One Mighty Pen

Don't Look Now Part 2

Tue, 02 May 2017 03:57:14 +03

I was still having hallucinations. I wasn’t aware of receiving any drugs through my ever-present drip, so these fantasies must have emanated from me. There was a garden area outside my hospital window, between my building and the building opposite. It was a haven for birds as there were plenty of trees as well as bushes and shrubs. I looked out of my window one night to see the trees talking to one another, each one leaning forward to address the tree opposite while they gestured with their branches. One night there was a storm and the trees started fighting each other, wildly thrashing with their branches, leaves flying in the wind. It was quite a show.

I mentioned this experience to one of the doctors. He looked at me dubiously with an “Oh, yes…”, while feigning interest in his computer screen. I never mentioned it to the medical staff again, although it did turn up later on my hospital notes. Be cautious about what you say while a hospital patient.Medical workers, especially those who work in hospitals are unsung heroes.

The nurses, doctors, technicians and support staff that I encountered were unfailingly cheerful, helpful and knowledgeable. I have never met a more dedicated body of workers. This extended all the way down the chain. For instance, the lady responsible for cleaning the patients’ rooms was also the oncology ward’s librarian; she sourced new books for the patients and made sure they were available for them to borrow. We had many an entertaining conversation when she came into my room with a bucket and mop. Her knowledge of authors and their books put me to shame causing me to re-appraise my concept of support workers. It is not accurate to impose a hierarchy on others, or to judge people on the basis of their jobs, I decided after a lifetime of doing just that.

After I was admitted to hospital with lymphoma I was given a lot of tests. These occasionally entailed late night visits to X-ray departments, now known as Medical Imaging due to there being a lot more than X-rays in their toolbox. One night a porter came into my room, with a trolley. Usually my bed would have been unhitched from the wall. Nowadays to transport patients, they take the entire bed with the patient in it. But Brett had a trolley. He helped me onto it. In the corridor outside my room he paused, then whispered, “Want to go for a ride?”

I understood him to mean that he was not going to take the direct route. I couldn’t wait. Banged up in a room by myself with only hallucinations to entertain me I was bored. I couldn’t move and was thoroughly debilitated by the large tumour on my adrenal gland. It felt like if I was being taken out to the park, or to see a local beauty spot.

At night, hospitals are warrens, a, empty maze of corridors lit by spotlights in the ceilings. The effect is pools of light in a sea of shadows. The porter, whom I guessed was in his late twenties, let’s call him Brett, set a cracking pace and we soon worked up quite a speed. I could see the soles of his shoes lifting high as I lay on the trolley,. It reminded me of Lee Marvin’s walk in the movie Point Blank. The whole thing was quite exhilarating as we whizzed down endless corridors. I hoped the journey to Medical Imaging would take hours. Suddenly Brett slowed and came to a stop. Because I was lying down and being driven head first I couldn’t see what was behind me, but I could see his face. It was distraught, but with a tinge of yearning. Then a female voice issued from an unseen person, “Hello, Brett.”

“Hello, Sarah,” Brett replied.

The tones of both their voices spoke of issues historical and unresolved. I was a witness to a real life drama; too bad I couldn’t observe this encounter. But I could listen and, of course, I could watch Brett. Making myself as inconspicuous as I could I lay perfectly still. What unfolded was a tale of loss and grief. Brett and Sarah had been on opposite shifts for months, one working at night, the other during the day. I gathered that they were about to commence a deep friendship when the hospital administration inadvertently stymied them by assigning them work at opposite ends of the day. Their exchange lasted only a few minutes before Sarah had to take her trolley and patient back to the ward. This was the only glimpse I had of her, just her back seen briefly as she pushed her charge in the opposite direction. Brett was subdued and brought me quickly to my destination in Medical Imaging. He left the trolley with the technicians and left. I never saw him again. Hopefully the pair met up again as they now appeared to be on the same shift pattern.

I had been in the oncology ward for nearly three weeks and at last I was judged ready to begin chemotherapy. Chemotherapy works by interfering with mitosis, normal cell division, which means that old worn out cells are not replaced by new ones. The best-known effect of this is, of course, hair loss; hair from your head, your eyebrows, eyelashes and your body dies eventually and thins and then disappears. It’s quite startling if you’re vain like me. I took to wearing a hat most of the time, but I couldn’t do anything about the eyebrows and lashes. Eventually I would look like Elmer Fudd.

I was having the chemotherapy regimen known as R-CHOP, an acronym for a suite of drugs designed to shrink tumours rapidly. It is not without its consequences as you will imagine. These made themselves known as the treatment progressed and I will describe the side effects as they occurred. But for now, I was grateful for the attention I was getting. This began with a new cannula,

that was attached to a vein in my arm – think of a miniature version of the Christmas tree that oilmen attach to the wellhead and you have the idea. Nurses, most of whom I had become friendly

with, appeared in gowns, masks and surgical hats. It was disconcerting to say the least, like seeing your mother in uniform. Right there in the ward, they dripped chemicals into my body that would shrink the massive tumour sitting on my adrenal gland. There was no pain, no pain at all, and seemingly no effect either. After six or seven hours the first stage of the chemotherapy was over and the next day I was able to go home.

NEXT: I LOSE A THIRD OF MY BODY WEIGHT AND HAVE A BATTLE WITH SIDE EEFFECTS.

The Clinic

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 16:23:50 +03

The Clinic

The news arrived the old fashioned way, electronically generated and then printed on a small white card. It came at 12 noon in a white envelope just as the party was beginning. It was the end of everything. At least it was supposed to be.

With a population of twelve billion the Earth was straining at the seams. There was not enough food, not enough room and not enough money to support everyone; something had to be done, governments had decided, before the pressure cooker exploded.

But from whom do you withhold resources? Certainly not from children, they are the planet’s future; not from the uneducated either because they supply the menial labour, although there was less and less of this as robot workers proliferated. Restrict childbirth then? But families were already restricted to one child unless they were very rich, or had staggering intellectual capabilities. The minority groups: the politically deviant, the mentally ill and the recidivist criminals – all the groups traditionally targeted by governments looking to make cuts were so small that targeting them would cost more than doing nothing at all. And as for the migrants, well, everyone was a migrant in one way or another and, in any case, the economy needed them. And so, despairing, technocrats turned their attention to the one group which had benefited most from the technological riches of the 21^st century, and which contributed least in taxes – the old.

Not that they were old anymore. Performers in their 70’s, once such a rarity, were now commonplace. Construction workers, ships’ captains, airline pilots and even astronauts aged in their declining years were not unknown. And old people didn’t look old, either; not any more. Silver hair, dentures, failing eyesight and fading memory were things of the past. At least they were things of the past in the western world. As long as you kept up your muscle supplements and had regular vitamin and mineral shots you could stay in your forties until you were over a hundred. And millions did exactly that, sucking money and resources from the planet’s economy without a second thought. The government was bound to step in eventually.

“I got the card,” Alexandra announced to no one in particular. “They don’t waste a moment do they? It’s my birthday and I get the card.” The group of friends which had gathered to celebrate Alexandra’s birthday paused and stared at the flame-haired woman with the plunging neckline who held the small white card in her hand.

“I didn’t know this was that birthday, Alexandra,” said a dark, petite woman wearing a tiara. “And you received the card today?”

An athletic-looking man thrust his hand out. “Can I see it? I’ve never seen one before,” the man asked. “I won’t be getting mine for years yet. Just wondered what they look like. What does it say?” he further enquired.

Alexandra thrust the card into the man’s hand. He fumbled it but recovered quickly and snatched the card from the air before it could hit the ground.

“Nice reflexes, Calvin!” A stunning blonde called from across the room. “I see how you keep your place in the first team.”

Calvin, who kept his place as the oldest player in the league by being married to a team owner, ignored the sarcasm and preened. He flexed his impressive muscles so the cloth of his jacket strained at his upper arms. Holding the pose he brought the card up to his face and began reading. It was disarmingly simple:

Congratulations on attaining your 85^th birthday. You are invited to a special meeting to discuss your future. Please call any of the companies printed on the other side of this card to register for your reward. If we have not heard from you after 7 days our representatives will call on you at home to discuss your options.

With much affection,

SimonTucker, Mature Persons Representative

“I wonder what they mean by ‘discuss your options’?” Calvin asked. “What options do you have after you turn 85?”

“You have no options, Calvin,” sneered the stunning blonde woman whose name, appropriately, was Lola. “You don’t really have a choice, unless you count deciding which sanctuary gets your business.” She turned to the flame haired hostess, “Alexandra, I am truly sorry. Let’s all get drunk and forget about this until tomorrow.”

Getting drunk was not really an option because excessive alcohol had an alarming tendency to add years to a person’s appearance after just one session. The supplements didn’t like it. But it was worth imagining for a moment. Alexandra shook her head to clear it of the fantasy before taking a defiant sip of her very weak pseudo-gin and tonic.

A week later, still not reconciled to her fate, Alexandra heard the front door chime softly. Two people, perfectly dressed with perfect smiles carrying lavender portfolios that were also perfect stood on the doorstep. He was an impressively groomed man in his thirties, she an impossibly thin woman of perhaps forty. Everything about them said government.

“Mrs. Pope?” the man enquired.

“No, I am her granddaughter,” Alexandra replied. And with her impressive décolletage and wrinkle-free face she could almost have got away with it.

“That’s a good joke, Alexandra,” the woman said, showing perfect teeth. “May we come in? We’re from the Mature Persons Foundation. You received our card, I think. We’re just following up. My name is Maddie and this is my colleague Kyle.”

Maddie and Kyle: two characters from a horror story, thought Alexandra

Settled comfortably in the tiny conservatory, Maddie and Kyle commenced their pitch without the slightest sign of embarrassment. Why should they be embarrassed? They’d done this almost a thousand times before.

“So Alexandra, you turned 85 years old last week and we just wanted to let you know what your options are,” Maddie said.

Kyle leaned forward, “Congratulations, by the way, Mrs. Pope, eighty five is quite an achievement.”

Alexandra was unmoved, “Thanks. So what are my options? Why do I need options anyway.”

“There’s no way to put this delicately, Alexandra, so I’ll just tell you,” Maddie said.

Kyle adopted a fixed smile while his colleague spoke.

“The government cannot afford to give you support any more, Alexandra. Your doctor is expressly forbidden to give medical attention to any patient after their 85^th birthday. He cannot prescribe medication or supplements.”

“Why not? I pay for them myself!” Alexandra snapped.

“It’s a matter of priorities, Mrs. Pope.” Kyle spoke through his fixed smile. “There are so many of us, all needing support and help and there is only a small pot to dip into. I know you wouldn’t want to deprive children of the help they need, nor their parents for that matter. It would be selfish and we know how generous you have been in the past to your own family.”

Maddie took up the lead again. “The government has also withdrawn financial help.” Maddie raised her finger to forestall any objection from Alexandra. “You own your home, but you have been receiving assistance in the form of discounts on utilities and property taxes. These have now ceased and in future you will be charged the full amount for these services.”

Before Alexandra could object, Kyle spoke again.

“It’s for the best, Mrs. Pope. It’s such a small pot and so many want to dip into it. There isn’t room for everyone and you have led such a full life. You have thrived, haven’t you?” Kyle looked Alexandra directly in the eyes while he spoke. Alexandra found herself wondering how old he was.

Alexandra was extremely irritated. “Okay, I’m sick of your good-guy-bad-guy routine. Give it to me straight; tell me what I am supposed to do.” Alexandra spoke harshly; she hated these people who had come with their beautiful clothes and their charming manners to kill her.

“You don’t have to do anything, Alexandra,” it was Maddie who spoke while her partner smiled. “No, you can continue just as you have before. So long as your savings and the medications and supplements you have managed to lay aside hold out there is no reason for your life to change at all.”

“I can stay in my own house? You won’t snatch me or have me assassinated?” she asked.

“Mrs. Pope! Do we seem like those sorts of people?” Kyle’s smile had wavered for an instant, like a small cloud crossing the sun.

“You can stay wherever you like, but we should inform you that many of the sanctuaries charge a fee if you delay your entry for longer than three months,” Maddie said.

“How much?” Alexandra knew the fee was going to be high.

“The amount is equal to the value of your dwelling and possessions if you’re a home owner; just the possessions if you’re a renter,” Maddie replied.

“I’ll be left with nothing to pass on to my family!” she said infuriated by the injustice.

“But only if you delay longer than three months, Mrs. Pope. It’s really quite generous when you think about it,” Kyle said winningly.

A few minutes later, seated in the front seat of their car outside Alexandra’s apartment block, Kyle and Maddie reviewed their visit with Alexandra Pope.

“I give her a day shy of three months,” Kyle said coldly.

“I reckon she’ll crack the month before,” Maddie replied with a laugh. “Just wait until the relatives start putting pressure on her.”

“How much this time? “ Kyle asked, giving his partner a quick glance.

“Same as usual, five thousand,” she replied, flashing him a rare smile. “Or is that too much for you?”

“Maddie, you have a bet,” Kyle laughed and steered the car out into the traffic.

The first thing Alexandra did after the pair had left was to ring her doctor’s surgery for an appointment. His receptionist said they had nothing available at the moment and she would consult with the physician and ring her back. Alexandra waited all afternoon and finally rang the surgery. The recorded voice of the same receptionist apologised for the surgery being closed and advised that callers should try again in the morning.

Her doctor was going over his consultation notes when Alexandra arrived. She walked past the empty reception desk and straight into his office, not even bothering to knock. The doctor looked up guiltily when she burst in; this was not going to be easy, he knew. Still, Alexandra Pope had been a patient for more than thirty years and he owed her an apology at least.

“Alex, how nice to see you,” he began. “It’s after hours, but I’m sure if you tell me what’s wrong I can…

“You can do what, Paul? Two visitors from the Mature Persons Foundation just told me that you can’t do anything because I’m 85-years-old.” Alexandra felt she had become a character in a farce.

The doctor had seen this all before. Dozens of his patients had been frog-marched to their reward when they turned 85. Some of them were in the prime of their lives. The news hit them differently, but reactions mostly followed a pattern: initial outrage, followed by bewilderment, a brief period of struggle, then fear and finally acceptance. When it was his time, which wouldn’t happen for thirty years, he planned to get outrageously drunk in a hotel room with two Asian prostitutes, preferably twins, take a pill when he was too drunk and exhausted to continue and not wake up. As he had admitted to himself, he was quite looking forward to it.

“I’m sorry, Alex, you’re correct in saying there’s not a lot I can do. I can’t prescribe you anything; I can’t sell you the preparations you need. I can’t even examine you. The penalties are quite severe if I do; disbarment isn’t even the worst one.”

Alex slumped down on a chair and began dabbing her forehead distractedly. “I don’t know what to do, Paul.”

“I know, it’s terrible,” the man replied. “But bad as it is it could be worse. Did you know that in some countries people have no options at all? They don’t have sanctuaries; they have to report to a collection point where they are forced to take poison. The ones that go on the run are hunted down and executed on the spot.”

It was a stupid thing to say, he knew; it was akin to the how-would-you-like-to-die conversations people used to have over dinner. But there really wasn’t anything else he could say. Alexandra didn’t respond, she kept dabbing her forehead with the tissue while her eyes skittered over the walls in panic.

“You have three months,” the doctor said, “before you have to report, so you have time to get things in order and make decisions. I’ve never visited any of the sanctuaries myself, but a lot of the pharmaceutical salesmen say the Mount of Olives is very nice. The Shady Rest is good, too, if you’re an Anglican. And there’s the After Life, if you believe in such things.” He hesitated, thinking that the striking woman in the chair in front of his desk may well be a believer, “Which I do myself I should add.”

He began to warm to his subject, “But if you’re seeking something really progressive, perhaps you should consider the Blue Trilby,” he glanced sharply at Alexandra, “though of course that’s really for people with alternative lifestyles.” He paused, thinking.

“Or yes, I’ve got it, the Ziegfield Follies! That’s fabulous, I hear, with dancers and full orchestras like the New York shows early last century. What a way to go!”

But Alexandra hadn’t heard any of it; she was wandering down the lanes and spinneys of her life. Her memories had suddenly become the most precious possessions she had.

“I was born in 2000, you know,” she whispered, “the dawn of the third millennium. It began with such hope.” She turned to look meaningfully at the doctor, “Before it turned to shit.”

She didn’t say anything further, just dabbed and skittered.

“Are you a religious woman, Alex?” he enquired as gently as he could. “Do you attend church? God can be a great comfort in times like these. Your parish priest can help you come to terms with things, if you’re religious.”

But the doctor wasn’t really thinking of the woman sitting before him, his priority was protecting his practise. Please don’t freak out on me in my consulting room, he prayed. I can’t treat you, or refer you. I am powerless to help you.

He had a sudden inspiration and opened a drawer in his desk to withdraw a sample that one of the salesmen had pressed on him. It was a new tranquilizer, very highly recommended with few side effects, so the salesman had said. Because it was a free sample it was absolutely untraceable. He poured a little water in a plastic cup.

“Take this, Alex, it will help you cope with things.”

He placed a pill in her hand and watched her as she swallowed it down. He put a second one in her hand and made her swallow it too.

The dabbing and skittering slowed and stopped.

“I don’t feel old, you know. I don’t deserve this, dying on command,” she said. “I never believed the stories until now. I wish I had, I could have prepared.”

As if anyone could ever prepare for the moment when life is suddenly withdrawn, the doctor thought.

“You can keep those pills, Alexandra,” he said, “Just don’t tell anyone where you got them!” On a whim he opened his desk drawer and scrabbled around for more free samples. He thrust a fistful in her lap.

Doctor Paul laughed the laugh of the guilty as he showed the woman out of the building.

“So long, Alexandra,” he called to her as her taxi swept out into the traffic. He even managed an extravagant wave.

Alexandra’s son, a trim, defiantly blonde man with an aching smile and fabulous teeth, was waiting at the kerb for her when she arrived home. He couldn’t believe how calm she was when she greeted him and showed him into the apartment.

“I just thought I’d come round to see how you are, Mother,” he began. “You look very well I must say.”

Alexandra’s son, whose name was Christopher, lounged on the beige couch nursing a glass of milk. He sipped it thoughtfully, appraising his mother who was gazing out of the window.

“Cassandra is well; she sends her love by the way. So what’s the news, what’s been happening in your part of the world?” he asked gaily.

“I’m being killed by the government within three months, as if you didn’t know, Chris,” she replied spitefully.

Her son hated the contracted form of his name, insisting on the full Christopher even when he was a child.

“But that’s terrible, Mother,” he said, ignoring the slight. “What did they tell you?”

“I have three months to choose a sanctuary,” she replied. “Meanwhile, I lose all my benefits. I can’t even see the doctor.”

“That’s awful, mother. You seem very calm about it, I have to say,” Christopher added.

“I took some pills. I can’t tell you where I got them; it’s a secret,” she replied, smiling.

“What happens if you don’t choose a sanctuary in three months?” he asked disingenuously and took another sip of his milk. “Can they do anything?”

“They can’t do a damn thing,” she snapped. “As long as the money and the body hold out I can live as long as I like. And I have to tell you I’m not tired of living yet!”

“But are you really allowed to do that, Mother? I’d heard…” he said, startled by his mother’s intractable refusal to accept death and the snarl that had suddenly formed on her lips.

“What are they going to do, assassinate me?” she spat at him. “They’re going to do that anyway if I let them. So, they fine me the apartment and my few precious possessions, what do I care!”

When Christopher reported back to his wife, Cassandra, later that evening he was furious.

“That selfish woman! Can you imagine, she’s going to give up her apartment and all her money and possessions just to spend an extra few years on Earth!”

Cassandra was equally exasperated, “I was counting on that apartment, Christopher. How can she do that to us! It was our chance to finally have a life, do some travelling, buy some clothes.”

She stopped to pour them both a non-alcoholic drink.

“Is there anything we can do?” she asked her husband artfully. “You know, what if she has an accident before the three months is out? No one would care; there’s even an argument that we’d be doing something to help the government, the planet even. If she fell under a train, or accidentally poisoned herself I bet there wouldn’t even be an investigation.”

Christopher was startled and stopped, drink half-way to his mouth, “You want me to murder my own mother?”

“Listen, Christopher, it wouldn’t be murder. You would be helping her make up her mind; you’d only be doing what the government wants to do anyway. In a way, it’s kind of noble, helping the authorities keep the population down.”

She sensed that her husband was wavering.

“You turned sixty in April and I’m not far behind. We’ve got twenty-five years to enjoy ourselves. Who knows what life will be like if we don’t have that apartment. Our rent is killing us and the cost of medical care is crippling. If she refuses to go into a sanctuary, then we’ll gradually lose everything. Do you want to watch yourself get older and broker until you finally die, bent and toothless and bald?”

But her husband was still not quite convinced. She continued to harangue him.

“And what will we have to leave our son when it’s our turn? And what will our son leave to our grandchild, little Stefan? Your mother’s stubbornness could destroy generations of our family! Is that what you want?”

Christopher couldn’t resist the tidal wave of rhetoric his wife had unleashed. He leapt to his feet, “Goddamn it, Cassie, you’re a persuasive woman. Let’s do it!”

In a state of tranquil bemusement, Alexandra had decided to hold a party for her friends. She rang one after another but couldn’t get past their machines. She left messages for each of them, inviting them to a party the following Saturday evening. She’d have a barbecue she thought, in the communal garden of the apartment complex. Lots of the residents did it. Steaks and a dunk in the pool, how perfect!

But when the apartment supervisor told her that he’d have to charge her two hundred dollars for the use of the facilities, it didn’t seem perfect at all.

“You’ve never charged me this much before!” she yelled down the phone at him. “It’s supposed to be twenty dollars! It’s always been twenty dollars!”

The supervisor was apologetic and, it should be said, a little embarrassed, too. But he had received an official notification that he was to cease all concessions and discounts to Mrs Alexandra Pope or risk being fired and forced to vacate his apartment in the complex. He had dependents and couldn’t afford to risk his job and his home, he explained to Alexandra.

Alexandra decided to go ahead with the barbecue anyway. It may be the last one she had, after all. In her heart she knew she was being pushed inexorably towards one of the sanctuaries, but she had decided to fight. Her ancestors, who had crossed the continent in a covered wagon and faced untold dangers, lived on in her genes.

Her son Christopher, not particularly well-versed in murder, had decided to visit the library to research the subject. Libraries were still thriving even in the late 2000’s. The books were symbolic, protected by glass and rarely touched, but the all-knowing computers were powerful research tools. They were also blessedly anonymous. You could look up anything you liked and be sure that it would take days, or even weeks for the authorities to notice. He could always say he was researching a crime novel that he was writing should anyone stumble across his search string.

He started with the search term, Murder. The computer came back with 295 million references containing the search term, Murder. He scrolled through them. On the twentieth page he gave up. A library robot brought him a coffee. He sipped it considering how he should continue to research the subject without wasting years doing it. Finally, on a whim he decided to approach the problem in the simplest way he could think of. He cleared the screen of the broad murder references and typed in a single sentence: How to murder your mother and get away with it.

The computer paused for a fraction of a second as if confronted by the enormity of what it was being asked. Then it flashed up four entries. Christopher breathed a little sigh of relief and began to read. The first entry was: Matricide in Mythology and History: a primer for those wishing to delve deeper into the depths of the human psyche.

I certainly don’t want to do that, he told himself and moved the cursor to the next entry.

Matricide and Parricide – the new family game from Sega. Be the detective, the murderer, even the victim in this absorbing romp. You never thought murdering relatives could be such fun…

“Jeez, the world today!” Christopher muttered to himself.

He moved the cursor to the third entry: UBC Dept. of Psychology: case studies recommended for students studying for an MSc in criminal psychology.

There might be some useful pointers in that one, he mused. He would return to that later, after reading the fourth and last entry.

There was a single word describing the subject. It just said UNTHINKABLE.

Nervously, Christopher clicked on the entry. He hoped it wasn’t going to launch him into a world of gushing blood, beating heart effects and maniacal laughter. He had turned the computer’s volume down just in case, but he needn’t have worried. There was just a picture of a white card with a message in beautiful scrolled script:

Congratulations on attaining your 85^th birthday. You are invited to a special meeting to discuss your future. Please call this number to register for your reward. If we do not hear from you after 7 days we will not trouble you again.

With much affection,

Simon Tucker, Mature Persons Representative

At the bottom of the card there was a phone number in tiny script. It was all very puzzling; Christopher didn’t know what to do, so he decided to do what he usually did which was to ask his wife, Cassandra.

Peering at the tiny phone number on the bottom of the screen he made a note of it on his pad, trying to look as disinterested as he could. His fellow researchers didn’t even look up from their screens.

“Well, obviously Christopher you have to ring the number!” his wife said sharply when he returned home.

He made a move towards the phone and stopped abruptly as his wife shrieked at him again. “Not from our phone, idiot! Don’t you know anything about crime?”

Christopher had to admit that he had lot to learn when it came to illegal activities. He spread his hands to show that he was nonplussed. “Do you know where there’s a payphone, dear?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, “there are several in China.” And then exasperated at her husband’s mystified expression added, “Call from work, Christopher. There are no payphones any more. You know that, don’t you?”

Of course he knew that, he told himself. This whole business had him utterly confused. He would call from work. If anyone traced the call then good luck to them finding the culprit from hundreds of suspects. He breathed easier. It was going to be okay.

Christopher worked as a supply teacher. Currently he was filling in for a pregnant teacher of biology at the Barack Obama High School several kilometres away. Biology wasn’t his first discipline, which was English composition. A fallow field if ever there was one, he thought wryly. Try teaching English composition to kids who do all their communicating via electronic devices. It will break your heart.

He took the morning period with the school’s youngest class. He liked the young ones best; you could blow their minds with pond life under a microscope, or by making a dead frog jerk about with a small electric current. The older ones seemed more interested in each other than what he had to teach them. They’re still learning biology though, he chuckled. Finally the bell rang and, after ushering the students out of the door, he rushed into the hallway where there was an actual payphone, a museum piece that had to be fifty years old. He’d never seen anyone use it, so perhaps it didn’t work.

It did work though, and the number connected, rang for a few seconds and was then answered.

“Unthinkable: solutions to insoluble problems”, the female voice said brightly.

The pedant in Christopher awoke. If the problem is insoluble then it cannot have a solution, he wanted to scream, but all he said was, “Hello.”

“How can I help you, sir,” the voice said

“Yes, er, I’d like to speak with Simon Tucker, please.” He was sure that sirens were about to go off all over the school; either that or the girl at the other end of the phone would say she had never heard of Simon Tucker.

“Just a moment, sir. Please hold while I connect you.”

An electric thrill coursed through his body. He was beginning to like crime.

“Yes?” The voice was male, completely disarming and possibly belonged to a man in his 40’s.

“I’d like to speak with Simon Tucker,” Christopher began. “I came across him on the internet yesterday and I would be very interested in speaking to him.”

“What was the search string you used yesterday, sir?”

“Did I tell you I’m on a payphone, a public payphone? In a public place,” he added to make sure that there could be no confusion.”

“Yes, sir. Please tell me the search string you used. I can’t put you through without it.”

Christopher looked up and down the hallway to see i

Don't Look Now

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 16:20:32 +03

Cancer is not a fight; sufferers don’t battle with cancer as it is often described in obituaries and news stories. It’s a disorderly retreat while you, with the help of others, search for an escape. Sometimes you do escape from it; increasingly more frequently as medical science improves its knowledge.

I hope this will happen to me.

I was coming back from Brisbane on the train in July. I had moved to the southern Gold Coast a year before, and I needed to visit the French Consul to endorse my Certificat de Vie, the form that pension officials in France require every year so they’ll keep paying you. I had the signed and endorsed form in my pocket when I was suddenly struck by an overwhelming desire to visit the bathroom. It was urgent and I was stuck on a train. Trains on the Gold Coast are considered as local. Local trains don’t have toilets.

By a combination of muscular effort and perhaps a bit of Zen I made it to my station. I rushed to the special room. On finishing my task I gazed down and examined my produce in horror: it was black, the black of Versace, or a conference of lawyers. I was in serious trouble, but at the time I didn’t quite know how much trouble.

I have never been sick; never in my life. Okay I’ve had colds and bronchitis, but nothing that required hospitalisation. So I had no experience of dealing with it. Some patients, you can tell, are very experienced; they know what their blood pressure should be, their oxygen saturation. They know the names of their medications, how to present themselves to the visiting physician. You could imagine them studying for years to gain entry to the ward. I knew none of these things. When the doctor arrived my first morning in hospital I greeted him and team of assistants with a hearty “Hey, docs! What’s happening?” The doctor-in-charge, whom I later discovered was a consultant (very, very important), shrivelled me with a single look.

I spent my first night in hospital after a joust with a doctor in the emergency department. By the time I arrived there was no sign of the symptom that had made it so evident at the station rest room. The doctor, who was a good diagnostician I surmised, had to satisfy himself that my observation was accurate. I heard the sound that most men dread – it is the stretching, squeaking sound made by rubber gloves being pulled on. He needed to explore my bowel; I was about to be violated.

But I fought back in spite of the male nurse who was holding me in a death grip, but the battle was quickly lost and the diagnosis confirmed: gastric ulcer. Well, that’s not so bad, I thought. Since Australian doctor Barry Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren had discovered that the human gut could be overrun by a nasty bacterium called Heliobacter pylori in the 1980’s, causing ulcers, even stomach cancer – and it was treatable with antibiotics – the scourge of gastric ulcers was in retreat.

I should add here that my father lost half his stomach to gastric ulcers before the discovery of Heliobacter. I briefly worked with someone who eventually died due to peritonitis, caused by ulcers. This was in the 1960’s; he wouldn’t have been more than thirty years old at the time.

I left hospital after a week’s stay and was told that the ulcer was under control and I should take these tablets, which I did. I felt fine, but just to make sure my doctor organised a PET scan. PET stands for Positron Emission Tomography and the scan involves injecting radioactive dyes into your body. It’s painless and hardly noticeable, if you discount the startling urge to visit the bathroom as the dyes go in. The scan is very good at discovering conditions that you didn’t know you had. As a diagnostic tool it’s invaluable because it shows things that other scans, doctors too, can’t find.

The PET scan that I was given showed a shadow, a very large shadow on one kidney. The long and the short of it was I had stage four lymphoma.

Oh Lordy! Cancer! Fortunately I had left nothing undone in my life. My numerous jobs and several career new-starts had seen to that, so I was content to go, if I were called. My partner Jean and my children were less content however. But I was philosophical. Worrying that you’re going to die is a sure way to hasten your demise, a variant on Murphy’s Law, I observed to myself drily.

Almost immediately the cancer began to show itself. I felt tired all the time and slept sixteen hours a day. Even when I was awake I was semi-comatose. I was confused and had difficulty walking. It was mystifying because only a week before I had felt fine; it was as if by acknowledging the tumour, which was the size of a cantaloupe, I gave it substance.

After intervention by a saintly doctor I was accepted by an oncologist into a world class public hospital on the Gold Coast and began preparation for chemotherapy. Yes, you have to be prepared for chemotherapy; the procedure demands that you are in relatively reasonable health before the oncologists will commence. I obviously wasn’t in good health, not even relatively so, a fact I was told caused by something of an irresponsible lifestyle. “Don’t blame me,” I retorted; when you spend an entire career in advertising, the film industry, journalism and television as I have done a measure of irresponsibility is expected, if not actually mandated.

It was in the hospital that I discovered what cancer is: the result of a cell going rogue and multiplying rapidly to form a tumour. When the tumour is mature cells detach and go rampaging around the body forming new tumours wherever they end up. This is what doctors mean when they say that a cancer has metastasised. The condition used to be terminal, but no longer apparently as my metastasised cancer would present no problems. “We’ll zap them, zap them all,” the consultant oncologist told me in an uncharacteristic departure from medical-speak.

It was about this time that I started to experience hallucinations. They involved the world outside my hospital room window. They always took place at night. One night I saw quite clearly two dryads climbing the vine that snaked up the wall of the building opposite. On other occasions I would awake at night and find my room lit by a ghostly light, the kind familiar to lovers of gothic films, even though the lights were off and the door was closed. I never found these hallucinations disturbing; I used to enjoy them in fact, as they provided relief from the boredom of being in bed all the time.

NEXT TIME: CHEMOTHERAPY BEGINS AND I AM TAKEN ON A WILD RIDE THROUGH THE HOSPITAL

Be Damned and Publish

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 13:52:30 +03

This will be apparent to most writers, but for those who are not aware, the fact is that it is extremely unlikely that you will get your new book published, at least, by a conventional publisher. Why is this, you ask? Your book is well-written and you have had it professionally edited. You paid a designer a lot of money to create a cover and worked long into the night for many months to create something that you believe people will want to read.

And yet, publishers won’t talk to you. In fact, publishers won’t even allow you to send your manuscript to them. Instead, you must find an agent to put your book before a publisher. But because UK publishers have off-loaded the vetting process onto agents, each of these agents now receives upwards of three hundred book proposals a week. In general, agents are either sole traders or at best have a few people on their staff. Their response is probably the same as yours would be if you were presented with a mountain of manuscripts to read and evaluate every week.

So, after six weeks you receive a note from the agent telling you that they’re unable to accept you and your book for representation. There are several stock reasons and if you persist in sending out synopses and three chapter proposals, you’ll eventually encounter them all. They go like this: we receive a huge volume of manuscripts and sadly cannot publish them all, including yours; you’ve sent your romance manuscript to a publisher of science fiction (the ‘you fool!’ is usually omitted but always implied) and my personal bête noir, the manuscript failed to excite us. Apparently, agents have to find themselves in a paroxysm of elation, a literary high of such massive size that it’s almost certainly illegal, before they will even consider your proposal. You go through this process perhaps thirty times, on each occasion receiving a brush-off, until there are no more agents to approach.

You fold yourself onto the sofa in despair. You open the wine and then consider your life and decide that you have totally wasted it. You will never write again; you have never suffered such humiliation before. The fat lady has sung. That’s all there is. It’s over.

This is the moment when you are confronted with the true reality of being a writer and the horrible realization that this is not an artistic pursuit, but a commercial one. So you ask yourself why you set out on this voyage of pain and rejection? Few writers, I submit, will have interrogated themselves on this subject, so let’s use me as an example. I have had my work rejected so many times that if an acceptance letter should actually arrive, I would expire from shock right there on the doormat. In any case, I would almost certainly consider it to be a fake - a cruel joke perpetrated by a mean-spirited acquaintance.

So what is it you can do when faced with universal rejection? The first thing you should acknowledge is that the rejection is not in reality universal. One person has decided not to take the risk of publishing your book. Even if every agent has rejected your work, this only adds up to thirty people in total. Thirty people out of a literary population of several thousand. And don’t forget, if you’re here in the UK then no publisher has seen your work yet. This is not the time to give up.

Of course, the next thing you should do is publish electronically. Amazon says that more electronic books are sold than physical copies. Sign up to Kindle or Smashwords or any of the numerous ebook outlets and upload your book. By the way, this is not an easy process and the formatting of your e-manuscript alone will send you running for another bottle of wine. Stock up, because you’re going to need gallons of the stuff. But persevere, because there is nothing like the thrill of seeing your book’s cover for the first time on the Amazon website.

This is where, for the first time, you face the commercial realities of publishing. People buy books (in fact, everything), because they believe they will get pleasure from owning it. They want to be romanced, seduced even, into buying your book. Acquire some marketing skills and try not to give in to the temptation of hiring other people to do it for you. There is no need; and they charge a lot of money to do it.

Next, you can if you wish physically publish your book and have it available for sale in bookshops. That option is available to you, most easily through CreateSpace. Lots of work involved here, of course, but take it slowly, top up the wine stocks and prepare for more rejection. The first bookshop owner to whom I offered my first book sneered at me and the glossy offering I placed in her hand, but agreed to take a couple of copies. They sold that afternoon, but I never received any money from her. So learn to be tough – have an agreement ready to be signed and insist on a signature. Do this and you’ll have left the heady world of literature and entered the arena of the street trader. Congratulations.

Lastly, if you really want to take control of your books, you can become a publisher yourself. This is the ultimate step in the writer’s journey, where you attempt to control everything. I have just embarked on this. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Con the Bastard and His Gang

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 14:33:42 +03

Struth, who'd be a shearer.

For the previous month I had broken my back along with the others in Con the Bastard's shearing gang in the wool shed at Boonoke. It was a huge property, one of Rupert Murdoch's indulgences and it ran over two hundred thousand merinos. It was so big they once lost a flock of two thousand sheep and had to take the plane up to find them. Even then it took two hours of aerial surveying to locate them and call the drovers in. The mustering and holding yards were each big enough to house the Royal Easter Show and when we pulled up in Gummy Smith's old truck that first day the air was so full of dust the drovers had tied handkerchiefs over their mouths. They whistled and yipped at the dogs, driving them almost insane with excitement. The dogs were running along the fence rails and over the sheep's backs with their tongues lolling out. It was better than a circus.

There were twenty of us in the shearing gang. I'm the ringer, the gang's gun shearer. I'd worked with most of them before in previous seasons, so it was easy to fall into a routine. You need a routine when you're shearing because it's the only thing that keeps you sane. It's a pig of a life, spending ten hours a day crouched over sheep with sweat in your eyes and your back so cricked you think you'll never straighten up. But like the great Banjo Paterson said, it's better than being an office worker and, to tell the truth, not one of us would swap the life for anything.

We'd just finished two weeks shearing at Hightrees and had driven all night to make it on schedule in Deniliquin. None of us had had any sleep when we pulled up at Boonoke, but that didn't stop Con going straight in to see Bill Stokes, the manager. Stokes came out of his office with Con fussing along behind him as we stamped our feet by the truck.

"Goo'day, fellers. How you doing?" he smiled. "Ready for it?" Bill Stokes inclined his head towards the sea of sheep in the yards.

Before we could reply Con had stepped in, "We're ready, Mr. Stokes. We'll start right away."

"Okay, stow your gear and be in the woolshed in…" Bill Stokes pulled out the old fashioned watch he kept on the end of a chain in his waistcoat pocket. He flicked open the lid and considered it for a moment, "…in an hour, no, make that an hour-and-a-half." He'd noticed that we all looked a bit knackered and knew that we'd use the time to snatch some sleep. He was good like that, old Stokes.

We grabbed our carryalls and nearly ran to the shearers huts, so desperate were we to put our heads down. Boonoke was an old property, nearly as old as Wanganella the property nearby where George Peppin had bred the original Australian Merinos in the 1800's. The woolshed was a museum piece and the ironbark floors and walls gleamed like they'd been freshly oiled. It was the lanolin

in the wool, the same stuff that makes shearers' hands softer than a woman's. The shearers' line was quite comfortable, neat little huts with two beds apiece and lined ceilings so you only cooked a little bit instead of baking like you did on other properties.

I bunked in with Portmanteau Jack because I knew I'd always be right for a drink from the huge portable bar he took shearing. The other blokes paired off and soon there was silence. As I fell asleep I wondered who had been landed with Gross Maurie and how long this unfortunate would put up with his nocturnal farting and belching. I'd had the misfortune to bunk in with him myself a couple of seasons before and had taken my mattress into the woolshed after the first night.

He was called Gross Maurie for his generosity with his bodily gasses and also to differentiate him from Maurie the Thumb, another member of the gang. We're a weird mob, that's for sure.

It seemed that I'd no sooner closed my eyes when Con's alarm clock went off. It was a huge monstrosity with two gleaming brass bells. Con would sit it in a steel washbasin and when it went off you could hear it a mile away. There were always plans afoot to steal it and throw it in a dam but Con guarded it like it was the Crown Jewels and wouldn't let anyone else within a yard of it. We all grabbed our hand pieces and ran for the woolshed because we knew that Con liked to judge things very finely, sometimes leaving us only a couple of minutes to get to work.

The woolshed at Boonoke is two-storeyed. The shearing is done on the upper deck which is set out in the shape of the letter T. The sheep are driven up a ramp from the holding yards below and held in pens. There's a pen for each shearer, with a swinging gate along the horizontal gallery. The classing table and the bins are situated in the vertical portion of the T.

Shearing is brutal work. You never get a break because your pen is always full and no sooner have you separated a sheep from its fleece and called the rouseabout to throw it on the classing table when you feel the beady eye of Con upon you. Con's the classer as well as the team leader and he's always making outrageous claims to property managers about how many sheep his gang can shear in a day. He's a devil when he gets on the grog.

After we’d been shearing for the best part of a month and settled into a routine word got about that Con had a bet on with the manager. We despatched the rouseabout to see what he could extract from the manager's secretary. She was on the wistful side of thirty with the hips and eyes of an experienced woman and the rouseabout was a young man and not bad looking if you ignored the missing front tooth.

He came back about midnight and tapped softly on my door. Jack and I were enjoying a tot of Slivovitz from genuine crystal liqueur glasses and discussing the woeful state of Balkans politics. When the rouseabout walked in and sat on the edge of my bed you could tell from the grin on his face he'd done more than just talk to her.

"Now my boy," said Portmanteau Jack, selecting another glass from his portable bar and giving it a polish with the tail of his shirt, "Compose yourself and tell us what you've learned." Jack always took on airs when he'd been drinking.

The rouseabout took his time, sipping the fiery liquid and rolling it around his mouth. "She likes shearers, " he said at last. "She says we've got the softest hands. We went into the woolstore and lay down on the fleeces. Then she made me take her clothes off and stroke her."

"What, all over?" said Jack. The rouseabout nodded. A sigh escaped from Jack's lips and I could see his eyes start to glaze over with memories of his own erotic escapades. Or perhaps he was considering having the secretary over himself for a nip or three.

The conversation was in danger of taking the wrong fork in the road. "We don't want to know about that!" I said hastily. Jack looked up as if he was going to disagree. "No," I said before he could speak, "Tell us about the bet, rouseabout."

The rouseabout looked almost as disappointed as Jack that he wasn't going to have the opportunity of relating the details of his conquest. I began to feel like a prude.

"Well, Con has bet Mr. Stokes that we can shear over four thousand sheep tomorrow. Bill Stokes is going to give Con a dollar for every sheep that we shear over four thousand. Con's got to give him a dollar for every sheep that we're under."

Jack lost his dreamy look and his composure instantly. "Struth!" he said. Four thousand bloody sheep in a day! That's er…" Jack scratched his head as he wrestled with the calculation.

"I worked it out already, " said the rouseabout eagerly. "She let me use her calculator. It's two hundred and twenty two sheep each. Course, if you let me shear as well, it's only two hundred and ten."

Jack and I sat back in stunned silence while the rouseabout grinned at us hopefully. "Well, what do you think?" he said all eager like after we'd failed to respond.

"I think you've got more piss and wind than a butcher's cat," Jack said dolefully. Then to me, "You're the ringer - what's the most you've sheared in a day?" I had to think about it because I seldom kept the tallies in my head from one season to the next.

"About two twenty. I did two eighty once, but they were lambs," I replied eventually. Jack gazed at me for a moment before coming to a decision.

"Rouseabout," Jack said firmly, "Go and get the blokes."

As the boy left the hut I called after him, "You'll probably find Gross Maurie's bunkmate in the woolshed."

When the gang had squeezed themselves into our hut, Jack took the floor. "Gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm unable to offer you all a drink as I don't carry a sufficient number of glasses."

Gummy Smith grinned, exposing his pink dentures with its solitary remaining tooth. "That's all right, Jack, " he said, producing a tumbler the size of a small vase, "I've brought my tooth glass." He held it out expectantly. Jack's face assumed an expression of resignation and sadness which became one of black despair as the rest of the gang produced their own drinking vessels. "Have you got any of that Cointreau stuff left, Jack?" said Gummy. He'd started to dribble and as he sucked the saliva back into his mouth his dentures chattered like a pair of castanets.

Eventually we were all settled with drinks in our hands. Jack sent a rueful glance towards his portable bar, now considerably depleted, and decided he would close the lid for safety's sake. Then he sat on it for extra security. The entire gang had their eyes fixed on him. Jack savoured his drink, stretching out the moment.

"Get on with it, Jack," growled Maurie the Thumb from the window ledge where he was perched.

Finally, Jack spoke, "Well, boys, rouseabout here has discovered something very interesting, haven't you, son?"

The rouseabout looked up from his drink into which he was gazing with false modesty. "That I have," he said, eyes all gleaming. Then not waiting, he rushed on. "I was over in the wool store with Diane cos she wanted to lie on the fleeces. She asked me to stroke her, so I did - all over."

The gang was transfixed. Maurie the Thumb clutched his glass to his chest with both thumbless hands. He'd lost them in a wool press years before though he was fond of telling people who didn't know the story that he'd been tortured by Aborigines. Jack's head settled on his chest with a dreamy expression on his face. Gummy was dribbling even more and the others were snuggled up to each other like a bunch of children being told a bedtime story. I knew we could be there all night unless someone broke the spell. I was about to interrupt the rouseabout's tale when Gross Maurie came to my aid.

"Cor, struth," someone said. "Dead goannas." As the noxious gas drifted further around the room the gang members wrinkled their noses in disgust and made a mad rush for the door. Only Gross Maurie was left sitting on top of the wardrobe with a pained expression on his face.

"It wasn't me, " he protested. No one believed him. After twenty minutes of concerted fanning with newspapers and bed sheets the room was finally inhabitable again. The meeting reconvened with Gross Maurie standing on the verandah outside, his head through the open window so he could hear.

"Right, where was I?" said the rouseabout.

"You were just working your way up her thighs, I believe," sighed Jack.

"Oh, yeh, that's right," said the rouseabout, gazing dreamily into space.

I knew that if he got into his stride again there would be no stopping him. It was time to speak. "Okay, Rouseabout, tell them about the bet that Con's made." If there's one thing that shearers like it's a saucy story, but gambling is taken very seriously indeed.

"What bet?" snapped Gummy suspiciously.

"Yeh," added another of the shearers, "What bet?"

So fierce was the interest shown by the gang that for a moment I thought the rouseabout was going to bolt. Even Gross Maurie was making movements to climb in the window in his eagerness to hear more. I stood up, waving my hands to get their attention.

"Listen, men. Con's gone and made one of his crazy bets with Bill Stokes. He's told him we can shear four thousand sheep in a day. It'll cost a dollar for every sheep under that number - and he gets a dollar for every sheep that we're over. Even if we perform a miracle we'd never get within cooee of four thousand. It's more likely that we'll shear well under. I glanced at Joe who kept an unofficial tally in case the management tried to pull a fast one. "How many did we shear yesterday, Joe?" I asked him.

Joe looked at me for a moment and shifted the quid of tobacco to his other cheek. He had a very prominent adam's apple and it bobbed up and down as he spoke, "Three thousand one hundred," he replied.

"Right," I said. "And where do you think Con's going to get the nine hundred dollars that he'll owe Bill Stokes if we shear the same number tomorrow?"

The gang members looked at each other as the dreadful realisation dawned on them. "Our bonuses," breathed Maurie the Thumb, "Our bloody bonuses!"

A horrified silence settled on the room. The rouseabout was the first to speak, "I reckon we should go to Mr. Stokes and tell him we're not going to do it."

Portmanteau Jack stood up, all five feet four inches of him, "That would be treachery, son."

"Yesh," said Gummy. "Con may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."

The rouseabout glanced at me, uncertain of the morals of the argument.

"They're right, rouseabout," I told him kindly. "We've got to stand by each other even when we do foolish things." Some of the gang nodded in agreement though it was apparent that a few of them sided with the rouseabout. "No, " I said firmly. "There's got to be a way out of this.

We talked for half-an-hour before formulating the plan. It relied on a bit of subterfuge, some bribery and a superhuman effort from the gang. As the shearers line subsided into sleep my mind was ticking like a clock.

I was up at 5 o'clock and pulling on my boots on the verandah by three minutes past. There was a lot to do and only a couple of hours left before shearing was due to start. A cock crowed in the distance and dawn began to peep over the horizon. I could see Boonoke's famous pepper trees begin to emerge from the darkness. The drover's motorbike I'd selected from the machine yard started at the first kick and in moments I had it burbling along the track that led to the jackaroos' quarters. As I expected, they were already stirring when I tapped on their door, but they must have thought they were still dreaming when I put my proposition to them. In the end it cost me a bottle of Bundaberg rum for each of the five of them, but they agreed. We all shook hands in the yard outside, sitting on our motorbikes. Then they wheeled out with their dogs riding on the luggage racks behind them. I watched them for a moment, the formation dwindling against the rising sun, before kicking my bike into gear. I had a tally man to suborn and no time to waste admiring rural images.

When I returned to the shearers quarters Con had the gang lined up and was haranguing the blokes about the virtues of hard work. He gave me a suspicious look when I strolled up, but I acted all natural like and he didn't twig.anything was up.

The blokes were playing their parts beautifully with just the right amount of disinterest. If they'd shown the merest speck of enthusiasm Con would have known we were up to something. When he mentioned the extra bonus of 50 cents for every sheep we sheared over four thousand a few of them couldn't help a contemptuous curl of the lips. Con got angry at this and when he gets angry you can cut his Irish accent with a knife. "To hell with you buggers! he ranted. "You ungrateful, lazy swine!" He was about to launch into further personal descriptions of a more slanderous nature when he noticed that several of the men were looking distinctly aggressive. He stopped short, red faced and panting, deciding that discretion might be the best course. He stumped off towards the shearing shed calling over his shoulder, "I wash my hands of you all. I will shear the sheep myself. Yes, and I'll class the fleeces, bale the wool and carry it on my back to market in Melbourne where I will auction it. I don't need you. I need nobody, only Con!"

It was such a spirited performance that I couldn't resist calling out to the men, "Three cheers for Con!" The men commenced a ragged hurrah and Con turned to glare at us. Then he removed the filthy green trilby that he always wore and stood with his bald head bowed. You'd have thought he was receiving a twenty-one gun salute.

The sheep were waiting for us, shifting nervously in their pens on the shearing level. I glanced down the line of men as I fitted my handpiece to the cable that fed off the line from the generator. Each of them gave me a little nod to let me know they were ready. The big hand on the shearing clock clicked around to 7.30am and we were off. It was like opening time at the pub. Instantly there was bedlam as eighteen huge merinos were dragged out of the holding pens. Then it was the same drill as always - throw it on its back and pin it while you shave off the legs and belly wool; throw it on its side to separate the fleece at the flanks; flip it over and repeat the process and finish the shear at the spine. All the time the sheep is wriggling and struggling to escape. When you've separated the sheep from its wool, you bundle the terrified animal down the shute to your personal pen in the holding yard below and call for the rouseabout to come collect the fleece for classing. As I worked I hoped the jackaroos were doing their stuff below.

By the time the midday break came around the ache in my back had assumed the dimensions of a major spinal injury; the others were feeling just as bad you could tell. Even Con had broken out in a light sweat with the constant flow of fleeces to trim and separate. I sneaked a look out of the open window down to the holding pens below. I could just see the end of the chutes by stretching my neck. On the stand beside me Joe was half way through shearing a young ewe, using his knees and elbows to keep her still. I quickly looked outside again. Even though he was still struggling to finish the shear, a shorn sheep popped out of his chute below. The plan was working perfectly.

It was simplicity itself. I had despatched the five jackaroos to round up five hundred of the sheep we'd shorn the day before and hide them near the shearing shed. There were at least a dozen buildings the jackaroos could use.

All the jackaroos had to do was bring the sheep over to the shearing shed in groups of fifty and keep them on the lower level, out of sight. There was so much activity and noise going on that no one would notice them being driven over. I had toyed with the idea of rounding up a thousand, but in the end it was decided that we'd make up the shortfall ourselves with concentrated effort.

The scam worked like this - whenever the jackaroos heard a sheep being pushed down a chute they waited for a half a minute then popped another one in the side where it passed through the lower level. The jackaroos' sheep would emerge just as if it had come all the way down from the shearing level. They'd have to get their timing right so that the shorn sheep didn't pop out too close together. But it didn't really matter as nobody was going to be watching. I hoped the jackaroos would have the good sense to replace the side panels when they day was over.

The only part that could have gone wrong was if the tally man, a company employee, raised a fuss. I knew that he wouldn't because I told him the story and there was a bottle of Portmanteau Jack's sambuca in his bottom drawer that wasn't there the day before. As I was leaving his house that morning I had mentioned that sambuca was an aphrodisiac and would make any female instantly compliant. The tally man had been chasing Bill Stokes' secretary for years without success. He'd been positively eager to help us out.

I had just shorn my one hundred and fiftieth sheep when I looked up and saw Bill Stokes staring suspiciously at me from the doorway. I put on my most sincere innocent expression and added a little pain, which wasn't hard. He must have seen the twinkle in my eye though, because he snorted and turned on his heel. I forced the shorn sheep into my chute and stamped three times on the floor to warn the jackaroos below that the manager was about, but I was too late. He must have run down the steps and around the building because just as he arrived at the holding pens two sheep popped out of my chute. Stokes couldn't fail to have noticed.

Down below the dust was like a brown fog and the noise of hooves and bleating made overhearing impossible, but I could see enough to read their lips as Stokes turned on the tally man in disbelief. "Did you see that?" he shouted.

The tally man licked the end of his pencil and laboriously made a mark on his sheet. "See what, Mr. Stokes?"

The manager was nearly tearing his hair out, "That, you fool! Two sheep just came out of that chute together! No one shears two sheep at the same time"

The tally man sucked on his pencil again and turned a pitying gaze on the manager, as if he was deranged, "I don't think so, Mr. Stokes, I'd have noticed something like that." Then, "Sometimes the heat and dust can play tricks on your eyes. You have to watch that especially in my job."

Bill Stokes looked as if he was going to explode, but the tally man faced him down and slowly he began to subside as uncertainty crept into his mind. You could see him puzzling to himself as he walked slowly to the fence and leaned on the rail. If the tally man ever decided to give up counting sheep there was a certain career for him in politics.

After watching the chutes for five minutes during which nothing out of the ordinary happened, Bill Stokes stalked off to his office. The tally man looked up at me and puffed out his cheeks in relief. I gave him a wave of congratulations and stamped on the floor for the jackaroos to resume.

With fifteen minutes left on the clock I looked out of the window again. The tally man gave me ten fingers five times to indicate we were still fifty sheep short. The ring-in flock had run out long before and there were only nine of us left shearing. The rest of them were slumped in corners or down below vomiting from exhaustion and heat stroke. Jack who was three up the line from me called for the rouseabout even hough he was midway through shearing a sheep. When the rouseabout ran up to him he silently indicated a hand piece and one of the vacant spots in the line. The rouseabout was nearly dead on his feet himself, but he managed a whoop of excitement and hauled a merino out of the holding pen. Con came over immediately to protest - rouseabout's aren't supposed to shear, just gather the fleeces for the classer - but when Jack told him to start gathering up the fleeces himself or, by crikey, he'd sheer the classer and toss him down the chute, he retreated. Silently, he began gathering up the fleeces from the shearers' feet. I think Jack's outburst had shamed him.

When the siren blew and the tally man handed the sheet to Bill Stokes at a few minutes past five the shearing floor looked like a battlefield with us on the losing side. Stokes perused the sheet thoughfully then dug into his pocket. "Four thousand and one sheep shorn, Con. I owe you a dollar."

Con threw out his chest and accepted the coin as if it was a VC. "It's a pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Stokes," he beamed.

We all pretended not to notice.

Although it was mid-week we all felt we had earned ourselves a drink. We piled into Gummy's truck and set off for the Conargo pub. We let the rouseabout ride up front in the cab. He thought it was great honour, but in fact we were all heartily sick of hearing how had shorn five sheep in fifteen minutes. Gummy didn't notice as he's deaf on the passenger side.

Bill Stokes was at the bar when we arrived, talking to the owner of a nearby property. He kept glancing over in my direction, so I sat at one of the tables and pretended to read a newspaper. I knew he'd be over for a chat.

After ten minutes or so he slid onto the bench seat opposite me and placed a beer in front of me. He studied me for a moment before speaking, "It's been a funny sort of day, ringer, funny. A shearing gang, for no reason I could discern, suddenly shears hundreds more sheep than it ever has before. Meanwhile, on the very same day, five hundred shorn sheep go missing and no one can trace one hide or hair of them."

I sipped at the beer he'd brought me, blowing the froth away from the side of the glass, "Well, I'll be blowed, Mr. Stokes," I said at last. "You never know, perhaps the shearers were inspired. As for those lost sheep, well, Boonoke is a bloody big place. Have you thought of sending the plane up to have a look for them?"

He looked at me suspiciously then his eyes crinkled and he started to laugh. It was so infectious I had to join in and soon we were wheezing and choking with tears in our eyes.

Our mirth was interrupted by Con who arrived at our table clutching a half bottle of ouzo. He swept off his hat and held it to his heart, swaying slightly. "Mr. Stokes, " he said solemnly, "I have the damn bloody finest team of shearers in Australia and I tell you today was only practice." He paused for a moment to take a swig from the bottle. "Tomorrow we're going to shear five thousand bloody sheep and I have a thousand dollars that says we can do it!."

Con stood erect, chest puffed out, while he waited for Bill Stokes to accept the challenge. He didn't notice Gross Maurie and Joe creeping up on him from behind. They were so quick that the rest of the bar scarcely noticed when Joe tapped Con on the head with a chair leg. Maurie and Joe each took an arm and dragged him out of the door to deposit him in the truck.

Bill Stokes turned to me, still laughing, "That Con," he said. "He's such a bastard".

"Yeh," I replied, "We make a good team, don't we?"

The Beautiful Game

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 12:23:49 +03

I don’t know about you, but while watching the World Cup I’ve been spending some time researching the culture of football. ‘Soccer’ the Americans call it. So do the Australians; to Italians it’s ‘calcio’ while the Brazilians call it ‘futebol’. Well, you all knew that, but do you know what the point of the game is? If you just said ‘the point is to win at any cost’ then you would be historically accurate. In early days, according to the games’ governing body FIFA, it was called Cuju and occurred in China as a military exercise in the centuries before the Common Era.

In early England, football was played between competing towns and villages. ‘Mob Football’ it was called, apparently as a comparison of the game with warfare. In Florence, a version of the game has remained unchanged since medieval times and is still played today. ‘Calcio Storico’, literally historic football, is gloriously and enthusiastically violent with players attempting to cripple their opponents by kicking and punching them until one side has the ascendancy. It’s a lot easier to score goals if your opponent has been driven away in one of the waiting ambulances.

Our delight in witnessing violent spectacles is part of our character, it seems. From the gladiatorial games of Roman times to public executions, many of which are still held around the world today, we’ve loved it. We’ve howled our approval, screamed at the victims, mocked the losers and thoroughly enjoyed the event. So when Colombia’s Juan Camilo Zuniga jumped on Brazilian star Neymar in their recent quarter final clash and broke his spine with a deliberate and well-aimed knee, it was part of the culture.

This brutal act was the Brazilian manager’s fault, screamed the newspapers. Luiz Felipe Scolari had provoked the challenge, journalists said, by demanding that his players assault Colombia’s James Rodriguez to neutralize his skill and artistry. Others blame FIFA for their referees who have been too reluctant to issue yellow and red cards in case this slows down the game. As if coloured pieces of paper can control warriors intent on winning at all costs. The true culture of football could be seen in the crowds and on the pitch of virtually every game. And it was typified by the swaggering performance of Netherlands goalkeeper Tim Krul who contemptuously harangued each Costa Rican penalty taker individually before going to stand between the posts.

But does violence and aggressive contempt for opponents make it a better game? For many fans the answer must be ‘yes’; crowds have been howling their approval for years, for centuries, in fact. No one speaks out against soccer violence so prevalent on the pitches of Brazil, not even the revered Gary Lineker who in his career was never shown a yellow card for a foul. There was even some grudging respect from him for Tim Krul’s unsporting display of gamesmanship. All of which would be okay, I guess, so long as this behavior is confined to professional players in competition. They’re getting paid for it. One day though, it may be your son who comes home with smashed teeth, or a broken leg, received on the school playing field from players who have learnt their skills by watching the professionals. Then it’s not okay, is it?

Things to Come

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 14:12:27 +03

It was the mid-1990’s. I sat in the lecture hall listening to a panel of academics answer questions about the future There were the usual inane questions about Star Trek technology ‘will we ever be able to beam people up?’ as well as whimsical ones about robots, poverty and interstellar travel.

But the big question never got asked: ‘what, in the panel’s opinion, will be the changes in the coming century that will most affect humanity and our planet?’

Can you imagine sitting at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1895, before a panel of Fellows which might have included Thomas Edison, Robert Koch, Nikola Tesla, Ernest Rutherford, Alexander Graham Bell and asking them the same question? Would the panel have predicted rapid transit systems, the World Wide Web, tissue cloning, satellite technology, the International Space Station and the Voyager missions that all had their origins in the 20^th Century? Would the scientists have predicted the rise and demise of apartheid, national socialism or Communism? And what about the globalisation of industry, finance and entertainment? Of course, it’s possible that some of them would have predicted one or two, but it’s unlikely anyone would have predicted them all.

So let’s turn our attention to the century before us. What life-altering events will people experience in the 21^st Century? Here, in my opinion, are some of them.

The coming century will see our planet struck by a meteorite causing damage ranging from disastrous to catastrophic. The Apophis asteroid due in 2036 is a candidate, but suspect a bolt-out-of-the-blue.

Within the next 20 years the world will be in the grip of something we have all dreaded. A runaway climate change that will eventually cause nations to withdraw from coastlines, abandon low-lying areas and send millions on forced migrations. No escape from this. Not now.

The idea of protecting cities with domes will be floated. This is the age of the mega-city and the engineering implications are sobering.

Overpopulation (in excess of 11 billion) by the end of the century will see millions starving. Euthanasia is introduced.

A colony on Mars will be established in the mid 2000’s and after several disasters will become self- sustaining. The political implications of satellite worlds won’t be felt until the following century.

New industries will be set up to operate and facilitate space mining and exploration. Artificial Intelligence will become enormously powerful enabling industries to be run entirely by robots. Hitherto unknown jobs in robot psychology, neural programming and profiling will become commonplace.

A studio apartment in London will cost 3 million pounds in 2080.

Gaianism, now not much more than a cult, will become a world-wide religion with millions of followers inspired by species extinction and planetary devastation.

Designer babies will become a reality as the gene manipulation industry arises. After 2070 or so everyone born will be a designer baby.

Several wars will be fought over water resources as resource-rich nations divert rivers away from neighbours, causing famine.

Wars will be fought almost exclusively by drones – in the air, on the ground and on the sea it’s the robots which will claim the victories. Wars will become a new spectator sport, global entertainment for hundreds of millions.

Already a considerable presence, China’s influence in Africa will grow to be virtually unchallenged by the mid 2000’s.

China itself will become all-powerful in its region, though not belligerent elsewhere.

The USA will continue to dominate its hemisphere and will share trade with Europe. The decline of of western society has begun, though its collapse is still far off by the end of the century.

The View from Here

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 14:03:28 +03

Rune of the Day: Nauthiz, hard lessons

I’ve never worried about my age, not until recently anyway. I sailed past all the watershed moments blissfully unaware that, for many people, it was extremely stressful to turn forty, or fifty, or sixty. To me these were like motorway signs: ‘You have just passed 50 years. Think of adjusting your diet.’ These milestones are just something to acknowledge as they dwindle in your rear view mirror. That was the case anyway, until I returned to London.

One of the first things you do when settling in a new country is find a doctor. Dutifully, I registered at my local surgery and forgot about it. I’m not a sickly person, in general, and since I gave up smoking three years ago my visits to the doctor have been rare. What I didn’t know was that once you turn 65 the medical profession won’t let you stay away. I’d been in Richmond no more than a week when the phone rang and I was invited by an extremely nice medical worker to attend an assessment session. On attending and undergoing a battery of tests, it turned out my cholesterol was too high, my blood pressure was up and my bones were too thin. Nobody had bothered to tell me about these shortcomings before. I was duly prescribed various pills and told to report back. I began to feel worse than I had ever felt before. Was this the anti- placebo effect perhaps? Does the very act of taking medicines weaken your body? Maybe so, but when I googled the medicines I discovered another possible reason: a list of side effects that would turn your hair white and, yes, I’m aware of the irony. So I binned the pills.

In the following months the medical workers and I played a cat and mouse game in which I attended the doctor’s surgery every week for tests. My bones were still too thin, though improving; my blood pressure was too high, and fluctuating and cholesterol levels, as ever, were insupportable. In short, I was clinging to life by a thread, even though I felt fine. I was questioned closely on a number of occasions and blood was drawn by the armful without getting to the bottom of this paradox. It wasn’t as if I could avoid the attention because they telephoned every week to make another appointment. The medical workers, concern for my parlous state written all over their faces, puzzled over me. With hindsight, I believe their aim was to collectivise me so I would join one of their clinics and thus be treated efficiently due to economies of scale. But I had no wish to become one of those who spend their lives in hospital queues trying to stay alive. It was a depressing thought. What could I do, I asked myself? The actor Tom Hanks had the answer: get your weight down to as close to college level as you can, exercise daily and give yourself challenging projects. So I’ve started. I’ll report back in due course, God willing.

One of the challenging projects I’ve given myself is to write several books. This was actuallysomething I set myself on my 65^th birthday nearly three years ago. So far I have three with a fourth on the way. I have plans for a fifth, six and seventh which are plotted, but not researched. The first three were ebooks, but last week I received my first consignment of paperbacks, fifty of them, which I’d had printed by CreateSpace. When you receive boxes of books you confront one of the great fears of self-publishing authors: how the hell am I going to sell these! But I’m in good company; no less a writer than John Grisham drove up and down the southern states with boxes of books in the boot of his car. Whenever he had a case which required him to visit a new town, he would persuade the local bookshop to take a few copies of his book, ‘A Time to Kill’. I hope the strategy works for me.

The Richmond Literature Festival is on at the moment and we’ve attended a few talks. Max Hastings gave a good one to promote his new book ‘Catastrophe’, speaking fluently for an hour on the First World War. Bamber Gascoigne was seated in the front row, splendidly whimsical with an arresting scarf. He still has the voice – ‘now fingers on buzzers, here’s your starter for ten’ – but not the rest of the package. But he clings to youth in spite of his 78 years. He recently held a fireside chat with Julian Fellowes of Downton Abbey fame. We were part of the audience then, too and were entranced by these two establishment figures who have shrugged off the years – Julian not so many as Bamber – so elegantly.

Please God, let me do the same.

The Empire

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 19:36:12 +03

I can’t tell you how difficult this blog was to write. Before starting I had to clear away the influence of decades of propaganda contained in movies, television shows, literature and in the speeches of Presidents persuading me that the United States was a moral and upstanding meritocracy, an example to the rest of the world.

Try this: “And now we prove once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope!”

This is a fragment of Barack Obama’s election night speech, a soliloquy so noble and uplifting that it inspired us. Millions in the United States and around the world thought the messiah had come at last to sweep away all the accumulated evil of the previous years.

I remember debating his victory that very night and relating my unease that the new president had little actual experience of government, and could turn out to be a babe in the woods. Dealing with the government agencies which had brought us concepts such as extraordinary rendition, and enhanced interrogation techniques was going to a monumental task. I was shouted down by my fellow journalists. Five years later my unease has ratcheted higher because the sentiments uttered so grandly by President Obama haven’t changed a thing.

The prison facility in Guantanamo Bay remains open with 166 untried prisoners still incarcerated there; this in spite of President Obama’s promises to close it on numerous occasions.

The number of US organisations involved, according to the Washington Post in 2010, in intelligence gathering is 1,271 government and 1,931 private companies employing at least 854, 000 people. Known collectively as the US Intelligence Community it was formed by Executive Order in 1981 by President Reagan. In the decades since then it has grown and grown and grown.

The USIC has become, I submit, so powerful and uncontrollable that even if the will were present, it is virtually impossible to dismantle even with strong leadership.

And now we have the vengeful pursuit of those who dared to release details of this intelligence-gathering organisation. Bradley Manning, the troubled 25-year-old US soldier, now undergoing trial on numerous charges including aiding the enemy, downloaded secret government files to the Wikileaks website. The founder of this organisation, Julian Assange, now cowers from the wrath of the US in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Neither of these whistle blowers will ever be free from pursuit.

And so we come to the most troubling case of all, that of private contractor Edward Snowden who revealed to the UK Guardian newspaper details of the vast intelligence gathering operations undertaken by the USIC and its UK equivalent. He fled to Hong Kong and is now in transit in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. Federal prosecutors have charged him with espionage. So desperate are US officials to capture him that they grounded Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane in Vienna on the chance that Snowden may be on board. In order to accomplish this Spain, Portugal, France and Italy closed their airspace to the plane, an indication of how much pressure the US is willing to use to capture the whistle blower.

Has the United States become another surveillance state? There is no war to justify such a vast intelligence network, not even the war on terrorism, and even that does not justify the charges of espionage and aiding the enemy that these men are facing. There is no moral justification for the actions of the United States in these cases, but it has become so powerful that it can act without justification.

Hugo Chavez, former President of Venezuela, used to refer to the United States as the Empire. He meant a nation bent on domination and on maintaining its dominion. Several other Latin American leaders now refer to the US the same way, including President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who experienced the power when his aeroplane was summarily prevented from returning him home.

Many Latin American nations fear the actions of their northern neighbour.

Should we be scared, too?

The Early Morning Sun

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:10:44 +03

After my triumphant, some might say hubristic blog of last December I have been suspiciously quiet. As one or two of you may be wondering why and what I’ve been up to in the last four months, here’s a brief description. But firstly, let me reassure you my silence has not been because I was banged up in intensive care after a liver transplant (in spite of what you think, Matty), or that I had been kidnapped by the FARC splinter group that operates largely unknown in the New Forest. No, nor is it because I had been whisked away by JLo to a tropical paradise in the Bahamas to film her new music video in which I played the part of the enigmatic, leaf-wearing bongo player. It was none of these things; my silence was due to the fact that I have been trying to turn myself into that most respected person, the professional novelist.

Of all the roads that we choose for ourselves in our life-long journey, writing must be one of the most thankless. And before you leap from your hard-won seat on the Tube, frothing at the mouth in outrage, I should reassure you that in arriving at this conclusion I have not considered sewer maintenance, animal dentistry or television production.

Writing can’t be so hard, I hear you cry, (hearing voices is a quite common trait in writers): arising late in your picturesque thatched cottage, tapping away for an hour or two before lunch, then a nap before dinner after which you peck away for another hour stimulated by Uncle Courvoisier. Then an hour in the garden watching the sunset completes the writer’s day, unless a phone call from your fawning publisher interrupts your reverie.

It sounds good, doesn’t it? Of course, you know what’s coming now: the reality and if you don’t want to know, then stop reading. I won’t bore you with what time I arise, but I can let you know that the sun rises really early at the end of April in London. After a wistful glance at the Tesco’s medium sweet Amontillado, you open your computer.An hour or so of procrastination follows because there is so much to learn. Google News must be scoured for every bit of goss, likewise the BBC News website. And if you are fortunate enough, as I am, to have friends who live at the opposite end of your day in Australia, then your email inbox is a trove of distraction.

When you look up from these pursuits, you are astonished to find that it’s nearly eight o’clock and time to have breakfast. Of course, you are far too busy to make anything substantial so, after another lingering gander at the Tesco’s medium sweet Amontillado, you return toast in mouth to your work. This is where it gets hard. If you are one of those writers who specialise in digital thingies, sport, food or travel then you may have magazine clients who will commission you. If you don’t, I strongly suggest you find one or two before you embark on this journey. If, like me, you choose to write books, or drama, then your road is more uncertain.

As I wrote in my previous blog, ebooks have provided a much awaited outlet for writers and the number of novels and non-fiction books has leapt skyward since epublishers have launched this opportunity. Even so, most of us struggle to find an audience. My first royalty cheque was for £26.05 after six months of sales.

Recently, I had an idea for a TV drama set in Brighton while in the shower. Every writer has his or her favourite place where inspiration seems to gush from a tap. Many times this place will be the pub. Perhaps it’s something to do with flowing liquid. This script was to be the pilot for a series,every writer’s dream because it comes with a regular and sizeable pay check. Having completed it I duly sent the outline off to the leading 15 drama production companies in London.

There was no reply from any of them. Then an email arrived from one of the company’s business managers which said, in essence, that they do not read submissions. In fact they throw them away and how dare I send them my work and I was not to do it again. There was an implied threat. The company is well-known and its productions are broadcast widely. I suspect many writers receive similar emails.

I have now re-written the script and made it a telemovie set in Vancouver, because there seems to be a market over there. I like it better I have to say, perhaps because I’ve imbued it with hope, without which no writer can survive.

But now it’s time to watch the sunset with a glass of Tesco’s medium sweet Amontillado. I’ll let you know how I get on with the Canadians in due course. Until then, cheers.

A Room Without Books

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 14:30:47 +03

“A room without books is like a body without a soul,” wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator in the first century before Christ. Or try this one from Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian essayist and poet, “I’ve always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.” These were people who loved books and you have to acknowledge that there are few more satisfying things than spending a rainy afternoon curled up with a book, the weight of it in your hands, the smell of the paper, the promise of it. But the time of books is coming to a close, not the literary pursuit that creates them, but the physical entity because electronic media is replacing them.

Just as the internal combustion engine swept horses off of our streets almost overnight, so the ebook reader – tablet, iphone and ipad – is replacing physical books at a prodigious rate. Amazon already sells more electronic books than physical ones; publishing houses have to adjust or simply go out of business. And frankly, I couldn’t care less.

Am I a philistine to be so unconcerned about the demise of books? No, I’m a writer and the rise of ebooks is the first real opportunity to be published for me and thousands of writers like me who hadn’t a hope of breaking into the elite group of people who style themselves as novelists. This elite was created by publishers as a consequence of their narrow and risk-free selection process for manuscripts. I acknowledge that there are also limitations on how many writers any one publisher can handle. Obviously, being part of an elite is good for those inside, not so good for the majority who aren’t.

The two things that publishers had that gave them their cast-iron ascendancy was their control of distribution and marketing. Ever tried to persuade a bookshop to carry your self-published book Don’t bother, you’ll be disappointed. Marketing consisted of conventional advertising such as ads, posters and adroitly placed reviews and personal appearances by authors. But epublishing has whisked the two foundation stones of distribution and marketing away from the publishing industry. Now you can do it all yourself for nothing. Having just made my first foray into epublishing I’ll share some of my own experiences.

Just as publishers try to get their books into as many bookshops as they can, I tried to get as big a distribution network as I could by signing up to Kindle, Kobo and subsequently Smashwords which gave me a presence on the massive Barnes @ Noble site as well as iPad, Nook, iPhone, Sony Reader and Kobo. If all of this sounds unfamiliar and slightly unsettling, imagine how I felt: I started my writing career on an upright Remington typewriter!

Next, I had to prepare my manuscripts for publication. I thought my eyes were going to explode after the fourth reading of the manuscript. After the seventh during which I was still finding typos, I nearly had a cigarette. In the process of epublishing you do everything, including the book’s front cover which means experimenting with graphics software like Gimp or the very, very expensive Photoshop. Good luck; I found someone to do it for me through YouTube for $10.

Being published is only part of the process, of course; after publishing I had to do the marketing. The internet offers an almost bewildering choice of marketing opportunities and if you think you can do without any of them, think again. I signed up to Facebook and Twitter and began spending a substantial proportion of my day tweeting and facebooking (or whatever posting on my Facebook wall is called). My son suggested that I ran a promotion and thus the whole family got involved in the process which eventually resulted after a whole day of frantic activity in my book becoming the fifth most downloaded book of short stories on the Amazon Kindle site. The book was free, of course – that was the promotion – but it was a substantial achievement nonetheless, we all thought.

It won’t have escaped your notice, of course, that here I am marketing again with this blog. So here are the titles of the books; please check them out on the Amazon Kindle site: Darwin’s Blueprint, a Sci-Fi adventure, Five for a Rainy Sunday, a collection of short stories, and Gavin: Confessions of a Clairvoyant Schoolboy, in which the title says it all.

The room of the future, to which the title of this blog refers, may well be a room without books. But it won’t be a room without ideas – many more ideas, I suspect, than it ever had before.

Living in the arms of a community

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 21:05:41 +03

A recent story in the Italian press talked about the role of the family in providing a safety net in times of economic crisis. The news story was based on a report (Coldiretti and Censis) that stated that around a third of Italians live at home with their mother and 40% live no more than half-an-hour-away.

I left the family home to make my way in the world when I was 18 and I couldn’t imagine living so close to my parents. I venture to say that I am fairly typical. The traditional Italian family model is often regarded as socially backward, but I live in a community in Rome where family ties are strong and in my view are culturally progressive.

Mauro and Amina who run the bar just outside our window have a thriving business that employs their daughter, their nieces and numerous old family friends. On a Saturday night when the place is really jumping and we can hardly hear ourselves think for the riotous noise, we know that a good percentage of the diners are either related or have known each other since they were children.

Paola and Augusto who run the Monumento restaurant a few steps away - due passi the Italians would say – have also been in Ostia Antica since they were children. Their own child, still at school, will no doubt enter the family business when the time comes. And why not? The Italians have embraced their community for many centuries and can relate their family and community history from memory.

Paula tells me about the time the Ravenati – natives of Ravenna - came to Ostia Antica to drain the marshland in the 1880’s and then they were followed by the Venetians who came to farm the reclaimed land. These are local memories, recited among the families for generations. By comparison, I have no idea who either of my great grandfathers was.

The wonderful thing about living in a community is that there is always someone around to help. If you are fortunate like we are to be adopted into such a community then you will never want for a plumber, electrician, a lift to the shops and all the other things that lubricate life’s cogs. And if that’s socially backward as the sociologists say, then I pity them.

Twice Forgotten

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:29:49 +03

The message drone had been orbiting the planet for more than a century. It was in a geostationary orbit, so it had been interminably gazing down on the same quadrant of the surface. Fortunately, it didn’t suffer from boredom like some organisms do, though part of it was organic. When the Interplanetary Survey Ship James Lovelock entered its own orbit around the planet the drone detected the ship and with numerous bursts of its attitude jets butted its way alongside. It was soon scooped up by the much larger planetary exploration vessel.

“What’s that, Murph?” the short, squat exobiologist was performing the exercises designed to rehabilitate the body after several decades of hypersleep. Murphy was holding a silver message strip which was suspended in a liquid-filled phial. The phial was coated in frost crystals.

“It’s a message,” he said.

“A message? From whom?”

His friend and fellow exobiologist Murphy was puzzled. His brow furrowed, “Dunno.”

Greenspan performed the yoga movement known as a sun salutation. “Oh, God, why do we have to go through this?” he groaned.

“We need to, I guess,” said Murphy.

“You never complain, Murph. Doesn’t it hurt when you do this stuff? Sometimes I think my tendons are going to snap, but you never complain. Actually, Murphy, it’s really annoying that you don’t complain. It’s like you’re mocking me.” Greenspan was irritated.

“Spanny, I promise to complain next time I do my exercises, okay? Meanwhile we have received a message that seems to be from a First Footer team who previously visited this planet,” Murphy replied.

Greenspan, who was on all fours and attempting to grasp his left ankle with his right hand, grunted. “Aren’t we supposed to be the first First Footer team to visit?”

Murphy put the message strip and player down on a convenient surface which happened to be the cover of the First Footers bible entitled Darwin’s Blueprint. Of course it wasn’t a real book; society had given those up centuries before, but a very good facsimile given to the pair on graduation.

“Yup, supposed to be.” An hour later the two exobiologists, showered and changed, sat opposite each other in the meal alcove of the tiny day room of the ISS James Lovelock. The message strip and reader lay on the table between them.

“I always think it’s amazing that you can get a shower from just one cup of water.” Greenspan said.

“Yes, it’s amazing,” replied Murphy who really wasn’t that impressed with the blizzard of tiny water droplets that issued from the atomiser in the shower. Showers lasted for just twenty seconds which was enough to clean him thoroughly, but not nearly long enough for him to sort out his thoughts. Ship-board showers always left him feeling uneasy and irritable.

“Are you ready to receive the message?” he asked.

“Ready when you are,” Greenspan replied. The message phial which the drone had disgorged wore an engraved hologram of a winged foot orbiting a planet, the symbol denoting that it was from the Guild of Exobiologists colloquially known as First Footers. Murphy inserted the phial into the reader which sucked it into its innards with an audible hiss. Various lights flashed around the base of the reader before it projected a beam of blue light and within it a tiny holographic image of a man on a horse.

“What the hell is that?” asked Greenspan.

“It’s a horse, Spanny,” said Murphy.

“Yes, I know it’s a horse, I recognise it from the catalogues. What I meant was, what is a man on a horse doing in a message?”

“He’s not a man, he’s a knight,” Murphy said.

The tiny holographic man was dressed in chain mail and brandishing a broadsword. He rode his tiny mount up and down the table before wheeling and making the horse rear up on two legs while saluting the two exobiologists. They watched the display with bemused expressions.

“There’s something familiar about this, Murph,” Greenspan said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but this seems like something I’ve seen before. Who is the message from?”

“It’s from you,” his partner replied.

The conversation missed a beat. Finally, Greenspan exclaimed, “It’s from me? How do you know?”

“Look at the man on the horse.”

Greenspan peered minutely at the image on the table. The man dressed as a knight riding the horse was Greenspan in miniature. And then as if to prove the point, the tiny Greenspan spoke, using a remarkable facsimile of the exobiologist’s real voice, “This is your test. Excel and you will be immortal.” Then after a pause, “Welcome to Heaven.”

Greenspan may have had an unusually dominant inner child, but his easy manner and infectious smile obscured the fact that he had an IQ of 153. A psychologist would have suggested that the intelligence and the mild manner were directly related – it was a disguise intended to deflect criticism, to make him seem harmless.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“Let’s go where?” replied Murphy.

“I think we should leave, Murph, leave orbit and blast off to an unsurveyed and uncomplicated planet where we can do our jobs without someone or something playing mind games with us. In any case, if someone has already been here, then we’re redundant as far as this place is concerned.”

“We can’t leave, Spanny.” Murphy half turned around and drew himself a cup of coffee from the spigot in the kitchen alcove. “You know that. It’s the Oath.”

Greenspan shrugged in acceptance of the inevitable. Then he got down to making the best of things. “Okay, as I see it we have three things to solve,” said Murphy. “First, who left the message drone for us to find. Two, how did these people know that it would be us to be the next to arrive? And three, what’s the significance of the knight?” “And four, why should anyone say that this planet is worthy of being called Heaven?” added Greenspan.

The port hole showed an Earth-like planet turning serenely. Murphy thumbed through the advisories until he came to the one referring to their current task: the survey of the planet OR 2317/3.

“Okay, it’s your turn to name the planet, Murph,” said Greenspan continuing the game they played every time they arrived at a new classification coordinate.

“Ok, I name this planet Mystery,” said Murphy. “May they be blessed, all who visit her.”

Greenspan grunted his approval and both of the exobiologists raised imaginary glasses in a futile toast. They both knew that the Committee for Planetary Nomenclature would name the planet entirely differently, giving precedence to the chairman’s cat before acknowledging those who had actually surveyed the planet. But any name was better that OR 2317/3.

Another hour passed while they despatched probes to the planet’s atmosphere. These would sniff the air, look out for life forms if there were any, taste the plants, again if there were any and generally assess whether it was safe to allow the two exobiologists to do what they were trained for – first footing on unexplored planets that scientists had believed might be a worth a second look. As the first look consisted of an automated spectroscopic analysis of light detected by an orbiting telescope several light years away, the work of the First Footers was pivotal to the human exploration of space. It was also extremely dangerous, lonely and quite poorly paid. All First Footers kept bank accounts on various planets. The holiday planet Frolic was a particular favourite of First Footers. They returned every thirty years or so to spend the accumulated interest which was occasionally massive. The banks didn’t seem to mind too much. Why would they? After depositing a few hundred thousand, many of the investors never showed up again.

Greenspan was monitoring the read-outs that repeated the information that the probes sent from the planet’s surface. “Okay, they’re coming in now, Murph.”

Murphy was monitoring another bank of dials a few feet away, “Yup,” he said.

An hour later, again sitting at the fold-out table in the meal alcove, the two swarthy exobiologists compared notes. “Oxygen 21%, Nitrogen 78%, traces of methane, argon, carbon dioxide, neon. Does any of this sound familiar?” Murphy looked up from the print-out.

He continued, “The planet masses 5, 9736 times 10 to the 24th, its surface area is a shade over 510 million square kilometres, 71% of which is water; there are extensive ice sheets. Plenty of mountain ranges so there’s tectonic activity, and there are tides as you would expect with a major satellite. What have you got, Spanny?”

“Okay, I’ve got plant life, dicots, monocots and I have chlorophyll-based organelles - photosynthesis. Flowering plants, no sign of pollination vectors yet. There’s no flight either - oh, wait, there are beetles, birds and bees. There are numerous species of megafauna, too. No sign of sentient natives yet, but the data is still coming in. It’s funny, but if I didn’t know better I could swear that this is another…” Greenspan trailed off, looking at his colleague.

Murphy completed the thought for Greenspan, “…Earth.” “And if so, and judging by the ice sheets and very large animals roaming down there we seem to have arrived around the end of the Pleistocene period,” responded Greenspan wryly.

Earth was a legend among humans. When the first colony ships left for deep space in the 2990’s, many parts of Earth had been uninhabitable for centuries. What scientists had been warning the population about since the late 20th century came true very, very slowly, but just as inevitably as they had predicted.

The people who left Earth on the first massive colony ships led a mass exodus that over the next two decades emptied the planet of nine tenths of its population, already depleted to less than a billion. These were the people who ran the ships; the colonists though, would never see the planet they had left behind. The reason they had no first hand knowledge of their home was that they were loaded onto the ships as millions of fertilised eggs. They were gestated and delivered, nursed and weaned in vast nurseries when they arrived at their destinations. Known colloquially as the Swarm, this wave of colonists spread slowly through the galaxies, each embryo colonist carrying in his genes the memory of a sun-blessed planet teeming with life and growth. Most of them would spend their lifetimes trying to recreate it, or find another one. It was an impossible dream; although planets like Earth abounded in the universe, not one was close enough to have been reached by the Swarm. Not until now.

“Like to go down and have a look, Spanny?” said Murphy enthusiastically.

“No,” Greenspan replied.

Two hours later, pre-flighted, suited and provisioned Murphy and Greenspan sat in the landing craft that would take them to the planet’s surface below. The orbiting sphere was wreathed in cloud and quite beautiful to the two men who had grown up on the tapes of Earth, many of them recorded by visitors to the International Space Station over a thousand years before.

“Where do you want to go, Spanny?”

“Surprise me,” came the reply.

“Oh, that’s guaranteed,” Murphy said, laughing.

The landing craft was spat out of the belly of the much larger exploration vessel and immediately pointed its nose at the large land mass that rotated into view. Automatics took care of the entry, so Murphy and Greenspan had nothing to do but look out of the port holes. They had done this hundreds of times before, but neither could conceal their curiosity, craning their necks for the first glimpse of the surface. Eventually, the craft broke through the clouds and revealed the majesty of a frozen world beneath them.

“That ice sheet is one kilometre thick according to the radar. Do you remember your Pleistocene glaciology, Murph?”

Greenspan had put aside his reluctance to visit the surface. Murphy hated it when his fellow crew member acted the smarty-pants.

“No,” he replied with a resigned expression on his face. He knew that Greenspan loved this stuff and could pull facts out of his prodigious memory almost without pause. He also loved to perform which occasionally made his presence almost unbearable. Murphy had learned to live with it.

“Okayyyy,” Greenspan began. Murphy resigned himself to a lecture from his colleague and looked disconsolately out of the window.

“Now, “Greenspan commenced with some relish, “If Mystery is really similar to Earth then we’ve arrived at the beginning of an interglacial which as you know is a period of warming in between glaciations. No one has ever worked out what’s responsible, but many theories include Milankovitch Cycles which are fluctuations in the amount of insolation…”

“Spanny, I think I’m going to kill myself,” interrupted Murphy. “As there is no known method of making you stop, the only way I can think of to relieve the pain of listening to your lecture is for me to leave your presence permanently. What method would you recommend?”

Murphy realised too late that he’d just provided a prompt for yet another lecture from his erudite colleague. He buried his head in his hands.

But instead of continuing, Greenspan exclaimed, “Wow, look at that!”

Below the landing craft, the gleaming ice sheet had thinned out. Large lakes appeared on the horizon and then swept beneath them as they flew south. More lakes were revealed. It was melt water from the receding ice sheet. Murphy, grateful that Greenspan had been diverted from his purpose, punched in a correction on the lander’s flight console. The vessel slowed and descended to 30 metres. It was a landscape composed almost entirely of what appeared to be tundra dotted with ponds and lakes. Vegetation consisted of moss and stunted bushes; it undulated beneath them, seemingly featureless except for a rocky ridge on the horizon like the rim of an ancient volcano.

The lander flew towards it, the automatic pilot keeping the craft exactly 100 feet above the ground. The nose of the craft tilted slightly upward as it climbed the gently rising face of the ridge. They cleared it and gasped. Spread out below them was a great plain of a luxuriant grass-like herb. Herds of animals grazed at various places on the plain. There were lakes scattered across the plain.

“Recording,” called Murphy to his partner, and activated the video and audio devices. Greenspan had a catalogue open and was thumbing through it.

“Can you slow down, Murph? I think we may have Mystery’s versions of terran mega fauna below us.”

A herd of tusked animals skittered nervously at the sight of the lander. Murphy brought the lander to a halt and hovered.

“We have a herd of probiscideans standing some 15 metres at the shoulder,” announced Greenspan. “And another herd of what appears to be tapirs,” he added. “Gee there are a lot of species here. A herd of stag moose – whoa, those are big babies – a large herd of giant beavers on the shore of the big lake.”

Murphy interrupted, “Any predators?” It was a prescient question.

A shadow swept across the meadow. The shadow was very large and the animals below instinctively closed up, ignoring species differences in the desperation to seek protection.

“There’s something big coming in,” said Greenspan.

The shadow materialised into a flying object the size of a small plane. It swept low over the herds now milling about in panic and lazily extended two huge clawed feet. It picked up one of the juvenile giant beavers with relative ease and flapped away into the distance.

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Murphy.

“According to the manual, that was Mystery’s version of Aiolornis incredibilis, I surmise – the giant condor, one big raptor. Wingspan of 5 metres, weight about 40kg, though that one seemed a lot bigger. Makes you wonder what else there is, doesn’t it?” Greenspan seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Any big cats, Spanny?”

“Can’t see any.” Greenspan turned towards his partner, hunched over the control console. “Why don’t you come over and look for yourself? Maybe you’ll find your big cats and maybe even what you’re really looking for.”

Murphy went to the viewing screen opposite where his partner was seated. He grunted, unwilling to acknowledge what Greenspan was referring to. Dusk was beginning to brush the plain with shadows. Herds of mega fauna were melting into the dusk. The two exobiologists became extra alert as the killing hour began, but it was almost completely dark before there came the sound of animals fleeing in terror, monitored by the microphones on the hull. Mega fauna make a lot of noise when they move. Murphy had switched to infra-red an hour before and the plain was vividly illuminated. It was the mammoth-like probiscideans that had spooked and were now lumbering towards one of the lakes. There was no sign of what was pursuing them. Or what would dare pursue them, thought Greenspan.

Greenspan went over to where his colleague was sitting disconsolately, gazing at the monitor. “They may not be here, Murph. They don’t have to be here, according to the Blueprint. Sure, somewhere on Mystery there are dominant predator species, but they may not be sentient.”

“They’re here, Spanny, and we have to find them,” Murphy said. “I know they’re here. This is Earth, isn’t it?” Greenspan sighed.

“It’s not Earth, old friend; it’s a planet like Earth. There may be sentient beings that live here, but they’re unlikely to be like us, or make the same mistakes. I know the Blueprint postulates primates, but when you think of all the permutations that could arise on a planet like this, the odds of a homo sapiens or neanderthalensis are pretty remote.”

The exobiologists subsided into silence, brooding on their own thoughts. Both of them felt that there was something strangely familiar about their visit to Mystery. They fell asleep chewing on it in the hope that their hindbrains would have the solution when they awoke in the morning. After eight hours, Greenspan sat up and bumped his head on the bulkhead, but he was too excited to register the pain.

“Murph, we need to get out of this zone and find a forested region. That’s where your sentients will be, if there are any.” Greenspan’s gaze settled on the portholes through which he could see a scrolling landscape. “You figured that out already, didn’t you?”

“Yup, woke up this morning with that very solution. I figure that if we position ourselves in the equatorial region and then circumnavigate the planet we’ll have the best chance of coming across something interesting. We’re travelling slowly though. Don’t want to miss something because we’re flying too fast,” Murphy exclaimed.

Greenspan knew his friend was feeling better. He went to the coffee spigot, “Coffee, Murph?”

“Thanks and croissants, those ones with the apricot jam, please.” Murphy didn’t look up from the console where he was reviewing the night’s recording.

Croissants this morning, thought Greenspan, but he didn’t comment, punching the combination for apricot croissants. The kitchen delivered it and the coffee piping hot. He carried the coffees and the croissants over to the meal alcove, just two steps from the kitchen slot, and placed them on the table.

“Breakfast!” he called.

The vessel was flying low over a range of rolling hills. The ice had been left behind in the north and the biome had changed from tundra to boreal and now temperate. There were forests of trees that were not dissimilar to those of Earth. And everywhere herds of animals grazed on the ground vegetation. Greenspan longed to get a sample – surely it couldn’t be grass, he thought.

“I got a sample while you were asleep,” Murphy said. “It’s not grass, more like some species of Pteridophyta - ferns. It’s over there.” Murphy indicated a plastic cube on the dissection bench.

“You landed! Murph, you landed without waking me up?”

“I sent a probe. Do you think I’m crazy, landing with those giant condors everywhere. There are several species of them, by the way, and at least one is nocturnal according to the overnight tapes. We’re going to need some sort of weapon when we leave the lander.” Murphy had recovered his optimism overnight, but he’d taken leave of his senses, thought Greenspan.

“We’re leaving the lander? When are we leaving the lander?”

“Just as soon as we find the sentient species, Spanny.” “And what are we going to do, invite them to dinner and tell them what a lovely world they inhabit and how important it is that they should look after it?” asked Greenspan. Then he added, “We should talk about this, Murph. We’re biologists, First Footers, we’ve sworn to investigate and classify life forms and assess planets on the basis of their suitability for human habitation, nothing more. We may not exploit resources for personal gain, or seek to profit from information we acquire, or supply information to any individual or company so they can profit. Everything we learn goes to to the Guild who then gives it to Migration and Settlement. It’s up to them to decide what to do.”

“Do you trust them?”

“Who, Migration and Settlement? No, but I trust the Guild.”

“You know what happened to Earth, don’t you? Human beings managed to make it uninhabitable within thirty thousand years, give or take a millennium. We destroyed most of the wildlife, cut down the forests, exterminated at least one competing species, honeycombed the crust with mines, polluted the atmosphere, changed the climate, enslaved minorities, impoverished whole continents and finally left when there was nothing remaining to exploit. Is that what you want to happen here?” Murphy’s jaw was thrust aggressively in his partner’s direction.

“That’s progress, Murph and in any case, how do you stop them?” Greenspan asked.

“I don’t know. I just want to find them, then I’ll think of a solution.” Murphy stopped looking at the recording of the night’s events and started sipping his coffee. He took a bite of his croissant; apricot jam squirted onto his coverall.

They were travelling so slowly it took another day and night to reach the equatorial region. On the way they crossed two minor mountain ranges and a significant one with peaks shrouded in cloud. They also traversed an ocean and spotted several species that on Earth, the real Earth, would have startled the marine biologists. Most of them were big and one was gigantic, twice the size of a Blue Whale, air breathers. There was another marine species that aroused their interest. These were smaller, about the size of Earth dolphins. Greenspan hovered the lander over the creatures so Murphy could get some shots. As if at some signal, the entire shoal rolled on one side and looked up at them while they hovered. It was a sea of eyes in an ocean of blue bodies.

“Maybe the intelligent life is all in the oceans, Murph,” Greenspan said.

Murphy just grunted, and then chuckled. “Did you pack the snorkels?”

Eventually a thin line of gold appeared on the horizon which resolved itself into a coastal fringe of wide, sandy beaches on which surf crashed. Then they were travelling over coastal scrub that slowly changed to forest dotted with clearings. Unlike the temperate regions, there was little sign of animal life, though conditions seemed perfect, lush and fertile. The trees consisted of five or six species with one variety that predominated, a tall specimen which soared twenty-five metres into the air. It had large compound leaves growing in a clump from the top of the branchless trunk. On closer inspection the leaves were composed of needles. Purple cone-like fruit dangled from some of them. Murphy called them pine-palms.

“We’ll need years to even catalogue the principal species, Murph,” Greenspan said. “And that’s just the land dwellers. I wonder where they are, by the way?”

“We’re going to have to land eventually. We can’t fly around all day and night,” Murphy said. “We’ll drop some bio swabs and make up a broad spectrum inoculation. We’ll arm the velo with compressed air tubes, okay?”

“Okay,” Greenspan said reluctantly. “I’d like to take another week to assess things, but…” Greenspan shrugged. “We haven’t even begun to unravel the mystery of the message yet either.”

“I know, Spanny, I know. Will you let me run with this for a little longer? I’m drawing something towards me, like a nugget on a string, or perhaps it’s a grenade on a thread.”

“Sure,” replied Murphy’s partner and that was all that had to be said.

Murphy grinned at Greenspan who patted his colleague on the shoulder. The evening found Greenspan reviewing the infra red images of the clearing below. The picture on the monitor showed a herd of horned animals grazing serenely. It was difficult to get a sense of scale until one of them reared up on its hind legs and began harvesting the cones from a pine-palm. It was one of the shorter specimens of the tree species, but nevertheless showed the grazing animals to be more than 20 metres long.

“Glad we didn’t decide to land, Spanny,” he said. “I’m beginning to wonder if our compressed air crossbow is going to be enough.”

“A brigade of marines and nuclear weapons would be better, I agree,” replied Greenspan, “but in their absence the crossbow will have to do.” He switched off the monitor. “Nothing apart from herbivores; no predators and definitely no sentients. I think we should move the lander. If there was anything vaguely primate-like around here we would have seen it by now, wouldn’t we?”

“Not if they’re smart. They could be reacting to our presence by hiding, most animals will do that,” Murphy offered.

“Isn’t that a learned response, handed down through the generations over millennia when animals first discovered that we were dangerous? Shouldn’t any intelligent species be curious when they encounter another species they’ve never seen before?” Greenspan stroked his chin.

Murphy laughed, “Spanny, when are you going to admit that neither of us are animal psychologists and we don’t know what we’re talking about?” Greenspan laughed, too.

The following morning saw the lander travelling slowly towards a range of low hills. In deference to the large tree eaters they had seen the night before they had increased their altitude to 100 metres. The velo had been fuelled and provisioned for a week’s journey. Now it squatted in the cargo hold, gleaming and ready. Overnight the two exobiologists had improvised and fitted the compressed air crossbow. It was bolted between the handlebars and to aim it the driver aimed the velo; there was a trigger that released the charge of air and fired the crossbow bolt. Reloading was automatic and they had fabricated a magazine that held twenty bolts. Each bolt had an explosive tip. Greenspan couldn’t wait to test it.

He activated the internal speakers of the lander. An aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute filled the cabin. “Thought you should hear something noble and good made by homo sapiens just before they destroyed the Earth,” he said.

“In fact it was fifteen centuries before, and I don’t think the composer was responsible for destroying the planet,” retorted Murphy.

He tried to ignore the music, but it wasn’t long before he was inspired to fly the lander in looping curves, banking the vessel in one direction, then another so it moved through the air in a kind of aerial dance. It was during one of these extravagant movements that the lander skirted a small hill and happened upon the species they had been looking for.

“Holy shit, Spanny, there they are and they’re being attacked by one of those giant condors!” shouted Murphy who had been snapped out of his reverie by the sight of a dozen quasi humans in a circle around one of the aerial predators they had seen on the first night.

The giant condor or whatever it was stood taller than the natives. Murphy hauled back on the control causing the lander to abruptly cease its forward motion. It reared back and hovered.

“Take it up, Murph, eight hundred metres!” Greenspan screamed from the rear of the cabin. The lander ascended like a turbo lift; when it stopped the natives were specks, only the giant condor was identifiable. As they watched it took off and with ponderous beats of its wings rose in the air. Each wing beat brought it closer to the lander.

“You know, Murph, I don’t think the condor was attacking those natives, I think it was listening to them,” Greenspan said. He squinted out of the porthole at the rapidly approaching raptor. “It’s their version of falconry only with giant birds.” “And they’ve sent it after us. We’re prey, Spanny,” Murphy replied, only half joking.

The giant condor was now above them. Murphy activated the hull cameras just in time to see the bird swoop, talons extended. It appeared huge on the monitors.

“That thing can’t do us any harm, can it?” asked Greenspan just before the lander lurched and there was an audible crunch from above their heads. One of the monitors blinked out.

“We’re three times its size so it can’t compromise our flying ability, but it can sure play havoc with the equipment that’s on the hull. There was another lurch and crunch. Murphy pulled back on the control stick and the lander rose higher, this time on the turbo jets. They rapidly left the raptor far below; it ponderously spiralled upwards, unable to catch them. They ceased their ascent and hovered at five thousand metres. Greenspan pressed for two coffees with cream and sugar.

“Did you get a look at those natives, Murph? They looked humanoid to me, but I only got a glimpse. Four limbs and they wore coverings. Let’s descend and find out more, but after dark, okay?”

“Okay, by me,” replied Murphy with more composure than he actually felt. “The inoculations are ready, so we can venture outside if we wish. Don’t forget that one of the raptor species, maybe all of them, are nocturnal. I didn’t get a good look at the natives either.”

Murphy bent himself to the task of loading the syringes.

Greenspan added, “Are these the sentients you were thinking needed protecting, Murph?” His crewmate said nothing, though a wry smile could have been discerned if he had kept his head raised.

To while away the hours remaining before darkness, the two exobiologists played ‘what if?’ games about the natives with the aim of trying to construct what they may be like. “Neanderthals trained dogs, so did Cro Magnons for that matter, so training birds of prey fits in with sentient beings. But they may not be the ones who end up dominating the planet, Murph. We’ve seen one hominid species, maybe there are more,” said Greenspan.

“How we’re going to communicate with them is what I’m concerned about,” Murphy replied.

“I think they’ve already communicated, Murph. That giant condor was a pretty clear message.” Murphy continued, ignoring his partner, “We have a translator in the computer don’t we? We’ll rig up a remote console on the velo and talk to them.”

“Murph, we’ve never used the translator in the computer because we’ve never discovered a species we thought was worth trying to talk to. We don’t even know if it works!”

“We have a manual, don’t we? You can work it out. I’m going to reduce altitude. That condor has probably gone by now, and we can’t see much from up here.” There were high winds at 5000 metres and they had blown the lander a hundred kilometres from its original position above the natives. Their descent brought down them over the coastal area they had traversed when they had first arrived on the equatorial continent. Dawn arrived as they were descending.

In the early light Murphy and Greenspan could see humanoid figures gathering something from the beach. They did not look up when the lander appeared above them, seemingly absorbed in their task.

“Looks like they're collecting purple seaweed; they eat it I guess. Dietary supplement if it’s like Nova Scotia Dulse. We should get a sample,” Murphy said.

“What the hell is Nova Scotia Dulse, Murph?”

“It’s algae rich in nutrients that the locals used to eat on old Earth. I read a nutrition primer once. It had been scavenged from one of Earth’s last libraries; it was a real book with illustrations and everything. Mostly a lot of old wives’ tales, but it had a few nuggets in it, like Nova Scotia Dulse. If it is a source of organic iodine like the real thing that seaweed could be worth a fortune, Spanny!”

“More money for the Guild,” Greenspan replied wryly. “The locals don’t seem to be eating it. I’m going to set the lander to hover while we take to the velo and go meet our new friends, okay?”

Murphy twisted a dial on the control panel and stepped away. In a moment the gleaming velo bearing the two exobiologists emerged from the lander on purring jets. It settled slowly and glided towards the group of natives. The two exobiologists landed 100 meters from the group and waited. A few of the natives glanced at Murphy and Greenspan; they seemed neither nervous, nor aggressive. They didn’t look all that friendly either, Greenspan noted.

While the two were well versed in the body language of Earthly animals, neither had any idea what responses they should expect. A smile could just as easily be a prelude to an attack as anything else.

“Is the translator turned on, Spanny? How much information does it need to begin translating?” Murphy spoke over his shoulder to his partner behind him. At no time did he take his eyes off of the group of natives.

“The manual said three minutes of conversation would allow the translator to respond. We should be recording this, Murph. This is the first time that anyone has encountered a humanoid species, so far as I know.”

There were two digital cameras affixed to the velo, one set up for close ups, the other for general views. Murphy felt for the button on the velo’s dashboard and turned the cameras on. The natives - Murphy and Greenspan had both simultaneously decided to start calling them Mysterians - had the normal complement of arms, legs, fingers and toes. Their skin was coloured various hues of dark brown, like a bodybuilder’s artificial tan. The most startling feature was their complete absence of hair. Neither the males nor the females had any on their heads and limbs at all, though each of them wore a loose coverall which extended from shoulders to thighs and hid the secret parts of their bodies. Their facial features would have distinguished them on old Earth as Native Americans, but there was a difference caused by the positioning of their eyebrows one centimetre higher on their foreheads than usual among homo sapiens.

“They look surprised to see us, Murph,” said Greenspan delighted by the Mysterians’ odd characteristic.

Murphy grunted. “Keep two eyes out for those condors, Spanny. I’m going to speak to the Mysterians.”

Twisting the throttle he sidled the velo across the beach finally settling it ten metres from the nearest group of natives. The Mysterians stopped gathering seaweed and watched the two visitors.

“That facial characteristic makes it really hard to read them. Everything we do, they just look surprised,” Murphy muttered. Then, much more loudly, he called out to the Mysterians, “Greetings, we are visitors from another planet. Our names are Murphy and Greenspan. What are your names? How are you called?”

The Mysterians began jabbering among themselves; both Murphy and Greenspan really hoped the translator was analysing what they were saying. It sounded like gobbledygook interspersed with clicks and animal noises.

When they stopped talking, Murphy spoke again, “Our planet is very similar to your own. We have some advice and insights that may be of help to you.” Again he spoke to his colleague who sat behind him, “Feel free to jump in here, Spanny, any time you like.”

Taking the cue, Greenspan cupped his hand to his mouth, “What do you call the seaweed you are gathering? Do you eat it? What do you call yourselves? And where are your children?” The last question was spontaneous. Murphy acknowledged the observation with a quick nod of approval.

Again the Mysterians jabbered among themselves. One of them, a female judging by the gracile set to its features, left the group and took two steps towards them. She stopped, still beyond comfortable conversation range and waited.

“I think she’s waiting for us to approach her, “Murphy said.

“I am not getting off the velo, besides the translator is here and I am not leaving that behind.”

“Well, Murph, I’m not staying here,” said Greenspan, swinging a leg over the pillion seat of the velo and standing up.

“Spanny, what are you doing! Get back on the velo!” Murphy was very agitated but did not let go of the velo’s controls. His partner took two steps towards the Mysterian. Four paces still separated them but it was close enough for comfortable conversation.

“My name is Greenspan. My partner is concerned for our safety. We have seen the large birds you command. Do you use them for hunting?”

The Mysterian began speaking gobbledygook and animal noises they had heard before when the translator suddenly cut in. All three were startled by the tinny voice that issued from the speaker on the velo’s dashboard. “…come for the smeltang.” The native indicated the sky with her hand.

All three looked at each other for a moment before Murphy spoke, “We do not understand you. More talk will help the translator learn. Please speak.” Again the tinny voice issued from the velo’s dashboard, but this time it was speaking Mysterian.

The native looked as puzzled as she was able with her eyebrows raised towards her hairline. Once again the Mysterian spoke to them and pointed to the sky, “The birds will come for the smeltang soon. If you wait you will see them.”

Just as she finished speaking another, older native strode onto the beach. He carried a long staff and carried himself with authority. He barked at the Mysterian who was talking to Greenspan and the native practically ran back to the group gathering the seaweed. They stopped harvesting and began scanning the sky.

“Spanny, get back on the velo. I think the giant condors are coming,” Murphy said. As Greenspan was swinging his leg over the velo the air was filled with the sound of beating wings. Four giant condors appeared above the trees and flew rapidly towards them. They were all wearing harnesses. The Mysterian with the staff pointed it dramatically at the approaching birds and uttered a piercing whistling shriek. Then he pointed the staff at Murphy and Greenspan astride on the velo.

“Murph, I believe we should leave immediately. How are you at dog fighting?”

“What?” said Murphy.

“Aerial combat.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.” Murphy half turned and looked at his partner, “Have you?”

“Only in simulation,” replied Greenspan. “That last time on Frolic I spent a week on the simulator. Got pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was flying against planes, not giant birds.”

“That makes you the most experienced pilot on this velo. Swop places with me, Spanny.”

They climbed off the machine and remounted. When Greenspan was in the pilot seat he checked briefly that his partner was mounted and strapped in. Then with a yell of excitement he took off. He was just in time, the condors had their talons extended and were swooping on the pair. The velo wasn’t designed for aerobatics. It felt slow and ponderous after the experience on the simulator. Greenspan’s excitement was replaced with a feeling of apprehension. He experimented with the jets mounted on the side and was rewarded with a sideslip that allowed the velo to narrowly avoid one of the swooping condors. Its talons tore a rip in Murphy’s coverall. He yelled something in Greenspan’s ear.

“What?” shouted Greenspan. Again his partner shouted in his ear.

Greenspan twisted the control grip and just slipped out of the path of two descending condors. The giant birds were now coordinating their attack; all four of them hovered over the velo.

Again Murphy, made frantic by trying to make his partner understand again screamed in his ear. “Boost! Hit the boost!”

Greenspan understood and looked for the control that would increase the velo’s power. There was a lever between his feet. Greenspan jerked it up to the stop. The velo reacted as if it had been stung and squirted away from the four condors. Greenspan laughed as the velo finally behaved like the fighters in the simulator. He was zooming all over the sky, out of control; he pulled the boost lever down to its middle position. The velo slowed, but was still plenty fast enough to outrun the condors.

“Going to try a shot!” he shouted over his shoulder. The velo climbed above the four condors which were beating their wings trying to gain some height. Greenspan lined the velo up on the leading condor and pressed the button that activated the crossbow. There was a loud pop and a bolt hissed towards the condor and struck it on a wing. Then the tip exploded and the condor jerked and fell out of the sky in a cloud of blood. It struck the ground and lay still, an untidy collection of feathers and bones where the group of natives stood watching the aerial battle.

“Shall I do another one, Murph?” Greenspan shouted over his shoulder. His blood was up.

“No,” his partner replied. “they’re being called off.”

The three remaining condors were descending and as the two exobiologists watched they landed near their fallen comrade. The natives milled around them. The velo climbed towards the lander and entered the docking port. The two men climbed ponderously off the machine.

“Well, we tried, Murph,” said Greenspan.

“Yeh,” his partner grinned ruefully. “I don’t feel like trying any more with these bird people. Let’s retrace our steps. Perhaps there’s another sentient species which may be willing to talk to us.”

“And who don’t practice falconry with giant raptors,” added Greenspan. “Before we go we should get a sample of that purple algae, though.”

The two descended after dark and landed. While Murphy monitored the beach, Greenspan slipped out of the lander and gathered a bucket of the purple algae. It was sopping wet and smelled like seaweed, its pungent perfume filled the lander when Greenspan brought it inside. He stuffed it into a sample pouch and sealed it in a storage compartment. They decided to leave immediately and retrace their steps back towards the ice sheet from where they would boost to the James Lovelock. It was a subdued pair of exobiologists that sat in the meal alcove with cups of coffee, no croissants.

“What do you want to do?” Greenspan said to his disconsolate partner. Murphy sipped contemplatively at his coffee.

“We’ll have to report the planet as occupied which will bring in the anthropologists, sociologists, zoologists and all the other ists. You’d never keep the colonists out either, they’d swarm to this place. They’d think it was heaven, paradise anyway. If we didn’t report this or put in a false survey we’d be breaking the oath, which I would do if there was a chance of getting away with it. But someone else has been here. Remember the message?”

“I’m still no closer to working that one out. But coming back to the Mysterians, weren’t you intent on saving them from themselves?” Greenspan said.

Murphy grinned, “Yep, I certainly was.” He laughed and spilled a few drops of coffee on his coverall. He fingered the rip in the garment’s arm and laughed again.

A few hours later found the two exobiologists draining the last drops from a flask of wine. The table was littered with half-eaten energy bars, glasses and dirty coffee cups. Murphy glanced out of the porthole,

“It’ll be dawn in a few minutes, time to grab some sleep.”

Greenspan, red-eyed, decided he’d take a last look out of the port hole, too. They were traversing the large ocean. The dawn light revealed shoaling shapes in the sea.

“Hey, Murph, you remember those dolphins? Well, they’re below us and they’re making shapes in the sea. Geometric shapes: squares, octagons, rhomboids, triangles, hexagons, dodecahedrons, circles. I don’t think dolphins are supposed to do that. I’m stopping the lander.”

Murphy was suddenly wide awake and leaped off his bunk. “I knew there were other sentient beings on this planet!”

Below the lander the sea was filled from horizon to horizon with the dolphin-like creatures they had seen on their outward journey. The shoal continued to form geometric patterns, even managing a crystalline outline at one stage. The creatures occasionally turned on their sides to peer at the lander hovering above them.

“Wow, Murph!” Greenspan was tremendously excited by the performance below them. While he gawked out of the port hole, Murphy prepared to lower a submersible microphone-speaker into the sea. He opened the hatch and started the winch; the microphone speaker array rapidly descended to the surface and then dipped into the sea among the marine creatures. Murphy punched a button and a symphony of whistles, clicks and semi-musical tones filled the lander’s cabin.

Greenspan left his vantage point, “Put it through the computer, Murph. Maybe the translator can make some sense of it.”

For three minutes there was only the sound of the symphony as the translator assimilated the sounds and looked for patterns concordant with human speech. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was all they had. At last, the speaker on the console in the lander spoke to them.

“Greetings, we are pleased to see that you have returned. We did not expect you, but we are happy anyway. What have you discovered in the time you have been away?”

Murphy and Greenspan exchanged a puzzled look. Murphy gestured to his partner that he should respond.

“We encountered a sapient species similar to our own that hunted with the giant birds that exist on this planet. Our meeting was not very productive and we left to return to our ship.”

“They are an aggressive species and you did well to escape them without injury. They have subdued many of the simian species on this planet; others they have exterminated,” the voice said.

Are they a threat to other life forms such as yourselves,” Greenspan asked and raised his eyebrows interrogatively at the microphone on the console.

There was a pause before the speaker began again, “We are not a simian species, obviously and do not compete directly with the zxxaxz. Some decades ago they discovered the craft of boatbuilding and in our concern we were forced to control them.”

Again Murphy and Greenspan exchanged a significant glance, “Control them?” They said in unison.

There was a pause, “Does this cause you concern?”

“The species bear a resemblance to us and the concept of control has uncomfortable associations for us,” Greenspan said.

“We understand. The control we practise does not involve violence or psychological intervention. We administer a tranquilising substance that interferes with their memory. They forgot how to build boats.”

Greenspan interjected, “Why don’t you erase the memories associated with falconry – those birds are dangerous!” The question was ignored.

“What beings did you encounter on your travels? We are interested in species from other planets. We know that you visit them. We know that it is your task to find homes for others of your species,” the voice said.

The question and statements stunned the two exobiologists, “How do you know this?” asked Greenspan, “Are you telepaths?”

“We are not telepaths. You gave us these facts about yourselves when you visited us many years ago.”

It was Murphy who first recovered from the surprise, “We have no memory of that. We are astonished to learn that you believe you have encountered us before on this planet. Can you give us more information please?”

“You are the species which calls itself homo sapiens sapiens. You destroyed your planet and consequently departed in what you called a Swarm. You search for other planets on which to settle and it is your job to survey possibilities.You are called Dr. Murphy and Dr. Greenspan.”

This time it was Greenspan who recovered his wits first, “How is it that we cannot remember this?”

Murphy jumped in, “And there is no record of our visit in any of our logs, or reports. Nothing at all…,” he tailed off and looked at his partner, an idea dawning on both their faces.

“That message, it really was from me, Murph,” Greenspan whispered.

The dolphin replied, “You asked us for some of the memory-cancelling substance so you could forget your visit. You had sworn an oath that prevents you from withholding information from your superiors. Ethics are laudable, but we suspect that you have been imprinted.”

“You mean brain-washed?” Murphy said, incredulous at the thought.

“We are not certain, but we suspect that is the case, yes.”

The two exobiologists were silent, unable to think of anything but the revelation that had just been given to them.

The dolphin spoke again through the console, “Will you consider staying? We find you interesting and believe that an extended visit would be mutually beneficial.”

Murphy and Greenspan didn’t need to confer. Both their heads shook violently, “No, no thank you,” they said.

The voice from the console sounded disappointed, “It’s a pity to waste such an opportunity for two sentient species to share their knowledge, but…we understand. Will you leave immediately?”

“Yes, immediately. Would you give us sufficient of the memory substance to remove our recollection of our visit here,” said Greenspan.

“You already have enough. We observed you gathering it on the beach last night,” the voice said.

“The purple seaweed!” Greenspan exclaimed.

“Yes, the purple algae. To erase your memory of this visit eat no more of the algae than you can fit in your fist. If you eat more you will erase more of your memory and may lose recollections you would rather conserve. The algae has a mild narcotic effect as well. You will go to sleep and wake up remembering nothing of your visit here.”

“Thank you. By the way, what do you call yourselves?” asked Murphy.

“We are the…” the speaker issued a short burst of music.

The creatures dived, disappearing from the surface. Murphy winched the microphone speaker array back into the lander.

The return to the James Lovelock was uneventful. Megafauna still grazed on the verdant plain near the ice sheet and the two exobiologists flew over it regretting their imminent departure. When they had parked the lander Greenspan retrieved the pouch of purple seaweed and measured out two fist-sized portions as the dolphin had recommended. The remainder was placed in the garbage for destruction, no recycling for this substance. The two exobiologists were uncharacteristically silent as they prepared the ship for departure. This time, as on their previous visit, there were no reports to write no log entries to make, so prepping of the ship was comparatively quick.

“I keep thinking we’re doing something wrong, Murph. I feel strongly that we should write a full report on Mystery and send it off to the Guild as ‘Most Urgent’. I can’t believe we’re going to keep this place a secret,” Greenspan said.

“I wonder how much of that is genuine and how much is conditioning, Spanny. A month after receiving our report, Migration and Settlement would have three or four colony ships en route to this place. The dolphins could distribute as much memory weed as they like, it wouldn’t stop the settlers. They’d change this world.”

“Yes, I know,” said Greenspan disconsolately. “Do you think the Earth could have been saved, Murph?” His partner thought about it for a moment.

“No. We evolved from species that were incapable of living in harmony with their environment. When your only concern is to reproduce and extend your dominion you’re eventually going to become so numerous there can be no sustainability. In following your nature you simply consume all the resources. When they’re all gone you leave in a swarm. The Blueprint says that all species are ultimately like that, have to be to survive.

“So what happens when our dominant species meets another that’s equally intelligent and dominant? How would survival of the fittest work for us?”

“Don’t think about it, Spanny. Eat your seaweed. And no matter how high we get we are not leaving any messages, okay?”

Quickly, bring me a nun!

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:42:03 +03

The recent revelations about Il Cavaliere’s excesses have struck a bizarre note in the media.

According to trial testimony one of Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties featured

girls dressed as nuns who entertained guests by stripping down to their underwear and

cavorting lasciviously. One of them was reportedly a minister in the government. Many will find this almost unbelievable behaviour for a prime minister to have encouraged in his home.

But this is Rome after all, a forum for authoritarian excess since historical times. The emperor Caligula believed himself to be the human manifestation of the god Zeus, beyond judgement and presumably restraint. He made his horse a senator, killed his sister and tried to eat their unborn child. His great-uncle, the emperor Tiberius, who preceded him, kept, according to the historian Suetonius, a troupe of young boys and girls in his villa in Capri. Called Spintrii, Tiberius would have them dress up as fairies and flit about so he could chase and catch them. Next to this sort of behaviour, Berlusconi and his liturgical strippers seem almost tame.

Authority and power does strange things to some people, leading one to ask if extreme behaviour is a manifestation of insanity, or something more insidious. Is there a tyrant lurking inside of each of us just awaiting a chance to stride forth? Are we restrained only by the lack of opportunity?

It’s easy to explain extreme abuse of power as insanity, but this may not be the case. Professor Anthony A. Barrett has written that Caligula was not insane, but merely driven to wantonness by his sense of self-importance. In other words, his ego.

Hollywood is one place where egos are encouraged to flourish and grow, by agents

and publicity people, minders and other assorted sycophants. An entirely artificial, you might say, imperial environment is created around the stars. Many of them respond wilfully and without restraint. If you have ever sat in on a meeting with some of these people you would have to conclude their egos have driven them close to insanity. I once baby-sat a very well-known American film and television personality during the production of a television pilot. The star’s behaviour which included nightly visits to live sex shows, violent and lurching drunkenness and habitual lateness on set threatened the production. Only by flying in his soon-to-be wife and his agent from Los Angeles was the star calmed down and the show salvaged. Nevertheless the star believed his behaviour to be beyond reproach. As far as I know, no one ever said, “You know, you’re behaving disgracefully. Stop it now.”

Certainly none of the production staff did.

Having worked in the film industry, advertising and television for a long, long time

I have seen more than my fair share of embryo tyrants, despots-in-waiting and latent oppressors. They did all have one thing in common: an unshakeable belief in their own entitlement and superiority. The problem is, they share these qualities with some of our greatest achievers and in today’s world it is, I would suggest, practically impossible to make great strides without them.

Italian Spring

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:16:44 +03

Accordion Boy is back in Ostia Lido. The sun has summoned him forth from wherever he goes during the short Roman winter. He knows only two tunes: The Lambada (also known as Llorando se fue) and Torna a Sorrento, vintage accordion pieces that evoke conflicting emotions. It seems that wherever you are in Ostia Lido one or other of his songs can be heard, evoking either a desire to dance or cry depending on which song he is playing at the time. I have no idea of Accordion Boy’s story. He is 14, perhaps 15 years old and every day he performs in the streets of Ostia Lido between the middle of March and the middle of September.

It’s a short winter in Rome, but I have never known a city more grateful for the return

of light and warmth. There’s a psychological yearning evident, too, I surmise. I was fortunate to attend the recent meeting of the General Council of the International Fund for Agricultural Development held over two days in Rome. It was the 35^th such meeting when donors meet to sign accords, pledge funds and outline their hopes for the coming year. As you might have expected, there were some glamorous guests, among them Bill Gates representing his foundation. He gave a worthy speech which the world’s media reported, but my respect was reserved for the Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti.

It wasn’t so much what he said, but how he said it. If you are not familiar with Professor Monti, he is an economist and academic and before being appointed Prime Minister of Italy he was a European Commissioner. There is little vanity apparent in the man’s demeanour and he is not a rousing speaker. But he was just what the doctor ordered in November when Italy lay gravely ill, broke, dispirited and suffering from deep-seated disrespect by the Western world. He is leading the technocrat government of Italy and providing an example, hopefully, for future leaders.

That he was appreciated by Italians wasn’t obvious to me and I had thought the absurd antics of his predecessor had created a model that no academic could beat, rather like a firework display will distract you from an art exhibition. But when he exited the plenary hall after his speech and was walking through the long reception area to his waiting car, he found himself in the middle of a spontaneous demonstration of respect. Every Italian in the building, there were three or four hundred of them, had gathered, to applaud him, motivated I believe by gratitude that they could at last be proud of their prime minister. It has been some time since Italians had pride in their political leaders. I hope it lasts.

Interesting Times.

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:54:53 +03

It’s been a long time since I last blogged. During the interim Silvio Berlusconi has gone leaving Italy in a financial and cultural crisis that no one expects it to solve by itself. The British Prime Minister has isolated his nation from European Union fiscal policies to the resounding cheers of Conservative backbenchers and the deep misgivings of many others. Meanwhile, in Durban the Climate Change Conference has cobbled together an agreement at the 13th hour to continue negotiating an emissions reduction plan that will come into force at the end of the decade. Of course, environmentalists and scientists are saying that 2020 will be too late.

Those of you who visited Italy in the 1970’s and 1980’s will remember a smiling nation, not rich, but one which demonstrated its joy for life. Now, and for the past twenty or so years, the misery felt by Italians is apparent everywhere. It’s not just manifest in the subdued behaviour in the bars and markets, it is also expressed in the body language of women trying to live up to an impossible ideal. Berlusconi demeaned women not just in his outrageous public–private behaviour, but also in his media which showed impossibly glamorous girls performing titillating stunts on his television channels. Several of these girls were encouraged to enter politics, or at least the political arena, becoming in some cases ministers. The message to women was, if you want to get ahead you must be young and beautiful. To live up to this, many Italian women have submitted to cosmetic surgery. It is a common sight on the streets of Rome to see women in their 50’s and 60’s wearing skin tight jeans and tight tops, their lips artificially plumped by collagen their breasts seemingly rock solid and their heads adorned with long blonde or coal black wigs. To change these manifestations of deep unhappiness I believe will take a generation, possibly two.

Great Britain has never felt itself to be part of Europe. I said this for years before it joined the Common Market and I haven’t changed my mind even though I actually had a role in the original Britain in Europe referendum campaign to gain entry. That was a long time ago. Having lived and worked in Europe for some time, both in France and Italy, I can report that Europeans have lived in an integrated community far longer than the European Union has existed. They have zipped across borders to work and zipped home again in the evening with scarcely a thought. Europeans of necessity are in general multi-lingual. For the British, mainland Europe was only ever a place to spend their holidays and to a great extent it still is. The British as a nation speak English only, or schoolboy French as it is flatteringly known. They do not want to be Europeans, they want to be British with all that implies. I wasn’t surprised that David Cameron opted out of fiscal union with the EU. His veto was a proclamation of Britain’s undimmed greatness, let the French and Germans have their hegemony, he was saying, we British will go it alone. He may well have his wish sooner than we all think.

The Durban Climate Change Conference has been saved from a farcical ending by an agreement that, in essence, binds negotiators to continue negotiating to find an agreement. The time limit for any emission reduction protocols to be adopted has been pushed back to 2020. Surprised and disappointed? You shouldn’t be, it was virtually inevitable. The four big emitters - China, USA, India, Japan – are never going to agree to a limit on emissions because it would be a de facto limit to their development. No government could sell it and no nation would accept it. Not that a reduction in GHG isn’t urgent because it is. We will go sailing past 450 ppm of atmospheric greenhouse gases and consequently the maximum 2 degrees of global warming agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009 will be like a sign on the motorway, briefly glimpsed while travelling in the fast lane. These, incidentally, are not my words, but the words of an eminent scientist, a Nobel Laureate and expert on the technology known as carbon capture and storage, spoken to me last August. Another note of caution from another eminent scientist, this time the former government chief scientist Sir David King: he told a group of NGO advocates, scientists and government workers in Brussels that by 2012 global oil supplies will no longer match demand. In case you didn’t get that the first time, next year, the world will not have enough oil to fill its needs. Of course, it’s an estimate, but it made me sit up and gape when I heard it. If you have wondered why oil companies are pushing shale gas so emphatically, now you know. Is Peak Oil upon us? According to Sir David King, apparently so.

What are we to make of all these goings on? I have no idea, but I do feel that I have become the subject of that most quoted of Chinese curses and I am not comfortable with it at all.

An Australian in Rome

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:29:36 +03

One of the nice things about Australians is the national desire for equality.

One Australian is as worthy of respect as another and affairs are conducted in a spirit of affable informality; why stand on ceremony when everyone is equal? Prime Ministers, church dignitaries and even on occasions army generals invite casual acquaintances to address them by their christian names. In protocol drenched Europe where everyone is concerned with status I had forgotten that in one corner of the world, a corner of which I am a citizen, people do not stand on ceremony. I was reminded of this yesterday when I was invited to attend a presentation on food security hosted by the Australian Ambassador to the Holy See. His Excellency, the Ambassador is the former Australian Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer who served in this capacity for three years in the Howard government.

This charming and extremely accomplished member of the Australian diplomatic corps chaired the presentation and was on first name terms with everyone present. The room was stuffed with diplomats from different parts of the globe and he knew them all and after a few minutes so did we. The stiffness, dare I say stuffiness, that characterises many nations’ plenipotentiaries melted away in this atmosphere of genial informality.

At the cocktail session after the presentation, His Excellency the Ambassador greeted the guests in a stockman’s hat, an Akubra I surmised, handing out drinks and sandwiches with informal gusto. It made me wonder what it must be like for the Royal Family when they host an Australian visitor, or what it would be like if an Australian were to be appointed to, say, the Middle East Quartet. Most negotiations would benefit, I believe, from a glass or two of informality.

Tim Fischer did give us an insight into how it might work when he gave us his definition of diplomacy. “Diplomacy,” he said “consists of protocol, vitriol, alcohol and panadol.”

Memories

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 10:17:13 +03

I was in the newsroom of Associated Press Television News when a young female

colleague drew my attention to a television monitor on her desk. It showed a modern skyscraper with smoke trailing from an upper floor. She told me that a plane had apparently crashed into the building in New York, though there was no evidence of a plane, just what appeared to be severe damage to the building. We speculated on the causes of what seemed to be a tragic accident: a plane that had suffered mechanical failure perhaps. A bulletin editor, one of the people responsible for sending out news items came over and mentioned that a client had messaged him to ask if we would be covering the event. As we all watched another passenger jet appeared at the edge of the screen and flew into a second building right next to the first one.

These pictures were coming live to APTN from the ABC in New York. APTN along with Reuters are the two main news agencies that disseminate print and television footage to media outlets around the world. If you watched any of the television coverage of the event now known as 9/11 or the Twin Towers, that’s where it came from.

As a news producer working for APTN it was my job along with several others to

send out these pictures in digestible lengths to our clients. Stories are usually assembled in some sort of narrative allowing the broadcasters to quickly edit them down to the length they need them for their news bulletins. We were working on tape – now it’s digital – so each item of around 4 or 5 minutes had to be first recorded from the live feed coming from New York before the tape was ripped from the recording machine and run around to the edit booth where the individual stories were put together. Usually you get 15 minutes or so to assemble an edit, on the 11^th September 2001, we were editing in something approaching real time. That’s a 4 minute story edited in less than 5 minutes. And that was my job.

People often ask how news journalists – cameramen and reporters – can stay uninvolved with the stories they are covering. In part this is because journalists have to be unbiased, another reason is that after a time you become inured to it all. I remember seeing pictures, what’s known as a raw feed, of the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Israel. The female bomber and her victims had been butchered by the explosives she had been carrying. You learn pretty soon to switch off your horror reflex, or you leave the business.

As I edited scene after scene of horror and destruction, a process that was to continue non-stop for 8 or 9 hours, I did not pause to consider anything apart from doing my job. But one sequence stopped me and in the 10 years that have gone by I haven’t been able to rid my mind of it. The shot started out as a wide angle of one of the twin towers and then slowly zoomed in on the top stories. As the resolution improved you could see what looked like leaves swirling around the building, and then as the picture got closer the leaves resolved themselves into people. These were the dozens of office workers who chose to leap rather than be burnt alive. I couldn’t imagine the desperate plight that would make people do that, but I knew it took enormous courage.

I continued working until I was relieved by another editor and then went home. I knew I had taken part in an historic moment, but I had no idea how to assimilate the memories and I still don’t.

Ferragosto

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 18:16:51 +03

Rune of the Day: Fehu, wealth

Those of you who follow this blog will remember that last August I wrote about being in Lyon during the European holiday month. Deserted streets, shuttered shops and restaurants and empty apartments predominated because the majority of Lyon’s population had left to enjoy their breaks on the beaches of southern France.

I also wrote of the emptiness of Rome which suffers from the same condition, which in Italy is known as Ferragosto. I was in the city just a day or two ago and marvelled at the Romans’ willingness to abandon their homes and businesses for a month. There’s no shortage of trade: tourists abound, most of them wondering why they can’t get a cup of coffee, or a meal in spite of the fact that their pockets are stuffed with euros.

But where have they all gone? The French as I mentioned before are adorning the beaches of Antibes, Bormes Les Mimosas, Cannes, Saint Tropez and others. The Italians from other cities have left for various places; the Romans have come to Ostia Lido.

Most foreign tourists who visit Rome have little idea that Rome has a beachside suburb connected to the city by train. As it’s part of the Roman comune Ostia benefits from cheap travel. A ticket that works in Rome will also work in Ostia. For one euro you can travel to Ostia from the Vatican, a journey of around an hour, involving a bus journey that will take you past the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, the Baths of Caracalla and Circo Massimo and then to Porta San Paulo where you catch the train. It’s the travel bargain of Europe, but few tourists seem aware of it. The Romans though know what wonderful value it is because they flock to Ostia in their thousands.

The good people of Ostia, realising that God has given them an opportunity, open their shops and bars at 8 am and keep them open until lunchtime when they will close to avoid the heat of the day, re-opening at around 5.30pm and remaining open until 9 or 10 pm. Unlike the retail outlets in the city, these establishments are jumping with activity. The other day, at our local bar, the fabulous Bar Remondi (no, they’re not sponsoring me), the customers were four deep, everyone screaming for their cappuccino, or café macchiato while the barista tried to keep up. And he did, although the experience was not a pleasant one for him judging by his pallor at the end of the rush. As an aside, if you have never had one of Remondi’s cornetti con marmalata, pastries which magically combine doughiness and crispness and ooze apricot jam, then you should get your tush over here before you die and miss one of life’s treats.

While you can park your car just about everywhere in Rome in August, in Ostia locals play a game of hunt the space. I used to begin at 6am and I was not alone as I patrolled in convoy around the streets, sharing the experience with other residents, garbage trucks and street cleaners. At the end of the first week of August I gave up on this early morning exercise after finding a space on a residential street not too far from where I live. I left my car there. I have returned a few times to check whether it’s okay and have noted the steadily thickening coat of seagull and pigeon guano, leaves and handbills that combine to give the impression that my car is abandoned. I will return soon with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge to clean it down, but I will not move it, not one centimeter, not until August is over.

A Polish Wedding

Sat, 13 Aug 2011 06:49:43 +03

Rune of the Day: Sowelu, the Sun

The road was guarded by a succession of people, most on bicycles, some on foot, two in a huge motorised bale elevator – a gauntlet of human sentinels stretching for a kilometre and with one ambition – to give good wishes and receive vodka. This was a small town in Poland and the event was a wedding.

Many reading this will be surprised to learn that any Pole can stop a wedding car transporting the bride to or from church and receive a bottle of vodka in return for a greeting. In fact, we know so little about this fascinating nation that I thought I would describe my experiences when I attended the wedding of my son a week ago.

But first, a quiz: how many famous Poles can you name? The film directors Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, of course and less obviously Fryderyk Chopin, the composer. Marie Curie’s parents were both Polish, as were those of Nicolaus Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy. Henryk Sienkiewicz, novelist and Nobel Prize Winner was a Pole as were Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II, two of the most influential figures of the 20^th Century. There are thousands more, less well known, but still distinguished.

Like you, I was aware of the first few names, but woefully ignorant of anything else. Americans have been familiar with Polish people for decades through immigration, but in Britain you may not have been aware of the Poles until 2004 when membership of the European Union saw thousands of them go over to try their luck and successfully settle.

So it was with some apprehension and considerable curiosity that I took a plane to Wroclaw and then a minivan provided by the bride’s family for the guests from other parts of Europe to Ostrow Wielkopolski, a small town around 80 kilometres away.

I had been told that Polish weddings last for two days, but I had not been told about many of the rituals. The wedding party, that is all the guests, were first taken to the bride’s home to collect her and take her to church. I was expected to bless the bride and groom at this juncture and they dutifully knelt before me and my wife and the bride’s parents. I had never administered a blessing before, in fact, I thought blessings were solely the function of church officials, so I had to hurriedly make something up. I hope it was acceptable, by the way.

After the service, conducted in Polish and English by the priest who switched back and forth most impressively, we were transported in convoy to the wedding reception.

It was a journey interrupted many times by the previously mentioned well wishers on the road.

At the reception held at the motel where we had been generously put up there was live music, a trio who belted out songs in Polish and Russian, many of them local standards which I had never heard before. And another surprise – all of the Polish guests could dance. I don’t mean shuffling around the room clinging to your partner, or jiggling around in some laughable attempt to show rhythm, but real dancing with dipping and coordinated movements. It was as if we had stumbled into a Strictly Come Dancing dress rehearsal.

There were many rituals to be observed: the throwing of the veil by the bride, the casting of the corsage by the groom, the presentation of gifts to the parents of the bride and groom. And naturally there were numerous vodka toasts. “Na zdrowie!” we called to each other time and again.

Ten hours later we lurched into the dawn. And ten hours after that, we returned to do it all over again.

The Fourth Estate

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:10:26 +03

Rune of the Day: Ger, Harvest

Everyone except perhaps newborn infants have been following the News of the World-Rupert and James Murdoch-Rebekah Brooks-scandal. One jaw-dropping revelation follows upon another so speedily it’s as if the whole business is being covered by the News of the World itself. But why is everyone so astonished at these revelations of anti-social, perhaps criminal behaviour in pursuit of a scoop?

Where do readers think the stories come from? For 168 years the scandal sheet has been titillating the British populace (all social spectrums, too) and at one stage was selling more than 8 million copies each Sunday, sometimes 9 million if the scandal was juicy enough. Those same people who are gasping in horror at the depravity of the journalists who could sink so low as to hack into people’s voice mail, are the same ones who revelled in the juicy titbits that appeared every Sunday in the paper’s pages.

Foot-in-door, bribe-offering, cynical journalists have been supplying material to newspapers, radio and television for many, many years and we’ve loved it. But you all know this and you don’t need me to tell you because you’ve been reading about it for the past few weeks. What you may not know is what the culture behind the front pages, the radios and the television screens has become. As society’s values have declined, our media has offered a mirror; some would say that the media has led the decline with nonentity celebrities, prurient revelations and obsession with anti-social behaviour. But who is selecting these stories, who has decided that it’s good to humiliate someone in jungle shows, or dwell on people’s failures and shortcomings

in artificial environments? And who is reading, watching and listening?

The media has been selecting for aggression for years resulting in a work culture that is truly frightening. Newspapers and television are no longer the places to send our sensitive and educated best to learn the skills of writing and broadcasting. They will be traumatised by the abuse, or be forever changed. I remember feeling real apprehension for my son when he expressed desire to do a week’s work experience at a television news agency at which I happened to work. I helped him achieve his desire then spent the week guarding him from the many who had tried to savage me. And it has been the same at every media organisation I’ve ever worked at. So don’t be surprised that representatives of our media exhibit behaviour that a few decades ago would have been seen as evidence of mental illness.

There are many to blame for the sort of media culture that has led to the current judicial enquiry into phone hacking. The main protagonists are justly accused certainly, but let’s also include media entrepreneurs, executives, managers and others who have mandated such practices in order to increase audiences. The journalists, too, who allowed and contributed to such a decline in values should share the blame. And finally, you and me, who by watching and reading such rubbish and not speaking up have allowed this disgraceful state to develop and prevail in a once proud and noble profession.

The Italian Life

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:15:12 +03

Rune of the Day: Perth reversed, Danger

As I suspected they would, Italians voted overwhelmingly against the revival of nuclear energy in the referendum a couple of weeks ago. I accompanied a journalist who was vox popping outside the local polling station and she reported that she couldn’t find one person who was in favour. Italy, which at present derives around 22% of its power from renewables, is looking at a massive investment if the growth in electrical demand is to be met into the 30’s and 40’s without nuclear power. However Italy accomplishes this, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi won’t be around to contribute to the planning. “We’ll have to say goodbye to nuclear power,” he said as the results came in. We may soon be saying goodbye to Il Cavaliere himself. He’s lost a lot of ground lately as well as a lot of support from the Italian electorate. But however you judge him, and many judge him very harshly indeed, there is no one in Italian politics today who commands such attention. Of course, it may not be the sort of attention you want.

Summer has come to Ostia and with it the crowds, the markets and

the itinerant salespeople. Italians have a wonderful childlike ability to extract the maximum joy from the simplest thing. There’s money in it, of course. Entrepreneurs , no doubt in league with the Comune, the local council and other authorities, have fenced off most of the beaches, filled them with sun loungers, umbrellas and bars and charge admission. If you want to swim, you pay – depending on the level of service – up to 12 euros. This will get you a sun lounger, the use of a cabina to change in and unlimited access to the sea. It has been the source of much criticism for years that only in Italy are you physically denied access to the sea and made to pay for a privilege that almost everywhere else is a right. The elite disport themselves like elephant seals, bronzed and glistening with oil, lying in ordered ranks behind the barriers. Of course, Italian rules are only made to be flouted, so locals have liberated a patch of sand a kilometre along the beach for their own free use from which they make forays at low tide along the shore onto the elite beaches. Proud to be invaders, they sneer at those silly enough to have paid.

Power Without Glory

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 07:52:38 +03

Rune of the Day: Inguz, Fertility

As I sit and write this Italians are preparing to vote in a referendum on a number of issues about their future. One of these is to do with who will manage the water supplies in the future, state or private enterprise; another is whether government officials can continue to claim that their duties prevent them from attending trials either as a witness or accused. Thirdly, Italians are being asked if they want the government to re-introduce nuclear power.

While I have some concern over the response to the first two questions, it’s the answer to the third that’s really worrying me not, as you might think, because I believe Italians will accept nuclear power, but because I think they won’t.

Flash back to 1987 when Italians last voted in a referendum about nuclear power. Italy had four reactors running and was building a fifth. The year before, in April, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear disaster had occurred: Chernobyl. Few people wanted nuclear power in the late eighties. The Italians voted against it and the nation’s nuclear programme was closed down. It was a relatively easy decision back then. Oil was relatively cheap and plentiful and the issue of climate change was yet to capture the attention of the general public. How things have changed.

In the intervening years Italy has become a huge importer of both fuel and electrical power – more than 80% of its energy comes from overseas. Italy is the world’s largest importer of electricity and Italians pay nearly half as much again as their neighbours, the French, to run their lights and appliances.

Italy’s Minister of Economic Development Claudio Scajola put the figure for the "terrible mistake" of the nuclear phase-out at some €50 billion. Italy is now the only G8 nation without a nuclear programme, something which the Berlusconi government had planned to correct until the nuclear accident, still ongoing, at the Fukushima Daiichi plant earlier this year.

That nuclear power is dangerous is uncontested and the Fukushima disaster shows that it can probably never be made safe, no matter what precautions are put in place. What is seldom stated though is that fossil fuel-generated power is dangerous, too. Oil and coal-fired electrical plants give off huge emissions; gas-fired power plants do, too, though not as much as the former. Oil is becoming scarcer (nobody knows how scarce) and consequently more expensive. The world is turning to natural gas and a boom in this commodity has already started.

Oil companies, aware that conventional supplies of natural gas are finite, have turned to an unconventional source known as shale gas. Shale, which is what you get when you bury sediments like mud for several million years, is everywhere. It contains gas trapped in tiny pockets and mining engineers have conceived a clever system of extracting it called ‘fracking’. In the United States mining companies are buying huge leases so they can mine the shale deposits and send down a cocktail of chemicals at high pressure to fracture the rock and release the gas. It stands to reason that not all of the gas and fracking liquid is collected and some of it leaks into the ground water giving rise to dramatic TV footage of residents setting fire to their tap water.

Of course, the technique will eventually be refined and leakages minimised, but it raises an interesting question: where do we want our future power supplies to come from? We can, of course, keep plundering the planet until that inevitable day when our planet, honeycombed, stinking and lifeless is declared uninhabitable by the human beings who remain. Or we can pursue alternative means of producing power that do not involve mining and burning fossil deposits.

Renewable energy is the only way, that is to say, wind, solar, tidal, hydro-electric. But there’s a catch: it will take decades and an investment of trillions of dollars to engineer renewable power producing systems to replace the ones that are currently run on fossil fuels. Renewable energy currently supplies between 15% and 20% of total power. Some countries have a high proportion of renewables in their energy mix, others not so high.

So what do we use for energy while we’re spending the coming decades building solar concentration power plants, wind arrays, tidal generators and the like? It should decreasingly be fossil fuels because they cause climate change and pollute our ground water. What can we use that’s plentiful and cheap and emission-free? Guess what.

Don't Look Now

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 17:16:17 +03

Ever had a close call? I mean a brush with death so shudderingly awful it left you thinking you were lucky to be alive?

I had one when I was a kid.

My family used to stay on a farm in Lincolnshire every Summer. I loved it. It was a few weeks of freedom. The rest of the year was school, doing jobs around the house, insults from my friends, casual violence from my enemies. But those three weeks in Lincolnshire I could do what I liked. Sometimes I helped with the milking, other times rode around on the back of a tractor, or speared fish in the stream that meandered through the farm. Nobody cared what I did, nobody gave me orders or made demands on my time. I did whatever I liked.

The year I turned fourteen they let me take out the shotgun.

The fields were always jumping with rabbits in the summer. They were so plentiful, the farmer, my parents’ friend could have turned them into a cash crop. Hares, too.

When you clapped your hands, the rabbits would take off, streaking across the fields. They went crazy.

I thought it was great. The farmer, though, he didn’t think it was so good. Especially when the wheat was standing. He thought those rabbits were a pest. The summer I turned fourteen I started to see things his way and when I casually asked if I could shoot a few for dinner, he said yes. Amazingly, so did my parents.

The shotgun was a small one, a 410, not like those double barrelled monsters that could fell an elephant. It was always left in the umbrella stand by the farmhouse door, a few red cartridges casually strewn nearby. You’d have thought it had no more importance than the walking sticks it shared a home with.

I walked out in the fields the next morning with it tucked under my arm, cartridges bulging my pocket. It was early and the farmyard was deserted. It must have been early for the rabbits, too, because there wasn’t a sign of them. I clapped my hands, but nothing moved. I climbed up on a fence rail and waited for the rabbits to get up.

I remember the details perfectly: the movement of the wheat in the wind, spiders webs glistening with dew along the fence line, a blizzard of puffballs as a heavier gust shook a patch of dandelions, a crow floating up from a stand of trees, black on red. If I’d had a cigarette I’d have smoked it. I was feeling that good.

After a while, there was movement. A rabbit, a big buck, scampered out of the wheat and began attending to some fallen ears of grain. His family joined him. They were right at my feet. Surely, they had to see me. But they grazed on oblivious to the nearness of death.

The gun was propped against the fence at my feet. I thought about reaching down, hoisting and firing it in one movement. I made an ever-so-slow movement towards the gun. I slid off the fence rail and fell flat on my face.

The rabbits fled.

I picked myself up and began to stalk the rabbits, shotgun advanced, hand on trigger. And when I turned a curve in the field there was another rabbit tableau right before me.

I raised the gun to my shoulder and pulled the trigger. Click. Misfire.

I remember thinking that I must have forgotten to load it. The rabbits hadn’t moved, so I retreated around the curve of the field and slid my hand down the barrel to the lever that broke the gun. I kept my attention on the rabbits, half-glimpsed through the stalks of wheat. I was willing them to stay where they were.

My hand brushed the lever. I went for a cartridge with my other hand, and gently broke the gun.

“Boom!” The explosion nearly burst my eardrum and a hot wind struck my cheek. I reeled back, thinking that I must be dead. I sat in the field, shotgun cast aside, sobbing with shock. I stayed there in that field of wheat until the sun was high in the sky.

When I returned to the farmhouse, it was lunchtime. Everyone was sitting around the big pine table. Nobody said a word to me, not even to ask me if I’d bagged any rabbits. I was really grateful.

That was my last summer on the farm. My parents never went again, preferring to holiday in Europe. I didn’t really mind. That brush with death had scared the living daylights out of me.

The years crawled by. School ended to my relief, to be replaced by the hope and disappointment of work. I never felt satisfaction, never lost my horror of that morning in the field of wheat.

Whatever I did, wherever I went I was a stranger. My job, though, was secure and it gave me routine, a sense of being needed, that kept me going. One morning, though, there was a note from the management saying that the company had been sold. My services were no longer required.

I had enough money to last a year, if I didn’t work. And I didn’t work, couldn’t work. I sat and dreamed the days away, a reject from life.

When you lose everything and nothing has substance, your mind revisits the places that gave you pleasure and so it was that I took a train to Lincolnshire and then a bus to Stamford. It wheezed along the lanes of my youth, hedgerows streaming past and then I was there.

The farmhouse was just as I had remembered it, delightfully higgledy-piggledy, a gingerbread house in the woods. It was late afternoon and there was only a curl of smoke from the chimney to tell me that it was occupied because the yard was empty of people.

There was no one in the machine yard, either, the overgrown museum of farm implements that I had so enjoyed as a child. I swished through the long grass and took the path that followed the stream, pleased to see that there were still moor hens.

And so I arrived at the far end of the field that had occupied so much of my mind. I followed the fence, saw the place where I had sat that morning so long before, turned the corner around the standing wheat and then I saw it, the explanation for everything.

In that place, where I had fumbled with the gun and felt the wings of death brush me, there was a small carved stone and some flowers. My name was carved on the stone.

Ever had a call so close, you felt lucky to survive?

Maybe you didn’t.

Hello again, Italy

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 17:11:32 +03

Rune of the day: Sigel , harvest

June 2^nd was the 150^th anniversary of Italian unification and some journalists are using the opportunity to assert that Italy isn’t really united at all. For a few, mostly English-speaking journalists, Italy is a loose confederation of cities each with its own identity and fiercely loyal inhabitants who couldn’t give a fig about a national identity. The reality though, as this English-speaking journalist has found out, is quite different. Romans, Florentines, Genovese and Neapolitans feel a sense of national identity. They are different, of course, as inhabitants of different cities are bound to be, but all are proudly Italian.

Returning to Rome after four years in France was an emotional experience. Neither

my partner nor I actually cried with relief as we left France and motored down through Piedmont in our little yellow car, but only because we’re too middle class for such things. Looking down on the bay from the road that clings to the cliff above Genoa made the tears well up, but by then we had mastered our emotions, though not the sense of wonder that Italy evokes in almost everyone.

According to the World Tourism Organisation, Italy receives 43.7 million tourists a

year, not as many as France, Spain, the USA and China, but a respectable number nonetheless. What is not known, not even by the Italian authorities, is how many come for a few weeks and never go home. There are thousands of them. Some come to find romantic partners, to escape their humdrum jobs, or simply to take a risk for the first time in their lives. Without the support of conventional employment which is nearly impossible to find in Italy, they offer photography courses, cooking tours and host conversation evenings for each other. Some do get jobs, though. English teaching is always a good bet, though not well paid. One lady of my acquaintance, the administrator of a large and prestigious university in the United States, came for a two weeks, resigned her job and started work in Rome as a dental nurse.

What is it about Italy that creates such feelings of romantic longing that corporate ambitions are shelved, the ties of friends and family broken seemingly without a thought? Is it the cupola of St. Peter’s gleaming at the end of Via della Concialiazone glimpsed as you drive by on your way to dinner, or the peal of church bells on Sunday mornings in Florence, the casual collection of magnificent antiquities that is Perugia? Who knows, most of the ex-pats I speak to are unable to articulate a reason. And I suppose I should ask myself that question, too, because I am no different to any of them.

I’ll report on how fate treats me as I attempt to make a new life for myself in Italy and hope that you’ll find it instructive. If you detect some thread among my ramblings that indicates a reason for my being here , perhaps you’ll let me know.

In and Out in 4 Years

Wed, 11 May 2011 15:58:40 +03

Rune of the Day: Inguz, Fertility

Those of you who read this blog regularly (thank you for tuning in) will have noticed that I haven’t posted for more than a month. It’s because I have been moving. No other task in my life – and I have had some beauties - was ever so brain-numbing as the move from France to Italy. Or, indeed, as was the move from Italy to France. Confused? I’ll start at the beginning.

It used to be that it was hard to get into some countries. Tibet, for instance, was apparently a bitch for anyone of foreign origin. Read Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson and you’ll find out that Siberia was pretty hard, too. In fact, any of the Soviet satellite nations were acknowledged as no go for foreign visitors. But nowhere seems to mention how difficult it is to get into France. By ‘get into’ I do not mean crossing the border, I mean settling there.

Real estate agencies in Lyon gazed at us in disbelief when we presented our pitiful sheaf of documents which included rental references for the past ten years, business bona fides and bank statements going back a decade. Where were our four recent and consecutive French rent receipts? Our CDI(long term work contract)? Our RIBs, which are printed details of our French bank accounts? “It is impossible, monsieur, dame, to help you.” My partner and I moved into a one room holiday let, paying 1200 euros a month, triple what you would pay for an apartment of similar size, so we could acquire the four rent receipts. My partner managed to get a long term work contract, something I never achieved, and after several interviews, we were finally allowed to open French bank accounts.

At our place of work, a television broadcaster, our original birth certificates were

required. It was understood that we would never see these again. As I was unwilling to part with the original I flew to London to acquire a certified copy of mine, my partner obtained her bona fide copy from her place of birth, Giugliano, a town near Naples, the first time she had visited since she was five years old.

And so, after four expensive and tense months living in one room, we had the documents required to be considered for the tenancy of an apartment. We retained the

services of Astria, a government agency which helps foreigners find apartments (but only if you have the right documents). We took the first apartment we saw in spite of the holes in the walls, the 30-year-old faded paintwork, the years of grime and filth, the dangling, naked light bulbs and exposed electrical wires because by then we were at the end of our tether. Of course, we re-decorated, spending a month filling holes, cleaning blinds and painting. We bought light fittings, furniture, carpets, a washing machine and stove because when you rent an apartment in France you get nothing but the walls and the floor. Finally, we had an apartment we really liked.

And after four years it was time to leave.

In Australia and the UK one month’s notice of leaving is considered sufficient. In France it’s three months. We had decided to move to Rome, to a furnished apartment, so all the furniture we had bought for the Lyon apartment had to go – that’s beds, refrigerators, tables and chairs, couch, cutlery, bedding, kitchen appliances - everything. Remember, when we moved in to the apartment it was as bare as a cave. The real estate agency required it to be returned to its original empty state. Fortunately it turned out there was a thriving market in secondhand goods via a website called Le Bon Coin. Finally we were down to the almost bare bones. We scrubbed and cleaned and re-painted (my partner much more than me) the apartment to a pristine state that couldn’t be faulted. It was a million miles from the drab slum we had rented four years previously. Our deposit was safe, or that’s what we thought.

Misgivings began to surface in our minds when the real estate agency sent in their

assessor, a dour and driven man, who began taking photographs of minute scratches

on the stone sink that had probably been created in the 19^th century, he found minute

holes that we had never seen before and photographed them with a macro lens so they resembled lunar craters. There was discoloration on the tiles of the balcony, a scratch on a tile in the bathroom, smears on paintwork all faithfully photographed and recorded. Records of the previous state of the apartment seemed to be non-existent: there were no photographs of the holes in the wall that we had repaired; the peeling wallpaper, the filth and grime that we had encountered and cleaned were unrecorded.

After two hours of this humiliation we were ushered out of the apartment – an apartment we are still paying for – like unwanted visitors. We sat in our car outside the apartment block in stunned silence before setting off for Italy. Never have I been so pleased to leave a country as I have France. Next blog I’ll tell you about arriving in Rome and the delight it brought to both of us.

Tales of the Fly River

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:14:57 +03

The man was real old and leathery, but his eyes still sparkled. He started to talk after the meal, shifting and settling his old bones so you couldn’t tell whether it was him or the chair that was creaking. The story came slow at first with wheezing breath, then in a rush as he remembered the hunt and the fish that had eluded him, up there at the head of the Snowy.

I packed that same night and left in the dawn with the night sounds still echoing. I travelled light, taking only my rod and fly kit and the old billy with some black tea. The moment my paddle dipped into the water I felt the excitement well up and I increased my stroke. Still it was dusk before I reached the stretch the old man had described with only time enough to study the eddies before dark

If the old man wasn’t exaggerating, this was the home of a monster brown trout grown so big it would take a man’s leg. Maybe it was something in the water or the weed growth that turned a five pounder into a twenty pound slab sided monster. Or perhaps none of it was true - fishermen can be awful liars sometimes. But the river, bathed in the orange glow of sunset, seemed to hold a mysterious promise and the last of the evening fly hatch dappled the surface like rain.

There! Against the far bank, in a hollow framed by the roots of a Red Gum and almost screened by overhanging branches, something big had risen. I watched the spot as I crouched by my beached canoe, gathering deadfall by feel for the fire. Again! A huge, hooked jaw had emerged from the depths, sucked a fly off the surface and withdrawn. I was transfixed. Then it was dark as if a blanket had been thrown over the sun and I could only imagine this behemoth. I don’t think I slept a wink that night and it wasn’t the dingos snuffling beyond the fire that kept me awake.

It was cool the next morning, and I shivered as I fit my rod together, thread the line and tied the fly. Time seemed to flow past and I fumbled with the knots in my excitement.

The trout’s lie had given me an almost impossible target, thirty yards across the river and down a little, through a gap no more than six inches wide. Too short and the current would sweep the fly away down river. Too long and I’d be into the branches and snagged.

I pulled some turns off the reel and began the rhythmic switching that pulls line through the rings and into the air until I had a great loop of it flying above me. I leaned into the final forward stroke willing the fly and leader through the gap in the branches across the river. Damn, it was too long and slightly wide and the fly and leader hung on a twig inches above the surface. Then there was a great surge and that massive hooked head lifted clear out of the water and plucked the fly off the branch as clean as you like.

It was a snaky line I’d cast so the fish felt no resistance and neither did I until I’d gathered a few coils in my hand. Then it was as if I’d hooked a log, ponderous and unbelievably heavy. Now the small hole in the bank was giving me different problems - not how to get the fly in, but how to get the fish out. I kept up the tension, gradually increasing it until I thought the leader must surely part, but it didn’t and suddenly the fish was out in the main stream, plunging and leaping. I ran along the bank, leaping tree roots so I wouldn’t have the current to fight as well as the fish and I prayed. I fought him for two hours with the rod tip touching the butt until at last he was beaten and I drew him through the shallows towards me, like beaching a boat.

The trout went 30 pounds even on my scales and if it had been any heavier I truly believe the spring would have snapped. I packed him in moss and laid him on the bottom of the canoe and set off home, because it was a full moon, although ghostly.

When I brought out the monster the old man laughed and laughed, whooping and wheezing and slapping his knee. “That’s not a bad trout, “ he gasped. “But as the to the one I was talking about, why, that’s just his baby brother!”

As I said before, fishermen can be awful liars sometimes.

The Silent Menace

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 18:10:12 +03

Rune of the Day: Ansuz reversed, Futility

There are groups of people in society which it is extremely inadvisable to

criticise. Even to mention them is often construed as criticism, so I won’t refer to them, but you know of whom I write. Now a new politically correct group is emerging, so before it becomes a capital offense to criticise them, I’d like to offer my jaundiced view of cyclists.

No other group of road users enjoys the privileges that have been awarded to cyclists.

Motorists pay road and fuel taxes, are subject to draconian fines for minor rule infringements and are under-represented in most of society’s forums. Cyclists pay nothing. Neither do they observe traffic regulations, road signs and traffic lights. Cyclists sail through intersections with the insouciance of the truly elite, ride on pavements, bowl over pedestrians who stray into their paths, all without raising a single eyebrow. Cyclists have considerable political clout because they have captured the moral high ground of the environmental debate.

Spare a thought for Ricardo Neis who now faces multiple counts of attempted murder after he ploughed through a gang of cyclists in Porto Alegre, Brazil in February. Investigate the story and you’ll discover that he had been caught up in a mass demonstration by the international biking pressure group Critical Mass whose aim is to bring traffic to a halt in cities around the world by swamping the streets with bicycles. Pressure and intimidation are the twin weapons of these anarchists. Senhor Neis was reportedly subjected to harassment which included having his car thumped by cyclists when he had the temerity to try and drive down the street. He fled, knocking over the cyclists who were attempting to impede his progress.

If you think that someone banging on your car roof is scarcely something to get in a lather about, try it yourself some time. Sit in your car and allow your friends and family to slap, kick and punch the bodywork. It’s like being trapped in a drum.

A couple of decades ago when there were many fewer cyclists, those that did take to

the two wheeled life were considered charmingly eccentric. Unlike the current crop, they were generally peaceful, observed traffic regulations and all without the benefit

of dedicated cycle lanes. That was before cyclists discovered the environmental gambit. In Lyon where I live, the city council is engaged in a frenzy of cycle lane creation. One quarter of the roads are now delineated as cycle lanes and woe betide you if you stray into one either as a motorist or a pedestrian.

Cyclists really have become the silent menace and their encroachment on our civil

liberties is real and a little disturbing.

I now await the 3am squeak of tyres and the tap, tap, tap of a tyre lever on the door.

Time to Think

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:41:00 EET

Rune of the Day: Laguz, overreach

I was in my early twenties when I first became concerned about

my helplessness should I ever be confronted with the fall of civilisation.

Before you start to laugh, consider this: do you know how to design a sanitation system, weave cloth, tan hides, fire clay pots and generate electricity? Undoubtedly some of you will, most won’t.

So what do I care, you may ask yourself, civilisation won’t fall and I will never be called upon to make a haven for myself and my family. There will always be Walmart, BP service stations, the local mall and abundant electricity flowing day and night from those doohickeys on the wall. There will, won’t there?

That’s probably what the former residents of Japan’s northern Pacific coast thought before 11^th March when a tsunami brought local civilisation to an abrupt halt. Many of the dispossessed, bewildered by the scale of the damage and trying to keep a grip on civilisation, are now camping outside the piles of rubble that were once their homes. Such is the devastation that even in the world’s most urbanised society, help cannot reach them, not for days at least.

Dreadful as the events of March 11^th are, they are not unique in human history. Humankind has faced natural disasters many, many times before from devastating plagues, seismic eruptions, famines and tsunamis. Civilisation has always eventually recovered, even from the 14th Century's Black Death that killed as much as half of the world’s population. But could there be a natural disaster from which civilisation would not recover? A sizeable comet striking the Earth would do it for sure. So might rapid climate change.

It was James Lovelock, the indefatigable British scientist, who first gave us the concept that we were living on a natural organism. The Earth, according to his theory of Gaia, is a discrete organism that is self-regulating and to a certain extent, adaptable.

Ever wondered how the oxygen content of the atmosphere, fixed at around 21%, stays that way? Bear in mind that 1% higher and forest fires would burn out of control. The Earth does it.

But James Lovelock and all of the scientists that I have interviewed say that our manufacturing endeavours are starting to overcome Gaia’s ability to adapt and self-regulate. They also say that the mere presence of 7 billion of us and our animals breathing out carbon dioxide is sufficient to increase the proportion of atmospheric greenhouse gases to a size where climate change is inevitable. God knows what will happen in 2050 when there will be some 9 billion human beings and at least the same number of domesticated animals. Curbing industrial emissions won’t make any difference at all.

What will climate change look like? I don’t know and none of my science interviewees know either. James Lovelock commits himself, unusually for a scientist,

to the view that southern Europe will be a Saharan inferno, though he says the British Isles and Scandinavia will be largely spared. But broaden his vision and you start to see migrations on an unprecedented scale, inundations of nearly all the world’s major cities due to sea level rise, the collapse of infrastructure. In other words, no land, no food, no power and precious little hope. And most of us are woefully unequipped to deal with it.

Stranger Beware

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 12:28:46 EET

Stranger Beware

Rune of the Day: Algiz reversed, protection

English speakers, in general, don’t have much idea of what it’s like to be a foreigner.

In fact, they have such a strong sense of self that most would not acknowledge that they are foreigners even when trekking in Nepal. It’s the others who are foreign.

But if you can’t raise some empathy, then at least find some understanding for those who are foreigners. That is, those who are not native speakers of the local language. Let me give you some small insights into what it’s like.

A few years ago, I lived in Rome and while I diligently took daily classes in Italian,

engaged a private tutor and took copious notes. I never really grasped the language,

but I had sufficient Italian to shop twice a week at the Trionfale Market in Via Andrea Doria. I was loyal to several of the stall holders, always buying my fruit and vegetables and meat from the same ones. This compact would last for about four weeks until the day I brought home my bags of goods only to discover one or two of them had been switched under the counter. Instead of the crisp spinaci and firm pomodori I’d selected I would discover rotting lettuce and potatoes. Would the stall holders have done this to an Italian? I doubt it. I didn’t have the vocabulary to complain and in any case the response would have been a shrug.

I moved on to other stalls, knowing that in three or four weeks time I would have to move again. In fact, foreigners in Rome are often treated with contempt, even those who have lived there for years.and speak the language well. Why is this?

When I moved to Lyon I’d hoped that the land of liberty, equality and fraternity would be more supportive and in general it was and is, but not entirely. The market traders still try to stiff you, but it’s not so blatant, and I have the French to complain. It’s not the same for my partner. Her Italian is extremely good, but in France it’s obvious she’s not French. She’s regularly scammed in hairdressers who seem to have a special premium price list for foreigners like her. And mistakes are often made by assistants at the till; one salon tried to charge her twice for the same goods, until she pointed out their mistake.

Banks, too, are not above taking advantage of strangers. Our own bank has recently removed all of its tellers. You pay in money now by putting cheques and cash into an envelope and posting it in a letterbox in the branch, no human contact required. If you want to do anything else such as transferring money you must go to the island help desks in the main concourse. There, lying in wait, are members of the bank’s sales team. Of course, they don’t call them that, they’re designated helpers, but their agenda is clear: to sell goods and services such as magazines, enhanced credit cards, insurance, anything that will extract a little more money from their customers. Of course, it’s a perfect place to ambush foreigners.

And ambush them, they do. My own partner was asked during a recent transaction whether she’d like to receive the bank’s magazine which costs 8 euros a month. She declined only to receive the magazine a few days later with a letter that began, “As you have agreed to subscribe to this magazine…” Once again we ask whether this would have happened if my partner had been a native French speaker? Again, I doubt it.

These transgressions are trivial, of course, but every time you are cheated or treated with contempt because you are foreign, it adds to the feeling of being an outsider,

of being unworthy of the locals respect; being a victim.

My partner and I are both well-educated and well-paid, but what if we were not? What if we were newly arrived from Bangladesh, or Sudan, or Poland, or Peru

with only a smattering of the local language and little money? Then I suspect that

these small transgressions would increase and begin to assume huge proportions. Self-respect, self-belief and self-confidence are the three cornerstones of personal survival. Remove them and anyone is vulnerable. Small wonder then, that migrant populations show a disproportionately high incidence of mental illness. Spare a thought, next time you are tempted to dismiss a foreigner as unworthy. One day, it might be you.

I'll get to it later...I hope

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 09:56:31 EET

Rune of the Day: Sowelu, Wholeness

Last month I cleaned my apartment so thoroughly you could have performed open heart surgery in the kitchen. My refrigerator and pantry have never been so well stocked, my clothes so clean and well-pressed. My files are all apple pie and the car is spotless. You’re right, I have a bad case of procrastination.

Since leaving my job at the end of the year to pursue my own projects I have sought nearly every excuse not to begin. At one stage it got so bad that I even expended several minutes of what should have been valuable writing time to looking up procrastination on the internet.

Procrastination is apparently associated with perfectionism, the pursuit of which can lead to feelings of inadequacy. Did you know that procrastination can be clinical in extreme cases? That is, it can be so chronic that sufferers are advised to seek professional help, though you’d think that the condition would delay them actually making an appointment, possibly for years.

For students, procrastination is an old friend. The website I consulted stated

that 80% to 95% of all students acknowledged that they practised procrastination

at some stage during their studies. There is even a condition called ‘student syndrome’

where students only begin to study seriously immediately before an examination. Well, we’re all familiar with that one, but I never knew it had been given medical legitimacy. I wondered if this could be presented in mitigation prior to failing, “You see, sir, I suffer from ‘student syndrome’ and I was hoping you could take this into account when grading my essay.”

Famous procrastinators in history are legion. Isaac Asimov took 10 years to earn his chemistry PhD, Douglas Adams was notorious for missing deadlines and Helen Hooven Santmyer took a reported half century to complete her New York Times Best Seller novel “And Ladies of the Club”. One can’t help but gasp at Ms. Santmyer’s magnificent act of procrastination. I can’t imagine to what lengths she went to delay finishing her novel, but I am sure that there was nothing out of place, no household task that hadn’t been completed on the day she scrolled that last page into her typewriter. Though I can’t help but wonder if her life didn’t seem just a little bit emptier without the big job that needed to be done mocking her on the horizon.

Of Man and Monkeys

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:54:51 EET

Rune of the Day: Algiz reversed, Protection

They came in over the balcony rail, silently avoiding the bed where we were enjoying an afternoon siesta. They followed their noses to the fragrant plastic box and delicately extracted it from the pile of personal possessions on the dresser. Then holding the box between thumb and forefinger one of them snapped open the lid and offered the contents – wax earplugs – to the others who chewed them reflectively until the box was empty. Then the trio tossed the empty box over the balcony and slid down a pipe to safety. The scene of this vandalism was Shanzu Beach, Mombasa , Kenya. The perpetrators were vervet monkeys.

That we live side by side with such clever and artful creatures as monkeys

should be no surprise. Colonies of monkeys live among the inhabitants of cities in Africa, Asia and South America. Delhi has a population of various species of monkeys estimated in the tens of thousands and they’re a problem because they steal, vandalise and occasionally attack humans, according to reports. Delhi is in the midst of a programme to reduce their numbers, basically by extraordinary rendition, to use modern terminology.

In Mombasa there is no such plan to reduce vervet monkey numbers and they’re left to steal, vandalise and entertain the hotel guests pretty much as they like. At Shanzu Beach there are two vervet activity periods, in the early morning and late afternoon. The morning show consists of a few mature adults raiding the garbage bins, but the evening show is something to behold. The entire troupe comes out, from tiny, frolicking infants to mature males, big and self-assured whose whole demeanour says, “I dare you.” They rampage throughout the resort, leaping from palm trees onto guests’ balconies, snatching something and leaping away. It’s quite a show and most people seem to enjoy it. When night falls abruptly, as it does in the tropics, they are suddenly gone.

I asked one of the locals when the monkeys had come to the resort. He told me they’d always been there and, in fact, were there when the construction teams had arrived to tear down their trees and erect hotels for their human cousins. That had been several decades before. The Delhi monkeys began migrating to the city when their own habitats were destroyed by the insatiable human hunger for land. Their successful adaptation from dwelling in the jungle to city life is remarkable and demonstrates great resourcefulness and intelligence.

Human beings are often intrigued and occasionally amazed when they encounter behavioural characteristics in species other than their own which appear to indicate intelligence.

The realisation that we share this planet with many species which have qualities we admire is slowly dawning on us. It is affecting our view of where we fit, which is not at the top of a hierarchical system with other species milling like amoebae far below, but rubbing shoulders with animals that deserve our respect.

The Best Age

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 20:47:51 EET

Rune of the Day: Ansuz, Signals

At one minute past midnight on Saturday, January 1^st2011 a milestone was quietly passed by several hundred million people around the globe. It is sixty-five years since the birth of the first baby boomers, defined as January 1^st 1946. The International Herald Tribune even had a picture of one of them: Aloysius Nachreiner of Buffalo, New York. With a birth date of April 30^th, 1946, I am another. What are we baby boomers to make of this amazing event? In my own mind, my 65^th birthday has no more significance than my 30^th birthday, or my 40^th. But it has for others. For the past ten years people have been asking me when I’m going to retire. People selling tickets in cinemas and bathing pools assume I have already retired and offer senior discounts. And after April 30^th they can legitimately level the ultimate and indefensible charge: “Sir, you are suffering from oldness and you must now leave the arena”.

Trouble is, I have no intention of going. Not now, not in ten years, not in twenty. I

suspect that there are hundreds of millions like me. After all, we are the mothers and

fathers of innovation and unconventionality, we boomers. We threw off the mores of our parents to which they had been shackled since birth and moved in with our sexual partners. Our parents didn’t even have sexual partners when they were our age. We grew our hair long, carried fringed bags and smoked pot. We didn’t pursue careers, we had adventures. “Shit, I’d like to try that, man,” was a popular cliché at the time. And to show that we had no respect for our children’s values, thirty years later we did it again. There is an enduring spirit that defines baby boomers and will make us unlike any retired generation that has ever lived.

To show that this isn’t just a Canute-like defiance of the natural order, let me offer

some demographics. Over the first half of this century, the global population aged 60 or over is projected to expand by more than three times to reach nearly 2 billion in 2050. Active life expectancy is expanding rapidly, (some might say alarmingly, if they had just seen the 67-year-old Mick Jagger capering on stage), and that offers an enormous marketing opportunity. Sports equipment for the over seventies, further education and travel, all tailored for the ‘retired’

How are these 2 billion ‘old codgers’ going to spend their time and money? I’ll tell you, we’re going to spend it on the same things we’ve always spent them on, enjoying and fulfilling ourselves. We’ll have money and dreams and nobody will be able to say we’re old, because we’re not and we’ll never be.

A Tower of Babel

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:46:39 EET

Rune of the Day : Mannaz, the Self

What is the essence of Europe? It’s languages, specifically 230 of them and

if you want success in Europe then you’d better learn one or two - three

would be better.

The place where I work is a Tower of Babel. It’s a television

broadcaster which transmits in ten languages and there are people here who can

go seamlessly from English to Russian to Portuguese and Spanish and then, of course,

to French because we all live in Lyon where the station is based.

One of the requirements for employees is that they must speak at least one language

other than their own. But how do they learn three or four languages? Part of the reason

is down to television.

A Portuguese journalist told me he learned English watching

Disney cartoons broadcast in their original version with subtitles. A Romanian

journalist told me the same story. But what about the Russians? And, before you ask, how does that account for the multi-lingual Italians who work here?

In Italy, every film and TV programme of foreign origin has been lip-synced into Italian since Mussolini. In any case, the films and TV programmes they watch are predominantly in English, so how do they learn the other two or three languages which most of them speak?

It’s a matter of much shame for the English journalists, many of whom even struggle with French, as do I. With so many cultures mixed together I’ve often thought that my work place would make a wonderful sociological study, a world in microcosm. Here, Russians marry Spaniards, Algerians marry Spaniards, too, while Germans marry Portuguese and, of course, the English marry the French.

Their children grow up speaking two languages fluently and will probably add a third and fourth by the time they graduate from university. There is a linguistic gene that is mostly missing from the English-speaking genome, I tell myself in one of those self-serving rationalisations that help you explain away shortcomings like not being able to dance, or still being a virgin when you’re thirty. Neither of these refer to me, of course. But skill with languages, I have to admit, is not my thing.

So, can I call myself a European in the cultural sense? Not yet, but as the Chinese say, ‘the oxen are slow, but the earth is patient’.

To the Arctic

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:21:42 EET

Rune of the Day: Sowelu, the Sun

I’m travelling north, almost as far north as it is possible to go. My destination is

Longyearbyen in the Svalbard archipelago, at 78˚ 12’ it’s the world’s most northern

permanent settlement. I go by train to Paris, then a plane to Oslo, another to Tromso

and yet another until finally I land in Longyearbyen. I’ve come to interview Dr. Malcolm Wilson, one of the world’s leading experts on the technology known as Carbon Capture and Storage. The car I’ve hired turns out to be a beaten up Ford Transit, the only vehicle available. It wouldn’t attract a second glance in a breaker’s yard. “It was the winter”, the hire company rep. tells me, shrugging. Fortunately, the winter is a memory, now it’s the time of the midnight sun. First impressions are of hundreds of snowmobiles, parked up awaiting the first snowfall and houses scattered along the shore of the fjord, as if a giant hand had playfully strewn wooden blocks . Because of the permafrost, all of the houses are made of wood and stand on stilts, none more than 2 storeys tall. But, hallelujah, there is a Radisson hotel. Who’d have thought? My shoes off – everyone pads around indoors in stockinged feet – I’m in the bar where at 1 am the barman is pouring shots of aquavit with one sweeping movement that fills ten glasses at a time. There’s a party atmosphere and everyone is very friendly. All of them are either scientists or researchers. The few tourists are tucked up in bed. I was told that the week before they’d had a heat wave, a high of 10 degrees C, but now it’s 4 degrees. Amazingly, it still feels warm in the sun which shines perpetually for four months in the summer. At 3 am I go to bed, the sun blazing through my bedroom window. The camera crew arrives the following night and I drive out to pick them up in my hired wreck. We have an amazing view of the almost-sunset from the airport car park, the sun grazing the horizon before skipping into the sky again. It gives me an idea for the start of the programme. Shorn of its winter overcoat the town is sketched in shades of black and brown. Mountains, also black, loom on the horizon, but far in the distance across the fjord there are glaciers glinting. The sense of isolation is overwhelming. It’s a frontier town and

there are dangers out there. We are advised to carry a rifle if we venture beyond the town limits because of polar bears. But during our 2-day stay we do not see one, only polar bear

silhouettes on the roadside signs. You get to travel to exotic places when you work in television, and Longyearbyen is, for me, the strangest. After two days filming we catch the daily plane to Oslo. As the plane gains height it circles over the interior wilderness that

we didn’t visit. If I come again, I may go there.

The Magic Hour

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 12:37:54 EEST

Rune of the Day: Othila, inheritance

I was standing on Quai Jules Courmont beside the River Rhone waiting for the precise moment when the evening light assumes that lovely luminous quality beloved of photographers. In Britain it's called the magic hour, but due to Lyon's more southerly latitude, here it's more like twenty minutes. I had planned meticulously, so that the bridge and the Fourviere Basilica behind me would be illuminated while there was still enough natural light to enable me to perform a piece to camera. With only two minutes to go everything was ready. The cameraman was set up, the illuminations had flicked on, even the Friday evening strollers respected our space and had gathered behind the camera.

It was then that an Irishman in pyjamas, leading a dog on a rope stepped beside me. "Can I help you? I used to be in television." He brought out a bottle of wine from his clinking shoulder bag, took a swig and then offered it to me.

I tried to explain to him that we had only a few minutes to record my performance. "Oh, well I'll help you with your lines." This continued for several minutes as the light diminished until in a moment of frustration and rage I bellowed at him. But he continued unfazed until I thought I was going to have to resort to the physical. I looked up to the cameraman who was gleefully recording every minute of the encounter. Behind him was a sea of spectators drawn by the camera and no doubt hoping to see some action. In my mind's eye I saw the next morning's headline: TV reporter lashes out at homeless man. I sobered instantly and for some reason, so did my Irish mentor. "I'm going behind the camera now and I'll direct you from there." By now, there were only a couple of minutes left of the magic hour. One take then. But my mind was a blank, scoured clean by stress.

I gathered my wits and launched into the piece to camera, "Behind the spectacle of a city by night is..." . I halted because the following words had fled. "Take one" intoned the Irishman from beside the camera. I began again, "Behind the spectacle of a city by night is the inconvenient truth that..." The Irishman: "Take two." I continued for eleven takes until I finally stumbled through to the end, my new friend solemnly recording each attempt.

By then it was quite dark and the cameraman had switched on the light mounted on his camera. The magic hour had gone, not to return until the following night. My mentor had a few last words for me as we packed up the gear, "It wasn't too bad, I suppose, but you'll have to learn your lines better in future." He held out his bottle, "You'll be wanting that drink now, I specs."

Empty August

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 12:48:17 EEST

Rune of the Day: Fehu, wealth

Everyone knows that Europeans flee their homes in August. I once spent half-an-hour tramping around Rome looking for a coffee and cornetto before giving up. This in a city where every second shopfront is a bar. But they were all shuttered, their staff vanished, just a note saying "Ferragosto", which is Italian for come back in a month. But if Rome was bad, then Lyon is worse.

Between the last week of July and the end of August, almost the entire population of the city pack their cars and head for the autoroutes, destination the south, the north, the east or the west. Anywhere, but Lyon. For the few of us who stay behind this has several advantages: you can park anywhere you like, the Piscine du Rhone pool on the banks of the river is deserted as is Carrefour, the giant supermarket chain. If you want a meal though, even in the gastronomic capital of France, you can forget it. All the restaurants and bars, as well as the tabacs are shuttered and the apartment buildings are almost completely empty. The Lyonnais do not take their cats with them when they go on holiday, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Our next door neighbours, whom we have never seen let alone spoken to, own a cat which moves in with us for the entire month of August, departing when it hears their front door open again. I've often thought that August would be a wonderful month if you were a professional looter. You could back a fleet of furniture trucks up to Lyon apartment buildings and clean them out. Lyon is a very wealthy city, so the looters could supply Europe's art and furniture markets for months, making a very nice living. But, Lyon is a very law-abiding city, and in any case, I suspect that the furniture van rental companies are closed, too. The television station where I work has to maintain a service throughout August, because it's a 24-hour news channel broadcasting all over the world. But it's a skeleton service – features is closed, marketing has gone, management too, together with accounts and three quarters of the journalists.

I am alone in the magazine section and often do not bother to turn the lights on. My only companion in the vast office complex is Celine, our production assistant. Why do I stay when so many others are on the Cote D'Azur? There's a certain perversity in the Australian character that recoils from mass activities. The French have their animateurs, Australians have their vast and empty bush where you can be alone for months if you wish. This year though, my fourth in Lyon, I'm starting to feel as if I am in the bush. I find myself looking wistfully at holiday websites and imagining golden sand and the thunder of the surf. I have two choices, I suppose, if I do not wish to feel like this next August: follow the crowd, or become a professional looter.