This year I have plunged into writing more than ever before – the April A to Z Challenge led to a world of poetry, I recently wrote a deep essay on changing our relationship with the motor car, I am re-working the first draft of a novel and of course, a great deal of my day job, two and a half days a week is spent writing. Also in the course of the year, I encountered through other writers, the Insecure Writers Support Group and then yesterday, the group post announced their twelfth anniversary!
Recently I have been reading Margaret Atwood “on”On Writers and Writing” and in an early chapter, she writes about the duality of writers – how there exists “the one who writes and the one who lives” and she explores the inevitable tensions that having such a split induces – the Jekyll and Hyde nature of the beast. I write because I am driven internally to do so, but externally, my partner is going through a difficult time which means that staying close to her, there is a lot of time which I fill with writing.
I have no illusions about publishing work – I once heard the statistic that 4000 novels are written for each one published. That may have changed in a digital age when self-publishing is ever easier – even if it is only on your blog. Still, whilst I am now polishing a second draft of a speculative novel, the act of passing through the stages of the journey towards publishing has a zen of its own. I am not saying that there is no anxiety about whether a piece of writing is “good enough”, or whether people will like my latest poem but for me, travelling hopefully is as important as arriving…
I left Ireland to return to the UK in 2005 but not before my late sister Carol, had rekindled my joy in writing by taking me to an in-person writing group in Sligo. A first novel was started (and is still in progress) and a second more straightforward one is that which I am revising, and so I thank Carol for that gift and I dedicate the following poem – the product of an online and ongoing writing group and I offer it towards the Insecure Writers Support Group and its anniversary since it is appropriately entitled “Worry Beads”. Back in July, it was also the 12th anniversary of dVerse Poets Pub so 2011 must have been an inspired year for poets – anyway, I posted a poem for their celebration here.
Worry beads…
The state of the nation is held in abeyance holding it’s breath till the next election the polls show a twenty point Labour lead – but I worry they still might lose and if they win I worry too they may not be different enough having posed in the centre to avoid alienating anyone.
I worry that my grandchildren All young adults flown the nest may not be able to buy a house of their own, their own nest. The doctor and his bright partner will earn enough but will the rapper find his way high enough to have financial success or will he fall like a spent rocket to a job supporting other’s dreams I believe he too worries although it doesn’t slow him down. The oldest by some years has already built several businesses and not anchored by children only cats and cake-making he and his girlfriend will go to America again and again and one day they won’t come back.
I worry that despite all help my spouse will not find her way out of the deep, dark past where she is lost in the labyrinth and no breadcrumb trail to lead her back to the light. As I keep her shell company in front of the TV I do not take enough exercise already impeded by a lame leg I know it cannot be wise and I will shorten my natural span which after all is only two years short of three-score years and ten.
I write to keep a space for me And to reach out to new friends across the digital ether but pushing a pen is not the same as pushing through the wall and I do not want to be found one day slumped across a keyboard mid-virtual conversation.
Still, on a scale of one to ten my worries rate quite low I have made marks both in the world, in certain hearts and in minds too the legacy of things is not as vital as a lot of love.
And so I write for love not glory, the oldest profession is surely to tell a good story and whilst I love to get good feedback if I don’t get published, will I really worry?
Halfway between Charmouth and Lyme Regis the tumbled rocks from the crumbling cliffs above bring to a close the beach that you follow eyes down searching from Charmouth they mark the point beyond which you will be cut off by a rising tide and face a choice between pressing on to Lyme Regis or struggling back over the hump of sticky Liassic blue-grey clay and braving falling rocks to regain the beach.
Though we did not know it as such back then this is the so-called Jurassic Coast one of them at least because the rocks curve up through the country like a spine with scoliosis to emerge again in Yorkshire with its counterclaim to tourists seeking fossils and imagining a dinosaur-infested past.
But Charmouth was made famous for fossils by Mary Anning, a glorious amateur who walked this beach every day especially after winter storms threw down hidden treasures from the cliffs. Mary found the first complete Ichthyosaur and too, found fame clawing it from begrudging academics of the day.
But back to the rocks midway along the route from tiny Charmouth to bustling Lyme Regis once graced by royalty. These rocks entrap in sheltered pockets miraculous casts of eons dead shells the gold of iron pyrites fools gold gleaming in the dross of sand and tiny pebbles
Find them if you can before the next storm crashes into the rocks and sweeps the treasure out to sea.
It was my mother on childhood holidays eschewing the search for larger, showier fossils despite the joy of splitting rocks thwacking them just so with her specially purchased geologist’s hammer she settled down to search among the rocks and finding the tiny, perfect overlooked treasures.
The last time I went there seeking out this secret trove hoping against hope that I remembered still where X marked the spot this secret trove which most people pass by in their search for bigger things I was summoned away for half-an-hour whilst a scene for “Ammonite” about the life of Mary Anning was filmed a few feet from my treasure seeking and when, months later I watched the finished film I recognised my absent self just out of shot.
I have been on that beach my whole life just out of shot in my mind’s eye a treasured memory of times past fossilised in fools gold.
We have gone far beyond a love affair with the car, the motor car, the automobile, we are beyond the comfortable love of wedded bliss and we have reached the time when divorce must be considered, with all the compromises and new freedoms that implies…
The Love Affair
And it was a Love affair to begin with! Admittedly, one that could only be pursued by the rich – the freedom given to those Edwardian pioneers, to go further than on horseback, to travel in a group, and oh! the speed – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows – “Poop, poop!”! Then came The First World War with lorries and ambulances. The interwar years when cars spread to the middle classes and finally, after The Second World War, we were truly wedded to the car, cars for all but the poorest and our world and lives changing beyond recognition.
Urban Sprawl and the Escape to the Country…
How were we seduced into these changes and what form did they take? It’s a tale of city and countryside, of congestion and the freedom of “the open road”. We live, mostly, in cities and towns but we dream, most of us, of living in the country. How many people drive 4-wheel drive monsters that were originally designed for country-dwelling landowners but became must-have status symbols of the urban elite – Chelsea Tractors as they are known – how many of those owners ever go off-road or ever use their 4-wheel drive? Incidentally, these huge cars, often justified as being safer for your family (if you can afford them)- take an unjustified amount of both materials and energy to construct, so that’s a very un-Green and inequitable contribution to Climate Change right there!
Advertising campaigns focus on a romantic image of the SUV as the car of the great outdoors.
Levelling Up
Recent changes in internet technology and in working practices stimulated by the Covid lockdown, mean that we can work wherever we want to – from home or at the office, the office usually being in the city and the home wherever we choose or can afford. But in this respect, those who live in the country, are still disadvantaged since the high-speed optical transmission available in cities, has not always yet reached the countryside. There is a clamour from rural populations for a levelling up so that the commuters, enabled post-war, by the motor car to live outside the cities, and commute in to work, may not be disadvantaged by slower broadband, that they may take full advantage of living in the country.
There are other things not available in the rural areas, such as supermarkets – another phenomenon that grew with the car, because even if you live in the city, the supermarket, unlike the corner shop, is likely to be some distance away from home and how else are you to manage to get a weekly shop home without a car? Food, DIY, furnishings, and any kind of specialist shops are in the urban environment and unavailable out in the country – at least if you want to touch and feel goods – because we now have online shopping. Assuming your broadband is fast enough for shopping online, you can order things online, have them delivered (by motor vehicle – anything from a lorry to a private car) and if it does not match the expectation (that touch and feel would have obviated) you can send it back, by vehicle again – still it’s better to have one vehicle doing a round of rural locations than dozens of rural dwellers motoring into town and back… This leads to other, less obvious environmental impacts – clothing retailers are very poor at standardising garment sizes so consumers may order a minimum of three items to bracket their size and having tried them on, return two of them, which the retailer cannot be bothered to repack and resell – best case they go to a third-party retailer like TK Maxx – worst case, they go to landfill, still in their torn-open plastic bags. 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.
The Suburban Deserts…
It is not just country- dwellers who are dependent on cars – as the car became more widely owned between the war – ribbon development spread out along the arterial roads stretching out from the cities towards those aspirational countryside locations and post-Second World War, the spaces between those roads were infilled with suburban housing estates. These estates were not provided with shops or pubs and buses – buses still modelled on earlier urban trams, did not, on the whole, extend their routes into these estates (as they do now, using smaller buses) – so another “driver” towards mass ownership of the car. There is now guidance on how to design housing estates in order to be bus-friendly but it depends on local authorities being prepared to press this home.
-and “Liberation”
Once you had a car, many other uses for it became apparent and were catered to, holidays at the coast demanded an ever-improving road network and the upgrading of A-roads to motorways and with car ferries and later, the Euro-Tunnel, motorists could even take their cars abroad if only to stock up with beer and fags on a day trip to France. How much was saved when the petrol was factored in, I wonder? Trips to the dump, car-boot sales, lazy trips to the corner shop, driving the kids to school, sometimes even when the distance is walkable and the exercise would do both kids and parents good, Z-cars (car crime demands police cars), driving to watch motor racing, banger racing, picnics in the rain, dogging, actually making babies, babies being born and too many people dying in cars– and so it goes on – the love affair was over and we became truly wedded to our cars.
Divorce
Divorce is going to be painful and it is going to have to happen, because there can no longer be any doubt that climate change is happening and happening faster and more damagingly than we imagined possible. The time for tinkering about with lightbulb replacement is past, we must all take more serious steps towards doing our bit to arrest the worsening problems affecting rich and poor countries alike, though the effect on poor countries is worse and the contributory factors of any kind of mitigation lie with the rich ones. Changing lightbulbs was, initially, a costly outlay because the energy-efficient bulbs were not cheap, but then came LED and suddenly lighting fixtures themselves changed and every public building must change colour constantly at night. However, even changing lightbulbs was a struggle to sell to people initially – because of the cost – even if the long-term effect was a saving – it was cash upfront and savings later and we humans are not good at deferred gratification. If lightbulbs were hard, how much harder will it be to make serious changes in our car usage? No wedded person wants to get divorced, not least because of the massive cost both financial and emotional and this divorce is no different – when you blow up a life together, it’s hard to believe there might even be any upside, or be able to see beyond the chaos to a new and settled life…
Like a divorce, changing our relationship with the car is not going to be a single, simple matter, no more than you can change housing, separate finances, account for custody of children, divvy up the record collection, who gets the dog, who keeps the friends, let alone the emotional toll, good breakups, the bad breakups, the goodbye sex, the loss of support and confidant – divorce is messy and the solutions are multi-faceted and often unique to each couple and it will be no different with the car. Going electric is only a part of the story and presently, a dubious part at that – so let’s examine some of the many parts that might contribute to the solution.
Social Changes
There are two avenues to be considered – the technological and the behavioural and neither is easy or straightforward. Taking the social first, there have been studies showing that already, some people would save money by ditching their own cars and simply hiring a car for those occasions that they need them – holidays, weddings, big shopping trips but many would question the use of the word “simply” because nothing is without any cost – yes you would need to plan ahead and make a booking but is that really so onerous? Yes – you would no longer have a status symbol that you feel reflects something about you sitting on your drive and some people might think you “gone down in the world” for leaving the ranks of the car owners – but then again, many would applaud you…
Good Government – Hands On or Hands Off?
Another example of the need for social attitude change is the term “Public Transport” which now carries a whiff of class distinction – let us rechristen it as Green Transport or Make a Friend Transport – for in the words of a British railway advert – “Let the Train Take the Strain!” – I can vouch for this as after breaking hip in a car crash, I was unable to drive for at least a year and enjoyed travelling by bus to my nearest city, some 35 miles away so much, that I didn’t return to driving a car for five years. Not only was I able to more fully enjoy the beautiful scenery where I lived back then, but the bus afforded me the opportunity to meet people I would otherwise not chanced to talk to… By contrast, the Conservative party here in the UK, took great pride in announcing via posters at railway stations, how the UK had the lowest subsidy for railways of any country, however the list that the poster detailed, might have been the list of railway operators from best to worst, with the UK at the bottom. The Conservatives are the party of the car and they also adopted, as part of Neoliberalism, the idea that for governments to govern – to make considered decisions about what works best for the country and nudge or even legislate for it – is a bad thing and that market forces (read unabashed greed and profiteering) should determine the course of things. They sold off (euphemism – De-nationalised) British Rail, breaking it up into a series of franchises operated by the highest bidder and disastrously, made the rails themselves, the purview of another company. Operating for profit almost always means cutting corners and this, plus the disjuncture between infrastructure and operators, contributed, in large part to many incidents, the worst of which was the Reading Station crash in which six people died and sixty-one were injured. Major rail crashes also occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Stonehaven.
There are already schemes bringing commuters together such as Car Pooling where people who work together, or in nearby home/job locations, share car and/or petrol expenses – what if we took this idea further wherein people within a given neighbourhood would belong to a co-owned carpool and could book a car suitable for “the day that’s in it “– a small runaround for taking and collecting the kids from school or doing the weekly shop and an estate car for that annual holiday – perhaps even a sports car to impress on that first date… There might need to be changes to insurance rules to facilitate such schemes but it’s not insuperable. In Canada, the distances to be travelled are vast and although it is illegal to hitchhike anywhere except at a petrol station, it is common to accept passengers who pay their share of the petrol. All these ideas are facilitated by online connections – either informal or actual websites, and this demonstrates both that people are willing to co-operate for a change benefitting the environment, even if there are some small inconveniences in co-ordinating themselves and secondly that these things, once mooted, can be organised from the grassroots up – with a minimum of governmental interference but perhaps the odd facilitation.
The Lessons of Oxford
I grew up in Oxford and would naturally have ridden a bicycle as soon as I was old enough even if I hadn’t had a father who became a crusader for “Intermediate Technology” (simple rather than high-tech solutions). I never learned to drive until I was 35 and had stopped living in London where I continued to ride a bicycle when possible or took public transport – busses or trains if the weather was inclement. If more people took to bikes and public transport, there would be fewer cars on the road and the benefits would be safer cycling, healthier bodies as well as the immediate environmental benefits – think Amsterdam or Oxford. Oxford has embraced and been the testbed for every measure to try and reign in the motor car. First it built a Ring Road or Bypass coupled with creating one-way streets that made it less attractive to go through the centre. Far from killing commerce in towns, many places have discovered that a more car-free city centre is such a boon that it promotes shopping, eating and sightseeing! Next, Oxford introduced bus lanes (which also facilitate bicycles and taxis) and shortly after, Park-and-Ride schemes. The latest scheme in Oxford has however, brought a backlash, not exclusively from those immediately affected (or benefitted, depending on your point of view) but as a rallying point for car defenders from far and wide who see Oxford’s latest experiment as the thin edge of the wedge – the enforcing of automotive divorce. What is this dastardly attack on the institution of marriage to the car? It stems from the idea of the “Fifteen Minute City” That every city be divided into neighbourhoods within which all the essential needs for living – shops, pubs, meeting places, bus routes out – should all be found within a fifteen-minute walking distance – innocuous you might think, but Oxford’s implementation – a retrospective planning measure, is to ring-fence such neighbourhoods with car-barriers to limit ingress and egress for cars – and this has been seen by some as a totally unwarranted attack, not just on car owners, but on their very human rights! Protesters were not merely local residents but car supporters from far and wide who flocked to oppose the dastardly council who dared to challenge the rights of the motorist! In our necessary divorce from the motor car – a front line has been drawn… True, such cellular enclaves have been devised before by town planners – anyone who has visited a friend in the suburbs of that planned city, Milton Keynes, will know the nightmare of entering such a cell and then not being able to find the way out. Not least, this is because the suburban cells of Milton Keynes were designed without the shops and facilities that would have made them into 15-minute solutions but would also have provided landmarks for navigation in a sea of identical housing. Planning for the future means making sure that housing estates are more than just housing, that the cars are parked or garaged around the outside of neighbourhoods, or at least, like the mews coach-houses of old – at the back of the houses with pedestrian thoroughfares leading to shops et al, at the front. Private developers are particularly notorious for neglecting to build any community facilities and merely cramming as many houses with concomitant roads, drives and garages as it takes to carry the occupants out of their housing only ghetto. Reto-fitting is, as Oxford has discovered, more challenging still…
Technological Options
Turning to the technological options for environmental solutions to divorce us from the CO2 emitting motor cars, vans and lorries – “What of the electric vehicle?” I hear you say. Setting aside the fact that you still have to generate the electricity to power electric vehicles and all the difficulties in weaning power generation off fossil fuels, there are major flaws in the current approach to electric cars.
The current generation of electric cars is predicated on the idea that people want a car that does exactly the same things as the cars they will be giving up – carry five people, travel at 70 miles per hour or more, have a capacious boot, carry forward all the crumple zone technology which keeps us safe, up to a point, in the event of a crash – and it is worth remembering that it has been determined that once over 30 m.p.h. – there is very little that a driver can do to influence the outcome of a crash and also, that the speed of impact in a collision between two cars is the sum of their two speeds so two cars travelling at 30 m.p.h. smash together at 60 m.p.h. Of course, if we travelled much slower, then such high-speed collisions and the ingenious and weighty crumple zones which have been designed to protect us in such events, would be less necessary.
What has disappointed me about these new electric cars is that they look exactly as before, take the same massive amount of energy and share of Earth’s resources to construct, worse if you think of the issues around Lithium for the batteries and they are, at this stage affordable only by the relatively rich. I had imagined a wholly new style of lightweight runarounds – cars perhaps a little like the Smart cars – economical two-seaters, but if you want to achieve all the old requirements of a car listed above, then you have to go big – as big as existing cars, because you cannot fit a big enough battery to supply the range or speed to carry the weigh of all that crumple zone protective steel in a small car. It just can’t be done, and in any case, the first adopters of electric cars are the better off and it has been much easier to sell them the idea of going green by simply changing to a “greener” propulsion of an equally capable large car rather than that of a small one which they are not in the market for anyway.
Small is Beautifull…1
If we accept the reality that people who live and mostly drive only in cities, neither need a high-performance large car nor can utilise the capacities of such cars due to congestion slowing things down, then would it not be better, for when you need to use a car, to have a small electric vehicle! There is a class of cars termed Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (how friendly does that sound!) which are small, light weight, much less greedy in manufacturing and material costs, and travel at the modest speeds actually suitable for driving in urban environs. That they have not gained greater popularity is in part due to the hazard of driving such lightweight cars in a mix with larger, faster, heavier beasts and partly due to the failure to grasp the necessity of switching to such vehicles.
Electric cars are not a new idea, in fact, they were quite common until petrol engines gained ascendancy, what about the electric milk-float – operating with heavy lead-acid batteries rather than the current lighter-weight Lithium ones, these workhorses carried a good load, travelled at moderate speeds and had enough range to get the job done – proof that a realistic spec. for an urban vehicle is eminently possible!
What if, instead of trying to change habits by applying punitive Low Emission and Congestion Charges to big cities (which become rallying points for the motoring rights lobby) we take joined-up government decisions to promote cities being small electric vehicle zones? What does joined up mean in this context? It means first promoting the manufacture of such vehicles up to and past the point of mass adoption, facilitating charging points by legislation where necessary (ie. all new homes to include them), and only then enforcing the adoption of the small vehicles in cities. Those who want to retain their old-style monsters might be forced to leave them in outskirt car parks and continue their journeys inward with a small vehicle or a bus. To get there from here is never going to be a single simple solution but always many parts that will eventually be greater than the sum of those parts.
My vision of the future is that there will be a two-tier division between town and country and it will probably reflect the difference in wealth that already exists between many (but not all) rural dwellers and those who live in towns and cities. Having said that, there will be a levelling up in many ways – more bus routes in town and out; smaller electric busses, electric vehicles in town and even in the country, they could be used to get to the station or connect with a bus route; status will not be judged by the car you own, in fact, ownership might not be the prime model.
New Ways of Doing Things
In Liverpool they have a company operating a fleet of electric scooters that registered users can pick up and use wherever they find them and are charged by distance travelled. All GPS locatable, the company goes round at night and collects the scooters to take back to base for recharging. Imagine how this might work for Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles. For sure you couldn’t go around with a car transporter picking them up at night – but wait! There are other clever technological solutions available! Firstly, if you operate a reasonably expensive drone, the last thing you want is for it to run out of power and crash miles away from you – so they have a sensor such that when they only have just enough power to get back to you – that’s exactly what they do – turn tail and use GPS to automatically get themselves back to you. Combine that with driverless cars – and a company could automatically retrieve vehicles back to base and deliver them to customers’ doorsteps for whenever they have been ordered. One of the issues around driverless technology is that it is aiming to be used in current type motor cars up to and including a mix of lorries and cars on motorways – imagine how much safer it would be if the technology were used to control new, slower, lighter vehicles around town.
There are so many aspects of our necessary divorce from the motorcar as we now use it and just as the effects of the growth of the car brought incremental consequences, so the solution to how to adopt a new relationship must also be incremental and multi-faceted. Let me leave you with one last anecdote that shows the interconnected nature of things. There are fleets of electric buses already operating and some of them are contributing to solving one of the problems of the regulation of power supply – especially renewable power supply which can be occasionally irregular. When the busses return to their depots after taking commuters home, they arrive back at the very peak time when those same commuters are cooking their suppers. So the buses can return whatever charge is left in their batteries to the grid and then later in the night, when the TV goes off, the buses recharge their batteries ready for the morning. Building storage batteries to smooth out the supply and demand for energy from renewable sources is one of the major drawbacks and costs to switching to those power sources but in this case, we can see how buses, and perhaps even private electrical vehicles could become part of the battery solution – food for thought…
What can you do?
The most useful thing that an individual can do at this moment is to examine the situation both personally and in terms of the wider picture – take an inventory of your own circumstances and figure out whether you could change things in your own relationship with the car as things stand now. If not – then what would need to change to make it possible for you – petition for more bus routes; wait for electric vehicles to get smaller and more affordable; buy a bike and start to use it for more than just leisure or exercise; discover car-sharers in your area or advertise if you can’t find any. So much depends on attitudinal change that you might start discussions with other people to explore the problems and solutions – knowledge and insight are vital to change.
And please, if you have responses, questions or opinions on what I have said – post a comment and start the discussion…
Image generated with Midjourney AI by Andrew Wilson
Six Degrees of Separation is an excuse to romp though six favourite books linked to an initial offering by our host KateW and eventually link them back to the beginning…
I must admit, my heart sank when I saw the title of this month’s 6 Degrees because romantic comedy is not a genre I have much acquaintance with but I soon realised that of course, I have read romantic comedies – even if they were written long before Chicklit was a twinkle in some publicist’s eye – so I turned to the nearest bookshelf to my desk…
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy does what it says on the tin according to our host/challenger KateW who read the book simultaneously with a bestie with whom she was on holiday and who had brought the very same holiday reading – the stars had aligned and much laughter ensued. I don’t think I will be buying this book (as I did with last month’s starting book which I am enjoying immensely) and KateW’s review tells me quite enough to give the flavour and wit of this book!
Looking at my bookshelf, my eye alighted on the plays shelf where Oscar Wilde -Five Major Plays stood proudly alongside The Complete Plays of George Bernard Shaw so for my first and second links I chose The Importance of Being Earnest and Pygmalion respectively – what! It doesn’t say they can’t be plays – they’re in books!
Here in the final lines of Wilde’s evergreen romantic comedy are not one, but three love stories resolved…
GWENDOLEN. I can. For I feel sure that you are sure to change! JACK. My own one! CHASUBLE (to Miss Prism). Leetitial (Embraces her.) MISS PRISM (enthusiastically). Frederick! At last! ALGERNON. Cecily! (Embraces her.) At last! JACK. Gwendolen! (Embraces her.) At last! LADY BRACKNELL. My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality. JACK. On the contrary,’ Aunt Augusta, I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
Enough embracing to qualify I think! On to Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw’s modern (for its time) update on the Greek story of the sculptor who fell in love with his creation which in turn, became the musical My Fair Lady. My volume was a gift to my father from his father in 1939 and maybe a first edition since there is no list of reprints. Believe it or not, I did read some of these plays as a teenager and even attempted some of the prefaces in the accompanying volume – and they are reputed to contain more words than the plays themselves. GBS was a socialist and the character of the professor and his life-changing relationship to Eliza is supportive of a change in attitudes towards women…
Sticking with plays – especially ones that have been turned into musicals, we next turn to The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare which went from highbrow(ish) to lowbrow when it was transmogrified into Kiss Me Kate! Katherina is an admirably feisty woman who is contrasted with Bianca, her younger sister “the ideal woman”. One might regard both this and Pygmalion as misogynistic – they certainly portray misogynists, but I side with those who feel that they are poking fun at the misogynists. This play gave rise to several musicals and films and is arguably the origin of some of the most major memes in romantic comedy…
Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship That Sang books, are not exactly romantic comedies and though they might make great plays, they are sci-fi novels but whether hard or soft is hard to say. Suspend your technological disbelief – definitely, but at the heart of these books are the sometimes romantic but wholly intriguing relationship between a girl who is literally enrolled, in fact, installed as the “brain” of a spaceship, and the “brawns” with whom she is paired. Spoiler alert – no sex is possible…
No one would seek to classify The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith as a romantic comedy either, but neither are they your standard detective procedural either and over the course of the books, we do get to see the developing relationship between Mama Ramotswe and her eventual partner – Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and this is definitely part of the oddball charm of this series.
So having stretched the rules with plays as well as novels, my last link is a poem, originally published in a magazine though books are available too… The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock – or Prufrock as it is known – by T.S. Elliot, is the poem credited with starting the Modernist movement in poetry. I link it back to our starting book of Romantic Comedy, because, like that novel, Prufrock is all about the anguish of alienation, self-doubt and creating what-if scenarios in the head – and whilst Prufrock does not give us a “they lived happily ever after” ending, it is gently humourous as it travels hopefully…
So today being the 10th day our poetry is to be crafted in the style of the Spanish Ovillejo which comprises 10 lines broken into two sub stanzas thus:
first stanza is composed of six lines
three rhyming couplets
the rhyme scheme is aabbcc
8/3 syllables per couplet
each couplet is a question/answer or echo
–
second stanza is composed of four lines
rhyme scheme cddc
6-8 syllables for the three lines* (I’ve seen a range of syllables used).
the final line combines lines 2, 4, and 6 together.
My AI muse Misky, recently made a post entitled Barglefloop and I quote her “barglefloop, means to mess with words in your AI prompt in order to confuse it, to turn nouns into verbs, to make single words compound, etc.” It occurred to me to experiment by adding the same prompt to Midjourney as Misky had used and see if the AI came back with the same images as she got – it did not! Here are the first four I got using the prompt “Barglefloop“
Where Misky’s images tended towards Hieronymous Bosch – mine were Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings Rivertown. Below is the fourth image enlarged to show the level of detail the AI has put in…
But what does this tell us about the way Midjourney works – that Barglefloop is nonsense and so the AI creates whatever it wants to – let off the leash so to speak? I decided to add some more nonsense “barglefloop female foxing blithy toves” – Foxing – as a noun gone verb, and “slithy toves” from Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky (’twas brillig and the slithy toves…). This time the AI seized on the only bit of the prompt that made sense Fox and gave me four fox pictures, ignoring the rest of the senseless prompt – so Midjourney, whilst known to hallucinate as much as the next AI was not so desperate to act freely – released by nonsense…
Cute but no cigar for Midjourney so now I went for all the nonsense, none of the foxing around “barglefloop blithy toves” and now we get something quite nightmarish in a Snarky/Jabberwocky Carrollian sort of way, with perhaps a hint of Bosch…
So lastly I decided to miss out the Barglefloop and just retain the Lewis Carrol words “twas brillig and the blithy toves” and now we can see an Alice in Wonderland flavour to the images – particularly the top two…
Lastly, I asked for variations on the bottom right image – a rather mad-looking figure with a slightly Victorian flavour…
Does this tell us much about the way the “mind” of an AI works – I will let you be the judge – and stay away from hookah-smoking caterpillars seated on toadstools – my advice…
The phone app blares just behind my head on the pillow where Barbara can hear it the tale of Walt watching for the Undertoad seeking to see it in the waves not daring to step into the water
The World According to Garp holds me for a few minutes before I slip beneath the waves of sleep the noise near my head inaudible, sleep – which eludes Barbara sometimes for hours but when she too slips under her last act of consciousness is to ask me to turn it off
I awake in the early hours from a dream in which a young woman I’ve just met on the street in a nowhere I know leads me into her house and begins to take her clothes off hippy, boho, vintage – it happens too quickly for me to know our place in time
A child wakes and calls to her from another room a partner arrives and I apologise for my near-nakedness I must have misread the signs I say to him as I redress
She appears with my jacket at the front door her eyes apologising and later I find a note in the pocket You did not misread the signs! Sorry… and a telephone number
When I awake properly I will arise and go to work I used to imagine a big red bus as a metaphor for death careering around the corner at any unexpected moment in the end it was a tractor with a trailer of indeterminable width on a blind bend that broke my hip but left me alive
Every time I climb into my car I wonder if today will be the day, standing, as we all do feet in the shallows of the Styx, that the Undertoad finally gets me…
