Author: humanist55

Roll of the Dice – Challenge 4 Fulfilled

humanist55

 

True to my Dice Roll Challenge – here are four blogs from A2Z that I haven’t visited before.

First up, near the top of the Master List – Wolf of Wordswith a piece of Fan Fiction – The Doctor in the Sky – Doctor Who Story. I grew up with Doctor Who and followed every iteration of the Doctor and am certainly a fan of our current, first female Doctor. The author Wolf of Words gives nothing away about him/herself so we don’t know anything about their background only the writing and that the blogger is quite prolific. They certainly capture the flavour of the time travelling hero. As series, Doctor Who has many writers so who knows – Wolf of Words – maybe one day…

 

Short and Sweet – Less Beaten Paths of America – each day pictures of signs eg “Entering Boring”! Make sure you click to read more because there are many signs each day – this guy has been on a mission!!!

 

Hennie’s Budgies  – does what it says on the tin – truly! Everything you wanted to know about Budgies but never dared to ask…

I am always attracted to the category Personal (journal, diary, musings) but not always charmed by what I find – not so here at Blog, Blah blah https://doodlingwords.blogspot.com/. Poems, prose, images – see if it’s to your taste…

F is for Fiction (Science amongst others)

humanist55

 For the sake of pairing some of these adjuncts to the novel alongside their respective chapters, I am taking liberties with the Alphabet for the next couple of days and so we come to F and not D…


My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

I have no time for people who say that they don’t read fiction – a slight sneer implicit in their assertion, as if they regard fiction as pointless and only non-fiction as worthwhile because it is true – factual. Such a limited understanding get’s my goat. The philosophy of Science as posited by Karl Popper tells us that there is no such thing as truth, absolute and unassailable for there is always the possibility that in some place in the universe, that “truth” will not hold and the best we can hope for, is to eliminate what is untrue and thus move towards the truth – whilst never actually arriving…

Fiction makes no such claim to truth and it’s raison d’etre is entirely other. Human beings are arguably defined by their story-telling – even if it is a by-product of our big brains – an unintended consequence of other evolved characteristics – if you can remember experiences and describe them to others – who is to say that what you say is true and not a complete fiction…

Science Fiction, or Speculative Fiction, is given licence to spin fantasies that are literally out of this world and they are, in consequence, allowed to be longer than other novels to allow for all the descriptions of new worlds. An ordinary novel (and of course there can be exceptions) is usually expected to be around 90,000 words whilst a science fiction novel may be allowed 120,000 or even more.

But the real reason why fiction, of any kind, is important, is that it takes us to new places and especially – it takes us inside another person’s head and shows us the world through their eyes, gives us a hint as to what it might be like to experience the world as that person. That said, the experience is filtered, mediated, shaped by the author of the fiction and who is to say that a man can or cannot imagine what it is like to be a woman or vice versa, what it’s like to have mental health issues, be rich or poor, what the other side of the world is like let alone what other worlds might be like.

So we embark on reading fiction trusting ourselves to our author/guide not to play tricks on us (unless they be enjoyable ones), to be coherent, to entertain us and most of all, to make us want to carry on to the end in order to find out what happens…

No time for fiction – merde!

Today’s chapter deals with a man continuing to deal with his world having changed utterly as well as telling us more about Hawaii 2 and Jack and Anna’s home there. What do you think, is it plausible? Please comment whether on this chapter or the whole story so far…

PinkStock Photos, D. Sharon Pruitt, CC BY 2.0   

<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 4
New Directions.

Jack and Douglas were back home together with Jack’s mother and a sister of Anna’s. It had been a painful return for Jack with all the reminders of his life with Anna and in particular, the return he had been anticipating following her trip to Hawaii 1. His mother had been staying at the house whilst Jack was in hospital as her own home was halfway across the continent in the cooler north and she had long ago taken down the more poignant reminders like the “Welcome Home” banner Jack had hung across the living room.
Jack and Anna had spent much of the first two years of married life building their home as many chose to do on Hawaii 2 and had built for a future in which they anticipated raising a family so there were several spare bedrooms as well as the little nursery space just off the main bedroom.
In a parallel to Earth there were coasts that were home to vast numbers of seabirds who fed on fish that boomed in the mineral rich currants that flowed up from the polar regions. The guano from these birds was mined early on in the colony’s development as it had been on Earth and used as a fertilizer, Brought in through the port of New Orleans it was combined with water from the mighty river to “green” the desert along the northern fringes of the New Sahara with forest species from native rainforest.
This project which had begun in the early years of the economy settlement had begun with a higher gantry of sprinklers to water the nascent forest but as time went on the forest began to change the very climate of the planet and rain was generated throughout the latitude and water abstraction from the great river reduced. Now the process of forest spreading into the New Sahara fringes was proceeding of its own accord.
Where Hawaii 2 differed significantly from Earth was that all the continental land mass was one in one piece bar a scattering of islands where volcanic mounts reached up through the vastness of the deep ocean that covered forty-five percent of the planet. Earth’s ancient Gondwanaland had been similar but this piece of data was one that had been lost to mankind, or at least, if it still existed in the fragmented data rescues from the dying Earth, it had not yet been found again. The mighty river which drained more than half the area of the Continent was not named the Mississippi after the river on which the original New Orleans was located but rather the Euphrates whose status as the possible location of the mythical Garden of Eden was a story that hadsurvived in multiple locations within the data matrix. This was because of the myth being the first story in the Bible the major document of one of the Earth’s great trees of religion the Judeo/ Christian/ Islamic tree and these religions had been carried out to the home worlds where they had evolved only slightly over the thousand years that man had been making his home among the stars.
So it was fitting that the rainforest project that surrounded New Orleans and had been so successful as a venture in climate change should be entitled the Garden of Eden. Interspersed with blocks of forest were plantations growing a mixture of tropical fruits both native to Hawaii 2 and from Earth but also crops such as rubber and palm oil which were used in various manufacturing processes. Many plastics on the home-world were made from renewable, carbon-neutral crops rather than the fossil fuels of Earth’s murky past that had led to The Destruction. It was not that fossil fuels did not exist on Hawaii 2 but their use was much more circumspect given the lesson of history and the new technologies that had been developed to avoid the use of hydro-carbons. If the original intent in colonising Hawaii 2 had been as a social experiment, it had turned out to be as much a model exercise in environmental practice too, geo-forming the world to reclaim the desert, making sure that the imported plants fit well defined niches and did not become weeds – genetically engineering them if necessary, to make sure they did not flourish like weeds. There were no high functioning sentient beings to take into account and most of the plants and animals were analogous to Earth species and their eco-systems, so it was decided that any amount of change to the planet was permissible as long as the choices made were sustainable…
By the time Jack and Anna built the tree-house, some 80 clicks from New Orleans, the trees were some 80 years old and it was amongst the buttress roots of the tree that supported the house that Anna’s body was laid to rest. She and Jack had talked about this idea for their final resting places but with the blindness of youth never imagining that the occasion might come so soon for either of them. Everybody on Hawaii 2 was buried in the soil except for members of a few religious sects who adhered to the ritual of cremation, or those who donated their bodies for Medical Research. The idea of nature recycling the mortal remains was mostly accepted as the best way and in Anna and Jack’s case, the idea that they would literally be incorporated into the fabric of the tree that they hoped the Descendants would continue to live in lent a special poignancy to the idea of supporting your family. If only it hadn’t come so soon thought Jack as they ascended to the house again following the burial ceremony. The house was thronged with friends and relations for the day, though most of them left before nightfall there being limited accommodation for such numbers nevertheless the coming together of so many people to offer their support and their memories of Anna was enormously sustaining for Jack, In particular he found that he was connected more strongly again to his life with Anna and before that even, a life from which he had felt curiously detached by the hiatus of his six month absence from the world lost in a coma. Being more connected to his memories of Anna allowed him to integrate young Douglas into the shared plans he and Anna had made. He had done more work on the house partly because he was physically more able but also because it interested him more than it did Anna whilst she was desirous to return to her studies of the history of technology. Towards the end of the house construction when it was mostly a snagging work, Anna had done just that and rapidly won the award of the research trip back to Hawaii 1 to search for data on the RAM jets that she believed she could make so much difference to Hawaii 2. The plan was that she would try and wrap up this research in the one trip and that on her return, house complete, she and Jack would start a family. Some of that Jack reflected ruefully, had come to pass and some most definitely had not. Another part of the plan had been that he would look for a job once Anna was pregnant, although there was no compulsion to work at all on Hawaii 2, everybody got given an allowance sufficient to keep body and soul together – most people did work, except for brief periods between jobs or when they were young and uncertain which direction to take. Jack had really enjoyed building the house and had been starting to think of a career in construction, engineering, or design, however, his science and maths skills probably precluded the last two and he would have ended up in construction. Now he had to think about Douglas. He couldn’t count on his mother or Anna’s sister continuing to live with him or offer the level of support that they had been whilst his strength was mending although neither of them had hinted at any time limits to their help. For a few weeks then, things drifted on as a routine evolved around Douglas and Jack, the two women sensitively deferring to the needs of father and son bonding as much as possible, nevertheless, they were as doting as any female relatives could be to both males and were clearly in no hurry to leave. And so it might have gone on indefinitely, or so it felt to Jack if it had not been for the visit one day, of an investigator.
Like many cities and features on the planet such as New London or the New Sahara, the capital of Hawaii 2, New Orleans celebrated the name of a city on Earth except that in the case of New Orleans, the “new” had been part of the original’s epithet. Picked because like Earth’s New Orleans, the city was built near the Delta of a mighty river and so like its namesake, the capital was an ideal staging post between ocean and river traffic. Without jet engines it was not only passenger planes but air freight that was not possible or at least jet powered, high speed freight. There was a redevelopment of airships which could carry freight wherever there were no navigable rivers that could be used as freight ways, but both airship and barge transport were slow and the settlers of Hawaii 2 adjusted their expectations accordingly. Many felt that the slower pace of transport had a beneficial effect on life generally and that other Home Worlds were frenetic by comparison and the people correspondingly stressed.
The house that Jack had built was in fact a tree-house, built around the still spreading trunk of one of the first trees to be planted in the Garden of Eden. The main living areas were on one contiguous level just below the point at which the branches forked away from the trunk and headed up into the canopy. The bedrooms above were built separately on different branches, but their floors extended and overlapped giving complete cover to the main floor below. An intricate system of gutters carried water into cisterns which the regular daily rains kept more than sufficiently topped up to supply the household’s needs. The climate was sufficiently equatorial to give a constancy of temperature further cushioned against extremes by the enveloping forest canopy so that only rolling screens were necessary to close the gap between ceiling and half-height walls around the edges of each platform. The judicious removal of a couple of branches not only allowed direct sunlight in early and late on in the day but opened some views out over the forest, the supporting tree being located on slightly higher ground within the forest. Most of the rain-forest ecology had been introduced into the newly formed forest, fortunately there were no dangerous predators and, in any case, the house was protected by motion-activated ultra-sonic animal repellents that kept those monkey-like creature that might become a nuisance from getting too close. The sounds of wildlife surrounded the house and gave it a truly enchanting atmosphere.

E is for Eden and the Euphrates

humanist55

 

For the sake of pairing some of these adjuncts to the novel alongside their respective chapters, I am taking liberties with the Alphabet for the next couple of days and so we come to E and not C…

My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

 

We learn in Chapter 4 of “Train Wreck”, that the capital of Hawaii 2 is called New Orleans because of its location on the delta of a great river but that “The mighty river which drained more than half the area of the continent was not named the Mississippi after the river on which the original New Orleans was located but rather the Euphrates whose status as the possible location of the mythical Garden of Eden was a story that had survived”.

Arguably, Hawaii 2, might well rather have been named Eden instead – but more of that in a later post – Hawaii 2 it was and it is only in naming its great river Euphrates, that tribute is paid to the Eden story. Naturally, one book that did survive the journey to the stars – in the last days of old Earth – was the Bible, as did the sacred works of all the great religions, even if they were carried forth by individuals, as digital editions, as we saw in the previous post.

To understand why Hawaii 2 might have been considered a veritable Garden of Eden, before and most certainly after the climate-altering activities of the settlers (changes for the best) – we may consider this quote from the seventeenth century poet, Andrew Marvel, from his poem, appropriately called “The Garden”.

“What wond’rous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.”

For this is almost the nature of the planet blessed with a perfect climate for agriculture, fertilised with a planetwide, gentle fertilising rain of volcanic dust – the early settlers could hardly believe their luck. Not only that, but no apex predators that would seriously threaten them and no highly sentient rivals either. Just as in the first transition of humans from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist and pastoralist, in the original, postulated Garden of Eden, thought to have been between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in ancient Mesopotamia, the blessing of abundance liberated mankind to develop more culture and art and  assured surpluses.

There is a theory, to which I heartily subscribe, that the Garden of Eden story, is an ancient race memory of that transition. Not that hunter-gatherer society and life was lacking in culture, art and pleasant times of surplus and not that agricultural life was all plain sailing – and of course, the flaws, were all the women’s fault! It’s easy to see how, whilst the men went off hunting for a few days, came back, cock-of-the-roost and feasted, and lay about for a few days before swanning off with their mates for another hunt – the women, left babysitting and child-minding, had to go off into the bush and gather food for all they were worth, both to feed themselves, and garnish the next feast.

What this lifestyle did give the women, was the time to develop a profound understanding of the workings of plants and natural phenomena like weather and seasons. When did it click that instead of searching an area for the edible grains, it was possible to keep the seeds and plant them in one place and produce a crop. Just one snag… Other creatures could take advantage of this unnatural abundance and so it was necessary to guard the putative crop. So now, instead of the life of Reilly, hunting with your besties, man was forced to “work by the sweat of his brow” – ploughing, planting, guarding, weeding and de-pesting before finally harvesting. A similar story can be told about animal husbandry. Some, might not have found this a good trade and they might have accused the women of “eating from the Tree of Knowledge” and characterized this as a sin against God’s word…

Still, by and large, farming caught on, though a terrible rash of grumblers than farmers it’s hard to find, women kept quiet about their part in the innovation and eventually, after some thousands of years of stability under agriculture, the Urban revolution followed as night follows day. The development of human activity seems to have been long plateaux of stability followed by brief revolutions that change the face of human existence and the mystery, in hindsight, is what took them so long.

What does seem to be the case is that, with the benefit of hindsight for the terrible demise of Earth, and with the carefully balanced introduction of Earth species both of plants and their concomitant pollinators, plus the judicious use of native plants and fruits, and the very careful planning of settlements and transport links, a veritable Garden of Eden was established with remarkable ease and the promise of great stability.

Of course, that is – if nobody upsets the apple cart…

The previous chapter laid out the premise of what is unique about Hawaii 2 and why it is so suitable for a Utopian experiment. Throughout the novel there is a mixture of technical stuff, history and in the last chapter, even a bit of sex thrown in – by no means gratuitously I hasten to add. The next chapter is purely  the human story – so my question to you, Dear Reader, is this – does it work? Is there a balance between exposition and conversation – human narrative and science fiction? Please comment…

Chapter 3
Loss and Gain.

The nurses and Doctor made themselves scarce as quickly as they could leaving Jack alone with his mother and the baby who with no further ado, she tucked into the crook of Jack’s arm. The baby lay calmly and looked up at him whilst he, feeling anything but calm inside was mesmerized by its gaze. Eventually, he looked up at his mother and asked “Where’s Anna? I don’t understand!”
His mother sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You have been in hospital in a coma for a long time, six months in fact! What’s the last thing you remember?”
Jack thought for a moment. “I was on the train. I went to meet Anna at the space lift. Where is she mum? How can this be my baby – Anna wasn’t pregnant!”
Jack’s agitation conveys itself to the baby even though his body has scarcely moved so weak was it after 6 months of immobility. His mother gently removes the baby and soothes it – the necessary pause while she does this soothes her son also.
“Anna must have got pregnant just before she left for her trip. She hadn’t told you?”
“No, though she said she had something special to tell me but she wanted to wait till we got home. She did look a bit different come to think of it.”
“Jack I have some bad news.” She paused to let it sink in. “There was an explosion on the train. You and Anna were nearest to the seat of it and were lucky to survive. You were both in the toilet and it’s what saved you. They brought you both here and mended all the bones and gashes but you both remained in a coma. They found out Anna was pregnant and that the baby was okay, growing in fact and they put you in a room together. I, your brothers and sister, Anna’s family and friends of the two of you came to talk to both of you, play music and hold your hands hoping you would wake up. The doctors are so good these days with physical things but when it comes to the brain sometimes you just have to wait – old school.”
She stood with the baby leaning into her shoulder, twisting from side to side and rubbing its back gently – willing it to sleep.
“The doctor’s hoped that when the baby was full-term that Anna might wake up going into labour but allowing a few days before she left Hawaii once she reached nine months and nothing happened, they had to perform a C-section Jack I am so sorry – but she never recovered after the operation it was as if the body had kept the baby alive and growing but once it was born she had nothing left.”
Jack had realised what was coming before she said it but the shock of hearing the words brought a strangled cry from him and then tears coursed down his face. His mother laid the baby down in a cot at the other side of Jack’s bed and then sat on his bed and gathered him into her arms.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

It was a few days later when the doctors having made their rounds and, declaring themselves “very happy” with Jack’s progress, Jack and his mother sat talking. The last few days had been busy with nurses fussing and feeding him and eventually freeing him of catheters drips and monitors.
“You know Mum I know it sounds funny, but if it had been a girl, I think I would have felt quite differently. It would have been as if I lost Anna but got a part of her back – a new little Anna. But being a boy, it feels like we have both lost everything – a wife and a mother.”
“But you do have each other don’t you.”
“Yes Mum, it feels like we’re in it together.”
“You are going to be a wonderful dad, Jack. Anna would have been so proud of you!” She saw the tears well up and could have bitten off her tongue! Oh! I’m sorry love, I didn’t mean to …!
“It’s alright Mum I know you didn’t…
They sat in silence for a minute.
“You know Jack, there is one very important task that can’t wait any longer! The baby needs a name – we can’t go on calling it “It” now can we?”
Jack was silent for a moment and reaching for his mother’s hand he said
“Would you mind if we called him after Anna’s Dad Douglas? I always liked the name, but I want her family to feel they have a real stake in his life – you know what I mean…”
“I think that’s a lovely idea Jack and of course I don’t mind. Maybe you could call him Jack for a middle name for you and for your father.”
“Of course Mum! That’s a brilliant idea and it sounds well -Douglas Jack Gulliver!”
“Well that’s sorted then! No-one wanted to name the baby, Douglas that is, until you woke up, so the poor little chat has been nameless for 3 weeks!”
“Good job I woke up then, eh?” Jack managed a smile.
“I always knew you would dear, I was certain of it!”
Jack looked down at young Douglas who was sleeping contentedly in his arms blissfully unaware of his new status as a named citizen of Hawaii 2.
“Okay Douglas, it’s you and me against the world kid!”

B is for Books – but not as we know them…

humanist55

 



My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

 

Today, let alone in the future I have imagined in “Train Wreck”, the world of books is being eroded by the electronic simulacrum – the digital book. For years, the demise of “real” books has been forecast but to paraphrase Mark Twain’s alleged remark on being told that a newspaper had published his obituary in error ““The reports of [book’s] death are greatly exaggerated.”

Why do those of us who read books – and it’s true that there are many who don’t – at all -why do we still sometimes prefer the ancient, analogue form to the digital?
Certainly, when researching in a non-fiction work, I prefer to build a mental map of a book – sometimes without even reading it cover to cover but instead, skimming across it’s surfaces and making mental crosses where the treasure is buried. It is uncanny how one can somehow go back and find those nuggets, sometimes even years later, without even marking the passage in the margins or turning down the page corners – both habits which I find sacrilegious to perpetrate even though I find a book annotated by another hand to be an object of fascination – a glimpse into someone else’s mind…

Kindle, the most successful iteration of the digital-book, has reproduced the marginal annotation though my reluctance to annotate has carried over to the digital book and when I research in the pure, book-form free word-scapes of the internet, I lift quotes out and assemble them in new documents for future contemplation.

For convenience, and because they are cheaper than “real” books, I do have a Kindle library on my smartphone, also, that I may never be caught without something to read (other than the ubiquitous internet). I don’t mind reading fiction in either analogue or digital form but when I do discover a book of true worth, I enjoy – almost fetishistically – having the real thing on my bookshelves and building collections of favourite authors.

So I am of that generation who are tweenies, caught somewhere between analogue and digital books – perhaps for my grandsons, it is a different balance.

In the universe of “Train Wreck”, the last days of Earth were hastened by the very exodus of mankind – the construction of great arks in space and the shuttling of cargo and humans to build and stock those arks for their journeys to the stars. The final push to mine, assemble, and grow the necessary materials and sadly, analogue books are finally, surplus to the constraints of lifting material out of Earth’s gravity well and they are finally left behind all but a few “treasures”. Even the digital world of the internet is reduced – bloated with nonsense, porn, cat videos, personal memorabilia of long-dead citizens – the task of extracting, condensing, and compressing the relevant data from the vast server farms where information was stored (at a huge and finally fatal cost to the environment) – often duplicated many times over, proved a difficult task. The new storage media proved, like CD’s had once done, not to be so durable and faithful in their ability to preserve data and so the researchers of Hawaii 1 found there were tantalising gaps in both the knowledge of old Earth and worse still, in the indexing, and so vast was that accumulated knowledge, that only patient research by human minds, could evaluate and restore order. Hence it is, that Anna, Jack’s wife and historian of technology, has to travel from their home on Hawaii 2, to Hawaii 1 to access the fragmented database in search of proof of her big idea…

Chapter 2
A Utopian Plan

SURVEY SHIP ANDROMEDA IN ORBIT,
 HAWAII 2, A.G.947

Captain Johannson never tired of the view. A veteran surveyor of new planets, none had ever been as beautiful as Hawaii 2. It reminded him of the pictures of old Earth before The Destruction – those first images from space , taken by the early astronauts with nothing better to do than take photographs whilst proving they could survive a few orbits in space. These pictures were so popular on Earth that they had survived in the data matrix in multiple instances. It was fair to say that they were probably the reason Captain Johannson had chosen to go into space himself, some fifty years ago. He had travelled the void through hyperspace jumps to new stars and their planets many times. Wherever Astronomers had identified a solar system that looked promising, there Captain Johannson would go and check it out. He had seen extraordinary sights, the variety of possible planets never ceased to amaze but as viable homes for mankind to colonise, well the margins of viability were narrow and planets that made the grade were few. In the nine hundred and forty seven years since the first colony was set up on Hawaii 1, only another four planets had been added to the Pan Human Federation. This one, provisionally named Hawaii 2 because of its extraordinary similarity to Earth, would be the jewel in the crown – if only they could solve the problem!

They could see amazing detail of the planet’s surface from space and with a multiplicity of sensors and filters could survey weather, geological strata, vegetation types and much more. But sooner or later you needed to get down there on the surface, to check out the wildlife, take physical samples, just breath the air! Of course, first you sent probes down – unmanned drone ships that would skim close to the surface filming and taking air samples before returning to the S.S. Andromeda. Except they mostly didn’t. Return that is. Mostly they flew through the tricky entry phase where the thinness of atmosphere caused such a build-up of speed one had to expend up a lot of rocket fuel slowing the craft up so that it wouldn’t burn up as the friction with the increasing atmosphere built up. Then, when the atmosphere was thick enough, the jet engines came into play and the probe could fly down, collect its samples and vids before flying up again to a height where the rockets could finally boost the craft back into orbit. The “problem” was that the jet engines were failing after random amounts of time and the probes, which were fortunately shaped to glide, after a fashion, ended up crash landing on Hawaii 2’s surface. Whilst some of the probes were intact enough to send back vids and other data, all of which was useful, the “problem” remained, inscrutable, until now. The latest probe had made it back although it had been touch and go and had immediately revealed the “problem”. The rear section of the jet engines was coated in volcanic glass to such an extent that the turbines that drove the compressors at the front of the engine had seized up and the engine stopped.

Once they knew what they were looking for, the Andromeda’s scientists were able to shine laser probes that could reflect off the very fine volcanic dust and map its distribution in Hawaii 2’s atmosphere. Most volcanoes threw out dust but it was usually heavy and fell to ground within a hundred miles of the source volcano and aircraft with jet engines would avoid flying near eruptions for obvious reasons. This particular dust, however, was so fine that it floated up into the atmosphere where it continued to circulate for long periods before eventually settling to the ground. Even then it could be whisked up from the extensive desert regions of Hawaii 2’s equatorial latitudes.

Captain Johannson had formulated a plan. Volunteers were being sought for a one-way ticket to the surface. The largest landing craft was being fitted with extra jet engines to be used should the originals give out and windows of opportunity when dust levels were slightly reduced were being studied. But the fact remained that this trip was only heading down. The crew would become Hawaii 2’s first settlers and volunteers were being assessed for psychological suitability apart from Captain Johannson that is. Always the surveyor and never the settler, Captain Johannson had decided he would like to settle down and nobody was going to rule him out on psychological grounds. S.S. Andromeda carried a selection of Earth plants plus some garnered from the five federation planets that had proved popular with human digestion and these were grown aboard the vessel in the hydroponics section. They would provide the agricultural start and everything else that might be useful was being catalogued and the logistics of getting it into the lander considered. All that they were waiting for was the window of opportunity – a relatively dust free day…

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,
 PAN HUMAN FEDERATION,
 HAWAII 1, A.G.947

“But that’s crazy I can’t believe we can cross light years of space, find a perfect planet, nearer to earth conditions than any we have previously identified – a needle in a haystack and you are telling me that we cannot fully exploit it because of volcanic dust!
“Yes sir precisely!”
“But is there no other way of getting on and off world didn’t the first Earth missions into space use rockets?!
“You are right sir they did but they soon realised it was too costly and in a way a blind alley, the wrong way to have approached space in the first place – all due to a historic accident!”
“Explain!”
Behind the desk of his office on Hawaii 1, Federation President Rosario leant back, put his finger tips together and assumed an air of concentration, as if by listening closely he might spot a loophole in the facts of the unpalatable news he was being given. Chief of Staff for the Federation of Home Worlds, James Hewlett paced the room hands clasped behind his back and began.
“There had been a war – the so-called Second World War and as I am sure you know war, is a great accelerant for technology. Some would argue there has been less technological advancement in the last thousand years of mankind’s expansion across the stars because there has been no war. Once we discovered the key to interstellar travel, to hyperspace manipulation, the universe was our oyster. Especially as it turned out that there were no little green men out there to compete with – there were plenty of planets for everyone, a void waiting to be filled even if none of them was quite so perfectly Earth like as Hawaii 2.
But in that war many developments occurred, rocketry on one side and nuclear weaponry on the other and at the end of the war, one of the victorious allies took most of the rocket engineers and all of the rockets whilst the other took just the top man, the real brains of the program – Werner von Braun.”
“How do you know all this ancient history James?” asked the President with only the slightest hint of impatience.
“Well sir, there is an ancient saying and unfortunately, the originator of it is lost to us, that ‘those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them’. I make it my duty as Chief of Staff to arm myself with all the history lessons I can.”
If the President heard even the mildest rebuke in the statement he did not reveal it but nodded sagely and said with no apparent impatience this time “Continue!”
“Well Sir, the Russians, for it was they who took the staff and stock, soon fired off all the rockets and did all the experiments with them that they could but then had to start from scratch building a new production organisation with the staff they had co-opted and without the former leader. The Russians were in a phase of collectivism called Communism which proved not to be a very efficient form of government and were doubly hampered by a totalitarian dictatorship, so it was slow progress. They did however manage to catch up with their opposite numbers the Americans in developing nuclear weapons and they knew how to deliver them around the world by rocket. The Americans believed in free market forces, in Capitalism and indeed it proved a much more efficient means of developing the atomic weapons and with the real brains of rocketry von Braun on their side they soon caught up with the Russians in the production of rockets as the means to deliver nuclear bombs to the other side of the world. And so, the Russians and Americans faced each other off with huge arsenals of nuclear weapons capable of extinguishing all life on Earth the so-called Cold War,”
“But that’s mad!” exclaimed the President,
James did a quick double take of his boss to see whether he recognised what he had said and deciding probably not said with some animation
“Precisely Sir! You’ve hit the nail on the head M. A. D. Mutually Assured Destruction, It was the theory that they work to – nobody could initiate an attack without knowing that the other side could counter attack before being destroyed and the aggressors would be equally destroyed since there was no defence against the rockets once launched.”
“Ok – but what does this have to do with space flight?”
“Well Sir, as well as rockets, both sides developed jet engines aplenty following the war, first for the military and then for passenger airliners The Americans also invented a little rocket powered plane to be carried as high as possible by a jet-turbine powered, bomber before being released to fire it’s rocket engine and be taken to the edge of space. Imagine the thrill of that first pilot to see the sky turn black and the stars come out before plummeting back to Earth in a barely controlled fashion!”
James paused for a moment to long and the president spoke tetchily.
“Yes, yes, but what has that got to do with our problem?”
“Ah well I was coming to that…

 

A TREE HOUSE, GARDEN OF EDEN,
 HAWAII 2, SEPTEMBER, A.G.1243

“So the Americans and Russians prove they both could make rockets and bombs with very different systems of politics and production but now they could wave their big dicks around but not use them. I mean you know how much you boys like your phallic symbols.”
Anna smiled up at Jack whilst gesturing at his crotch with a fore-finger which she provocatively curled and uncurled. Jack put the two cups of tea down carefully on the bedside table before suddenly grabbing a pillow and swatting his wife of two years. She shrieked and rolled towards him wrapping her arms round his thighs and pulling him down onto the bed. An hour later after a thorough exploration of dick waving and more besides and lying side by side with fresh cups of tea she continued.
“So the Americans and the Russians fought a few proxy wars but in their frustration at not being able to use their big shiny weapons, they wanted a grander gesture and when the Russians became the first to put a man into space orbit then the Americans had to go one better and said they were going to send men to land on the moon!”
“Wow!” said Jack “Serious dick waving!” Grabbing Anna’s hand he wrapped it round his own member and demonstrated the said motion.
“Behave yourself Jack! You were the one who wanted to understand why it’s so important that I go away for three months and I am trying to explain! So down boy!” She gives a sharp squeeze and then lets go.
“Alright, alright! I will pay attention Teacher!”
“Okay, so because the Russians had used a rocket to send a man into space and because the payloads involved in getting a ship that could go to the moon and back were so huge, nobody thought of anything other than rockets as the way to go forward. The whole bomber/ rocket-ship idea was just forgotten about. After the moon landings the Americans did develop a shuttle landing craft that was reusable and could take cargo into space, however, it still needed a massive rocket to get it up into space even though it could fly or rather glide back down again.”
“How big were these phallic symbols then?”asked Jack
“Seriously massive – like sitting on a huge bomb twenty times the size of the payload and although the shuttles achieved a lot, eventually in cooperation with the Russians, after a couple of accidents, one on take-off and one on landing with loss of all lives, the shuttles were phased out.”
“So they stopped exploring space then?”
“No, there was an International Space Station by then and the Russians went on using their trusty rockets to maintain the program working with the Americans and other countries but then something new happened.”
“What was that?”
“Well, private industry got involved and worked on getting tourists into space in at least a sub Orbital flight. After all a generation had grown up with all the excitement of the first space flight, the moon landings and the images from the space station and rich people wanted to go there for themselves!”
“I bet they did! What’s not to want! I wish I could see Hawaii 2 from space as you will next week!” said Jack ruefully.
“Well maybe one day we can afford for you to at least go up the lift my love.”
“Yes but you are going to do that and more – again! It’s not fair!” Jack stuck his bottom lip out and pouted in such a parody of a two-year-old that Anna was reduced to helpless laughter.
“I know my darling but one day…” She squeezed his arm.
“Seriously love, I am so proud of you getting chosen to go back and do more research. I know one can do pretty much anything one wants here on Hawaii 2 but when it costs as much as this trip then you’ve got to be good to justify it and someone obviously thinks you have what it takes – apart from me that is!”
“Ahh thanks love!” She rolls over and kisses him before continuing.
“Anyway, the private companies went back to the piggy back idea, building jet powered mother-ships from really light materials and small spacecraft that could rocket up into space once the mother-ship reached its highest point and then like the shuttles they could glide down again.”
“But we can’t use a system like that on Hawaii 2 because of the dust, am I right?”
“Correctamundi! We’ll make a scientist of you yet or at least a science historian.
“Alright Anna, I may be a builder but that doesn’t mean I know nothing!” and he tickles her till she begs for mercy
“Ok, ok! You’re right it’s the dust and Hawaii 2 has a real problem with it.”
“But if Hawaii 2 is the most Earth like planet to be discovered then how come they didn’t have the problem, aren’t there volcanoes on Earth too?”
“There are and very occasionally they did produce the exact same dust that is a problem here on Hawaii 2 and occasionally they did have to ground their jet aircraft but it was never to the same extent as it is here. Hawaii 2 much more recently emerged from an ice age – only 4,000 years ago whereas on Earth, 11,500 years had elapsed by the time jet engines came along. So we have a lot more glaciers in close proximity to volcanoes and even then it has to be a particular type of volcano to produce the very particular fine dust which messes up jet engines. The volcano melts the ice above it and the water runs down hits the molten lava and boom! Very fine dust particles all over the atmosphere.”
“Ok Anna you’re starting to lose me on the technicalities love but the reason you’re going off to Hawaii 1 is because you think there may be a solution?”
“Yes! When I went there before I found a reference to something called a ramjet which doesn’t have moving parts so it might not be affected by the dust – it could change everything for Hawaii 2. I can’t believe that’s nobody else discovered it before me although the reference was truncated by the data degradation and I need to search for it again in other areas of the data.”
“Why can’t they copy all the data and send it to all the other home planets why do you have to go all the way there to research?”
Anna thought for a moment before answering.
“I don’t all together know. I can’t see why it isn’t technically possible – they don’t let us interrogate the original Matrix, it’s too fragile, so it’s already a copy we use. It is massive, I mean it’s all the data they could gather from Earth before the destruction. Maybe it’s a power thing – it gives Hawaii 1 a unique hold over everyone else controlling access to that knowledge.”
“I see, so I have to lose the love of my life for three months because she would rather study Ram Jets than be with me…!
“Well I could pay some close attention to your very own pocket rocket, Love of My Life – right now!” she twinkled.
Unbeknownst to the happy couple, a small part of the payload delivered by that rocket deep inside Anna’s body a short while later, actually reached it’s ultimate destination triggering a series of changes that would progress for the next nine months.

 

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,
 PAN HUMAN FEDERATION,
 HAWAII 1, A.G.947

So Mr President the long and short of it is that without jet engines to-power mother-ships most of the way up to space we can land whatever we like on Hawaii 2 but it’s a one-way trip. Well not quite, we can build a space elevator but it’s capacity would be tiny, a real bottleneck. However it could be used to export high value, small volume goods such as gemstones, rare earth metals, etc and of course a small number of significant people.”
“But no mass exodus once the next planet is identified and prepared. Is that what you are saying?”
“Exactly Mr President, but that may offer us another possibility – a unique possibility!”
“What kind of possibility can a planet have with minimal trade prospects and no chance of becoming a stepping stone for the human race?”
“Well Mr President, you remember we talked about the different historical systems on Earth ranging from Democratic Capitalism at one end of the spectrum and Totalitarian Communism at the other?” President Rosario nodded, “Well the economics of those systems needed constant growth and/or War to provide consumption and stimulation of the economy and ultimately this is what lead to The Destruction and forced mankind to reach for the stars. Whilst all the Home Worlds pledge to maintain their environments in order not to repeat the mistakes of Earth it is a balancing act and any one of them could go out of balance and a few have come close to it. There may not be nation states any more but the trans-planet corporations compete for control of resources and conduct cyber attacks which resemble war only too closely. It is only the memory of The Destruction which allows governments to keep a lid on things and a thousand years on that fear becomes less potent despite being hard-wired into our education system. Hawaii 2 offers a chance for a unique experiment, one which economists have long pondered as a possibility.”
“Go on – though when I hear words like experiment and economist in the same sentence I immediately wonder how much it’s going to cost especially given that we are talking about a Planet with no trading possibilities!”
“Restricted trading possibilities but high-value possibilities…”
“Ok, so what are these economists proposing for Hawaii 2”
James Hewlett noticed the minute shift forward of President Rosario in his chair and he knew that the president’s interest was piqued.
“Alright so what if you could have a population stabilized at whatever level is needed to maintain itself where there was no war because everybody is provided for equally so no need to fight for resources. Modern technology to do almost all the grunt work. We could build a utopian society! High levels of education as well as leisure, freedom to choose whatever work you wanted to do or not work at all!”
“Well that sounds peachy but what would be the point of this experiment? I wouldn’t mind living there myself, but we are hardly in the business of setting up planetary holiday camps…”
“Make no mistake, Hawaii 2 would pay its way or rather, aside from the initial colonist transfer and mining infrastructure, it would have to be self-sustaining with those high value exports buying in whatever was still needed from the outside. The information from Captain Johannson’s landing party or settler group, I should say – confirm all the space side survey reports! No! The value of Hawaii 2 is that it is an almost closed system – we can keep the trans planet corporations out, so imagine how good it would be to know how to manage a Society without War and find a way to have an economy based on peace and stability rather than constant but unsustainable growth, Hawaii 2 could be just the laboratory in which to perform such an experiment!”
“Interesting!” Said President Rosario.


The proposed Virgin Galactic Spaceship and Mother-ship combo

A is for Arctane… 2021 A2Z Challenge

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My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…
Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…

 


Arctane is one of three human home-worlds mentioned in Train Wreck besides Earth, the decimated world of origin of the human race. It is the least important in the novel since none of the characters go there and its not involved in the plot, however it is a good starting point for exploring the universe of the Pan-Human Federation as these four worlds are called.

I was amazed to learn that imagining alien worlds goes back a long way – Dante in his “Paradiso” (1320) imagines his narrator ascending through sphers of the Moon and planets to eventually join with Angels. Giordano Bruno was martyred in 1600 for describing multiple, inhabited worlds orbiting other suns in his “De l’infinito universo e mondi” (“Concerning the Infinite Universe and Worlds”, 1584) – fortunately it is not so dangerous to write Science or Speculative Fiction these days…

When I was boy, scientists were coy about stating that there must be other suns with other planets bearing life since we had not even seen evidence of a planet crossing the disk of its star or causing a wobble in the stars orbit. As of 2018, 3078 exoplanets have been detected using such methods in our galaxy alone, although only 53 are “optimistically described as having the potential for life. There are of course an incalculable number of other galaxies…

The problems with travelling to other stars to explore such planets, are distance, the means of covering the distance and getting in and out of the gravity wells at either end of a planet-to-planet journey.- Most science fiction books skip lightly over these massive problems by having had someone invent the requisite drives for both interstellar journeys and getting on and off planets. So the Speculations of Science Fiction, fall into three categories – they are either about what we will find should we ever get there; considerations of what it is to be human by imagining us against some alien backdrop; or lastly, they are just a good yarn, cowboys and Indians, detective story, thriller or pirates of the asteroid belt dressed up in a futuristic setting. The realities of how and when we might ever be able to achieve such voyages lie far in the future.

My novel “Train Wreck” is really the second type of science fiction – what it is to be human – framed as the third type – a detective mystery. There is a crime at the outset and by the end of the book, we will have found out the who and the why, but along the way, is an examination of a Utopia and how people might succeed in expressing or suppressing human nature in such a society…

Arctane is a “mere” mining planet where materials valuable enough to human activities and rare enough to merit transporting between the stars have been found. The rarity of suitably inhabitable planets is such that all the planets in the Pan Human Federation orbit different stars and so you can bet that whatever interstellar drive has conveniently been discovered, its pretty d**n quick and even then, it takes an appreciable length of time to make the journey. Of course, like the canal-boats of Earth’s nineteenth century (a period of Industrial Revolution), although slow, once a flow of boats is under way, regular deliveries arrive.

Arctane is the very opposite of a Utopia, it is practically a “Company planet” since everything that happens there is by and for “The Company” and Arctinians are, as mining folk throughout human history have been, a rough and ready lot with no time for the niceties of civilisation. I have perhaps included the existence of Arctane simply to offer a contrast to the paradise that is the Utopian experiment which is Hawaii 2 and a worse alternative to the main replacement, human home-world for Earth that is Hawaii 1. Those who volunteered to go to Arctane in search of fortune, were almost diametrically opposite to those who first volunteered but were then carefully picked, to inhabit the Utopian experiment of Hawaii 2.

If you want to explore some of the many worlds science fiction writers have imagined, Wikipediadoes not disappoint and for images of imagined worlds – including the one shown at the start of this post, click here.

 

And now for the Frontispiece, Prologue and Chapter 1 of Train Wreck…

Train Wreck.

Hawaii:- from the Polynesian word Owhyhee meaning homeland. As the Polynesian peoples spread out across the Pacific Ocean, each new island colonised was initially called Owhyhee, Once the numbers of settlers rose to a suitable capacity for the island, a new group would set out in search of the next Owhyhee.

Prologue

HAWAII 2, DECEMBER, ANNO GALACTICUS 1243

If the explosion that severed the Spacelift Express had happened any further from the capital then the fatalities, at least in that section of the train aft of the explosion, might have been total. A parched tongue extended from the vast wastes of the New Sahara Desert and pushed its way almost to the city. The tongue was lapped either side by two valleys verdant with man-made greening right up to their watersheds. This desert tongue was the scene of the atrocity and was within range of rescue vehicles, both land based and, as luck would have it, the weather permitted airborne rescue helicopters too.

 

The explosion, the result of a bomb, it was quickly but discretely established, occurred in the dining car, severing the carriage at that point as well as the maglev monorail on which the train ran. The carriages behind this point hit the break in the rail, jumped off its guiding influence and concertinaed – the train swinging alternatively left and right. The forward section of the train carried on a little further around the gentle curve of the track at this point for although the catastrophic break in the monorail had cut power to the maglev engines, the aerodynamic air intake that helped compress the air flow smoothly beneath the train when in motion, carried the sinking carriages just far enough to avoid being crushed from behind by the rear section. The sudden sinking of the carriages onto the monorail caused a sudden enough braking that some passengers, especially those on their feet sorting out their luggage ready for the imminent arrival at Grand Central were thrown to the floor in the front section. In the rear section of the train those standing formed the majority of the dead. Those still seated fared proportionally better in both sections but having said that, there were plenty of dead amongst the seated of the rear section too.

 

One young couple were particularly lucky as having been closest to the explosion yet partially protected by having both entered the toilet at one end of the dining car and just closed the door behind them when the explosion happened. They were thrown around badly and were both in an unconscious state which resolved, once all other possible care had been given to their battered bodies, into intractable comas in both their cases.

Fortunately… 

Chapter 1
Awakening.

HAWAII 2, MAY, A.G.1244

He could hear a baby.
He could hear a woman talking to the baby in the high-pitched voice that even men adopt instinctively when talking to babies, he remembered Anna telling him how that worked.
“Yes you are a beautiful boy, aren’t you!”
Gurgling from the baby.
“Just like your Dad there! The Sleeping Beauty! Who’s a beautiful boy? Coodgie, coodgie, coo!”
More gurgling followed by spluttering and a tiny sneeze.
“Bless you!” The woman’s voice. Wait! That was his mother’s voice! What was she doing here and where was here?
He tried to speak but there was something stuck in his throat but a rasping sound emerged followed by his Mother’s voice calling for a nurse and then suddenly there were lots of voices around him.

“BP please?”
“BP normal at one-two-five over eighty but pulse is up to ninety-eight.”
Okay let’s de-intubate please. Gently does it he’s had it in a long time!”
He feels like his throat is being ripped out. He liked it better when the baby was here and his mother.
“Murrghm!” He tries to sit up and call her but he feels as weak as a kitten and his throat is dry and sore.
Gently now! Lie back Jack and let me wet your lips.”
Something spongy is applied to his lips and a trickle of water slips into his mouth and down his throat, he nearly chokes. He tried to open his eyes realising that if he could hear then he should be able to see but something was stopping them opening. He tried to raise his hands to his eyes but they weighed too much and they seemed – encumbered. He panicked and started thrashing his arms and crying out for his mother and suddenly her voice was there again.
“It’s okay Jack, just relax a minute and the doctors will help you.  You’re in hospital but you are ok!”
Someone was holding his hand, holding it down but stroking his arm. It was his mother’s touch, the touch when he was in bed settling down after a story and slipping into sleep. He calmed down. Hands removed something from his face, undid tape from his eyelids. The doctor spoke again.
“Now Jack – try opening your eyes please.”
At first everything was blurry, heads bent over him in a semi darkened room then a blinding light from the doctors torch, first in one eye and then the other. Then there was more light as someone twisted the blinds open and the bright sunlight came flooding in and finally, there was his mother, tears of happiness running down her face as she bent forward to hug him as he lay there and he felt her tears run down his cheek. After a bit she stood up again and a nurse moved in to remove something from his arm the bed was tilted upwards bringing him to a near sitting position.
“There was a baby!” he said “Where’s the baby?”
His mother looked at the doctor who shrugged and nodded at the same time. His mother turned to him and with a pained look but in a bright voice, a too bright voice, said
“Jack you have a son! You are a father Jack!”

Lockdown Craftiness…

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 My partner and I decided to spend the winter escaping the virus in the relative safety of Crete and rented two doors down from her sister in Mavrikiano, Elounda. barbara and Virginia plunged into knitting and eventually the itch to stitch got to much and I purchased a double-ended crochet needle from one of the knitting shops in nearby Agios Nikolaos before the lockdown was clamped down even tighter than in the UK. 

I have only made some samplers to explore new stitches in Tunisian Crochet which is my thing and to stitch with alternating colours on the pairs of rows. I can give more details if anyone is interested…


The Big Reveal…

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 Last year, I only discovered the A2Z 2020 Challenge on the first of April – the start day and had to wing it with the theme of the unfolding Covid 19 Pandemic. This year I have had time to think about it in advance and have to make it not just a 26 day blogging challenge, but a 26 day novel completing challenge…


Some years ago, laid up after a hip replacement [I am not as old as that suggest but I have just reached pension age 🙁   ] I awoke in the middle of the night from a dream which I knew was meant to be the start of a novel. I immediately dictated all I could recall into my phone and began writing the next day.

I confess, I already had a novel on the go which has languished for more of the 15 years since its inception than not. Whilst still actively thinking and reaching and very occasionally writing a bit of the first novel – darting hither and thither within its structure, the second novel – “Train Wreck” – has been a start at the beginning and work through in order affair. Still, there has been a lot of time when life got in the way of writing and so I have decided to try and complete it with the impetus of the 2021 Challenge.

To comply with the A to Z part of the Challenge, I am going to invent an aspect of my novel’s world(s) – for it is a science-fiction in a thriller format – the Train Wreck is a whodunnit! But I shall then publish a chapter a day – luckily I have a headstart of twelve which gives me more time to write the balance…

And if anything else demands musing on, I will tack that on too…

Needless to say – Feedback would be most welcome!

I will aim to visit as many other blogs as I can – its going to be busy!

Music in a Time of Covid…

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 With a nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez – I want to talk about listening to music without which, I for one would find the world a grey place indeed! I do not lightly recommend Apps but as we sojourn in Crete, we are only able to enjoy BBC Radio 4 without which my beloved Barbara cannot get to sleep, by virtue of Radio Garden! This clever facility allows you to rotate a globe and zoom in to any internet radio station anywhere in the world and tune in to their offerings. This includes BBC stations despite the corporation’s determination that nobody, anywhere in the world shall listen to them because they do not pay a licence fee!!!

So in this time of renewed lockdowns – take a trip, tune in drop-out, take a slow boat to China, or see what they listen to in the Aleutian Isles or see what everybody does in Hawaii. Local news and international music – it can be enlightening as to the nature of our global village. For sure, the pandemic has made us – if we were not already – more aware of the fact that we are living in a global village with all the consequences as such. My partner and I have escaped lockdown (and the weather) in England and there may have been very few cases of Covid 19 here in Crete, but the cases in Greece are on the rise as they are everywhere… all the more reason to lose yourself in music.

Of course, not all musical discoveries have been via Radio Garden, my sister-in-law, our new neighbour, recommended an Athens based station which we now also tune into all day on our televisions – KOSMOS. (Our television is rather alarmingly named F&U). KOSMOS is an extraordinarily eclectic mix of music blues, pop, rap, world music, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian, North African – it’s all there and if we can’t understand the DJs – it matters not as they don’t talk too much. Another app which I like to use quite frequently is Shazam, in a quest to either identify music I recognize but cannot always remember who it is by or to add new artists to my Spotify lists. KOSMOS has offered lots of new tracks or interesting covers yet the usually infallible and fast to identify, Shazam, has frequently drawn blanks. I can only assume that these (mainly European covers are too obscure to have been added to Shazam’s database. Anyway, eclecticism is always the sign of a good radio station for me – I understand that in America, stations are totally specialized which I absolutely hate…

In other matters, today is the day of the US Presidential Election – the result of which we await with bated breath. If Trump falls, perhaps other right-wing abominations around the world may follow…

In Crete

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 The quandary over holiday v. living continues… We are experiencing some “survivor guilt” combined with some separation anxiety in regard to family back in England not to mention friends – we feel blessed to be somewhere so paradisial (mosquitos excepted) whilst family and friends must fight through an English winter made worse not just by the counter-Covid measures themselves, but by the stress of watching an inept, misguided and venally self-serving government bluff and badger their way through the crisis. At present, the local governments of the North of England have been demanding more money to help the afflicted if they must go into stricter measures again and the government are ploughing ahead anyway. This is really a battle against the “power-grabbing to the centre” of the Dominic Cummings led government and quite rightly so – nor is this dilemma solely being enacted in Britain but in many countries around the world including here in Greece…

On the “living in Greece” side – we have attended a wedding of our next-door neighbours – him Greek her Russian, their baby so was baptized following the wedding- a beautiful church whose interior was completely covered in paintings of saints, bishops, and disciples. Followed by dancing at the wedding feast – limited to 50 attendees – so more than thrilled to have been invited. My partner’s sister’s partner was doing the catering for the event.


Furthermore, we have begun to learn the language in the contemporary manner – using the app Duolingo! Whilst choosing a suitable app  – came across Busuu which is named for a language whose native speakers had dwindled to a mere eight before the app (which unfortunately doesn’t cover Greek) offers the chance to learn Busuu as well as a small selection of other languages – so now there are presumably more speakers – who knows, perhaps like the native American tribe used for communications during WW2, there is a society of surreptitious Busuu speakers defying the eavesdroppers on the internet, whispering sweet nothings to one another or who knows what!!!

On the “going home eventually” side of the coin, our funds are finite and life is not cheap here and of course, Brexit still looms…

Nevertheless, we have been here over a week now and some sort of “new normal” begins to emerge.


Locusts…

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It is not my intention to make this a nature blog, but when a locust, an animal of mythical status quite literally, drops into your hand, or to be precise, onto the USB cable you have in your hand – it is worthy of a photo at least. They do occur in small or rather, regular numbers here in Crete but I understand they rarely get triggered into the massive swarms possible in nearby Africa. A quick search of the internet shows there are many species of even the European Locust but I was not able to identify this one easily – any entomologists out there?

Locusts are an apt metaphor for the outsourcing companies that the UK Tory government see fit to issue with contracts for Covid 19 Test and Trace as part of their ideological drive to centralise power with the Cabinet, richly reward their donors and no doubt themselves at some point down the line. It is the latest version of neo-liberalism and driven on the ideological side by Dominic Cummings (principal advisor to Boris Johnson) who is determined to curb what he sees as the bloated power of the UK Civil Service. However, as the linked article shows, this outsourcing is highly inefficient and costly. to give one example, local authorities in the UK have highly skilled tracing teams for use in sensitive areas such as STD cases but the government ignored this resource at the outset of the pandemic when it could have made a great difference in holding back the tide – preferring to centralise power to itself, not to mention the profits inherent in outsourcing. The outsourcing teams were undertrained, the privacy issues minimised for centralised efficiency and due to general inefficiency, were underused (staff reported being paid to sit on standby for calls and not receiving any) and when they did get calls, their efficiency in tracing (64%)was much lower than that achieved by local authority teams in their fields (97%). Still the locusts swarm around the government who are secretive about the amount they are dishing out but may very well run into billions on track and trace alone…

Meanwhile, here on Crete where our personal escape plan seems to have succeeded, that is to say, we arrived by air without so far, displaying any sign of having Covid 19 (touch wood). Due to the UK government first saying it was impossible to issue travel/quarantine on return bans for anything less than a whole country, they then did one of their trademark U-turns and following a planeload of returning holidaymakers from just one Greek island, the government imposed a 14-day quarantine on all people coming from all Greek islands. This ignores the fact that it was those British holidaymakers who probably took the disease with them and shared it amongst themselves as well as the islanders. Consequently, many people cancelled their Greek holidays, unable to take unpaid holiday leave to quarantine on their return and their employers unwilling to grant it anyway. Our own direct flight to Crete was one of the casualties and we had to fly via Athens which was a rushed and harassing connection.

The effects on the Greek tourism industry have been catastrophic – especially on the islands which often depend on tourism and considering that the total covid record for the whole of Greece amounts to say – one day in the UK, this seems very unfair and it is quite ironic that one should be expected to quarantine passing from the comparative safety of Greece to the dangers of out-of-control Britain. Given that most Greeks do not know anyone who has contracted covid 19, even at several removes, the level of compliance in mask-wearing in shops and by those serving in restaurants, is all the more remarkable. I feel that in the long term, people will look back on this pandemic and see the apparently limited numbers of victims compared say, to Spanish Flu) as opposed to the long-term effects which we are just beginning to suspect the extent of and be amazed at the initial good response of people to something they could not see happening for themselves and the squandering of that good effort by some governments due to concerns for economic health. The Greek islanders – through no choice of their own (unlike say, New Zealand) – have been forced to take the economic hit but been saved, so far, the health hit – it remains to be seen whether they will feel blessed by that…

Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still in the process of settling in to what is clearly more than a holiday (at a projected three-month minimum) and yet not an outright move to live in another country. This is what exercises our minds presently…

P.S.

On the millipede front, I was wondering what other creature might benefit from the bonanza of the beast’s appearance since this seems to be axiomatic fodder from our watching of nature documentaries. Every morning there are many dead bodies on the steps down to our apartment and no sign of anything eating them – so imagine my surprise when I saw the not merely dead, but somewhat desiccated body of a millipede moving with apparently unnatural animation – a sideways movement impossible for a live millipede. The cause was an ant, a fraction of the millipede’s size who not only dragged the beast on the horizontal, but up a 7cm step. Unfortunately, I missed this feat by the time I got the video up on my phone but below is some of the heroic event on the flat – David Attenborough eat your heart out!