Writing

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

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…

 


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!”

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!

A Fork in the Road…

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Three fictional responses to the best and worst possibilities that could grow out of present times…

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


Robert Frost


Devolution 1

Gemma – Transformation

I can hardly believe how life has changed since the Covid 19 crisis. And for the better too. Life used to be a merry-go-round of work, kids, husband, sleep, and then work again. Yes, the kids are back at school again – there’s still the husband – lol, and I do work, but it’s different work now. I’m working for myself now. I used to work in a factory, making rubber gloves and my task was to pack the ruddy things into boxes – all day long – mind-numbingly boring! It was a small firm and when the virus struck and the need for personal protection skyrocketed, the boss thought that we’ld be quids in. He wrote to the government offering gloves at a very good price but we heard nothing back and meantime, most of us were on zero-hours contracts and he couldn’t claim the money the government was offering – he had to let us all go. I saw him the other day – coming out of the Social Security Office after claiming for Universal Credit like the rest of us used to – the crisis wiped him out – bankrupt. He said he heard that the PPE contracts all went to some big firm – he said it came out in the paper that some Tory minister had connections with the company… I never trusted the Tories as far as I could throw them – a lot of people I knew went over to them with Brexit, their heads full of nonsense about immigrants and getting our country back, but as far as I can see, the only people who ever stole our country from us, was the sodding Tory government.Anyway, back to lockdown – I went on universal credit and of course, it wasn’t going to come through for weeks, in fact, it took two months – thank God for Mike, my husband and a delivery man, and YES! – his company actually was quids in with the crisis! He worked all through the lockdown flat out and miraculously, managed not to catch the virus. I love Mike to bits but I was so relieved we didn’t have to be locked down 24 hours a day – him, me and the kids – we wouldn’t have made it. Don’t get me wrong, Mike is a lovely man, but he can’t keep still for five minutes so out on the road was the best place for him whilst I did my best with the kids – home-schooling, painting rainbows to thank the NHS, making up quizzes – I didn’t know I had it in me. Course, there were loads of tips on tinternet and that’s where I first saw about people making scrubs for the  NHS and Care Home workers – weeks before it was on TV news.
I had my mum’s sewing machine – she used to make clothes for me when I was little but when I was a teenager I had loads of arguments with her because I wanted shop-bought clothes – selfish little minx I was ‘cos she couldn’t afford them. Well, I started teaching myself to use the machine from YouTube videos and soon I downloaded patterns for how to make scrubs. You had to use the right kind of material so they were washable and you made a bag for the scrubs to go in so the workers could put the bag straight in the washing machine without touching the scrubs. It took a bit of practice but soon I got it right and the feeling when I had my first pair collected by the co-ordinator in my area – well! You had to pay to talk to me! Then my kids got interested, Lisa and Liam, they helped me by cutting out the pieces and washing the materials my friends and neighbours dropped off. They still had to do their home-schooling but they went at it with enthusiasm so they could get on to the scrubs. Also, they had a bit more respect for me since they seen what I had done – in the early days I was struggling with their schoolwork – I hadn’t been that hot at school meself but with a bit of patience on their part, we figured stuff out together, mostly. Once the crisis was over, they did their own washing and ironing lol! And I – I started making clothes for a living. While we was still in lockdown, Lisa and I got so fed up with not being able to go shopping for new clothes and we used to watch the Great British Sewing Bee where the contestants had to do a Transformation challenge so we decided – since we couldn’t get any nice fabrics – to take one of my old dresses and make one (a lot smaller) for Lisa. She was so thrilled with it, not just because she had a new outfit ‘cos she couldn’t go out in it (though she shared it on Instagram with all her friends) but because I had made it for her. Who’d have thought it! All that fuss I used to make with my Mum and Lisa went for it! Maybe ‘cos she was proud of what I had done with the scrubs – they weren’t just plain blue or green like regular ones because of the fabrics people gave us, they had patterns and even superheroes from children’s duvets. Then again, all her friends thought her dress was really cool too! I’d never done anything like this and I was so proud of myself and my kids, and how many scrubs we managed to make together! So after the crisis, Lisa and I went to a fabric shop once they opened again and though we started by buying and making a few patterns both for her and me, they were a bit naff and soon I started making up my own ideas. Lisa was using the sewing machine by now and together, we started making clothes for her friends. After a while, the local paper, well it was an online thing, did a feature on me and then a local shop asked if they could show one of my “creations”. Then a small firm asked if they could make one of my “designs” and soon I was making enough money that I came off Universal Credit – what a proud moment that was!

So the crisis did me a big favour, lucky enough, no-one in my family died though one uncle was touch and go, but me, I came out of it with a whole new life and according to the mayor, I have “done something to help the local economy” – result!

Revolution

Annie – 1 – Feral…

God knows we never imagined we’d end up hiding in the Scottish highlands, protected by guns, booby traps and subterfuge, and still the question we keep asking ourselves is – how did it come to this?

Was it that first eleven days when the government dithered around the idea of sacrificing unknowable numbers of people to, possibly, arrive at herd immunity? Of course, they knew at that stage that the elderly were affected more by Covid 19 and who knows whether, in the Cabinet meetings, they dared to whisper the idea that culling of the ever more expensive baby-boom generation would solve a lot of problems, reduce the pressure on the NHS costs, liberate inheritance money to the next, less fortunate generation. Of course, there was the unfortunate fact that these were the Tory party’s traditional power base voters, but heck, they had five years till the next election and maybe that next generation would be grateful and pick up the votes…

I am on Guard duty, as usual. Mr McPherson, Jock is tending to his animals with help around the farm from my husband Tom whilst Mrs McPherson, Maggie, is baking bread and making jam from the strawberries that grow well in the sheltered hollow where the farm is nestled. The hollow is completely hidden by a bend at the top of the long straight valley that leads up to it so that you would have no idea that there was a farm here when you look up from the main road below – except for the track leading up the valley. And that was a problem when we arrived with our unwelcome news, two months ago. Tom had been in the army reserves when he was younger so he and Jock worked out a plan to put off anyone tempted to investigate the farm track. We had passed a car whose occupants had been shot at close range where they sat and Tom and Jock loaded up onto Jock big trailer and brought it back to the farm. Carefully positioned in the entrance to the farm track, as if trying to leave, the car with its gruesome occupants, both blocked the track entrance and hopefully suggested that death had already passed this way and there was nothing to be had here. As long as the group who had murdered the car’s occupants didn’t return and recognize their handiwork – it might work, but then again…

I’m getting ahead of myself. The first two months of lockdown went better than expected in the UK, the hospitals were not overwhelmed by the rising numbers of patients and the people, by and large, accepted the restrictions imposed on them without complaint and clapped every week in appreciation of the bravery and dedication of first, NHS workers, then delivery drivers and anyone not locked down but continuing to work and support the rest of us who were. Then the problem of people living and working in the care sector became apparent. A bit of the shine went off the NHS when it was realized that the people sent back from hospitals to residential homes without testing, in the early days of the crisis when hospitals were being cleared for action, were probably the reason why the virus decimated those homes so quickly and completely. In turn, this reflected on the government for their failure to prepare for a pandemic and the more specific failures in this particular case as well as the suspicion that they just didn’t care enough about the residential homes’ occupants. Under increasing pressure from the press and the public, the government did what it always did, looked for distraction and scapegoats. 
People, perhaps orchestrated behind the scenes and in tabloid papers, were clamouring to go back to work and the government stoked it by unclear messages about the safety of doing so, sowing confusion so that no blame could attach to them, or rather nothing that would stick. Lots of people had lost their jobs, mainly in the lower end of the job market, the gig economy, the zero hour contract end of the market. There were a lot of unhappy people as what aid there was to be had from the government, came through slowly – food banks grew in importance. Those that did return to, or find new jobs, were forced to accept lower wages – companies claimed they couldn’t afford more after the lockdown and it was “take it or leave it”.
Of course, nobody in government would have dreamed of officially suggesting the affluent old as scapegoats, but the forces on the right have always pulled the strings in a sly way, whether it’s the Nazis, Moseley’s Blackshirts or the National Front – there’s always someone behind the scenes, whispering in the ears of yobs and disaffected youth. Of course, the concept of an age war had been around before the Covid 19 crisis, babyboomers living in comparative luxury and drawing down NHS services in increasing numbers, and as more things became treatable, demanding those treatments. The younger generation was facing the prospect of paying for this older generation on the “strength” of inadequate jobs, unable to get on the housing ladder, which Margaret Thatcher had sold to the nation as the inalienable right of British citizens. But these rumblings and grumblings might never have come to much without the Covid 19 crisis…

I squint down the telescopic sight on my automatic rifle and check that the farm track is clear right down to the road. There are grass and weeds growing up on it now, which is what we want – no indication that anyone travels up it or that there is anywhere to go to at the top of it. We travel a different route to the road now when we need to, and its usually only Jock and Tom who go, driving a four-wheel-drive buggy over the hills surrounding the farm, and down to the road further along from the now disused farm track, and being careful not to leave evidence of their passage. They make occasional, very discrete outings to check up on other local farms, farms not as lucky as the McGregor’s, lucky that we arrived when we did. The friends who were our first destination, were not so lucky. When the troubles threatened us at our home on the outskirts of Newcastle, we decided to visit Pat Tricia and Steve, some farmer friends near Aberdeen who agreed to our plan – safety in numbers and Tom’s military background was reassuring. We loaded our aged camper van with food and anything we thought might be useful, we locked down our house as best we could in the limited time we felt we had. Gangs were already raiding nearby suburbs on a random basis, the rumours were of scores being settled, particularly conspicuous consumption, flash cars, big houses – they were drawing the attention first. We didn’t expect that our friends’ place would be a target at all – remote as it was, but it turned out, the remote farms, far from being safe in their isolation, were easy pickings for the feral gangs, Killing the occupants if they were older and sometimes even if they were younger – the yobs failed to distinguish between landowners and tenant farmers. They robbed whatever valuables they could find, often torched the property, took the odd sheep for celebratory barbeques back in the cities. 
When we arrived at the farm, we could see immediately that there was something wrong – there were a lot of cars parked in the farmyard although we couldn’t see anyone about. Tom parked off the approach track, behind a group of trees. He instructed me to watch the farm from cover, with binoculars and keep in touch with him using our mobile phones on earphone for silent operation. He crept up to the farm along a hedge line. As he made it to the corner of the house, I saw a man with a gun come out of the front door, lean the gun next to the door and wall over to some bushes and start to urinate. Thanks to my silent warning, Tom had flattened himself to the wall and the intruder, wiping some blood on his trousers as he went, passed almost within touching distance of Tom, his Bowie knife already drawn. The intruder didn’t have time to react as Tom cut his throat and fell silently to the ground and Tom dragged his body out of sight. Tom quickly secured the gun – an automatic rifle he told me when he had moved to the cover of a wall on the opposite side of the yard – a position which gave him command of the whole yard. I knew Tom had been on lots of training exercises, but he had never been deployed in an active combat situation – to see him kill a man in cold blood with such decisive efficiency, shocked me to the core. Now he waited until someone else came outside calling a man’s name. A couple of others drifted out, laughing and swigging from a bottle of brandy and joined in the shouting of the missing man’s name. Suddenly Tom started shooting from his concealed position, sweeping the yard with a long burst of automatic fire that dropped all the men to the ground. One other man emerged gun in hand but by the time he had realized all his companions were on the ground, a short burst from Tom despatched him too. He told me he was going around the back of the house to check whether there were any more invaders inside and to keep watch. It was as if I had not known this Tom and yet I realized I that I had always known him – just expressed in different ways – how he packed for a journey, knew where to find things. I felt safe with him – as I always had, but more so. Ten minutes later Tom appeared at the front door and shouted and beckoned to me to come to him. I ran down and into the house and found Tom bent over Patricia on the floor, bleeding. Steve was face down on the other side of the room, not moving.
” You’ll have to go to Jock and Maggie now – warn them, they’re good friends” Patricia was saying weakly “you’ll find their number in my phone, you’ll be safe there -they’re way up in the highlands.” She winced and her eyes screwed shut. “Thank you Pat” I said, “typical you thinking of others first but we will get you to a hospital!” But it was too late, Pat’s body gave a little spasm and she was gone. I turned to Tom and burst into tears, so much had happened, had changed in the last twenty minutes. He held me tight for as long as I needed but then as soon as I let him go, he said, “We must do what she said Maggie – it’s obviously not safe even here – we need to move as soon as possible.” And so it was that we buried Pat and Steve together, left the intruders where they were as some sort of warning, gathered all their weapons and the stash of ammunition from their vehicles, plus Steve’s shotguns “God knows where they got the automatic weapons!” Tom said. We packed them along with more food, into the camper van and left a couple of hours later just as it was getting dark. We had found Jock and Maggie’s number in Pat’s phone, she hadn’t bothered with locking and passwords, and we rang and told them what had happened. I heard Maggie gasp but they said to come on up and gave us their address. We pulled into some forestry off the road and slept in the front seats for a few hours, the back was too full and resumed the journey in the early hours of the morning when we thought we would be less likely to encounter trouble…

As soon as reports of violence against older, richer people began, the government deployed the army and whilst the sight of a few patrols calmed things down in the trouble spots, mostly in deprived northern cities, it soon became apparent that most of the army had moved south and were deployed to protect what used to be called “the Home Counties”. Soon the press reported that the government had lost control of the northern half of the country and formed a protective cordon south of Birmingham and that’s when law and order really broke down – riots, retaliation from the police, all-out attacks on police stations and of course, looting. Once the shops were looted, picked clean, then the mobs turned their attention to individual houses and that’s when Tom and I had decided to leave. Pat and Steve had been longtime friends who we went to stay with most years – being farmers it was harder for them to do the opposite. Jock and Maggie were like them in some ways, not dourer but a bit more reserved. They were shocked by our tale when we arrived but practical, Tom clearly knew how to defend us and he and Jock quickly went off to hatch a defensive strategy and Maggie and I unpacked the food from the van and bonded over the act of stowing it in her pantry and cups of strong tea.
The television was still going then, still showing a semblance of the news, but it was clear that either less was known about what was going on “up north”, or that the government was censoring the news. As the days went on, the untroubled south became less and less real or relevant to us though there was coverage of what was happening in other parts of the world. More right-wing governed countries like Poland and Hungary had suffered worse from the virus, not locking down soon enough, their hospitals overwhelmed and there too violence flared and soon there were no more reports coming out of those countries either. We had the internet for a bit but only by going up onto the hill and connecting Tom’s laptop via his mobile phone – Jock and Maggie were had not bothered with the internet before – but soon the phone network went down just as the landline had done a few weeks before. We cannot contact our children any more though Tom and mine at least know where we are, the authorities do not know about us or our fate. We are completely on our own now.

It’s getting too dark to see now and in the unlikely event that anyone comes past the dead people at the bottom of the track and makes it up to the farm, there are booby traps on tripwires. They are meant to be blank shotgun cartridges to scare foxes and maybe poachers, but we have loaded them with live cartridges – we need the upper hand in the event of an attack. I extricate myself from my hide and walk round the bend to the farmhouse where the lights are on and supper will be ready for us all.

Tom and I used to talk, in the early days of the lockdown, about how the pandemic had not turned out like in the movies and tv dramas – lots of dead bodies everywhere and the survivors going feral in the ruins of civilisation – little did we know. Back then, it all seemed very unreal, the government and the media quickly adopted the language of war, – fighting the virus, the workers on the front-line and so on, but that’s not how it felt, you looked out of the window and the streets were calm and empty and the TV and web were full of diversions to occupy adults and children alike and re-runs of old comedies. It all changed and went downhill so quickly so still we ask ourselves – how did it come to this…

Devolution 2

Annie – 2 – Reformation

We had always been Tory voters and everyone around us in our posh suburb of Newcastle voted that way too, as far as we could tell. When lockdown happened, we were comfortable enough in our detached house with a big enough garden to walk around in and work on but we started to feel cut off by the high fences and hedge that separated us from the neighbours. We could hear them but not see them and if we wanted to talk to them, we had to shout an invitation and then meet them on the pavement out front – socially distanced of course. Thursday night clapping for the NHS seemed a feeble affair when we were all so far apart – not like the enthusiastic affairs pictured on the news from terrace streets in inner cities.
We did our social duty, of course, surveyed the area to see if there were any older people who needed shopping doing for them, but either they had children nearby or insisted on driving to the shops themselves – masked and gloved. There are no corner shops in the suburbs so it was always a trip to the supermarket and the chances of running into people we knew in the queue to get in, was slim. Our only contact with the outside world then, was via the internet and the telephone. It was lonely.
Newcastle, whilst socially and architecturally vibrant, was still impoverished or rather socially divided into well-off and deprived, affluent suburbs and older inner-city terraces. Years of austerity had whittled away at the local authority provided services, drug and alcohol services, school facilities, hospitals – for people like us, with BUPA and no vices, this was not a problem although the prospect of having to go into an NHS hospital in the event of catching the virus, added to our determination to avoid catching it.  not that we were snobs, but just afraid of being treated in an overwhelmed or failing facility. But for most of the population there would be no choice. London succumbed to the virus first and then spread unevenly, thriving in hotspots which it appeared, were related to areas of deprivation – including Newcastle. Scientists speculated as to causal links, shifted their thinking from a flu-like disease to a multi-organ attacking complaint, from one strategy to another. And the numbers of infections and deaths in Newcastle, rose steadily.
The press started asking more searching questions. What was the government’s exit strategy? When would lockdown end? Did the government accept any blame for the slow start to lockdown, the return of infected elderly patients to care homes and so on? And gradually, Tom and I started to question the government’s record too. I should say that Tom was a retired barrister but who was a member of the Army Reserve and I had used to spend many weekends on my own whilst he went off on training weekends. So Tom was used to both incisive, analytic thinking, and also, to decisive action plans. He moved from default Tory voter to “They couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery!” in about six weeks.
We both watched the daily briefings from the government but Tom started to read far and wide on the internet – seeking answers to the mysteries of the virus which seemed to deepen rather than achieve resolution and to the evaluation of different governments performance in tackling the pandemic. 
My research was rather more prosaic, mostly centred on Facebook and Tom had to disabuse me of a few conspiracy theories and other examples of fake news but Tom had to concede that the articles which were shared showing that countries with women premiers had acted faster and better and got better results – certainly than our own government’s performance. And so between us, our knowledge grew and our views changed.
Furthermore, as time went on, we both grew more and more frustrated at not being able to contribute anything to “the war” on the virus – language you would imagine Tom, as a part-time soldier, would have embraced, but no! He read an article showing how such language is not helpful except for whipping people up with speeches. By the time lockdown ended, Tom and I had sustained a Damascene conversion, we were anti-austerity, anti-centralised government, pro-local sourcing, pro-devolution. When the lockdown ended, in a muddled way that we suspected was designed to prevent blame attaching to the government, Tom and I joined our local branch of the Labour Party but after attending a few meetings, we were disillusioned with them too and turned to local government and Tom decided to try and stand in the next council election. I supported him, acting as his promoter and social secretary until he said that we should both try and stand. 
But then came the second wave of Covid 19 – a much worse one than the first wave – deaths soared – lockdown resumed and all of the government’s dissembling and attempted blame-shifting fell flat – people saw through it! The regions had become increasingly bolshie about the strictures being handed out by central government, they took their own line, tried to obtain information about their own regions in order to base their decisions on. More importantly, they talked to their neighbours, co-operated, shared resources, sourced local solutions. This rebellion against the government was not lost on the government and their five-year, massive majority started to implode. The opposition party eventually called for a vote of no confidence and incredibly, enough Tory MP’s rebelled and the government fell in only the second year of its term. For the first time ever, the recent local elections had attracted a larger turnout than the national election which resulted in a hung parliament which dragged on in useless stalemate and decreasing their role even more. That scuppered the no-deal Brexit that the Tories had plainly been headed for and with all the other problems faced by ourselves and our European neighbours, the whole thing just seems to have slid into inactivity and things between us are changed more by Covid 19 than Brexit.
Tom and I failed to get selected by local Labour Party – still too middle-class looking, but we did become activists working with the councillors who were elected, and in many ways, this proved better for us because we were free to work, liaise and support whatever causes and issues we wanted to – keeping homeless down, encouraging synergy between local businesses. People made unemployed by the lockdown have found new and innovative ways to make a living – we watched a piece about a woman who taught herself to sew scrubs for key-workers during the lockdown and now designs clothes that are made by a local firm and sold in local shops. No transport costs, no foreign sweat-shops or possible child-labour. Farmers markets have returned bigger and better, not just for the middle-class but for everyone. Okay, the vegetables are more seasonal but people are more experimental with their cooking – not in terms of exotic foreign ingredients but home-grown things. It’s not just necessity now, it’s an informed choice by consumers – old-style, growth-based capitalism seems to have died…fingers crossed. Yes we miss travel, foreign holidays, but you can’t argue with the figures on reduced pollution – same with commuting, much reduced as people now insist on working from home and those who have to physically go to work, are gradually moving to be nearer rather than do the big commute – and who ever enjoyed that – really!
From sleepy semi-retirement, we were drawn into a new and active life. We have new friends and we have purpose and meaning. We act as sentinels against the excesses of central government and campaign to keep local government strong – we won’t look back…

Bread and Circuses – Metonymic, Akashic Records and Materialism

humanist55

A morning adventure…

Lying in bed this Saturday morning, I started checking my emails on the phone. There was an alert to a post by Deborah Weber over at Garden of Delights for the letter Y (part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge) – Yeppsen – the amount that can be held in two hands – an obsolete word as many of Deborah’s words have been, unusual, interesting words.

Then it was over to an email chain from my school friends of 47 years ago and one of them mentioned panem et circenses (yes we were posh enough to study Latin) or in English – bread and circuses. Just to check I had translated it right and to see what it originally meant, I checked it out on Wikipedia which as well as attributing it to Juvenal’s “Satire X”, told me that the phrase is an example of a metonym. Well despite the posh-ish education, I had never heard of this so it was another link on Wikipedia to find out what that means! To explain, Wikipedia (last updated on 30th April 2020 so hot stuff!) had to examine and contrast Metonyms and Metaphors as well as touching on Synecdoches and Toponyms and even Metalepsis. You see how this internet surfing goes…
Back to the meaning of Bread and Circuses – Juvenal was expressing disappointment that the mass of Roman citizens had ditched their republican ideals of taking their politics seriously and electing their, politicians, generals and officials – instead they fell for cheap bribes of grain (for bread) and circuses (entertainment). How little things have changed, we in the UK have a Prime Minister who made up the story about the European Union bureaucrats requiring straight bananas in future. He was working as journalist in Brussels and was too lazy to research real stories about the EU and later took us out of the EU – whilst in the US – well let me go no further down the critique of the political technique of distraction – you all know who I am talking about…

A depiction of Juvenal in the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 1400s. Wiki Commons


So what is a Metonym? Well, an example would be talking about The White House meaning, not the building itself, but the President and all his men and women in the West Wing who constitute that part of the US government. Now that is only part of this in-depth article in Wikipedia and if you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, then head over there pronto! I did read it all, and it was interesting to me even though I realized that I use metonymic phrases all the time without realizing it, but what I thought about it was a) you can use things without needing to understand the deep philosophical/linguistic issues and b) that this is the sort of stuff I bet Deborah Weber would love!

So I decided to go and read Deborah’s About page where I learned that Deborah is a Spiritual Guide and Alternative Health practitioner. I find myself very torn by this because – as my stepdaughter has told me – I am a materialist. I prefer rationalist, but that does not mean I do not have a spiritual view of life either. My first blog, Ripple, from which I quoted on bread, yesterday, was named for my belief that we all emanate energy and effect into the world, and even after we die, that energy and effect carries on spreading out into the world. What you do in life, for better or worse, goes on and on so that even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do think that how you live your life is very important not just in a karmic sense within your lifetime, but in terms of what you leave behind, how you change the world. So I really like to describe myself as a Spiritual Humanist. I think I will do a whole post on this but for now I just want to say that there is much about Deborah as a blogger and health practitioner that I love and much that I find difficult such as Akashic Records. But hey! That’s okay, things don’t have to be binary, we can handle grey areas rather than mere black and white…

So all this happened before I even got out of bed…

Y is for You…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

There are very few words in dictionaries beginning with X but here is one you can get your teeth into…

You Make The Difference!

I first got a computer of my own around 1998 and shortly afterwards, I broke my hip and had to spend a year on crutches. But like the present lockdown, being stuck at home gave the opportunity to both develop a business and to explore the internet and how it worked.

What I learned was about the biggest business which sorts out the content of the internet at one end of the scale, and about all the individuals who contribute the content itself at the other end of the scale. At that time, the dot-com bubble had just about burst and like many people, I was wondering how you could make money out of something that was so exciting and full of potential as the internet clearly was. Well, it turned out that Google was the answer to that particular conundrum – it’s incredible power to index content plus the concept of matching advertising to words in emails, searches, etc., was winning combination and one that nobody else has since matched. However, without content, there would be nothing to index (or advertise) and whilst, as the years have passed since then, commercial sites have increased in size and sophistication, so too have the mass of individuals who put up content about their hobbies, hobby horses and interests – not least us bloggers!


When I first went on the internet, I was amazed at how much material was already there as a result of individual effort and passion and what a democratic, leveling process this was. Think of the libraries and encyclopedias and textbooks of the past, produced by professional writers and publishers at great cost and not always great profit. Now Wikipedia demonstrates both the strength and pitfalls of “co-operative” authorship. Tales of editing wars over particular entries are legendary. Nonetheless, it is often our first port of call when researching, doing homework or just filling an idle moment – although, surfing the net generally goes by the maxim that the most interesting items always appear when you are researching under time pressure and not so much when you are footloose and fancy-free…

The A to Z Challenge is an example of this liberal, undirected, fascinatingly varied contribution to the evergrowing internet and those who have laboured for  several hours a day for almost 26 days!  Some 500 blogs on the Master list at 2 hours a day for 26 days, well that is 26,000 hours work! We have seen essential oils, photographs, haiku, incredible quilting, politics, self-development to name but a few and all this has been done by YOU!

Q is for Quality of Life…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

The current crisis has changed the lives of almost every person in the whole world and the following are fictional responses, imagining those changes (albeit with some research) and especially changes, for better or worse, to the quality of life…


Susan, Sex Worker

My working name is Susan and I am a sex worker according to my key worker, a prostitute if you are the pigs, a tart if you are a punter, and I am a drug addict. I got to do heroin because I can’t face working the streets without it and I work the streets because I need to buy heroin. Dealers know this and use it against me and the other girls, they let us have the first score of the night for free but then we have to pay back double plus the next score so we are playing catch up all bloody night. Then when we are ready to finish, they give us some bad shit that makes us feel so ill we need to work again for one more score – bastards.

But things are different now – what with the virus. The week before lockdown, the dealers were selling cheap – afraid they wouldn’t shift their gear – that meant we had an easier week. But when lockdown began the police were all over us girls on the street and we couldn’t go out without risking being locked up properly overnight – not good when you’re dying for a hit. The dealers wouldn’t come out either ‘cos the police were everywhere and stopping cars all the time. Then there was the boyfriend – pimp some would call him, since he was always pushing me out the door to work and score for both of us. After two days without drugs he chipped – not without givin’ me a black eye first – I think he went back to stay at his bro’s so I don’t have to fight with him no more – good riddance!

I can go to the pharmacy in town each day for my methadone but for a few days I was starving for food. I thought about it and then I rang George. George is a punter who I used to visit at home and he is 65 and he give me a home for now and food. Of course we do the business but now I am there all the time, he don’t want too much. Maybe once a week was enuff anyway – I think he is more glad of the company – he can’t go to the pub no more and I don’t mind him neither, an’ he has loads of books which I like. I do the shopping for us – I go out each day for the methadone which I often used to throw up ‘cos I’m bulimic but my life is less stressful than for as long as I can remember so I mostly keep it down.

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 1
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 7 

Freddie, 6 year-old boy

My brother and I live in Stevenage, which is in Hertfordshire, with our parents and during the week, our nanny. Daddy does something with money – I don’t really understand and Mummy is a lawyer but I don’t really understand what that is either. They have explained but I can’t tell them I don’t understand ‘cos then they’ll think I am stupid and they are very strict about being clever at school. Usually, we go to school in the week and our nanny – she is called Jane, she takes us and picks us up and stays with us till Mummy comes home. Jane lets us sing on the way home but we are not allowed to sing at home. We made Rainbow paintings on our last day at school, but we got into trouble because we drew a rainbow on the driveway with chalk, like we saw other children do on the TV. Mummy made us wash it off and Jane and Mummy argued. Jane is fun and now she is teaching us at home because we can’t go to school because of the virus and although Mummy and Daddy are home all the time – they are still working and we mustn’t disturb them. I miss going to school and seeing my friends. We still get to sing when Jane takes us out for exercise – everybody is allowed to go out to exercise for one hour a day. This is the best bit of the day!

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 6

James 85 year-old in a Residential Home

I am afraid for my life – more even than during the Blitz. My parents wouldn’t let my sister and I be evacuated as we lived just outside London on the hill above Greenwich and when we came out of our shelter after the all-clear, we could see London burning and once a bomber crashed in the High Street but never was I as afraid as I am now. Last year I had a leg amputated which is why I am in here but I was doing okay till this Covid 19 thing. I needed help going to the toilet and in the shower but the staff at this home were kind and brilliant. Now though, they are doing the best they can but still, 12 people in the home have died of the virus and the staff haven’t got all the equipment they need to keep themselves safe or therefore me. I try to call on them as little as possible but sometimes I have to. I know they always liked to help me before because I don’t have dementia, like lots of the residents, and they could have a proper conversation with me – but now they are stressed and afraid both for themselves and for me. I watch the television and I understand what is going on, I may be 85 but I’m not stupid, and it’s obvious that everyone in residential homes has been abandoned – they are not even counting the deaths in homes – only those who die in hospital. The government says that that is how all countries are measuring the course of the disease but it feels like we just don’t count any which way…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 8
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 2

Glen, 10 year-old boy.

We had to sleep on the street last night because Mum can’t work and the landlord threw us out of our flat – Mum told him the government said he wasn’t allowed to but he told her to fuck off and he nearly hit her. Today we went to a hostel and we have got a place to sleep tonight but it’s horrible and we are not allowed to be there till this evening. We sat in the town centre but the police wouldn’t listen to mum when she said we were homeless and told us to move somewhere else. So we are now sitting by the river where there are no police but people keep giving us funny looks ‘cos of all the bags we have with us. I’m hungry…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 5
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 1

George, 65 year-old

I have been furloughed because of my age and my partner Jane’s age and our health. I am pre-diabetic and she has COPD so we are especially vulnerable to Covid 19. My job is such that there is nothing I can do to work from home and I am unlikely to get paid again till this is over though, and for people our age, self-isolation could go on a long time. In the old days, at 65, I would have been receiving my state pension but now I have to wait until next March. We are saving a lot of money, no commuting costs, no going out costs at weekends (I only worked four days a week anyway so we had long weekends) and we are eating less. Even things we might like to buy, like plants for the allotment we started last year, we cannot, because garden centres are closed. Still, we are lucky, we did equity release recently so we won’t run out of money, whatever happens. Our daughter and grandson do the shopping for us each week which I miss because I like to cook and I like to do the food shopping. Jane likes to shop for clothes – she even bought me some new trousers online because I needed some – at least you can still get some things that way…
We thought it would be really difficult spending all our time together instead of three days and evenings, but it is like both of us are retired now, not just Jane who was already retired and we have proper togetherness most of the time and the time seems to fly by – so much so that it would be hard to keep track of the days if we weren’ keeping a diary. Of course, we have our moments, such as when I spend too much time blogging and not enough talking together, or we just get a bit fed up at the things we miss doing and the people we can’t see. But on the whole, we know we are lucky to be alive and to have each other and our health – fingers crossed…

Quality of Life Before Covid 19:- 7
Quality of Life Since Covid 19:- 8

L is for Love…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Love is in the air
For young lovers in lockdown
While lost loves
Dream of love locked up
Not locked down.

Love is the drug
That takes you to a different place
Consumes you from within
Tricking your cells
To accept false flags
Before breaking your heart.

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Love the time we have
Hate the loss of freedom
Saving money because we can’t spend it
Losing money because we can’t earn it.

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Let me be a survivor
Don’t wanna be a deep-sea diver
Or win a million fivers
Just let me live and love a little longer.

The one who loves you
Hides in plain sight 
You never gonna feel its bite
Covid 19 –
Who loves ya baby…

——————————————————————

Love is in the air
John Paul Young

Love is the drug
Roxy Music

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Annie Lennox

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Juliet Turner

The one who loves you
The Divine Comedy

G is for Grammar

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Frankly my Dear –

Some people make a great fuss about Grammar, in short, they are pedants!
Those of us who write, or speak, in English, know that we can understand the language as it is spoken, no matter how “badly”, with words strung together in almost any old order. Not like the Germans who literally fall over and can’t understand you if you don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence ( I may be exaggerating slightly for comic effect) and what is with all those portmanteau words a sentence long? The French are not much better, they pretend they don’t understand you because of your atrocious accent and despise you even more if you don’t attempt to show yourself up – of course, they may just be (understandably)  miffed because French used to be the official international language unit English superceded it because, I believe of the ease with which you can learn it to the point of being understood. Why am I talking about speech when the subject of this blog is grammar? Well there is much the same ease of communication in written “English” as with speech – that is, it is easy to get to the point of being understood, being perfectly correct in speech or written English is another matter altogether. We have rules of grammar so arcane that they make putting the verb at the end of the sentence look like child’s play. But here is the point, if you can make yourself understood, even speaking or writing in a patois, then that is the most important thing. 

There is another reason I have talked about speech in a piece on grammar, and that is because, when I am writing, especially in a blog, which to my mind should sound, inside the reader’s head, as if you are talking to them, then grammar is there to help the reader to achieve that feat. Nowadays I use Grammarly, an app which is far more than a spell-checker, it spots extra spaces, offers fairly basic grammar suggestions and even assesses the tone of your writing, mine comes out, disappointingly, as “Formal” given that I strive for relative informality…

I am sure you will be glad that this is not the sort of blog where the writer offers compendious coverage of their chosen topic – the internet is there for that sort of thing if you really want the nitty-gritty of grammar but I hope you understand why I began with the quote “Frankly my Dear – I don’t give a damn…” If I can understand and be understood, I will not judge and I hope will not be judged on some pedantic point of grammatical correctness. 

I will, however, talk briefly about three things which I use a great deal, which the grammar police would probably disapprove of. Firstly, as in the “Gone with the Wind” quotation above I often use a hyphen rather than a comma when I want to indicate a slightly longer rpause than I feel a coma suggests. Likewise, at the end of the quotation, I have put there dots, the proper name of which is,  an ellipsis and the proper definition of which is “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” Now I think you can see what I mean about obscure rules… What I mean when I finish a sentence with three dots, is that I want to leave the sentence idea hanging in the air and not terminated by the finality of a full stop.

Lastly, I want to mention the Oxford comma. This is the sort of rule that divides even the pedants of English grammar… In brief, I was taught at the age of seven or eight, and I actually remember the very lesson – that you should NEVER put a comma before an and. Now the strange thing, is that I grew up in, and received this lesson in Oxford, and though I have been using the Oxford comma, the breaking of this rule for a long time. I use it because it reads better as if spoken. An example is the comma after the word Oxford (first instance) in the preceding sentence. In the following sentence you would not use the Oxford comma ” My favourite puddings in order are Bread and Butter Pudding, Apple Crumble, Peaches and Cream.” But in this sentence you would – “The ingredients required are Flour, Sugar, Peaches, and Cream”. Makes it read right…

 So there it is, ignore the rules as long as you are understood and to my mind, what makes writing sound like speech is what works best…

I Don’t Give a Damn…