Cool Lasers

I’ve been reading a lot of science articles in the mornings as anyone who follows me on Twitter @nealasher or Facebook will be aware, but this one I have to put here.

As an SF writer you’re always in danger of being tripped up by the science geek who will point out your errors. Back in The Line of Polity (I think) I used ‘laser cooling’ for a space ship and someone – in a review I believe – dismissed this as a ridiculous idea.

Well, nar nar nee nar nar:

In micro electronics heat often causes problems and engineers have to put a lot of technical effort into cooling, for example micro chips, to dissipate heat that is generated during operation. Austrian physicists have now suggested a concept for a laser that could be powered by heat. This idea may open a completely new way for cooling microchips.

Moore's Law for Batteries?

Most of you reading this have heard of Moore’s Law and most of you are familiar with the idea of the technological singularity and that Moore’s law is just one element on that exponential curve. Other elements include the steady reduction in cost of that computing. This in turn relates to the shrinking time and cost of decoding a genome … if you want to learn more about all that just head over to the Singularity Hub and do some reading, or watch a few Ray Kurzweil interviews.

But I’ve been thinking about batteries and other forms of power storage. We have exoskeletons now that enable the crippled to walk and, if you check out ‘Boston Dynamics’ on You Tube you’ll find some excellent robots. But these exoskeletons, even though they have FDA approval and are being trailed in America have unwieldy and short-lived power packs, while the robots you mostly see are running at the end of a power cable. We need smaller or more powerful batteries, super- and ultra-capacitors so, what I was wondering is, is there a Moore’s Law for batteries? Opinions vary:

“Energy efficiencies have gotten pretty good…but the scary thing when you look at it from a capacity and efficiency standpoint with regard to weight and volume, it hasn’t really changed that much. It’s clearly improving, and I think costs have gotten a little bit better, but not all that much either. When you compare it with the electronics that we’re using it with and Moore’s Law, it’s basically standing still,”

...because there’s not currently a Moore’s Law for batteries, and I’m doubtful that we’re going to ever hit a Moore’s Law-style pace of accelerated progress and lowered costs for batteries. Yes, batteries will come down in price and become smaller, but at nowhere near the same speed — and with a lot less progress — as to be able to be compared to Moore’s Law.

Sure, the Moore’s Law of electric cars  – “the cost per mile of the electric car battery will be cut in half every 18 months” — will steadily drive the cost down, says Agassi, but only once we get scale production going. U.S. companies can do that on their own or in collaboration with Chinese ones. 

But I guess we have to remember what an exponential curve looks like and remember we might not be on the rapid up slope with batteries – on this one we might well be right down in the bottom left of that blue box.

What do you think?  

Moscow Mule

Posted on my Facebook page by Keith McDade. So, if you're a long-time reader of my books, what word are you seeing here? More in comments...

Writing Update

I’ve just passed the 130,000 word mark on Penny Royal II but this last week I haven’t been hitting my target of 2,000 words a day. Generally it’s been at about 1500 a day, but in total. I’ve probably been writing more than 2,000 but deleting plenty too. About 1,000 words disappeared into my BitsSF file at the start of the week. While going through the text altering certain plot points I’ve been coming across bits that just do not need to be so complicated and hacking them down or deleting them. A new character put in an appearance then was quickly disappeared. And then there are those bits of text where the motor has been idling while a clear the ice off the windscreen – often rambling and sometimes repetitive – and they have to go too.

This slowing down process always happens with me at the end of a book. It’s the start of moving into the editorial phase. It’s also even more involved this time because I’m not only altering and deleting stuff in Penny Royal II but in Penny Royal I as well. It’s all very necessary because, near the end, I don’t want you skipping stuff because you’re thinking, ‘What the hell happened then?’ or the even worse, ‘Oh get on with it will you!’

And at the BBC...

I guess the fact that they were put through the mangle over cutting that program about Jimmy Saville led program makers to feel they had carte blanche on the next target. The complete lack of judgement kicked in as soon as they heard the words ‘Thatcher’ and ‘Tory’. All this was of course exacerbated by a complete lack of sensible oversight. Yeah, George Entwistle needed to resign because quite obviously he wasn’t worth his huge salary. But next a sharp knife is needed to cut out some of the diseased wood. It’s easy enough to spot – just check on who regularly buys the Guardian. No, strike that, it’s probably paid for out of our licence fee and then distributed free in Broadcasting House.

Oh, and I’m seeing twitters about how this is distracting from the child abuse. Do these people think that being accused of paedophilia isn’t abuse too?  

The Cutting Room Floor 1

While in the process of writing a book I occasionally reach a point where, having just written a large block of text, I decide, on reflection, I've been heading in the wrong direction. Sometimes this text is amenable to some heavy editing, and sometimes it just has to be cut out like a growing tumour. Thing is, I’m a bit of a hoarder, and am reluctant to throw something away I’ve spent work on. So, what I do is drop said block of text into a file called ‘BitsSF’. Sometimes I’ll go back to that file when I want to start something new, maybe a short story, another book, but not often.

Anyway, I just tweeted ‘Okay, so what shall I blog about now? Any bright ideas?’ whereupon a guy called Robert Annett replied, ‘What about some extracts from the cutting room floor?’ I do believe I’ve done this before, but it’s still a good idea. Here’s a small piece from BitsSF for you, warts an’ all:

The NEJ’s weapons carousel was much more complicated than the name implied. It spanned the nose of the ship between nacelles and not only offered up selected weapons to the various launchers within those nacelles, but was also an autofactory in itself. From this complex of packed moving machinery and shifting linked belts carrying the ship’s armament, Jack could select a variety of missiles and also customize them to specific purposes. Here there were also facilities to make entirely new weapons to the AI’s specifications. It was all either automated or utterly under Jack’s control. There was no room in there for human beings – they would have been minced by the machinery.

Standing in a corridor that ran beside the bulkhead to the rear of the carousels, Cormac glanced at Blegg and smiled.

More later.

Borderlands

While we were in Crete I got an email from Jude Feldman who is the general manager at Borderland Books in San Francisco. A customer was trying to obtain a copy of Mindgames: Fool’s Mate. While I couldn’t provide Jude with said book I did let her know about the publication of The Departure, Zero Point and Jupiter War by Night Shade Books in America, told her how nice it was to see my books selling well in Borderlands (ego search of course) and in return received the nice email below:

Jude Feldman

General Manager

Borderlands Books

866 Valencia St.

San Francisco  CA 94110

415 824-8203

Glad to hear those titles will be coming from Nightshade!  We like working with them, they are local, and of course when they publish your books it is a lot faster for us to get them than when we have to import them from the UK.  As to our bestseller list, you are a frequent guest there.  Every time you have a new release, a dedicated group of customers (including the store's owner and several of our staff members) sets up what is essentially a vigil, checking with us every afternoon to see if the post (and therefore your new title) has arrived yet.  It's not quite a bank holiday when the books do arrive, but it might as well be, because at least a handful of those folks stay up all night reading and skip work the next day. 

There are only a small number of authors who inspire that kind of loyalty, so although it is completely understandable, it's pretty heartening for a bookseller to watch.

Thanks for your work.

Cheers,

Jude

Prometheus

Yesterday wasn’t a very good day. I managed to leave our freezer open all night and now it has apparently packed up, I dropped hot cigarette ash on a new blanket Caroline had bought in Crete, and then I had the horrible misfortune of watching Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.

SPOILER WARNING!

What a spectacular failure this film was. It had many superbly cool elements in it that should have had the SF nerd in me squealing with delight, but unfortunately they were delivered with such a lack of coherence I started to lose the will to live about halfway in. This was a bad film and now I will talk about why I think it was bad so, if you haven’t seen it and haven’t noticed the spoiler warning above, stop reading now. And let me point out now before anyone offers explanations: yeah, I probably missed picking up on some of the exposition. That was because I failed to care.

Where to begin? How about starting with an octopus creature removed from a woman’s body by auto-surgery? This thing started off at about the size of a human fist and in a matter of hours grew into something the size of a car. Did it eat the auto-surgery? This was something that annoyed me in the original Alien film. I later discovered that the original script contained stuff about food stores being raided, but that 'detail' not appearing in the finished film was a fuck up.

Move on then to the female this thing was removed from. Apparently, along the way, she acquired super powers that enabled her to run like the wind and leap chasms with her torso sliced open and then stapled together again. Perhaps it was the power of her faith that kept her going – the same faith that made her realise that the ‘engineers’ had invited humanity to their home world. Oh sorry, that was wrong. Apparently these engineers had left messages throughout human history indicating the position of some sort of weapons dump or military research facility. Why?

Why did the android infect one of the scientists (archaeologists, whatever) with the stuff from pots scattered inconveniently across a floor like alien eggs? Because his delicate sensibilities were offended? Putting aside the sheer silliness of this infection turning said scientist into an octopus seed carrier, can I just point out that frying him with a flame thrower seemed like a rather extreme and irrational response? But then none of these people were behaving rationally anyway and no motivations were clear. Why did two of our intrepid explorers stay in that building? To get rich? Or to provide us with the convenient cliché of the idiots who wander off in the territory of monsters? Why did one of them then suddenly start treating a creature that seemed a by-blow of a snake and a flatworm as if it was Tiddles the family cat?

What was going on with that fucking big head? Yeah, I can see that the need was felt for a rehash of scenes from the Alien films with talking heads scattered about, but come on. So, this engineer’s head, severed apparently for a couple of thousand years and failing to decay, gets somehow zapped into life, bleeds a bit, bubbles up like an accelerated boil and then explodes. Why?

Then we have one of the cliché idiots coming back to the ship after having his snake pet wiggle into his mouth. He’d undergone a similar transformation to flame thrower man but in his case, instead of turning suicidal, he turned psychotic and started killing everyone. Why?

Now let’s look at the ending. Along the way our intrepid heroes have learnt that underneath that building is an alien ship apparently full of bioweapons to be used against Earth. How they learned this is a mystery. Apparently, the all-knowing Alien films android cipher learned this but I didn’t spot him telling anyone earlier on. These weapons are to be used to clean the slate to ‘start again’, so he later told super woman. Why would you want to spread something across Earth that seems to generate all sorts of fast evolving life forms that are as hostile to you as anything else? Now, I could think of explanations for this just as I could think of explanations for so much in this film. I could write this as an off-shoot of some war between two factions of the engineers. But that’s not my fucking job!

Moving on… super woman runs back from the launching alien ship and, over suit radio, tells the captain of the Prometheus that if the alien ship gets away there won’t be any Earth left to go back to. This guy is then apparently so convinced he decides to be a suicidal hero by crashing Prometheus into the alien ship. His two crewmen go with him because … well because obviously you at once decide to kill yourself at the babbled behest of someone with a torso of steel. Where they on fucking drugs?

This film was a colander of plot holes, undeveloped characters who did stuff without motivation (and who I failed to give a shit about), crap story-telling, and Alien films clichés and rehashes. It was visually beautiful and special effects were superb, but we’re past the time when the new gobsmacking stuff like that was enough because now everyone can do it and it’s time to return to the real foundation of such entertainment, which is story-telling. And finally, and most annoyingly of all and most sad, it could have been brilliant. 

Very disappointing.      

Complete Genomics

Interesting article and video clip over at Singularity Hub...

Reid expects single cell sequencing to be commercially available within two years, and he’s very optimistic about the potential of whole genome sequencing in the fight against cancer. “I don’t think my kids are going to worry about cancer. I think we’re going to nail it in my lifetime. We’re never going to be able to stamp it out [completely] because they are mutations, and mutations are going to happen. But we’re going to be able to treat it. We’re going to turn cancer into a chronic disease, not a death sentence.”

Hyperion

Bloody hell!

Gene Therapy

One of our habits/traditions in England has been weekend papers, read in bed (with tea and coffee and cigarettes for a healthy start to the day). Previously we’ve had these delivered but now that delivery costs more than the papers themselves we’ve started going to fetch them. I enjoy a chuckle at Clarkson, read some of the politics, skip over the celebrity stuff then Caroline removes the puzzle pages which we take off to Crete. This morning, out of all the articles about the economy, Europe, whatever, the one that really caught my attention was a small column quite a number of pages in. It was the most important article there and it was about this:

Regulators yesterday approved the first therapy in the western world that can correct errors in a person’s genetic code.

Europe has approved Glybera to be used against a rare inherited disorder which disrupts fat production in the body.

The treatment uses a virus to counteract LPLD, lipoprotein lipase deficiency, which can led to acute inflammation of the pancreas.

I can remember when this was confined to science fiction and the most speculative science articles about what it might be possible to do (Remember that chat between Roy and Tyrell in Bladerunner?). I can remember when this was a future possibility but maybe in ten or fifteen years if massive hurdles could be leapt. This is about changing something as ineluctable as fate: genetic predestination; the hand of cards you were dealt with in the womb and could never change. 

Writing Update: Penny Royal II

Penny Royal II is now past 122,000 words and I’m slowing down a little as I enter the home straight. This is because I have had to go back to alter and add or delete plot elements, even in the previous book, to ensure things lock together. For example, I found it necessary to go back to the start of this book and have a particular entity, with a soft and changing body, undergoing radical surgery to install a ceramal skeleton. Other alterations required are about emphasis. I need to ensure that some King’s Guard warships are seen as very powerful, while an ancient factory station is outdated and vulnerable. I also need to concentrate on the internal life of a particular war drone so the reader understands its motivations.

All this is pretty much a tidying up exercise. When you write fast to produce a massive uproarious story some things fall by the wayside – you drop the ball and have to go back and pick it up. You forget things, like I forgot that a particular prador controlled a number of skeletal Golem, and I also forgot that a Penny Royal Golem is along for the ride. I need to elaborate on how a renegade prador reproduces (incidentally there’s more in this about prador biology and society: prador females, mating, fourth-children). And thinking about the next book, I might have to add something about a black hole and something called ‘the black hole paradox’.

Righto, back to work.

Cancer Deaths

The main news story on breakfast news this morning is about lung cancer now being the main cause of cancer death in women. This is obviously a terrible thing, isn’t it? A doctor came on explaining the demographics: many decades ago more men than women smoked and now we are seeing the results of women catching up in that respect. He pointed out that there is usually a large delay between smoking and this kind of cancer death, though neglected to mention that the delay is often a life-long one. Deep in this blog you’ll find a graph with lung cancer deaths along one axis and age along the other. People can die of it at any age, but the bulk of them die when they’re over 70. Now, while death of any kind is a terrible thing, are these new statistics a terrible thing too?

That many people die of cancer now is because they’re not dying of the killers of the past. Anyone who has done some research into family history will know about that. Consider for a moment the possibility that an increase in lung cancer deaths in women in the above demographic might be because many of them are not dying of something else. In fact the woman they had on the show had been cured of breast cancer before her lung cancer was discovered. Breast screening, smear tests and the resultant treatments have hammered those kinds of cancers and, of course, the most difficult one to cure remains. Life is 100% fatal – remember that next time some of these TV dipsticks start shouting statistics at you. It is arguable then, that this increase in deaths from lung cancer can be seen in a positive light.

Let me illustrate: Kevlar vests are introduced during a war. Statisticians bemoan the increase in the number of deaths from head wounds.

SF Wars

I found some goodies in the post when we got back. Here we have SF Wars edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates. My story in here, The Rhine’s World Incident, was first published in Subterfuge.

War is becoming increasingly 'SF-ized' with remotely controlled attack drones and robot warriors already in development and being tested. Over the past 100 years the technology of war has advanced enormously in destructive power, yet also in sophistication so that we no longer seem to live under the constant threat of all-out global thermonuclear cataclysm. So what will future wars be like? And what will start them: religion, politics, resources, refugees, or advanced weaponry itself? Watson and Whates present a gripping anthology of SF stories which explores the gamut of possible future conflicts, including such themes as nuclear war, psychological and cyberwars, enhanced soldiery, mercenaries, terrorism, intelligent robotic war machines, and war with aliens.All the stories in this collection of remarkable quality and diversity reveals humankind pressed to the limits in every conceivable way.It includes 24 stories with highlights such as:The Pyre of the New Day' - Catherine Asaro.The Rhine's World Incident' - Neal Asher. Caught in the Crossfire' - David Drake. Politics' - Elizabeth Moon.The Traitor' - David Weber.And others from:Dan Abnett, Tony Ballantyne, Fredric Brown, Algis Budrys, Simon R. Green, Joe Haldeman, John Kessel, John Lambshead, Paul McAuley, Andy Remic, Laura Resnick, Mike Resnick & Brad R. Torgersen, Fred Saberhagen, Cordwainer Smith, Allen Steele, William Tenn, Walter Jon Williams, Michael Z. Williamson, Gene Wolfe.

Downton Abbey

Just before we headed back from Crete, Greek TV was showing episodes of various British (or English speaking) TV shows. They had Call the Midwife, Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and Wallander. I avoided the last of these because I didn’t want to see all the emoting, but watched the first two and enjoyed them both. Back here we borrowed the first series of Downton Abbey from Caroline’s parents and have nearly watched it all the way through.

I know it probably doesn’t do much for my street cred but I’m enjoying it immensely and want to see the rest. Nice one Mr Fellows. 

Jerry Bauer

Quite a while ago I did a blog post concerning a photographer called Jerry Bauer who took my first 'author photograph' (the one here). It seems that there isn't much about this guy on the Internet and, as a result, I keep getting people contacting me concerning rights to his photographs. They want to be put in contact with his son Jonathan Bauer. Unfortunately I lost contact details through various changes of computer in the past. So, if anyone out there knows those contact details could they please get in touch using the email at the bottom of my biog on the right.

Maria Tsouraki-Antonakaki

So, Elly told us that the wife of a lawyer friend of her husband Nectarius has written a book and wants to publish it in English ... or something ... so much gets lost in translation when the subject is specialized. The lawyer and wife wanted to talk to me, apparently.

Nectarius and Elly are nice people, generous, and we have enjoyed their company, kazanis and gifts of raki for years. For example, the two kazanis we’ve had here over the last two weekends weren’t for Nectarius’s raki. He attended yesterday’s and at the end of it was mortified not to be able to give us raki because he has run out and won’t be making any until after we’ve left. My response to this approach, therefore, wasn’t my present, ‘I will only read hard copy of published books and comment on them, or not.’ I said I was prepared to look at maybe a couple of chapters and maybe pass them on to someone if they’re of interest, and handed over my contact details.

On Friday we got a phone call from Manolis, the lawyer, assisted in language by a younger lawyer called Yorgos. They invited us for a meal in Sitia. We thought, what the hell it’s something different, and accepted. We were to meet on Saturday in Sitia square by the statue, at 7.00 PM where they would recognize me because they had been checking me out on the Internet. We duly turned up there were a young guy eyed us for a while then approached. Maybe he did not recognize me at first because, as Manolis pointed out later, they had looked at the terrible picture of me on Wikipedia (get it changed, Manolis said, you look like a really old man there). Next Manolis turned up and we trooped over to a harbour front taverna called Gorgios where Maria and her young son Stelios awaited.

While we ate pasta and drank white wine I tried to get a handle on the situation. It turns out that Maria has written three books that have been published in Greece. She handed over a copy of her latest – pictured here – and it’s one I would love to read in English. It’s about Italians occupying Sitia during the war (the town we were in at that moment and one lying only twenty minutes drive from our house). This book apparently sold 5,000 copies, which I’m guessing is pretty good in a country where book reading seems a rarity. The cartoon on the front depicts Mussolini and of course I was reminded of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres, and I have to add that we also learned of another interesting authorial connection: a close relative of Maria on her father’s side was the butcher on Spinalonga – the island leper colony in Victoria Hislop’s book.

Anyway, the book pictured here, and the two before it, are not the ones with which she wants to break into the English-speaking market. It is her latest, which seems to be a biography about a rather conflicted Greek character. This guy was confused about his sexuality from a very young age which, as you can imagine, went down really well in Orthodox Greece. His life, as far as I can gather, was traumatic. Some incidents illustrate this: a sex-change operation in Morocco with a lack of anaesthesia and during which he had to be tied to a bed, an attempt to rescue two boys, in Muslim North Africa, who had been accused of homosexuality and were to be hanged. This character is now a wealthy female notary in Athens. Seems to me this is the kind of stuff that is ticking all the right boxes for Guardian readers all across Britain.

Now the problems: the book is in Greek so I’ve no real idea how good it is, nor how well it will translate. My advice was for her to write a synopsis, get that and two sample chapters translated into English, whereupon I would try to find out who in Britain might be interested. Publishers and agents please note, if this book is any good you have the added benefit of being able to write-off trips to Eastern Crete against expenses!

Note: the title of the book shown reads in phonetic English as Parafono Embatirio. The first word seems to be dissonant or discordant while the second is a military march (music). I would guess the English title would be Discordant March, Tuneless March or something like Marching out of Step.

Packing Up

Wednesday 17th October

Interesting to see how in Cuba the government is allowing people to travel more widely. However, people in useful professions, like doctors, will face restrictions on their travel. So the ZAs (zero assets) are allowed to travel but probably can’t afford to, while the SAs (Societal Assets) are firmly controlled. Familiar?

I have to say something about this. Planet hunters have discovered a world in a system where four suns are in orbit about each other. A presenter, talking to some ‘expert’ involved said something about it being like science fiction, whereupon the ‘expert’ replied, ‘This is stranger than science fiction.’ Well fuck you matey. I might not have used four suns, but only two weeks ago I was writing about a system with a white dwarf and black dwarf orbiting each other and in turn orbited by a red dwarf, the whole system acting like some giant stellar food processor to mince up asteroids and worlds and shepherd them into an immense gas and dust ring. Go read some science fiction Mr Expert. Dickhead.

Thursday 18th October
I have suffered from acne rosacea for years but whether that is what I have now I have no idea. It’s changed, headed off to from around my nose towards my ears and on my chin, the spots are less like pimples and more like eczema. I’ve taken the various drugs to keep this under control and, as is usual, they stop working properly after I’ve been taking them for a while. I’ve tried all sorts of topical skin treatments, some of which have helped and some of which have aggravated the problem. One of the best topical treatments I use I didn’t learn from a doctor, and that is sticking baby powder on my face (the talc has to be fine). The powder sticks to the spots themselves and remains there when I wipe the bulk of it off. It conceals them and dries them out, and they’re much reduced when it drops off later. However, best of all for this condition is getting my face into sea water. The spots heal and fade. Now I’m not swimming just about every day the spots are flaring up again so I’m trying an experiment. I’ve made strong brine from local sea salt and intend to put that on my face every morning. It stings like a bastard. I hope it works.

Friday 19th October
It’s slightly cooler today than it has been over the last week, at 20C inside and 23C outside at 9.45AM, but I’m still sitting here in shorts and T-shirt as I get on with my work. After my efforts revamping our stove it looks like we won’t be using it this year (though I’ll have to fire it up at least once to cure the heat paint) because we are only here for another six days. Meanwhile it seems the Greeks know we’re heading away so are having their kazanis earlier just to ensure I struggle with my latest attempt at temperance. There was also a general strike yesterday which I’m hoping will not be protracted and won’t be occurring on the day we head back, which could screw things up a bit.

Things to do: I have to put netting over the citrus trees to protect them from winter winds that tend to frazzle them and kill off young fruit. I need to get some varnish on shutters that are peeling. I need to seal some cracks around a step in our roof, which I wanted sorted this year but wasn’t done because our builder went AWOL. I need to plant out some of the pot plants and shift the rest to the front garden where it’s quite damp. I need to stop my regular currency transfers because I don’t want any more than the minimum to cover bills sitting in a Greek bank. I must decant my large amount of chilli sauce into plastic bottles for transport back to England. Then I have to remember what other bits and pieces have to go back and pack them, knock off the power and the water, and go. It’s sad.

But then, back in England there are things to enjoy: always something to watch on TV, Chinese and Indian food either a short drive away or delivered to our door, Brussels sprouts with a Sunday roast, fish and chips in Hastings or Brighton, cheaper shopping with a lot more variety, comfy carpets and gas central heating coming on automatically every morning and, of course, constant fast Internet I will be pigging out on for months on end.

Tuesday 23rd October
I’ve just started on the packing. That’s two securely-wrapped 1.5L bottles of chilli sauce sitting in the case I used for my hand luggage on the way out here which in turns sits inside my suitcase. This time I won’t pack our various rechargers and other electrical items around them, because last time customs felt the need to examine a large bottle of liquid surrounded by wiring in the middle of a suitcase. I wonder if they thought the pomegranates in there too were fragmentation grenades.

I’ve been watching the BBC World’s take on the US election campaign. The presentation has been thoroughly partisan – obviously in BBC terms Obama is Luke Skywalker while Romney is Darth Vader. Next the presenters went into shock when Obama got a spanking in the first presidential debate and thereafter were struggling to hide their bias. I wonder if they had received complaints. In their cloistered group-think world it must be difficult to comprehend that an awful lot of people out here in the real world don’t agree with them. In some of their ‘reasoned debates’, however, they’re not so careful. You get wall-to-wall lefty liberals who still think Keynesian economics, high government spending, state control and high taxes all pave the way to socialist utopia, and who attack anyone who says, ‘Hang on, maybe spending more than their tax take is why governments are in debt?’

It absolutely hammered down with rain here yesterday and last night and I put the stove on for the first time. Shortly after that I put on the bathroom and kitchen fans and opened the window to get rid of the fumes from the curing paint. Today we have what is about standard for an English summer: cloud and sun, wet and the temperature struggling to get past 20C. Now for that English winter...

Beaches and Booze

Wednesday 10th October

No swimming or beach time yesterday since it was cloudy, not particularly warm (relatively) and most of the beach had gone anyway, as you can see.

Upon mentioning this to Stelios at the Gabbiano I learnt something I hadn’t heard about the beach here. What I had heard was that the building of an enclosed harbour for the boats and a breakwater to one side of the little area beside it changed the currents and resulted in the sand of the main beach being steadily eroded away and deposited over there. However, though this might be true, it now appears that a dredger used to suck up loads of sand in and about the harbour and that this was then deposited along the main beach. Since this stopped four years ago, because, of course, there’s no money to pay for it, the situation with the main beach has been steadily getting worse.

The cloud yesterday only sprinkled our windscreen on the way back home last night, but now the rain has arrived. I woke at about 5.00 to the sound of thunder and a steady downpour. This morning at 8.30 it’s grey and drizzly but the thunder has stopped. When I got up I first checked our stove pipe for leaks, found none, then spotted a pool below one of our roof windows. I’ll have to check that out when I go up to pull a plastic bag over the chimney pot – no need for the stove yet since the temperature outside is 18 and inside it’s 23.

Thursday 11th October
Why the surprise about some Taliban punk shooting a teenage girl through the head because she is bright, well-spoken and campaigns for female education? These patriarchal bullies and murderers are frightened of the mysterious packages they’ve turned their women into, and want them dim and blinkered because if they’re educated they’ll be much harder to persuade into a Semtex waistcoat. Wankers.

Friday 12th October
I’m being a good boy now and pushing myself to adhere to my target of 10,000 words a week. Yesterday, because I had to take Caroline to the dentist at 12.00, I was 1,300 words short of my target for that day. However, because I’d done just over the 2,000 on each of the preceding days I only had to do another 952 words to hit my weekly target, which I’ve done. Penny Royal II is now just 300 words away from 100,000. I also have a few sections already started, along with some notes, so on Monday I can dive straight into a space battle and thereafter advance the plot to its final physical destination ... which happens to be a Polity factory station called Room 101, which was also supposedly destroyed during the prador/human war...

Saturday 13th October
The EU being given the Nobel Peace Prize is yet another case of politicians being given credit for something that has happened despite them. Much was made in a BBC discussion (during which there was just the one token anti-EU speaker) of how war between European countries is now unthinkable, laughable. One idiot even asserted that there were only two choices: the EU or war. The truth is that political and economic integration aren’t the reasons Germany hasn’t invaded Poland lately. The real game changers are global communication, transport and education. We all know that European politicians enjoy a good war and have been getting their hands dirty elsewhere in that respect since the last big one. But they cannot get us to agree to a war with close neighbours we see every day on TV. They cannot demonize people we can chat with at the press of a button. They can’t get us to hate people we can see after an hour or two on Easyjet or in the Channel Tunnel.

Of course, another reason European war would be difficult: the politicians who would take us to war are held in utter contempt and many people are smart enough now to see through their lies. They haven’t really changed since Brutus shoved a knife into Caesar. They are still ideologues or thieves, or both. Whether you think it a good thing or a bad thing, the Arab Spring wasn’t brought about by politicians but by mobile phones and Facebook.

Finally, the presentation of this prize to the EU has pushed the Nobel awards further into irrelevance. I mean, didn’t Al Gore get something? Like just about any award you can name it is highly politicized and often risible.

Monday 15th October
They had a kazani here by our house over the weekend. For those who don’t know, this is when they fire up a still and turn hundreds of litres of fermented grapes into a large amount of raki, meanwhile drinking the stuff and eating lots of barbecued food. It started at about midday on Saturday. We avoided it during the afternoon, went off for a meal at about five, then came back and joined in at about 6.30. Much raki and food was thereafter consumed until maybe midnight. The next morning they continued stilling the raki at 6.00AM. We wandered out at about 10.00 feeling a bit crappy, drank coffee and smoked cigarettes until midday, whereupon it kicked off again for a few hours. We returned to our house at about 2.00 and spent the rest of the day not doing very much.

This has basically confirmed my growing aversion to booze. I enjoyed some of it but spent more time feeling like crap because of it, sometimes a bit depressed, disinclined to do stuff, feeling like I’d knocked my health down again. It’s one of the penalties of growing older. I’m reminded of Caroline’s grandma saying she didn’t give up booze and cigarettes – they gave her up – or of my father who stopped smoking because it interfered with him being able to play his clarinet or saxophone. Drinking is okay when you’re younger, when hangovers are either nonexistent or you recover in a matter of hours, but when you enter the time of the two-day hangover; when the feeling crap outweighs the feeling good and the former stops you doing the stuff you really want to do, it’s time to think very carefully about your lifestyle.

Congratulations to Felix Baumgartner! I watched his jump on the TV and just from that perspective it gave me the heebie jeebies. It is nice to see that the ‘right stuff’ still exists.

Tuesday 16th October
I finally bit the bullet yesterday and cut all the grapevines off the pergola, dug up one of the two of the plants and severely chopped back the rest of the other. Having a grapevine like that is all part of the Mediterranean thing but up here is simply a pain. It requires lots of pruning, insecticide and fungicide, and hasn’t produced more than a handful of grapes. Because we’re quite exposed up here the usual course of events is a nice growth in early spring whose shade we avoid because we want the sun, an ensuing massive spurt of growth I then need to hack back, a scattering of grapes beginning to grow, then along comes a hot dry wind for two or three days which frazzles and rips apart the leaves and kills the grapes, whereupon we spend the rest of the year clearing up the mess every day. It had to go.

I’m well past the 100,000 word mark on Penny Royal II, and preparing for the particle cannons to open up...

Deadwood and Parasites?

Wednesday 3rd October

Both stove glasses were cracked, the bolts that tightened the clamps to hold those glasses in place had rusted solid, there was rust elsewhere, heat-resistant seals were falling apart and the whole thing looked pretty crappy:

I managed to find new sealing material here, bought new bolts, drilled out the old ones and re-tapped the holes, cleaned off all the rust, re-sprayed with heat-resistant paint, fitted seals and glass and now the thing is as good as new:

Thursday 4th October
Caroline and I watched and enjoyed the first season of Deadwood with its sleezy depiction of that town in gold rush America. Set design and clothing, in fact all the physical details were superb. It has some excellent actors too like the hotel owner I always remember as the genetic designer from Blade Runner and the doctor who I always remember as the Harkonnen’s mentat in the film of Dune and, of course, the central supporting pillar of all this: Ian McShane as the saloon owner Al Swearengen. My only gripes concerned my inability to understand some of the talk and some holes in the plot. I understood that the slightly antiquated way of speaking added to the general atmosphere, but when it came out of the mouth of someone playing the drunken Calamity Jane I understood none of it. As for plot holes, the most glaring was when Al Swearengen makes the illogical and thoroughly out of character decision to back off on stealing a gold claim because the sheriff, Bullock, would make a good ‘front man’.

In season II it seems to me that they’ve made the mistake I’ve often seen in other series: those producing it decided to give us more of what they think makes their series a success, and got it wrong. I’m guessing that the decisions made at this point were by committee rather than by someone with a clear vision of where the series was going. In this case they’ve gone for more atmosphere which apparently means rambling speeches from the ‘characters’ to say in twenty-five words what could have been said in five. The result of this has been that the frankly poor plot of this season is suffering even more. I’ll give you an example: I just watched an episode where the leader of a group of miners decided to tar a black man, who had only just appeared on the scene, and the back-story of why this happened simply wasn’t there. This event had no connection at all to the miners’ earlier anger at a county commissioner who was threatening their gold claims, and the evident anger of their leader at this black man wasn’t at all explained. Also, adding insult to injury, Swearengen’s role over these episodes, after a rather silly and weakly justified fight with Bullock, has been to suffer bladder stones. I do hope this season improves now he’s recovering.

Friday 5th October
Here’s an update on the news for my American readers. The people at Night Shade Books are looking forward to bringing The Owner Trilogy to print in the US and have scheduled The Departure for publication Feb 5, 2013 with Zero Point following May 7, 2013 and Jupiter War September 3, 2013 (catching up with publication of that last book in Britain). Nicely keying into that my short story The Other Gun will be appearing in Asimov’s April/May issue that year with, of course, mention of these books in attached biog. It should be an interesting year with those three books slamming into the American market in rapid succession. In essence this should work as quite a profile-raising exercise.

Monday 8th October
I just watched the lift off of a commercial resupply rocket heading for the space station. I have to admit to being tickled to see that the robot craft its taking up there is called ‘Dragon’. Of course the name probably stems from the fire-breathing version, but I can fantasize about someone on the project choosing the name from their SF reading.

I notice someone put graffiti on a badly painted wall in the Tate Gallery. I don’t understand why this is news – surely a coat of white wash will sort it out?

Tuesday 9th October
I’ve just cleared 93,000 words with Penny Royal II and my characters have still yet to arrive at a particular destination where the end game of this book is to play out. I am just entering what I’ll call a precursor punch-up with a bit of war time history on the side. I have been enjoying detailing in these books a Polity bioweapon, based on a prador parasite, and delivered by assassin drones made in the shape of that parasite. Blame my winter reading of that blog ‘Parasite of the Day’.

Into Octomvrios

Wednesday 26th September

I’ve been reading much more lately. I read Terry Pratchett’s Snuff and it was a book I didn’t want to end; I read one about the campaign Alexander the Great in Afghanistan that started out seeming crudely simple but then grabbed me and had some interesting parallel’s with the present day; and I’ve read some other books I’ve enjoyed immensely. However, for every book I’ve read and enjoyed there’s been one I’ve made an attempt on – reading maybe a hundred pages – then finally put aside.

Was it that the characters were unbelievable, the history inaccurate, that I couldn’t picture the scenes in my mind, that the plot was daft or too obvious? No to all of these. Every time it was because despite my efforts it failed to engage – it was boring. This is why I sometimes struggle to fill out a review of something that did engage to the end. Really I should just say I enjoyed said book and will buy (or otherwise obtain) further books from that writer. All the rest is pointless decoration.

Thursday 27th September
It’s nice to see that finally, grudgingly, governments are beginning to admit to the real economic problems their countries face. A year ago it was all about the greedy banks causing the crash, which in essence is true in the same sense as pneumonia being the infection that brings a cancer patient to the edge of death. The real problem, the cancer, is governments overspending, bloated state sectors and far far too many people used to sucking on the state teat whether through welfare, the NHS or its equivalents or by being employed in the ever expanding public sector. Of course now those same governments face a dilemma. They know that they have to cut their spending but the voters they’ve bribed are objecting to this. Instead they fiddle around the edges, try to squeeze more money out of the people who actually generate wealth rather than waste it, increase business-killing taxes and talk blithely about financial stimulus. Politicians only spend on the promulgation of their particular ideology, hence the fucking windmills spreading across Britain, or on feathering their own nests. Their spending always fails to generate more wealth, and every time they do something ‘new’ they just create another stratum of bureaucracy to drain their country of wealth.

Friday 28th September
What I want to know is when is someone going to invent a device that records smells in the same way as a camera? I am of course aware of just how complicated such a task would be and I’m guessing that someone is already working on such a project now. When this machine is available I want one and with it I’ll take my first smellograph of this plant:

The name I’ve been given for it here is night flower. It doesn’t look like much but when it’s flowering on a hot evening (I guess it’s pollinated by moths) its jasmine-like smell is intensely powerful. We can smell its perfume even when we get out our car, which I park over a hundred feet from our house.

Monday 1st October
Last week was a good one with 844 words written on blog posts and 10279 written of Penny Royal II taking it over 80,000 words. As noted before I started this book on July 19th, so that was 52 working days. It should have been, at my supposed rate of 2,000 words a day, 104,000 words but it works out at 1538 words per working day. This means that somehow I lost about two working weeks. Some of this was because of shopping and a portion was because I did some work on the house but, if I’m totally honest, the rest was probably lost to hangovers. This is why, 10 days ago, I knocked the booze on the head and, as is usual during my temperance phases, I’ve missed it not at all.

Tuesday 2nd October
So a few days ago Kostis told Caroline about a fan of mine being here and wanting something signed. I enquired about this later noting that the book I’d left in the Revan’s book shelf was missing. I learned from Yorgos that it was the friend of a fan of mine who, ‘thinks you’re God’. What with the language barrier and one thing or another all I truly gleaned was that there was a couple here of who the girl had a friend who was a fan. Whatever – just so long as she wasn’t carrying around a sledgehammer I didn’t mind.

The two apparently turned up yesterday at four, then seeing we were on the beach left us in peace. Later, when we were up at a table, a woman called Pauline, who has been a long time resident here, wandered across. The two were friends of hers and she went back to tell them we were now off the beach. I immediately ordered a carafe of wine to settle my nerves. The couple turned up. They were from London – a bubbly hairdresser and a guy called who works in the legal profession. They weren’t fans but they were tickled by the idea of meeting the author who their friend rates (Hi Gavin). I duly provided bookmarks, signed that book from the shelf for Gavin and had my photograph taken with them.

I wish I hadn’t had the wine. I enjoyed just one glass of it and subsequently woke up in the night with a stinking headache.

Stirring the Mush

Wednesday 19th September

Over the last couple of years Nectarius, husband to Eli who owns the raki still and building next to our house, has co-opted me into the raki making. Since he and she don’t live here it’s a bugger for them to come to stir their barrels. This needs doing every day because the fermenting grape mush quickly forms a thick crust that slows down the process. My job is to go out every day, shove my hand in and scrunch up that crust, then dip my arm in and stir it into the fluid below. I was worried about cleanliness and the possibility of introducing vinegar bacteria, but the initial fermentation is so fierce this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Caroline recorded the last rain of spring on May 19th. While we were down in Makrigialos yesterday it spotted a bit and we were told it had rained here in Papagianades. The roads were wet on the way back and when I stirred the grape mush I found about half an inch of water sitting in the barrel lids so it must have tipped down, bearing in mind that the barrels are underneath a metal roof. So, we had zero rainfall for four months minus one day.

Friday 21st September
There was a discussion on BBC World about the Moslem reaction to that American film (and the subsequent French cartoons) and the talking heads were busily discussing what the reaction should actually be. Just a thought here, but how about behaving like and adult and not throwing your toys out of the pram? I note that there was a complete lack of burning embassies, murdered consuls and riot deaths when The Life of Brian came out. There was also much talk on the show about freedom of speech and how much should be allowed. The answer is quite simple: all of it. This was basically what various Americans have been saying but the good old BBC interviewers weren’t very happy about that and tried to shut them up. Perhaps they were uncomfortable about the way the state has undermined free speech in Britain.

Saturday 22nd September
Wow, during the backlash in Libya against the militias the main target was the extreme Islamist group accused of the embassy killings. It was notable the lack of cries of ‘God is great’ in this protest. These were younger people in T-shirts and sunglasses with a lot less spittle on their chins, which were generally shaven. It was nice to see this attack of sanity.

I see that Mitt Romney has had to reveal how much tax he’s paid, and the fact that his worth about 250 million apparently means that he’s ‘out of touch’, while Obama is of course a horny-handed labourer. Now, just a thought here, but for a country that is trillions in debt wouldn’t you want someone in control who knows how to accumulate wealth? The implication from the Democrats of course is that here is a rich man creaming a fortune off the backs of working plebs, once again demonstrating how socialists fail to grasp that the economy is not a zero-sum game.

Tuesday 25th September
Enough of this political shit. I put down my ranting to me not feeling so well over the last few weeks and therefore having less immunity to some of the idiocy I see on the TV. But now back to writing.

Penny Royal II is definitely more than halfway through which means I’m course to finishing the first draft in November (maybe). This gives me nine months to do the next book and then tidy up all three. I am very much enjoying myself with this – venturing into some weird territory with forensic AIs, strange physical transformations, some games with the unreliability of memory when it can be edited, all of course interspersed with exploding space ships.

Ecko Rising – Danie Ware

Anyone who has frequented Forbidden Planet London in the past, either to buy books or sign them, will probably be familiar with Danie Ware. Good on you Danie for keeping your own writing under your hat and not bending my ear about it. Now I’ve just read an uncorrected proof copy of her book.

I found Ecko Rising a tad confusing at first but intriguing enough to keep me reading and the slowly introduced back-story began to clear my confusion. Being a roll-up smoker myself I could have done with a little more of that background/back-story earlier rather than so much focus on how a character called Lugan smokes his roll-ups. Next I was getting much more into it with Ecko on the move, but then the switch from an SF scenario to what is effectively a fantasy one (and on flicking ahead to discover the fantasy stuff seems to be most of the book) nearly lost me. It shouldn’t have really since any jerk reading the cover will see the words ‘cross genre’. However, a chapter titled 'The Monument' dragged me back in and I started really enjoying it.

Okay, you all know me well enough to know I won’t post a review of a book I didn’t enjoy. Generally I don’t finish such books so reviewing them would be unfair. This book had its frustrations for me like: stop moping and bloody do something will you Ecko, the way characters are introduced making me feel I should have read them in a book before this and some generally confusing scenes/conversations that just didn’t seem to go anywhere. But, the idea of the contemporary (well, near future) character dropped into a fantasy world that might be a virtual reality is a good one and well done. I like the contrast between fantasy characters and the smart-talking technologically upgraded Ecko. I liked the way that the reality of wounds in a spear and hack-em’ world was depicted. On balance there was a hell of a lot here to like, and I motored through this book. It’s a page-turner and I’ll be getting hold of the next one.

Stoves & Kittens etc.

Tuesday 11th September

One thing I will say about the Kindle, especially when down on the beach, is the speed of sales. A lady came over to us who we have seen here year after year – she and her husband take a holiday with their disabled daughter. She’d been told that one of us was an author and came over to ask about that, directing her question to Caroline. Caroline got about five seconds of fame before I claimed the position. We chatted with her for a while then her husband when he came over. About ten minutes after that he was lying on the beach and buying my books through his Kindle. Of course, my then nerves set in: I wonder what he’s saying over there? Is he enjoying what he just bought?

Wednesday 12th September
I’m lagging behind a little bit but Penny Royal II has passed the 60,000-word mark and is progressing nicely. I do get these stops and starts during which I have to consider where to go next or what to do with a certain character. Last time it was the latter and, as always seems to happen, I discovered I’d already laid the groundwork for that character’s story and, once his course was clear, wrote a couple of thousand words in a couple of hours.

Meanwhile, Mark Croucher, who I met during some of my Forbidden Planet books signings, has won a prize in Macmillan’s ‘Neal Asher Ultimate Reading Initiative’ competition. Here’s his prize:

Friday 4th September
What rosy-spectacled visionary coined the phrase ‘the Arab Spring’ and whoever thought the Arabs were fighting for ‘freedom and democracy’? All they seem to want is the secret policemen, with their propensity for giving people an anal examination with a cattle prod, replaced by fanatics who wants rip into those who fail to ‘respect’ their belief in a sky fairy. Those protestors in the Middle East need to understand (as do the politically correct and permanently offended in Europe and the US) that respect is not a human right, but has to be earned. All those protestors are earning is contempt, while destroying any prospect of earning one red cent (or pink pound) from tourism. It’s sad to see people throwing off the chains of autocracy only to don the chains of theocracy.

Note: there’s a large difference between respect and being polite or politic.

Monday 17th September
Ah the cloud is starting to arrive and I expect the rain will be along shortly. In response I’ve started cleaning up our stove here since both glasses were cracked and need replacing, and the whole thing is a bit grubby with rust here and there. As is always the case when I start on a job like this it’s turning out more difficult than expected. The screws into the clamps that hold the glass in place are completely seized in place. On the first door I had to drill down the centre of them with a small drill, grind the heads off, then drill them out larger and re-tap the holes. Of course a drill broke off in one of these so I had to use a Dremel to grind that out before drilling for a larger thread (M6 to M8). I guess all those years in engineering still have their use.

Tuesday 18th September
It was interesting hearing Salman Rushdie talking yesterday. As he pointed out, the protestors and preachers in the Middle East are using words like blasphemy, apostasy and heresy, which are all from a medieval vocabulary. The interviewer was pushing Rushdie, suggesting he had been a bit too provocative, but he wouldn’t back down. When asked about how we in the west should respond he was quite firm: we should adhere to the principles of freedom and free speech, and we should be braver. Are you listening Hillary Clinton?

And just to finish on a positive note. Penny Royal II is now past the halfway mark, and the disappearing kittens returned – the cynical old bastard writing this blog being wrong:

Sauce and Skyscrapers

Wednesday 5th September

Somebody asked me on Twitter about my chilli sauce recipe. It’s quite simple: I put half a kilo of chillies and a bulb of garlic through a food processor (green bits removed from the chillies and the garlic peeled, obviously). This lot goes into a saucepan with two cups of vinegar and two cups of sugar and a dessert spoon full of salt. I bring this to the boil for about five minutes, take it off the boil to stir in corn flour (mixed with a bit of cold water) to thicken it, boil it up again then put it into hot jars or bottles – use those with metal lids. This is the basic recipe but variations include adding red peppers or tomatoes to bulk it out and bring the heat down a bit, and another recent variation where I’ve added root ginger which adds another dimension to the heat. I might also try adding Cretan basil too since masses of the stuff grows here. I also heard about a chilli dressing in which peaches are used and, since we’ll be getting good crops of peaches henceforth, I might try something with them. Here’s our very first crop:

Saturday 8th September
I just watched a program on BBC World about Shanghai which was quite interesting and rather confirms my contention that in the next ten years we’ll be seeing Chinese on the beach here and buying holiday homes in the surrounding area. However, I just kept on cringing every time I heard the tagline of this program: ‘Shanghai, the city where skyscrapers grow faster than trees’. No shit Sherlock! Whoever made that one up really needs to get out of the office, and out of the city a bit more. Perhaps the BBC should employ David Bellamy as an advisor, ho ho. To be quite crass, if skyscrapers didn’t grow faster than trees those aeroplanes would have missed the World Trade Centre by several thousand feet.

Monday 10th September
Francios Hollande claims he will turn the French economy round in two years. Apparently, against all reason and the wisdom of Keynesian economics, pissing money up the wall by employing more public sector workers and driving the ‘super rich’ out of the country with a 75% tax rate doesn’t seem to work. He’s now got to make about 30 billion in cuts. Socialists talking economics would be hilarious if they didn’t get into power. As it is Hollande is like a donkey claiming to know how to drive a truck.

The paralympic games have been the most successful ever. ‘This success must be placed at the feet of athletes like Oscar Pistorius.’ Really, some BBC presenters really need to think very hard about what comes out of their mouths.

Tuesday 11th September
Ah, recovering at last. I had an infection in my eye for a few days and generally felt quite rough (hence the tetchiness of the comments above) then, as I was recovering, we went for a meal at the Gabbiano and came back here with a litre of cinnamon raki, which we polished off that evening. The next day we went along to a charity event to raise money for a dog’s home here, whereupon I drank far too much wine. So, a couple of days feeling rough because of a bug followed by a couple more that were my own fault. Back to work.

Into September

Wednesday 29th August

Apparently, after four decades of study, scientists have concluded that cannabis smoking when you’re young will reduce your IQ. Putting aside how laughable IQ tests are in the first place I wonder what they could possibly have used as a control in such a study. I also have to wonder, as is so often the case in many ‘studies’, if those old favourites ‘correlation is not causation’ and ‘confirmation bias’ are raising their ugly heads. I would suggest that a forty-year study of the effects of cannabis smoking on intelligence was not aimed at proving that there is no effect. How do you prove someone is thick because they smoke lots of weed as opposed to smoking lots of weed because they’re thick?

Apparently tropical storm Isaac has political implications. It delayed the election of Mitt Romney to the leadership of the Republican Party. It’s not quite a hurricane yet but the connection is there to hurricane Katrina because it’s, well, a storm. George Bush is a Republican and he didn’t do enough in response to Katrina, therefore, if you’re still following this tenuous thread, it can be seen that Mitt Romney will have to answer some hard questions about his attitude to hurricanes, or tropical storms, or something. Not much in the way of bias and agenda then in this report from the Obama-worshipping BBC. To top this off, Mitt Romney the ‘multi-millionaire’ is also aloof from the American people. I look forward with bated breath to the BBC examination of just how much President Obama is worth now.

I note now that Isaac is hitting New Orleans with winds gusting to 130 kilometres an hour and is being described as a hurricane. So in real money that’s 81.25 miles an hour so makes it to hurricane status by 6.25 miles an hour. Phew. Those damned Republicans.

Thursday 30th August
Ah, Isaac has now been downgraded to a tropical storm but is still ‘lashing’ or ‘battering’ New Orleans. I also see that water has been flowing over the levees again and flooding out some houses. So will the Democrats be blamed for this inadequate work?

Meanwhile the wind that arrived here on Tuesday blasted all that day, throughout the night then into the following morning. When we went down to Makrigialos on the Wednesday most umbrellas were folded down, the beach abandoned and only diehards in the sea. However, the wind was dying and my prediction for the wedding at Revans bar was wrong. They got really lucky, since over the summer when that wind arrived it blew for a minimum of four days. On this day it just died off. We took a look in the bar before heading off for a meal, then afterwards took some photos, and very nice it looked too.

Friday 31st August
With the wind having chilled things down a bit and summer heading towards its end it’s not so pleasant sitting outside so much (up here), so we settled down to watch a film Caroline had bought. This was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I found enjoyable, but with some qualms. There seemed moments of desperation in the plotting, it was a tad chaotic, various excellent actors seemed to be playing caricatures of themselves and the apparent aim to capture the essence of India, old age and alienation, failed. Meanwhile Caroline, who had read the book, was baffled and said she remembered very little of what was going on from the book.

The book was here so I thought I’d give it a go. It was wise, sometimes sad, often funny enough to have me laugh out loud and perhaps beyond the grasp of those who’ve yet to feel intimations of mortality. It was also a little chaotic and not some easy straight line plot. Like the film it tried to capture some essence of India, the realities of old age and alienation, but it succeeded. It was about feelings, human relationships and life, really, and it was excellent. But in the book there was no homosexual high court judge seeking out an old Indian lover. No one went there for a hip operation. No pensioner got a job in a call centre. In fact the list of things that happened in the film and did not happen in the book runs just about all the way through it. The only connections are that some characters had the same names and there was a Marigold hotel some pensioners went to. Read the book and enjoy it, watch the film and enjoy that too but in your mind call it The Marigold Hotel Revisited by Posturing Actors.

Monday 3rd September
If I needed any further proof that dancing to the Wii is effective then I have it now. Throughout August, because of eating out so much what with visitors here, my weight steadily increased (as did my girth), despite my swimming for miles each week. Even after we stopped eating out it just hung on. Four days now of dancing to the Wii for half an hour a day and it’s already heading down again, being the lowest it’s been today since early August. Really, if you can get past feeling like a berk, I recommend it.

Penny Royal II is now past 50,000 words and I am having fun with it. As I pointed out to Caroline, after polishing off my last 2,000 words in a couple of hours, there’s nothing like a good space battle to get the juices flowing ... so to speak.

Tuesday 4th September
Damn but it’s easy to sit up here in the mountains at this time of year and think that the warmth is all but over. The house temperature has been a steady 25C, the temperature outside not much higher during the day and plummeting to 21C in the evening. Of course this kind of warmth would be very welcome during an English summer but here acclimatization has to be taken into account: when you’ve been used to the high twenties and it not dropping much below that in the evening you tend to start piling on the clothing. Then there’s the difference between the mountains and the coast. We went down to Makrigialos yesterday to find a temperature of 34C and a nice warm sea.