Doom, Gloom, but Raki is Coming

Wednesday 21st September

Ah, the rain is on its way. It’s been particularly humid lately but warm enough to prevent a lot of condensation. However, last night the mist and cloud began forming in the mountains here and this morning some leaden looking cloud is rising above the horizon. It’s time to start bringing in the terrace furniture in the evenings, and time to ensure we have some dry logs inside the house.

I see, on BBC World, that the Times World Atlas rather exaggerated the extent of ice melt in Greenland and has been picked up on this by people at Cambridge University. The area claimed to have melted in the World Atlas is apparently ‘absurd’. However, the BBC reporter interviewing a sweaty and worried looking Cambridge professor stated, ‘But you wouldn’t dispute that ice has melted?’ This is what is known as a leading question and of course the professor answered as required, though he did manage to slip in an ‘associated with’ global warming rather than the preferred ‘caused by’. What’s astounding about this is that just a few years ago, such a report, it being contrary to accepted writ, would never have made it to the screen. Here we are seeing some tentative ventures into arse-covering and I suspect we can look forward to stuff of a similar nature over the next few years. Enjoy the prospect of BBC presenters pretending astonishment at not having been parboiled in their beds and claiming to be the innocent victims of corrupt scientists.

I note that a previous Afghan leader has been a blown up by a bomb that was concealed in a turban. Damn but those Danish cartoonists shouldn’t have given the Taliban ideas. I also wonder, whilst you’re taking off your belt, shoes and jacket at the airport to put them through the X-ray scanner, whether you’ll see any turbans on the same conveyor. Of course not, that would be the evil racial or religious profiling, and civilization would collapse if you were to note the unlikelihood of any inclination to suicide bomb a plane in the blue-rinse granny being searched ahead of you.

Thursday 23rd September
Yup the weather is changing, though no rain has actually dropped on us. We sat on our terrace last night watching the flashes of a thunderstorm beyond the mountains opposite. Down in Makrigialos the sea was still warm, but only suitable for surfing. I took a bit of a dip and hurled myself through a few waves, but then we both retired from the windy beach which, with this rough sea, is steadily disappearing again.

Now, frequently we get people here asking us if we have tried this restaurant or that, or this bar or that bar. Our reply is always a self-deprecating, ‘We’re really boring’ going on to say that we use just a few of either. We know a few nice bars where we get precisely what we want and we know a few restaurants which have their various quirks but where the food is always good and tasty. We’re often loath to try other places because of the prospect of disappointment. However, yesterday, what with the beach and the sea being out and Revans bar having been occupied by a loud-mouthed knob-head, we ventured off. And what happened rather proves our point.

First we went to a beachside bar we hadn’t been in for months. The moment we walked in we could see it was run down and none too clean. The wine was okay, but the carafe dusty. The tables had been wiped without any real effort to get them clean and the floors were dirty and scattered with sand. We finished our wine and headed off. After a brief sojourn in another bar that we know is good – the drinks are always right, the snacks are very good and the place is always clean and tidy – we decided to try a beachside restaurant people had recommended, though with the proviso that rather too much food is served there. Since by this time I was starving, this seemed like a good idea to me. We wandered over to this restaurant and sat down. Having already had some wine we ordered two fresh orange juices and our meal. The juices turned up, a little tardily, but they were good and big. Next the place began filling up with customers, which is always a good sign, and we awaited our meals. Having come to very much like the lamb chops with garlic served at the Gabbiano I had ordered the same here, while Caroline ordered chicken with pepper sauce. And we waited, and waited.

About three-quarters of an hour later our meal turned up – good platefuls but no spectacular amount. There was also an excess of decoration what with little piles of tomato, cucumber and tzatsiki dotted here and there and herbs sprinkled around the edges of the plate (the expression to describe this is ‘lipstick on a pig’). I dived in to my pile of lamb chops with garlic... Now, maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t lamb chops be served hot? Also, whilst a glob of grated raw garlic dropped on top of cold lamb chops is ‘lamb chops with garlic’ this was not quite what I expected. The only hot thing on the plate was the soggy chips. I also feel that on a lamb chop the meat should outweigh the bone and gristle. After scraping off mouth-burning raw garlic I ate the meat, and ended up with pile of debris little different in size to the original pile of lamb chops. Meanwhile, Caroline had tried her chicken, in its covering of brown muck scattered with a few peppercorns, and decided she really didn’t want her shoes resoled today. We ate what we could, hurriedly paid the bill and left just as fast as we could. On the drive back it was necessary to keep the windows open so Caroline didn’t end up gagging at the smell of my breath. For about an hour afterwards I felt nauseous and back at home had an Ouzo to get the horrible taste out of my mouth, while Caroline had to go and clean her teeth to the same effect. Screw other people’s recommendations and screw trying ‘somewhere new’. We’re back at the Gabbiano tomorrow.

Friday 23rd September
What with the financial crisis continuing, G20 leaders are going to take ‘strong action’. On the news we see sharp-suited politicians (and their pet ‘financial experts’) climbing out of limos clutching folders and heading importantly into buildings, or making speeches at decision-making conferences. All of these people, living in their elitist bubble, are certain and determined about the need to do something during this ‘dangerous time’. Of course the problem here is that people like this have absolutely no idea what to do. Getting paid a large salary without ever any penalty for fucking up doesn’t really prepare one for problem solving. They talk blithely about ‘liquidity, volatility, challenges, calming the market’ or whatever other buzz-words happens to be in vogue at the time, meanwhile seeing no further than insuring their own budgets and salaries aren’t cut and resorting straight away to more taxes and more state control.

So, you want business making money, you want ‘liquidity’, you want people grafting away and increasing your country’s wealth, you want that money flowing into your treasury? Here’re some ideas: Why don’t you stop hamstringing businesses with increasing red tape? Why don’t you stop taxing their working capital into oblivion? Why don’t you lose tax systems that penalize success, that is, are you so stupid that you think taking more money off people because they do more and make more money is actually some form of encouragement? Why don’t you stop paying bureaucrats large amounts of money to shuffle paper and interfere, that is, how about you lose much of the money-wasting business-killing state sector? Why don’t you tear up welfare systems that actively encourage sloth, indolence and state theft? And why oh why don’t you realize that you aren’t the source of solution, but the problem itself? Thank you for listening (ho ho).

With plenty of cloud scattered about the sky we got a shower of rain yesterday. Today it is windy, grey and showery, and the temperature has dropped below twenty. In Britain this would be your average summer’s day, but here it’s a rather abrupt change from the warm seas and temperatures approaching thirty of just a few days ago. We now have the smell of wood smoke in the village, and the likelihood of seeing a Cretan dressed in anything less than trousers and sweater has dropped to zero. Summers have to end, unfortunately, but it’s still a bit depressing. I’ve no doubt that there will be more hot sun, but for me there’s going to be a lot less swimming and more walking, some drainpipes to fix and some holes to seal, and the prospect of having to spark up the stove.

Saturday 24th September
Either someone sent me something or I read somewhere that the hypothesized ‘dark matter’ in our universe is coming in for a bit of a kicking. I never much liked this hypothesis because it seemed far too convenient; far too much of a fudge i.e. I know the density of strong cheddar but when I cut a lump of it which, by my other measurements, should have weighed one pound, I found it weighed a pound and half. I therefore hypothesize the presence of invisible cheese which I will call ‘dark cheese’. To which the reply has to be, ‘Check your fucking scales, mate.’ And now, it seems, Einstein might be getting a kicking too.

By now anyone with a science fictional turn of mind will know that those excellent lunatics at CERN in Geneva, who have been firing neutrinos 400 miles to Italy, have found that the neutrinos have been arriving a bit early i.e. they were travelling faster than the speed of light. Now, if this turns out to be true, Special Relativity just took a terminal wound. You see, even though the mass of a neutrino is very very small, Einstein’s theories tell us that the mass of an object increases with its speed until, as it approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity. So one also has to wonder why Italy isn’t now a smoking crater or, in fact, our whole planet, or the universe itself. You see, if their measurements are right, by Einstein’s theory, objects of infinite mass should have arrived at the end of that four hundred mile course in Italy. But then again, we would have burnt out the universe accelerating them, since that would have required infinite energy...

The guys at CERN are putting their data out to be checked by as many other scientists as possible. One of them asserted, ‘All scientists are by their nature sceptical.’ Yes, that scepticism is a defining trait of a scientist and its lack rather defines what a scientist isn’t. Now, can anyone think of a ‘science’ where results are twisted to fit the theory and the data isn’t put out there for others to check?

Monday 26th September
Caroline spotted this beauty sitting out on the path before our gate. I reckon it must have fallen out of the fig tree where, with these camouflage colours, I probably wouldn’t have spotted it before. Until such a time as someone lets me know what this one is called I name it the Harrier jump-jet moth. And here we are seeing something that looks a bit like some of the landing craft you’ll find in my books.

According to Christine Lagarde, in a recent meeting European leaders all agree they’re going to continue working together to resolve the debt crisis. She tells us it is going to be hard and there are some tough times ahead, doubtless going on to a Champagne supper after the program in which she appeared and further discussions over caviar and biscuits about how difficult it is all going to be. What these ‘European leaders’ mean of course is that it is going to be tough for just about everyone but them. You won’t be seeing any of them suffering because of endless tax hikes, endless increases in the price of petrol, food and household goods; or because their company just collapsed; or because the bank their savings are in just went to the wall etc. They’ll still be on the kind of annual salary most people would be glad to receive for five or ten years of work. They’ll still be swanning about on the European stage feeling very important, they’ll still be heading to various meetings flying business-class or in their chauffeur-driven Mercs while checking their overseas investments, they’ll still be issuing buzz-word sound-bites to the media and they’ll still suffer no penalty for having fucked things up in the first place. Let’s just reiterate something: if government is in debt then a government overspent, okay?

Monday 26th September
Ah, raki season is arriving. Because of the inclement weather going on for longer than usual a lot of the grape harvest on Crete has been spoiled. I’m told a combination of rain and sun at the wrong time was the problem – maybe showers knocking off the grape flowers, or the moisture causing mildew? Anyway, the guy who makes raki right next to our house, Nectarius, wasn’t sure if he would be making it this year. However, he’s a can-do sort of guy and recently turned up with the barrels you see, which are all full of fermenting grapes he had to buy near Iraklion (over a hundred kilometres away). I’ve been co-opted into stirring this stuff up every evening, so I damned well hope they still the raki while I’m still here.

The Bully State – Brian Monteith

The End of Tolerance

‘Even if I am a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.’ – Mahatma Gandhi.

This is pretty good as it covers the lies and fact twisting used to push through legislation ‘for our own good’. I didn’t, for example, know about the measurable rise in deaths in countries that introduced the seatbelt law – the unintended consequence of people feeling safer so driving faster and closer to the car in front – nor how the statistics in Britain were skewed by the drink drive ban. Nor did I know the story of Fred Hill, who was a WWII dispatch rider, and his protest against being forced to wear a crash helmet – a protest that led to him dying in Pentonville prison. It was also interesting to read about how the IRA killed more people than any Muslim terrorist in this country yet no need was felt for ID cards and all the rest of the autocratic anti-terror legislation. I of course did know about the lies, fact twisting and ‘consultations’ with bought-and-paid-for NGOs used to push through the smoking ban, and how the same methods are being used on alcohol and ‘unhealthy’ foods.

‘The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.’ – Henry Louis Mencken.

This book ventures into the mindset of the people who want to control every aspect of our lives, and points out that though the majority of them are politically correct dicks in the Labour Party, and their useful idiots in local councils, they are by no means unique – the urge in politicians to lecture and admonish and generally treat voters like idiot children is a strong one. To a certain extent it is dated, in that it was published under the Anti-Midas Gordon Brown, and an awful lot has happened since then. However, this does not undermine the central thesis of the Nanny State turning into the Bully State in which advice and nannying to try and change people’s behaviour have turned into fines and prison sentences.

‘The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be the defenders of minorities’ – Ayn Rand.

Departures to Departures

Wednesday 14th September

After yesterday’s Internet session and after my ‘harbour swim’ I heard a strange noise coming from my bag on the beach. It took me a moment to figure out that this was my mobile ringing, since it was only the second time it had rung this year. It was Julie Crisp at Macmillan, happy to inform me that The Departure had risen to number 18 in the bestseller chart. I’m presuming, like with The Technician last year, this is the Bookscan chart, which is compiled from weekly sales of all books in Britain (though whether hardbacks are separate from paperbacks I don’t know).

I was a bit ‘out there’ during this phone call – feeling slightly knackered, still partially into Dan Simmons’ Endymion, and slightly wrong-footed by this contact from the outside world. I also saw it as par for the course with me. The Departure has gone three places above The Technician which, I’m told, finally went to number 21. This is how it has always been for me ever since my first story was accepted and the magazine concerned folded before publishing it – a steady climb of the ladder; another step up in ‘success’ but no massive leap and no huge critical praise and concomitant hype.

I have to add here that I now prefer this steady climb to the high peaks followed by deep troughs in the publishing world. I’ve seen authors receive huge critical praise for a first book then being hamstrung by expectation. I’ve seen authors’ first books being hyped outrageously and them briefly being a big noise in the publishing scene, whereupon the ensuing book or books are just whimpers. While I’ve been steadily climbing the publishing ladder, I’ve seen others falling off and landing hard.

However, with The Departure climbing into the top 20 this means, apparently, that a book of mine has passed some kind of watershed and has become a lot more noticeable. Whether this means they can put ‘Science Fiction Bestseller’ on the cover or you’ll be seeing it in shop displays of top 20s or in newspaper lists of the same I don’t know. Anyway, after the phone call and while part of the way into a carafe of white wine, I began grinning like an idiot.

Thursday 15th September
My goodness aren’t financial markets fickle things. A few politicians get together and state that they’re not going to allow Greece to default on a debt they can’t possibly pay and things are hunky-dory again (probably for a day or two). I’m astounded that anyone can actually believe a politician any more, but maybe there was an underlying message of ‘not yet’ that the markets were responding to. Meanwhile that dipshit Barroso tells us that the solution to the debt crisis is more European integration. Yep, the solution to the pain caused by hitting your finger with a hammer is to whack a couple more fingers. Of course the eurocrats want more integration because that means more power and money for them. Of course the eurocrats want to delay Greece’s default and the subsequent collapse of the house of cards because, whilst it remains standing, the big salaries keep rolling in and they can strut about on the European stage like the little tin-pot Hitlers they are.

Friday 16th September
Congratulations Denmark! The people there have voted in the centre-left and their new prime minister has promised to increase taxes, increase public spending and let in more immigrants. What an excellent way to completely butt-fuck your own country.

Monday 19th September
Well, I can’t correctly say that I finished the Endymion omnibus, since I was skipping large lumps of it as I drew towards the end...

The weather here this September has been very good so those who were saying that because the summer here started late it will continue late might be right, though in reality that was a fifty-fifty bet. The sea has also been surprisingly warm so I’ve been able to continue with my harbour swims with the result that my gut seems to be receding a little. The good weather has also brought out the kind of display on our bougainvillea we’ve been aiming for since we bought this place:

The black figs are also appearing in quantity on the tree next to our house. It’s nice to eat a few but more than say four or five a day results in frequent flier points in the toilet:

It looks to me as if I’ll be getting a ringside seat on seeing a country go bankrupt. The debt here is in the region of €450 billion which, divided over a population of 14 million, comes out at over €30,000 a head. To get its next loan so as not to simply run out of money the government must get rid of a 100,000 government employees and sell off a load of state assets. Instead it’s trying to leech more money out of the working public. The latest wheeze is a tax ranging from €3 to €16 per square metre of your home, the amount to be added to the electricity bill with the power being shut off for non-payment. ‘Vulnerable groups’ i.e. those already costing the state a packet, such as the unemployed, pensioners and irresponsible breeders with four or more children, only get to pay half a Euro. Meanwhile I have no doubt at all that the politicians here are salting away their disgustingly large salaries in foreign bank accounts.

Tuesday 20th September
And another load of chilli sauce to add to my stores:

I’ve made three lots now and the open jar of it I have in the fridge keeps getting topped up with the remainder from each boiling. I’ve also given away about four jars – two to Greeks who actually like the stuff one to a Bulgarian and one to an English couple. It occurs to me that if this country collapses and food was to be in short supply, we might be living on a combination of chilli sauce, figs and pickled onions, which I suspect would involve toilet paper in the fridge and frequent changes of underpants.

Incidentally, Huan Tan, I have your recipe and bought mangoes so as to follow it, but then decided I would rather make sweet mango chutney with them instead. I’ll be looking up a recipe for that today.

The Jupiter Conflict or Jupiter War is now approaching 114,000 words and its plot threads are resolving. I suspect I’ll finish it this month and that it’ll be a shorter book than both The Departure and Zero Point (though I’ve yet to write the chapter starts and this will only be the first draft). This I feel is a good thing. Have you ever noticed the ever inflating size of books in trilogies or other series where the author is suffering from plotline proliferitis and struggling to get it all nailed down with the last book?

Our neighbour Jean-Pierre is back and the Greek neighbours were on him like flies on an open wound. When I walked down to see him last night I asked two of the kids, ‘Jean-Pierre ina mesa?’ to which one said ‘Neh’ whilst the other corrected me by saying ‘Pedro’. I replied, ‘Oshi Pedro, ina Jean-Pierre’. The Greeks up in these villages like to give foreigners pet names – I started out here as Nico and all the Albanians here have their ‘Greek’ names even if their own names are used in this country anyway. I don’t like it and I don’t like the thinking behind it. It is the application of a pet name to a pet. It’s demeaning and a conversational method of downgrading someone. They call me Neal now, probably because I ceased to tolerate any more shit from them.

And finally, just to annoy various people we’ve seen here over the year, and who are now back in their home countries:

Plants and Rants

Tuesday 6th September

Here on Crete we have the fantasists who feel that being thousands of miles from their home country enables them to get away with the most outrageous lies (if they happen to have come from London they always knew the Krays) but there are also many interesting and genuine people here. We have Roddy and Ruth, the former of whom played with Frank Zappa and has his own band (The Muffin Men), whilst the latter makes, repairs and works with theatrical costumes, has dressed Nichol Kidman, and has just been working in Belfast on the costumes for ‘Game of Thrones’. Caroline now has her hair cut by an Italian guy in Lithines, who was trained by and taught at Vidal Sassoon. But name dropping aside, there’s a couple here who run an astronomy and art school, we have an ex social worker, teachers and university lecturers, someone who worked on the sets for Star Wars and many others besides.

The latest addition to the list above, which is by no means complete, is the guy who may be buying our old car. Whilst chatting with him and his wife in the Gabbiano we learnt that he is a Norwegian narcotics cop, which caused a pause in conversation whilst Caroline and I realized we were gaping.

There is, I think, a bit of a selection process going on. Generally the people who buy a house here, whether they are immigrants or have a holiday home, have ‘something about them’. This something has enabled some of them to accrue the money for such a purchase, but it is also what has driven them to step outside their comfort zone and take that risk. Others who have accrued no more money than what was in their house in their home country, and now live on a pension, also stepped out of that comfort zone and took a larger risk. But of course we must not neglect those who ran away; who thought that the problems they had in their home countries could be solved by a move here, and discovered otherwise. They generally don’t last.

Wednesday 7th September
Well sometimes you get blindsided. Whilst talking to a couple who we’ve met a few times before, we moved onto the subject of books and, inevitably, some mention was made of my books. We were sitting in Revans at the time so I pointed to the book shelf in the bar and said there was one they could try. The guy, Trevor, asked, ‘Which one?’ I pointed to the shelf again and said, ‘Second in from the right on the top shelf,’ and he asked, ‘But which one?’ ‘The orangey one with my name on the spine,’ I replied, slightly baffled. ‘But which title?’ he finally asked. ‘Hilldiggers,’ he replied. ‘Oh yes,’ said he, ‘I’ve read that one. I think I read most of your books before we moved here – the ones with Dragon in them, the Skinner ones and some others.’ I was a bit gobsmacked because, of course, I’m so used to talking to people who haven’t read my books, don’t have much interest in science fiction and quite often those who don’t read many books at all.

Thursday 8th September
Jupiter War has now passed the 100 thousand word mark and those of you sitting there with calculators will know that I haven’t been sticking to my ‘2,000 words five days a week’. I could of course include the word-count of my blog posts but even that won’t bring me up to 10,000 words a week. However, I know that last year I went back to England with 80,000 words of Zero Point done whilst this year it’s likely I’ll be heading back with the first draft of Jupiter War completed at, probably, about 130 or 140 thousand words. So do I hammer straight into the next book? I don’t even know the title, story, whether it’ll be an Owner or Polity book or even one set in the Cowl future. I’m thinking that maybe now is the time to turn to some short stories to send off to Asimov’s and other magazines, or to any anthologies that will have them. One of those short stories may then grow in the telling and actually turn into the next book. We’ll see.

Friday 9th September
Ah I see that Obama is going to inject 450 billion into the American economy to create jobs and cut taxes. Well, maybe if he, and other parasite politicians before him, had left that money in the economy in the first place there wouldn’t be such a problem, though of course this money isn’t coming out of some sort of emergency fund; some wodge of cash stacked away for a rainy day. It’ll just be a further addition to America’s 13 trillion debt. But don’t you just love that ‘inject money to cut taxes’? It’s rather like raiding someone’s larder then, after feasting on the food, noting that the guy stocking the larder is starving and might not be able to fill it up again, so giving him back a couple of loaves of bread to keep him alive. I often wonder how those who jumped on me, and played the race card, when I first criticised the Obamessiah, feel about him now. They probably still think he’s wonderful but hamstrung by the dark forces of conservatism. Certainly the leftist dipshits at the BBC, despite all the contrary evidence, still think the sun shines out of his arse.

Monday 12th September
Since, both this year and last year, I’ve probably given away more plants than I’ve actually planted in the garden, it’s nice when someone reciprocates, and especially nice when it’s a success. After delivering some bits and pieces to a guy called Rich, he dug up a couple of runners from plants in his garden. Of one of them he told me, ‘It doesn’t look much, but the scent is good.’ (This was a plant I’d read about in the gardening section of ‘Athens News’, but cannot remember the name) I duly planted it in a pot and it shot up over the summer. Then, two evenings ago when we came back from the beach, we noted a perfume in the air as we stepped out of the car. As we walked down to the house – about fifty yards from the car – the scent grew steadily stronger and stronger. Rich’s plant had flowered, was surrounding by humming bird moths, and had a scent probably an order of magnitude stronger than jasmine. Here it is, does anyone know the name?

Tuesday 13th September
Ah, apparently the Italian government is to introduce more ‘austerity measures’ because, like the rest of the PIIGS it’s on the slippery slope. After overspending since year dot, mismanaging their economies, pissing money up the wall on silly social projects, hamstringing businesses with fucked-up safety and environmental legislation and always increasing bureaucracy, employing huge numbers of time-wasting paper-shuffling overpaid bureaucrats and generally demonstrating their inability to run a piss-up in a brewery, I have no doubt that the politicians will be the first to subject themselves to ‘austerity’. Doubtless they’ll be reversing the screw-ups listed above, along with cutting their salaries down to something within the realms of reality, ceasing to employ family members in non-jobs, ceasing to misappropriate funds, ceasing to submit huge expense claims, ceasing to take long expensive foreign trips and ceasing to lie and squirm and evade responsibility. Doubtless they’ll also be culling their number and ceasing to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses of party-political ideology. Oh yeah, and have you heard about the cheese mine on the moon?

The BBC is apparently going to have a discussion about the ‘doubts that the governments of giant economies can pay their debts’. Well let me let you in on a secret: most of them can’t. Let me let you in on another secret: lawyers; academics; graduates in political science and sociology; union reps; ideologues and generally people who have had no experience of real life, actually working for a living and real finances (i.e. people who don’t get that you don’t spend more than you’ve got on something that’s never going to make a profit) aren’t the kind of people you want running ‘giant economies’.

And now just for a bit of amusement, and because Chris thought it would be amusing too ... Chris was so pleased to sell his wife’s car he celebrated with a bottle of cider, whilst naked:

Hyperion - Dan Simmons

Be warned: there are some spoilers here...

I really enjoyed many aspects of the Hyperion Omnibus and would certainly recommend it to anyone, however (isn’t there always one of those?), it was a bit of an up and down experience for me. The Priest’s Tale was excellent, with its cruciform parasites and how the horror of them for a catholic drove Father Dure to do what he did, and I quite enjoyed how that plot thread was woven in later on. But balanced against that, what later seemed the proselytising of the C. S. Lewis kind, with a bit of L. Ron Hubbard thrown in for good measure, had me gagging. Apparently love is a fundamental basis of the universe, whilst god, being woven in at the Planc level, transcends time and is the triune entity of the Christians ... and lo the messiah is to be born!

The Soldier’s Tale with its violence, military technology, mysterious woman (and with Kassad’s yet to be explained encounter with the shrike as the mysterious woman) I much enjoyed too, though later on this was a plot thread that tended to fizzle. The Poet’s Tale, whilst still enjoyable, suffered from a problem I felt was endemic throughout the books: too much in the way of literary allusions and pretensions. How often I found myself skipping the obsessing about Keats and pointless quotations of poetry. There’s much about the power and wonder of poetry and poets, and the implication that isn’t the pen mightier than the sword? Yeah, well, take your Parker to your next sword fight and see how you get on. The Consul’s and The Detective’s Tales were great too, but by then I was starting to get anxious about the proliferation of ideas and plot threads and the possibility of this not completing.

The setting of Hyperion was excellent, with this whole story taking place under a sky lit by interstellar war, as was the interplay between the shrike pilgrims. The tree of thorns is a horrifying image that sticks, and the time tombs were the kind of idea just about any science fiction writer would be jealous of.

The shrike itself was good whilst only glimpsed, but suffered under close inspection. My feeling was that it started out as a monster from Dr Who and was not cured of the rubber mask syndrome by the later add-ons from Alien. And, now I’m reading Endymion, by its Terminator II transformation into a good guy.

There were lots of ideas and threads needing to be tied together in these books, and so they were, sometimes very well and sometimes in a kind of soapish babble. Simmons did manage to pull the rabbit out of the hat, but it had lost one ear and most of its fur during its stay. Still, don’t get me wrong, there are hours and hours of science fictional reading pleasure here. I in fact loved the whole massive chaotic canvas of this story which, really, wouldn’t have been possible without that mass of ideas and interweaving plot threads.

Microscope and Car

Wednesday 31st August

In the past I’ve often been prepared to take a look at something someone has written, and yet to have published, and make comments on it. I learnt quite a bit through this process during my ten years membership of a postal workshop and have always been prepared to give a bit back, but no more. Frankly, over the last ten years, very little of what has been sent to me, as a typescript or an email attachment, has been worth the effort, and some of it is quite appalling. So, as of now, I’ll only comment on published books, even though maybe only one in ten of them are worth the fulsome praise being sought.

For example, having just glanced at something that is allegedly going to be published, I abandoned it after the first page. In the first four-line paragraph there were two missing words, a spelling mistake and missing punctuation. The first page had over twenty similar errors I could actually put a red circle around. Other grammatical errors too numerous to detail warranted a red circle round the whole page. Really, if people can’t be bothered to sort out such basic stuff before sending it to me, I can’t be bothered to read it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider myself to be a paragon of virtue when it comes to the English language. As far as grammatical errors are concerned I can point at them but I don’t really know all the lingo to describe them. I learnt by the seat-of-my-pants from that day, when I was about fifteen, when I sat down at my Dad’s manual typewriter, hammered away two fingered for an hour, then had to stop and go ask my parents what a sentence was. However, this is all stuff that can be easily learnt elsewhere, from books, just like I learnt it.

Sunday 4th September
The dreaded lurgies have attacked again and I’m suffering something much like tonsillitis. Attempting to lay off the fags by chewing nicotine gum results in painful hiccups, I can’t swallow hot drinks and keep on waking in the night choking on phlegm. Wonderful.

Meanwhile we’ve been watching ‘Game of Thrones’ which has been excellent. I tried the first book of the series but gave up after a hundred or so pages, bored with the family stuff and ‘character building’, but after seeing this series I might well pick up the book again. There were notable snaffles or maybe hat tips in this: a fat inept guy called Sam as a companion to a hero (Gamgee anyone?); the girl who wants to fight like a boy and who, during a sword fighting lesson, decides she doesn’t want to practice and gets the lesson on fights not necessarily occurring when you want them (I think I first read that one in Dune and have come across it many times since); and of course horse lords and a dragon lady right from the pages of Tanith Lee. Definitely looking forward to the next series and I’ll be asking someone who has a house here (hello Ruth) which costumes she worked on!

Monday 5th September
One of the things I say when interviewers ask me about how I started writing is how, at a certain age, I chose not to be ‘a Jack of all trades and master of none’ by concentrating on just one of my many interests. I blame my parents with their house full of books, their varied interests, and the various subtle pushes I got from them. I got a chemistry set as many did, but I also got ‘extra’ chemicals from my Dad’s college, followed by some instruction in using chemical formulae many years before I saw them in school. I got fish tank, but instead of putting in water and fish I filled it with caterpillars, watched them turn to chrysalises and hatch out, looked the result up in an Observer book, before then moving on to water scorpions, caddis fly larvae and any other weird creature I found in the stream across the road. I got a microscope which only in later years I realized was a good one – cast iron body and multiple magnifications – and spend many happy hours with my eye glued to the lens. But all this is a round-about way of getting to my recent purchase.

I’m not an easy person to buy presents for, since there’s not much I want beside the odd packet of pants or socks. I can’t be bothered with many of the technological gadgets now available. I wouldn’t want an Android phone or a Blackberry because, thought I know I might have use for many of their functions, they aren’t enough to justify the expense nor the time expended in learning to use the damned things. I don’t really do toys. However, when I saw what was available in Lidl last week I knew straight away that it was a toy I wanted: a microscope with a USB connection so that images and video clips can be taken from it.

Of course, how often I play with this particular toy remains to be seen...

And another purchase this last week. When we arrived here it was necessary to buy a car as quickly as possible so as to avoid the large hire car costs. Stelios put us in contact with a guy from Motor Plan who was selling off some old ones and from him we bought a Renault Thalia. It had 42,000 kilometres on the clock, was a 1.4 saloon with plenty of boot space and has been ideal. Yes, there have been the usual problems what with bearings, joints and a belt (plus tensioner) needing to be replaced, but these are all expected. However, what has been very annoying is a sensor over the flywheel which, when it gets a speck of dirt on it, simply stops the car. The sensor can then be cleaned with a squirt of cleaning fluid in the right area, but more often than not it needs to be taken off to be cleaned.

We carried on with this car for four years, since cleaning the sensor is just a ten minute job. This last summer I haven’t had to touch it for five months and so, when offered a much newer car at a reasonable price I was indecisive. What made me decisive was driving Samantha and Dean back to Iraklion airport and having the car pack up right at the worst possible point, which was in the queue to traffic lights just outside Agios Nicholas. Perhaps this was my own fault in that if I'd cleaned it before the trip I'd have had no problem. The next day I looked at at the other car (a Kia Rio) and said yes.

Heavy Metal

Righto, I’ve been given permission by David Fincher to show some pictures from the now defunct version of the new ‘Heavy Metal’ film which I’ll scatter through this brief summation. A few years ago I saw a thing on You Tube called 'Rockfish' a short CGI-animated science fiction story. I thought it was good and finding the email of the guy who did it, one Tim Miller at Blur Studios http://www.blur.com/ I sent him a message saying how much I enjoyed it. Tim thanked me, glad I liked it since he had books of mine on his shelf. A while after this he told me about this Heavy Metal film and asked if I had short stories they might use.

Pictures from Mason’s Rats

I sent loads, they selected some and I altered some, amalgamating the three Mason’s Rats stories into one and shortening Snow in the Desert. They asked me to write some specific ones, so I wrote one called Half Breed which was an orc/elf battle based on Rorke’s Drift, and a short piece called Dinopocalypse. And on story count my stuff made up two thirds of the film. It was all very exciting since the people involved were Tim Miller himself, David Fincher (Fight Club, Seven, Alien 3), Kevin Eastman (owner of Heavy Metal magazine and creator of the Ninja turtles) and subsequently other people were to be involved, like Gore Verbinski, Guillermo del Toro, Tarsem, Peter Chung and Jeff Fowler (film buffs will know these names) and latterly James Cameron. Also I began to see the artwork being commissioned, which was very good.

Pictures from Bad Travelling

Initially the film was being looked at by Paramount, but they dropped out, and thereafter Fincher and Miller carried on hawking it around. At one point it went to Tom Cruise (he has a film company too), who looked at my story Snow in the Desert and thought it would make a good film by itself. However, all this was to no avail. Robert Rodriguez just optioned Heavy Metal and sadly he doesn’t get any of the stories/concepts/art that Miller and Fincher developed for their version of Heavy Metal.

Pictures from Snow in the Desert

Now Snow in the Desert might be turned into a ‘feature’. That would be great, but I have no intention of holding my breath!

Mantids and Madness

Tuesday 23rd August

Funny, in my last post about the goings on in Libya and Tripoli I ended with the comment that maybe I was being too cynical, but apparently I wasn’t being cynical enough. Whilst the BBC reporters were swallowing whole the rebel claims, and reporting on the capture of Gadaffi’s sons and his imminent fall, I was foolishly swallowing whole their reports. It’s been a pertinent reminder of how partial the news can be and, really, it ain’t over till it’s over.

Checking out the various lists on Amazon I see that the Kindle version of The Departure has risen to the number one spot in ‘Science Fiction, New and Future Releases’ with the hardback at number five. If I confine myself to the ‘Science Fiction, Hardback, New and Future Releases’ it’s at number three whilst in ‘Science Fiction, Bestsellers’ it is at number fifty-five (though of course yet to be released). Generally, over my last four or five books, a new release has always risen to one of those number one spots on Amazon for at least a while. I’m guessing that in sales terms my course hasn’t really changed much i.e. they’re climbing slowly but steadily with each new release.

Wednesday 24th August
Jupiter War is now into the 90,000s and steadily growing. I twittered last week that I might finish this book, which is the third of a trilogy, before the first book of the trilogy is even published, but I now think that’s unlikely. Certainly I’ll have the first draft done before we return to England in November

Friday 26th August
I hear this morning that Japan is 10 trillion in debt and beside the flippant ‘to whom and let’s shoot him’ I have to wonder just which countries aren’t in debt or, rather, which parasitic governments aren’t in debt. Here in Greece the leech government is sucking harder as the host country dies. I learnt yesterday about further confiscatory taxes with people who own houses above 100 metres in area being hit, PAYE tax payers being hit with a €50 ‘solidarity tax’, people with a boat above a certain length being hit, whilst if you own an SUV, combined taxes can amount to as much as €2000. Meanwhile the banks are preparing for the inevitable default and the possibility of Greece crashing out of the Euro. If this happens, this means me drawing out all the money I’ve paid in to my bank here, stopping payments and waiting. Greece may go back to the Drachma at a government set exchange rate followed by the rapid devaluing of said currency, which will mean a better exchange rate for me later, but the Greeks maybe having to use a wheel barrow to take their drachmas to the bakers for a loaf of bread. I utterly despair of the stupidity of governments across the world. As a guy I was chatting to yesterday noted, if governments had been companies the politicians would have been fired by now and prosecuted for fraud.

Here’s a couple of praying mantises knocking about our garden. I tried finding out a bit about them in my laptop copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica but found it only under ‘mantid’, which seems a bit daft in this hyperlinked age.

Monday 29th August
Oh dear, I must look into what is happening to Alpha Bank, which is my bank here. Apparently it is merging with Eurobank so as to be able to survive. I really don’t want the cash machines telling me to bugger off. I must also get myself a safe...

Meanwhile the weather here is turning a bit crappy. Though it is still in the 20s here up in the mountains, quite a lot of cloud is already appearing. I rather suspect another crappy winter is on the way and that we’ll be burning up a large portion of our wood supply before we head back to England... Um, but checking some of last year’s blog posts I see that my first moan about summer ending was on the 24th August

Meanwhile, I’ve learnt that our new neighbour has had a car accident, possibly while driving his car back here from Belgium. Stelios said something about him having a metal plate in his skull or face...

And just to introduce something a bit lighter, here’s a picture of me wearing silly glasses:

August...

Wednesday 17th August

Yesterday I drove to Iraklion airport to pick up Samantha and Dean – my niece and her boyfriend – who are staying in our ‘ruin’ for two weeks. No real problems on the drive because if you remain aware that there are nutters on the road you can generally keep out of their way. The temperature hovered at about 30 and after the drive there and back I must have sweated about a gallon into my car seat, this was probably why, afterwards, two half litre glasses of ice-cold beer hardly touched my tonsils on the way down. It’s a struggle here.

Thursday 18th August
The chillies are coming thick and fast now and, having collected half a kilo of them it’s time to make sweet chilli sauce. I never actually wrote the recipe down for myself (unless it’s buried in this blog somewhere) but recollect it being half a kilo of chillies, one whole garlic bulb, salt, a cup of sugar and a cup of vinegar. However, I did write the recipe down for someone else and that says two cups of vinegar and sugar, and yet someone else told me I put corn flour in to thicken too. The only way to find out is to just do it...

And, retrospectively, here I am about essential authorial tasks, that is, preparing onions for pickling:

Well, the kids seem to be enjoying themselves. They took chairs up on our roof to soak up some rays in the morning whilst I wrote my 2,000 words, and then spent most of their time in the sea when we were all down in Makrigialos. As we were on the way back, intent on buying some bread rolls and not able to find enough, we decided to eat in the Gabbiano, whereupon plates were cleared, much laughter ensued and photos had to be taken of us being able to smoke in a restaurant. They retired to the ‘ruin’ at midnight and we hit the sack shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile, to send in an email, I took a few up-to-date pictures at and from the house, which I thought I might put here:

Friday 19th August
I’m presently reading through The Hyperion Omnibus by Dan Simmons and both enjoying and remembering the book Hyperion, which I read many years ago. When I finish the omnibus I’ll maybe write a review of it, but meanwhile let me share a couple of things with you now.

As many of you will know, Hyperion is loosely based on The Canterbury Tales what with the travellers telling their various stories (in these cases usually involving some hideous encounter with the shrike) and from ‘the Poet’s Tale’:

On Heaven’s Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labour could be; not mere physical labour, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labour. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher plains.

Much hollow laughter ensued from me after I read that. There speaks the effete writer whose closest encounter with a spade has probably been in a deck of cards and whose knowledge of physical labour has arisen from other effete writers, but whether that’s the poet in question, Martin Silenus, or Simmons himself I leave you to speculate. Hard physical labour numbs the mind, probably because all the blood flow is concentrated in the muscles, and the mind is focused on such mediocrities as not chopping off ones toes with the spade. In that situation the most it can manage is endless repetitions of ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’

The next bit to share is also from ‘The Poet’s Tale’:

Writers were among my acquaintances but, as in all times, we tended to mistrust and badmouth each other, secretly resenting the other’s successes and finding fault in their work. Each of us knew in his or her heart that he or she was the true artist of the word who merely happened to be commercial; the others were hacks.

And there speaks a writer with true and direct personal experience of other writers and the writing world!

Saturday 20th August
Bugger, the wind is back. After I polished off two and a half thousand words yesterday we went down to Makrigialos as usual. I managed my harbour swim, though coming back doing breast stroke I had to keep my head turned out to sea to manage to breathe. Thereafter, lying on the beach trying to read Hyperion became a bit wearing, because I didn’t want my entire body, including my eyeballs, exfoliating.

Whilst we were sitting inside Revans for a while Caroline checked out the books and discovered one that had been left there. I’m never sure whether to be glad to see books left like this or not:

Ah, here’s some of the local wildlife, the latter of which I’m saving to show our visitors:

Monday 22nd August
Well, it looks like Colonel Gadaffi is on the way out what with the rebels into Tripoli and his son being captured. Let’s just hope he’s not sitting in a bunker somewhere on a nuclear warhead with his finger on a button. Now, apparently, they are all free in Libya and will be able to say what they want. There’ll be no tribal conflict and everything from now on will be hunky dory what with peace and democracy settling over the country like a big comfy duvet. This is of course is about as naive as the thought that the rebellion would be over in just a few months. Look forward to the fanatics trying to push their case, various factions at each other’s throats and terrorist bombs going off in Tripoli over the next few years. Yeah, I know, I’m a cynic.

Mid August

Wednesday 10th August

Damn it, I’m still having to type without using my left little finger and it’s a pain. I tried folding it up with a rubber band to keep it out of the way, but didn’t like the colour it was turning...

Along with the heat, cicadas, beaches filling up with holidaymakers and further Greeks at the weekends, we get Greeks holidaying here in our village too. I’m told quite a lot of them are from Athens, coming here to old family homes for a getaway. I spotted two Greek children coming down the side path to the ‘ruin’, probably having crossed the roof of our main house and, though I can snap out phrases like ‘Where are you going?’ or ‘What do you want?’ easily enough, in the time available I couldn’t quite put together, ‘Where have you been?’ and ‘That’s my fucking roof up there. It’s not a public highway and how would your parents feel if I followed you home and tramped all over their fucking roof?’ They’d probably gape at me in bafflement and then hurry away from the mad Englishman.

Here’s something Lorrie McCullough at Underland press sent me. You can pop over there and explain why you would love to live on Spatterjay, or Masada...

The project, authored and edited by Jeff VanderMeer, is called If You Lived Here: The Top 30 All Time Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Worlds. It's a compendium, of sorts, but also a travel guide to places like Dune, Ring World, Middle Earth, Lankhmar . . . and beyond . . . We've all lived in these places--in imagination if not in fact--and we're all united by our common experiences of them. We wanted to collect the worlds together in one place as both a walk down memory lane and a place to start new dreams.

We're reaching out to readers, writers, and booksellers to ask for nominations of worlds to include. We've set up a web form at www.ifyoulivedherebook.com, which takes the nominations and asks respondents to describe what they love about the world. (If things go according to plan, we'll include some of the responses in the book itself.) We're looking for as much community involvement as possible in this project, and we'd love it if you could help with a signal boost, a mention, or even some nominations of your own.

Friday 12th August
The wind has been blasting on and off over the last week. When we were at the Staousa Bar over the weekend it was pretty damned fierce and even though we were partially sheltered we needed water in the ashtray for it to serve any purpose at all. Over this last week it’s been humid too, so 30C (in Makrigialos) feels like 40 feels at other times when the humidity is lower, and clouds have been appearing in the sky, which is almost unheard of here in August. Yesterday it was very windy and got very cloudy, in fact without the wind carrying the cloud across the sky like an avalanche I’m sure it would have rained. Today it’s windy again, now blowing hard enough to chuck our chairs about the terrace, and the temperature up here this morning was below 20C with plenty of cloud about, and it’s bloody annoying.

It’s funny how wind can be characterized when one wouldn’t do the same with other weather. Like an annoying brat it runs around flipping letter boxes, knocking plant pots on the ground, violently shaking bead curtains and rattling loose tiles on the roof. Every now and again it throws a tantrum and starts throwing chairs about, when not maliciously mauling all my plants and trying to kill them off. A bit like a bully looking for a fight it shoves at my car when I’m driving, throws sand in my face and waits until I’ve filled a roll-up paper with tobacco before knocking it out of my hands.

Of course this crappy weather rather confirms something I was saying a little while ago. After the worst winter the Eastern Mediterranean has seen in fifty years there were those who were saying that now we’ll have a long hot summer. Bollocks. There is no chain of logic there and that is weather prediction based on hope. It could well be that another crappy winter is on the way and that it will start early.

Monday 15th August
At last the clouds have disappeared from over the mountains and the wind has stopped. The temperature this morning is 24C at 9.30, which we haven’t had for quite a few days now.

Whilst we had this wind we were back to the English way of spending an evening, i.e. slumped in front of the television. In England my mother watched a Danish series called The Killing, which is about just one murder and spread over quite a few episodes. She said it was very good and we’d heard good reports elsewhere. A couple here loaned us the series but it turned out to be the American version of the same thing, set in Seattle. Nevertheless it turned out to be very good (well, apart from one episode near the end that consisted entirely of parental angst) at depicting a single murder and many of the real consequences of the same, which most other detective/thriller series tend to trivialize. I recommend this.

What is not recommended is something called Haven. Like Fringe this was another attempt to jump on the X-Files bandwagon, but unlike the Fringe the acting and the story lines were crap. Two episodes were enough for us to not bother watching any more.

Hopefully the TV will be off in the evenings from now until October, but I doubt it.

Getting Hotter

Wednesday 3rd August

Well, things seem to be stirring on the Hollywood front. I’ve just heard from Tim Miller at Blur Studios that one Robert Rodriguez has now optioned the Heavy Metal project and that in so doing he doesn’t get any of the stories/concepts/art previously submitted. This unfortunately means that you won’t be seeing a total of five of my short stories animated for the big screen. However, along with this bad news came the good, and it seems that something might happen with a certain short story called Snow in the Desert. This was, as those of you who have been following this saga might remember, a story of interest to some guy whose name was ... damnit, what was it, er, Thomas travel, Tommy Journey? No, I’m sure it had something to do with ships. Cruise?

As I noted in my previous post an LA producer also got in contact with me wanting a chat. Now this may be connected to the above or have nothing to do with it. Since, as I’ve discovered, these things tend to be rather secretive, i.e. say anything about this and we’ll have to have you shot, I’ll try to keep you updated but can’t promise to.

Of course all this is very exciting and leads to some drunken speculation out on our Papagianades terrace of an evening, but I’m not holding my breath. I keep on with the bread-and-butter work of writing the books and trying to keep you guys entertained and, if I get too big-headed, Caroline will certainly find me some sweeping up to do or a toilet to clean.

Monday 8th August
Damn, I had to take a bit of a break from typing from Wednesday last week because of something annoyingly petty: the end of my little finger hurt. It’s some form of RSI from typing I’ve had before which results in the end of a finger hurting quite a lot at a simple touch. ‘Type with your other fingers!’ I hear the cry. No, if I carry on it tends to spread to other fingers. Now I’m attempting to be a bit less heavy handed, which will of course change when I get excited about something I’m writing. Which reminds me: I once actually managed to wear a hole through the space bar of one of those old grey keyboards, so why is it now that they tend to go wrong before I can get anywhere near that stage?

Along with the cicadas and other big insects we’re getting some of the nice big spiders appearing here now. This one, which is about two inches across, has made its home on the side border leading up to the ‘ruin’. The day after I damaged its web with the spray from a hose pipe the line of white glyphs appeared on its web below it. A rough translation runs something like this, ‘Stop breaking my web – I’m eating those noisy buggers for you!’

Since the beach is now overrun with holidaying Greeks we went on Sunday to a taverna at a place called Kalo Nero (this means ‘good water’ and, as Stelios told us when he was showing us around, ‘not any more’). Here we have a nice demonstration of the price variations between tourist areas and places more remote. In Makrigialos a half litre carafe of white wine ranges from €4 to €6. Here (and the picture is of the view) a carafe costs €2.50. Also, in Makrigialos the price of a beer can be €3 whilst in some places in the mountains it can cost as little as €1, along with enough mezes to feed you for a day.

So, with a buggered finger I caught up some of my reading. On Friday I finished off the last book of four by Simon Scarrow telling the stories of Wellington and Napoleon. These are Young Bloods, The Generals, Fire and Sword and Fields of Death, and I heartily recommend them. As I noted before, the battle scenes and descriptions of the campaigning got a bit wearing and repetitive, mainly in the middle two books, but then how many different ways can you describe cannon balls and canister shot ploughing through files of soldiers? I would imagine that in trying to stick to historical fact Scarrow allowed the dry dead prose of the historian to slip into the books. However, these were four massive 600+ word tomes and I read them all, so the above, whilst it had an effect, did not stop me reading. What I also enjoyed was the acquisition of historical knowledge, about the Napoleonic Wars, about the politics, national manoeuvring and attitudes 9like the low regard for human life), about the way technology was developing (the first use of howitzers, for example) and, as always, this sort of stuff gives an insight into the present day. It is of course the usual insight of ‘technology advances whilst humans are as bad as they’ve always been’ or ‘no, the world is not falling apart – this is just business as usual’.

Tuesday 9th August
So, just before my swim to the harbour I noted a large boat moored outside the harbour, just beyond the buoys marking the dividing line between the swimmers and the jet skis. As I set out the water was clear enough for me to see the frappe cups and plastic water bottles on the bottom. About halfway to the harbour I noted slews of a pink substance floating just below the surface and thought that might be something I’d seen before: masses of globular objects that had to be eggs of some kind. At the harbour I turned round and swam back, momentarily encountering what I briefly thought was a jelly fish but turned out to be a plastic bag, which is why so many jelly-fish eating turtles are dying with guts packed with plastic. After a relax on the beach, reading the Hyperion omnibus by Dan Simmons and then having to put it down before suffering RSI, I went for another swim with my new mask and snorkel. There wasn’t much to see, unless you enjoy drifts of coffee stirrers, fragments of plastic sheeting and the occasional dilapidated tennis ball. I then noted more of that pink stuff, along with something else floating near the surface. This other object, this brown lump, changed my earlier assessment of what that pink stuff was. Andrex, probably. I’m guessing the people on that boat are flushing their toilet straight into the sea. Nice of them.

But of course turds and toilet paper swiftly come apart and rot down in the ocean so, apart from inclining me to scrub really hard in the shower and wash out my mouth repeatedly, these are nowhere near as much of a problem as all that plastic out there. The environmentalists should be focusing on stuff like that, which is one of the many reasons why I get so angry with their present preoccupations, like their insistence on the need to build bird choppers (American whooping crane anyone?), or their delight in the closing down of nuclear power stations in countries that last saw big earthquakes and tsunamis when Noah was wishing he’d left out the woodpeckers. And of course, I utterly despise their need to get rid of a gas that is a plant food and which they insist magically causes snow storms whilst also frying us in our beds, despite the fact that the main thing to track the rise in quantity of that gas in our atmosphere is the number of luxury cars being hired at climate change conferences.

With these riots going on in London, Teresa May tells us, ‘The police need the help and support of the local community,’ which is the usual politician-speak urban-elite claptrap. Well, here is the result of decades of ‘sensitive’ urban policing, irresponsible parents, a complete lack of punishment for criminals, political manipulation of the police, HSE bollocks, and cops being employed and promoted on the basis of gender, racial equality, their political correctness and ability to fill in reports, rather on them being over six feet tall and capable of collaring thugs. What the police need, Teresa, is to grow a set. Perhaps what we could do with is a few less diversity-trained ethnic outreach community relations officers, and a few more fifteen stone hairy bastards who know how to use a truncheon.

Ach, enough of that.

Having finished the Scarrow Napoleonic War books I then picked up Col Buchanan’s Stands a Shadow, kindly sent to me by Julie Crisp at Macmillan. On the back of the dust jacket is a quote that runs ‘Two pages into Farlander (the previous book) I was hooked ... I’ll certainly be reading the next book, for I have a feeling it’s going to be even better. Nice one Mr Buchanan’ by a guy called Neal Asher. So was this even better? I didn’t find myself being immediately hooked for any of a number of reasons: my hangover was getting in the way, because I couldn’t remember the story of the previous book, or because the prose seemed laboured to begin with. Really I should have read Farlander again before going onto this. Another thing that kept pulling me up was the odd chemistry of the ‘black powder’ here, and in one case a confusion between grape and chain shot (but then would anyone who had not just read four books on the Napoleonic Wars notice?) Anyway, I did get hooked later on and ended up finishing this at about 2.00 in the morning. My overall impression was that this wasn’t as ‘clean’ as Farlander – maybe suffering from a touch of mid-series syndrome – but it was as vivid and believable and a damned sight better than a lot of the lauded fantasy books out there, and I’ll certainly be reading the next one.