Day 6

Day 6 is going to be a long one. I woke at midnight to the sound of thunder and pouring rain, dozed on and off until about 3.00, got up and had a cup of tea while filling in my journal, went back to bed to try and sleep some more and finally gave up and got up at 5.00. My total hours of sleep were probably not much more than two or three. Nicotine withdrawal? Well, I reckon that yesterday I had about 10 to 15mg of the stuff by NRT which, calculating on about 1mg per cigarette, is about the same as when I was smoking, so buggered if I know. Insufficiently tired? I cycled 8 miles yesterday and spent most of the day working on a synopsis so you wouldn’t think so. Touch of depression probably, which is a problem I’ve had before when trying to give up the weed.

Anyway, heeding the suggestions of others I’ve ordered some melatonin – a substance that apparently aids sleep – and I’ll let you know how I get on with that.

So, it is now 6.15AM and I’m at my computer, obviously, so I’ll read some science articles and get on with some work.

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Oh right, I forgot to post the above. It is now 9.15 and numerous science articles later it really is time for me to get on with that synopsis. But, of course, now I feel like I want to go back to bed!

Day 5: Steaming, not Smoking

Day 5 at 12.15. Bit more difficult today because I woke up with the right hump, Caroline has gone shopping and I’m sitting here alone at my desk trying to get some work done. I hasten to add that Caroline had already planned to go shopping and didn’t leave because of my hump, though I wouldn’t have blamed her. Anyway, after a bit of work in the morning I cycled over to my mother’s house. She was going out so I just had a brief chat before she left. I then adjusted the handlebars on what was Caroline’s bike, which had been a pain on way over, for the cycle back – round trip 8 miles.

Back here I’ve been puffing on an electronic cigarette, an inhalator and then tried a NiQuitin sweet. The sweet was a bit on the strong side. When I hadn’t quite got the hang of nicotine gum and thought you just chewed it like normal gum (many years ago) I found the stuff gave me the hiccups. These sweets are very much the same. Note to self: let it dissolve in the mouth and don’t eat it like a Minto in future.
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On the work front I’ve been steadily converting chapter notes for Penny Royal I: Isobel into a synopsis. For the writers amongst you here’s how it goes. This:

Chapter 1

PR made in Room 101

T is resurrected in virtuality

T on planet, polity forces bombed

Gets turned into this:

Chapter 1

Thorvald Spear wakes in a seemingly perfect hospital where he meets an old associate and learns that he has woken in a pre-resurrection virtuality. He died during the prador/human war which ended a century ago. Now buffered from the shock of returning from the dead he remembers some of his past. He was a bio-espionage expert amidst a division under General Berners, trapped on a world called Panarchia and surrounded by prador forces. Hoping for rescue he saw a Polity destroyer arrive but, instead of rescuing them it dropped antimatter bombs and annihilated them.   

After I’ve gone through the chapter notes turning them into neat little paragraphs I’ll sew them all together. It is a little more complicated than that because some shuffling around is required: bits scattered through concerning one thread, or character, have to be lumped together, some set-dressing has to be discarded. Eventually I’ll end up with a whole and long synopsis. I then begin hacking it down. This is all good stuff because throughout that process I find myself getting to the essence of the story.

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Now, back to the not smoking: After that damned sweet I’ve got a bit of a headache, in fact, precisely the same kind as I used to get when I smoked too much. Reading up on this stuff I see that a cigarette has about 9mg but absorption is about 1mg. So, I’ve had a piece of gum and a sweet at 4mg each and puffed on the e-cig and inhalator, so maybe, taking into account absorption, 6mg upwards? No way would I have smoked 6 or more cigarettes by this time of the day and, does that 1mg absorption apply to filtered roll-ups? Must exercise a bit more self-control with the NRT!

Day Four

Day 4 at 4.15PM and I’m sitting here typing (while drinking an espresso) just to try and keep myself awake. Whether it’s jet-lag, the effects of stopping smoking (and drinking) or the aftermath of a stressful few weeks I don’t know, but the urge to flake out on the sofa is very strong. Yesterday I wearily closed my eyes at 1.00PM and next thing I knew 3 hours had just disappeared. Or perhaps it’s because I’m being more active physically? I got in a second weight-training session today, followed this afternoon by a walk down at the prom in Maldon (Old picture here from the winter. Hot and crowded today).

So, other effects: after just three days my morning smokers’ cough has gone. My senses of smell and taste are improving. The result of the former is that during that walk along the prom the smell of frying burgers and onions was the most exquisite torture, while I can now smell a cigarette at a hundred paces and zero in on it as if possessed of the targeting vision of a Terminator. The improvement in my sense of taste – and my appetite – has resulted in an almost manic urge to stuff food in my face (hence my reaction to those burgers). Thus far I’ve been pretty good in suppressing that with various fruits or by nibbling my way through a carrot or two. Hopefully it will pass along with the other side-effects of kicking this habit.

Sorry to bore you all with this but by talking about it on the Internet I am deliberately putting extra pressure on myself to stay the course.

Obsessively Busy

Having tried to give up smoking before I’m aware of the pitfalls so will be avoiding any form of alcohol for a few months. On the ‘doing stuff’ front I haven’t stopped. Yesterday began with a shopping trip to Tesco and then Maldon, Caroline’s visit to the doctor and then to St Peter’s to give blood for testing, then back home. Here I potted up some plants we’d bought which also led into me cleaning out our composter and spreading it round the garden. I next went out to the garage to check on my bike. After a little bit of thought I decided to reinstate Caroline’s bike with the pieces I’d taken from it for mine, and throw mine away. This I duly did, taking my bike, in pieces, and dropping it off at the local junkyard. While in the garage I’d noticed how messy it was so returned with a dustpan and brush. I then pulled out my weights and in between weight-training sets swept up all the crap.

Incidentally, while in Tesco’s we bought a couple of Vapesticks which seem pretty good and on the basis of which I ordered the kits.

Today’s jobs: when I moved the composter I noticed how ratty the wall of the garden shed looked, so I’ll be staining that before the composter goes back. I’ll then have a tidy of the garden cutting out dead and excess growth and dumping it in the composter. At some point I need to take apart my shaver to see if I can fix it – when I turned the thing on yesterday I couldn’t turn it off again and it sent an hour or more sitting in the sink buzzing. I need to clean out and sort my toolkit, like I did my bedside cabinet drawer yesterday (some oil capsules had burst in the bottom leaving a horrible sticky mess). Glancing around I see other things that need tidying up and sorting out. I may even go out and have another weight-training session, though I need to be careful not to overdo that. Then there’s a synopsis for Isobel (Penny Royal 1) that Bella Pagan would like by the 24^th…  

Day Two Begins

Day one completed. I got through it with nicotine gum and an inhalator I’d used before and still bears the teeth marks of that occasion. Certainly a few cravings hit me but with my mind set and a couple of pulls on the inhalator I was fine. Also, that Caroline is giving up and has her mind set too is a huge plus point. The electronic cigarette wasn’t much good (sorry, Rich and Shona). I thought it simply wasn’t charging up but soon discovered I wasn’t drawing on the thing hard enough for it to activate. Actually getting some ‘smoke’ out of it is akin to trying to suck a marble up a straw. Maybe I’ll look into acquiring one of these nicotine ‘pens’.

Day two begins with a piece of liquorice-flavoured 4mg nicotine gum and a new cartridge in the inhalator. Judging my yesterday’s food consumption (fried breakfast, Chinese meal, and lots of fruit) I know I need to repair my bike and get it on the road as soon as possible. I think I’ll also clean out the garage and brush the rust off my weights too. And, generally, I have to do stuff. The thing about smoking is that it sucks up time. Yesterday, while thoroughly cleaning the car, I found myself pausing for a ‘break’, then realising that this meant going inside, sitting on my arse and smoking a cigarette. Caroline, working in the back garden, found the same thing. Instead we both just carried on doing stuff and, as a result, where thoroughly knackered at the end of the day.

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Someone asked me on Twitter to please not turn into a ‘born again non-smoker’. No fear of that. I know how for some people it seems almost necessary to be that way – part of the required mind-set to give up. To give up an addiction they love they have to get angry with it. This in fact is where a lot of the anti-smoking bullshit comes from, not from those who have never smoked. I won’t be a ‘born-again non-smoker’ because I am giving up something I have enjoyed, on and off, for 35+ years, and I am not a hypocrite.  

A Bit Crabby

The thing about Crete is that an Englishman as young as me having a house there is a rarity. There are very few ways an expat can earn a decent living there. Yeah, there are a few that pursue the dream of owning and running a bar but they’re turned over by the Greeks like landlords here in England. And yes there are occasional successes like a couple I know running some accommodation on the coast. But mostly those that can afford a place have retired, sold a house in England and made the move to live on a pension. Most of them are, therefore, knocking on or well past the door marked ‘60’. The other thing about Crete is that unless you are the kind of person that does stuff, ennui sets in, and that hole is filled with things like drink and cigarettes. Combine these two factors and you’ll understand why people all around you have heart conditions, emphysema, stagger along and gaze in terror at steep slopes while wheezing and coughing. It is, at about this point, that they start thinking about maybe giving up smoking and easing off on the booze.

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Over the last couple of years I’ve developed a smoker’s cough and have been using Aerolin inhalers too much. However, I can still swim for half a mile or so every day, still cycle for miles and feel I haven’t quite reached the point of no return. I am, therefore, going to attempt to give up smoking.

Prepare yourselves for some right crabby posts here. And I’ll start with noting that if there hadn’t been so many statist prick ‘health professionals’ telling me how I should live, or the campaign of disinformation on passive smoking, or the constant denormalization of smokers by those attempting a bit of social engineering, I might well have made more attempts to give up over the last few years.

Last Post from Crete

As those of you on Twitter and Facebook may know Caroline has some medical problems which have forced our return to England. I may write about that at some point in the future. Here below are the the posts I wrote in Crete before and as things got a bit hectic/traumatic.

Monday 1^st July

As is often the case with me I woke up at 4.30 this morning, dozed until 5.30, thrashed about a bit, then got up at 6.00. This gave me the opportunity to do some watering, update my journal and have a little eke about in the garden. The light here is excellent – often brighter on a cloudy day than a cloudless day in England – but in the mornings it can be something special. I don’t know whether these pictures capture it... 

Tuesday 2^nd July

I see that many people are protesting in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood was voted into power and one could cynically say that perhaps the Egyptians haven’t quite grasped the concept of democracy. However, there are always protests in every country against the government in power – you only have to look at Britain to see that – and Egypt’s problems come down to that trusty old phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ They are short of essentials like fuel there and in a steady state of collapse. According to an Egyptian (and Muslim) business man the problem with the Muslim Brotherhood is that they haven’t been working to sort out the economy but instead concentrating on creating an Islamic State. The collapse in one of their biggest revenue earners, tourism, he says, is a prime example. This concentration on Islam is, apparently, slightly off-putting for global tourists. So I guess a previous item on BBC World about a guy starting an Islamic hotel, with men and women segregated and no alcohol allowed, isn’t quite working out then? Let me use another trusty old phrase that has fast become one of my favourites, ‘No shit, Sherlock.’

Wednesday 3^rd July

I was somewhat tickled by a Facebook comment on a picture of me sitting down in our kafenion last Saturday: ‘I thought all the hired muscle retired to Marbella.’ I guess I haven’t yet managed to pull of either the effete or wacky writer persona just yet. I haven’t got a big fancy hat, I don’t wear a kaftan or a corduroy jacket, I’m not baffled by practical things because I’m an artiste, I don’t press the back of my hand against my forehead and cry, ‘I’m blocked! My muse has abandoned me!’ I guess this is why when, out here, someone inevitably asks me what I do they often have a startled look when I reply. I just knew they were thinking ‘Essex builder-boy who made some money’. But then, the parody of the writer I’ve just described only applies in some cases.  and the rest look quite normal.

Thursday 4^th July

I see that the IPCC, because of high temperatures in Death Valley, have been rolling out their usual line of, ‘It’s been the hottest decade on record’ and of course the BBC leaped on this at once with an extensive report (They have to say something because of those pension investments in green energy). A graph showing this appeared on the screen, too briefly for me to check the scales on it, then we had the line about more people dying because of the heat, which again ignores the fact that many more people are killed by cold and that on balance less people are dying from both. While Shukman was rambling on about this he did, just for balance (ho ho), manage the four words ‘temperature change has stalled’. But this is the most critical part of it all. Holding out their models as evidence they have been telling us that the correlation between C02 rise and temperature rise is plain* yet C02 has continued to rise while global temperatures have flat-lined for 16 years. Their much adapted, biased and pissed-about-with computer models that cannot even predict the past let alone the future, are wrong, and it is these models that their whole argument is based upon. But you know the part of this that always annoys me? I have yet to see any firm evidence that higher global temperatures are a cause for concern, yet there is plenty of historical correlation between higher temperatures and times of plenty. You really have to be a dick to think that higher levels of plant food in the air, milder winters, increased precipitation and hotter summers is somehow going to lead to disaster.

 *It isn’t plain, unless you lie about the hot and cold periods in the past, which the ‘climate scientists’ have a history of, and manage to invert the fact that the ice-core correlation is C02 rising about 800 years after temperature rises and then, again, somehow forget that correlation is not causation.    

Rats and Flies

Monday 24th June

I’m feeling a bit like a murderer now. After rats chewed down my sweet corn I popped into a hardware shop in Sitia and bought four rat traps at €1 each. I baited these with chunks of tomato and put them in and around the composter in the back garden. On the first night I got one small rat then on the second night I got two big ugly ones. Looking at the corpses before tossing them into the olive grove behind (where they’ll probably be snapped up either by village cats or sand martins), I couldn’t help but note how similar they were to our chinchilla. But traps are the best way to deal with the problem. One local suggested I buy ‘pastilles’. These are a form of poison. I don’t like poison. The rat will crawl off and die somewhere in pain and then, if it gets eaten by something else, the poison can kill that creature too. It’s a coward’s way because you often don’t see what you’re killing. Better a swift snap resulting in a broken neck or crushed skull. Let’s just hope I don’t wonder round there one day and find myself having to duck crossbow bolts...

Tuesday 25th June
Yesterday I wrote that final additional section at the end of Penny Royal III, or Spear & Spine, and felt I could then safely say I had finished the first draft of that book. I enjoyed writing that section because it had in it one of those moments rather like the one in The Skinner, near the end, where Ambel, in a companionable manner, slaps Janer on the shoulder. The book stands now at over 168,000 words. Definitely no more word-counting from now on. I have a basic list I’ll use as I work back through the books: more about Mr Pace, machines feeding power into U-space, Amistad’s miscalculation of scale and the vague ‘more emotion from the characters’. This list will grow as I edit and as some neater or more-workable ideas occur. Right, to work, starting with the second on the list above.

Wednesday 26th June
That was all I needed when I walked in last night and turned on the TV: Obama on climate change. Apparently Americans are already paying the price with recent disasters. Okay, nothing to do with the fact that there are now hundreds of thousands of people, homes, businesses and infrastructure where there used to be a buffalo herd and the intrepid hunter Two-Dogs-Shagging. Oh, and did the Indians keep climate records? As far as I recollect America hasn’t been around very long. He then delivered the canard that those who doubted catastrophic global warming (let’s call it what it is before the goalposts were shifted) have now conceded that it is true. This is of course the complete opposite of the truth. After 16 years of global warming flat-lining while CO2 has been increasing – precisely what many in the upper echelons of ‘climate experts’ said couldn’t happen, according to their computer models – many believers have been going, ‘Ahem, maybe we over-egged that pudding’. The only people who ‘believe’ we are going to fry without action right now are government ministers who burnt their boats, those making money out of green energy, green anti-capitalists and others on the left who want to use it as a stick with which to beat their enemies, and those strange cloistered creatures at the BBC. Next we had Roger Harrabin, still desperate not to be made redundant from his job as Environmental Correspondent, confirming that everything that Obama said was true and, incidentally, that the man has complete control over the sun because it seems to be shining from his rectum.

Regarding Obama’s aptly timed visit to Africa ... I wonder why the words ‘sleezy political opportunism’ keep leaping to the forefront of my mind.

Sunday 30th June
The temperature here on Crete has hit the sizzle zone. Even up here in the mountains it’s been reaching 30C most days. I’m also finding that not a day goes by without me being bitten by something at least three or four times. There are the mosquitoes that hammer you if you stay late in Makrigialos – you only know they’ve had a go when you wake up in the night scratching a new series of bites. They are always here, however I suspect, along with the Sahara dust, we had a lot of unwelcome visitors blown over too. There are the flies that look like normal house flies until they land on you and start chewing, and then there are others whose bite stings just as much, but which are almost invisible – drifting away from you like a fleck of dust. These last are a bastard because mosquito screens don’t stop them. I’ve been up time and time again in the night spraying round the bed because something decided to snack on my protruding leg. Thinking about all these it occurs to me that I missed an opportunity for some added nastiness to the fauna of Spatterjay. Then again I might save it for another world, where people have to wear armoured suits to prevent themselves being drained dry by mosquitoes the size of bananas.

Poison Study & Magic Study

A week ago I picked up the first of a fantasy series by Maria V Snyder: Poison Study. I started reading it, immediately engaged with the characters and found it was a book I didn’t want to put down. Many other books I read I have little difficulty abandoning when there might be something else to do, like farting about on Twitter and Facebook, playing a game of Candy Crush or going for a swim. This one kept hold of me, and even kept me down on an uncomfortable sun bed when a carafe of wine was calling. I also didn’t feel any need for a break to read something else when I finished it and immediately picked up Magic Study. This was just as good and I polished it off over a couple of days. I’ve now stuck Fire Study in my backpack and am looking forward to starting that.

Trophies and Flowers

Sunday 16th June

Here then is the front cover and full jacket of Jupiter War. What you’re seeing here on the front cover is an upright robot and a spidergun, while the full jacket shows a battle scene later in the same book. As always there are things I could say don’t fit – while the spidergun should be there that upright robot shouldn’t – but as always it’s an excellent picture that captures the spirit of the thing. It is real art, which always adds something.

 Monday 17th June
On Friday evening we went to our favourite restaurant for a meal and unfortunately have to admit that we’re finding it less favourable each time we go there. In our first years there we enjoyed the food, enjoyed watching Stelios and Nico do their dance and Nico occasionally doing something crazy like walking on his hands between the tables. Last year because of costs and the Greek thing of family first, Nico was given the boot and replaced by a family member who didn’t last. Things were a bit less good there but still we enjoyed the food wine and atmosphere. But the atmosphere has been degrading a little because of financial worries and the three brothers running the place have been smiling less, and now we have the cherry on the top. The Gabbiano gets most of its trade from the hotel opposite which is generally occupied by Scandinavians. I don’t know why, but now there are more Scandinavian families there. Too often we’ll go for a meal to find ourselves eating out in the nursery with screaming food-chucking ‘little darlings’ everywhere, while the waiters just look harried and smile not at all. Oh isn’t it wonderful how he expresses himself as he yells and runs around! Also, being smokers who have been subject to the ‘denormalization process’ for many years we’re finding it difficult to relax and spark up a rollie, aware of the glares with their subtext of, ‘How dare those people smoke around my precious offspring, and don’t they know about the instant death caused by second-hand smoke?’ We’ll be going elsewhere now.

On Sunday evening we went with neighbours Chris and Terry out for an evening at a restaurant near Sitia (love how the grapes grow there). This evening’s sole purpose is to gather up money for a local dog charity. They are looking after a lot of dogs though, I have to add, there are ten less now since a Greek local thought it might be an idea to break in and poison the dogs.

Anyway, on this evening there is usually a raffle and a quiz, but this evening it was something different. There were 5 teams of four people. First off was a dart match during which each member threw 3 darts and the scores were totted up. We won that by dint of Chris and I scoring over 80 with our throws, which no-one else did. And here is our prize, of which we have shared custody. I’ve no doubt that if my brother Paul sees this he’ll laugh while thinking of his boxes of trophies in his loft – including one for winning the Essex Super-league.

Next it was Pictionary. This dragged on a bit since we were last up and when we had our go we came second. I got the highest number of correct guesses from my pictures but then that wasn’t surprising when my list was: fork, bacon and eggs, smell and T-shirt while my only failure was Groucho Marx.

Tuesday 18th June
So, the BBC story this time was about China running a trial ‘carbon exchange’. The presenter claimed this exchange was needed as she then conflated it with the ‘debilitating’ pollution in Beijing. Now, a carbon exchange concerns the buying and selling of the right to emit CO2: a colourless, odourless trace gas and plant food. This stuff does not debilitate humans until orders of magnitude higher than the present few hundred parts per million in the atmosphere. If you burned all the fossil fuels on the planet you still probably would get nowhere near ‘debilitating’ levels of CO2. So, are the reporters, managers and everyone involved in producing this program item pushing left-wing propaganda, lies and half truths? It seems likely that they are, what with cooling-chimneys as a backdrop to the report – these look ominous but produce neither pollution nor CO2 because what’s coming out is steam. Or are they all as thick as a box of turnips? I have to add that of course the former does not exclude the latter.

Thursday 20th June
When we came here I discovered that a rat had been living in my apotheche (shed). It took me having to empty the shed of everything to drive the thing out, but then that was necessary so as to clear all the shit and piss off the floor, and then chicken wire over the unglazed window kept the damned thing out. Of course these aren’t your usual sewer rats but healthy Mediterranean rats that eat fruit, vegetables and, I was surprised to discover, snails, whose shells were strewn all over the floor too. Either this rat or one of its relatives then took up residence in my composter. This is against the back garden wall and it was using a drainage pipe in the wall to get through. I blocked this pipe and then, in a revenge attack, the rat chewed three-quarters of my sweet corn plants off at the ground. I now open the composter lid while clutching a large lump of fire wood. Last night I woke to the sound of something scrabbling and chewing just outside our bedroom window. I must have been quite a sight charging out naked with a fire poker clutched in my hand. What shot away, hitting the underside of our gate as it went, was a cat. I moment of investigation revealed why: I’d used a polystyrene tray that had contained chicken to go underneath a couple of plant pots. The cat had grabbed this and proceeded to try and eat it, incidentally tipping over two of my plants. Advice to cat: please, go eat the fucking rat.

Friday 21st June
Doncha just love all these high-level discussions by government ministers about how to go after tax evaders? Let me give you a translation: ‘We’ve pissed all your money up the wall and racked up vast debts on unaffordable welfare, social spending, bank bailouts, proliferating bureaucracies, our own unearned salaries and perks, wars that have nothing to do with us and on subsidies for crap like windmills, and now we’re looking for more cash and someone else to blame.’

Wow, there’s a program on BBC world about Georgia. And there was me thinking, what with ‘Report on Africa’, that nothing of importance happens outside that continent. When it first came on I thought interesting, here was a long-running in-depth program about the goings on in Africa, though of course it would be necessary to turn on the ‘white man’s guilt’ mental filter, and I was so looking forward to long-running Reports on India, on China, on America, but it seems those places are not sufficiently of interest to the BBC.

Sunday 23rd June
Plenty of flowers in the garden this year. We have lilies that seem to be turning into triffids and this year we haven’t had the long hot wind destroying the flowers on the brugmansia.

I have just written the ending of Penny Royal III, well, the bit I’ll put THE END after. I still have another section to write prior to that and a recent idea I had concerning one plot thread means I’ll be going through all three books altering and adding. So at what point do I say I have rough drafts of all three books? When I do that prior section – the other stuff can be about turning rough drafts into the final polished version.

Jupiter War Cover

And while I' on here. Go take a look at this excellent article from Jon Sullivan.

Thursday 13th June

Oh well, a quick and unexpected chance to post something more....

It was with much amusement that I watched the BBC report on Greece closing down its state broadcaster. The government there claimed it was a prime example of the profligacy and waste in the Greek system, while the unions claimed it was all the government’s fault because a series of political appointees put in charge. It would be nice to think this had made some at the BBC very uncomfortable, what with its profligacy, waste, political appointees and institutionalized left-wing bias. But they’re just too arrogant there. So how much did this massive new broadcasting centre cost in these ‘times of austerity’ eh?


I see Google is under fire for its tax affairs. This international company is arranging to pay its taxes in countries where taxes are low and though adhering to the law it is, apparently, not adhering to the spirit of the law. Law shouldn’t require the latter form of adherence; something is either right or wrong. If the British government doesn’t like what Google is doing it should change the law. Or, here’s a thought, rein in that socialist greed for other people’s money and drop taxes to the point where international companies are rushing to pay taxes in Britain. We have been in, for some time, that era when bankrupt governments must go cap in hand to wealthy international corporations – something science fiction has been predicting for about 50 years.

Tyres & Doctors

Tuesday 28th May

Last year the tread on the tyres of my car here was getting a bit low and I’d decided that this year I’d change them. But with one thing and another getting in the way I didn’t even get round to checking the tyre pressures until last week. I checked them and they were fine, however, one of the tyres, which had received a knock at some time in the past taking a small chunk out of the side wall, was developing a split. It made me a bit sick seeing that so I immediately went to a local garage to get a new set. This being Crete the guy didn’t have the tyres in – they had to come from Ierapetra – but stuck a second-hand tyre on for me so we were at least safe. The date for my new tyres arriving came and passed. Apparently the tomato truck that delivered them wasn’t running that week. I got them fitted yesterday and now my car has new boots, five days after I went to buy them.

Thursday 30th May
Looking at these pictures you’d probably think to yourself, ooh look, a lovely misty morning in the mountains, and you’d be wrong. I wish I’d taken a picture yesterday when it arrived with a blasting wind, was twice as bad as this and had a yellow tint. There was no mist involved here and not a scrap of moisture in the air, especially with a temperature of 25C at 9.00AM. I could taste dust in my mouth and smell gunpowder in the air. This is of course a dust cloud blown over from Africa, and these pictures are showing the tail end of it.

When someone was telling me about this recently, claiming there was a lot coming over and talking about how badly it affected his breathing, I dismissed it as another aspect of born-again non-smokerism, mainly because the day concerned had been forecast cloudy and there was definite high cirrus in the sky. I’ve been changing my mind ever since what with the crap being deposited on my car in recent weeks and now this.

Shock horror probe! Apparently the EU is suing Spain because hospitals there are forcing people, who present their European health card, to get private treatment and/or hand over their insurance details. What a lovely fluffy place BBC land must be. Only in the UK do we have a health system free at the point of use to every foreigner.

Monday 3rd June
Well, how odd that my last post concerned health systems. So, without going into personal detail, what do you think of the likelihood of this happening on the NHS: getting to see a doctor, without appointment, in quarter of an hour; less than an hour later getting blood and urine taken for testing at a microbiology lab; then an ultrasound scan shortly after that, but only when your bladder is full enough – being sent away by the technician to drink beer and water; then being sent by the technician to a specialist doctor for further check-ups and another scan (though having to wait for half an hour because the doctor was busy); and the next day – at midday – getting an MRI scan; and, in every case, being greeted by the professional concerned with, “Yes, I know who you are.” Actually, I wonder if this would even be possible in England if you went private. Quite a lot of this is to do with numbers of people.

One problem with the NHS is how far removed from the people who are paying are the nurses, doctors and bureaucrats. Their paymaster is the government, but these people lose sight of the fact that the government doesn’t have any money of its own – everything comes from the taxpayer. Only rarely do these people get fired if they’re lazy, inattentive, cruel or simply don’t do their jobs right, and rarer still is any likelihood of them losing out financially. It is this remove that allows them to think they can lecture people about their lifestyles rather than getting on with what they’re paid for and, of course, it is the stifling top-heavy NHS bureaucracy that turns people into numbers rather than patients. And in the words of Forrest Gump, ‘That’s all I’ve got to say about that.’

Tuesday 4th June
Over the last year or more I’ve been designating the books I’m writing as Penny Royal I, II & III, but mooting some tentative ideas about what they will actually be called. I’m settling on Isobel for book I because the subplot of this book in the overall story arc concerns one Isobel Satomi, who has some transformational problems. Book II may well be called Room 101 which is a title with a double meaning. Factory Station Room 101 was where many of the bad AIs came from, and is one the Polity would have us believe was destroyed during the prador-human war. Here’s a relevant entry from the Polity Encyclopaedia about the dreadnought the Trafalgar which ... was built halfway through the Prador/human war at Factory Station Room 101 before that station was destroyed by a first-child ‘Baka’ – basically a flying gigatonne CTD with a reluctant first-child at the controls, though slaved to its father’s pheromones and unable to do anything but carry out its suicide mission. The last book might be called Spear and Spine because there are resolutions here for Thorvald Spear who died during the war and lives again, and because he carries the spine of Penny Royal that contains the recorded dead...

Wednesday 5th June
I fill in one page of a journal every day, which can sometimes be boring and repetitive but is part of my daily discipline. At the bottom of the page I record whether I have done 20 press-ups and 20 sit-ups, my weight, the temperature at 9.00AM (only in Crete that one), my fiction word count and my blog one. I also record my main exercise, which at present will be ‘1 dance’ or ‘1 swim’. Sometimes, depending on what resolution I’m trying to stick to at the time, I’ll record alcohol units drunk, cigarettes smoked, food eaten. If I have done all on my present list (and my fiction word count is above 2,000 words) it’s been a good day. Yesterday was a good day because at last, after doing everything else, I found the sea calm enough for me to do my harbour swim. And as always, though I’m often reluctant to exercise, I felt a damned sight better after it.

That’s all – may be a while before my next blog entry.

So bye for now from both of us in sunny Crete!

Artichokes and Teeth

Monday 13th May

I have to admit to drinking an excessive amount on Friday night. After wine and brandy at the Gabbiano I made the critical mistake, when back here, of deciding to have some raki. As many hardened soaks out there know: it always seems like a good idea at the time. I spent the next day feeling like crap and with an indescribably foul taste in my mouth and was of course telling myself, ‘Never again!’ In the evening, after an internet session down at the taverna, we strolled back to the house past and above our new neighbour’s little terrace. Anna and Babbis were down there eating and drinking in the typical Greek manner and invited us down. Both of us immediately said, ‘No!’ ... as in ‘No, please don’t make us do it.’ After some explaining they said okay, but then Babbis demanded that we go down for coffee the next day. Come Saturday we felt much better and ventured down to see them at about 10AM. Some nice frappes were duly served and we sat there chatting. Anna then turned to me and said something in a combination of slightly broken English and Greek which, with reference to my Greek/English dictionary I finally managed to work out. Many years ago we knew Anna and her husband (now divorced) and during one evening out with them she labelled me ‘the alcoholic writer’. What she had just said was, ‘You will soon see it is your destiny to be an alcoholic writer’, whereupon Babbis came out of the house with a plate of ‘aginara’, which is the edible part of a globe artichoke, raw, soaked in lemon juice and sprinkled with salt, along with a bottle of raki. It would of course have been rude to refuse a second time. Raki at 10.30 in the morning. *Sigh* Well, at least I read on the internet just recently that artichoke is very good for the liver and may even help it regenerate...

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On Sunday night we watched the last season of Deadwood, impatient, annoyed... The first season, once we were past the language barrier, held out so much promise. The second season was a bit meh but we felt it worth staying with and were a little annoyed hearing it had been cancelled after three seasons.

The third season was when the writers completely lost the plot. From a writer’s perspective I can see where it went wrong. There were too many ‘characters’ that for some reason had to be given their own little story, some of those stories just plain irritating, and this resulted in a proliferation of irrelevant sub-plots. Additional characters were introduced when there were more than enough already. I mean, all that prickery about an actor’s troop arriving? The overly complicated and convoluted verbiage had grown. And in the end there was too much concentration on ‘character’ and not enough on the story with the final result that it all fell apart. That ending: the Chinese being armed, Sweringen hiring 18 gunmen, the other saloon guy killing for no apparent reason, the killing of the whore, the woman selling her gold claim ... what a completely unsatisfying mess. Deserved to be cancelled.

Wednesday 15th May
We went down to Sitia yesterday where I had booked an appointment to have my teeth cleaned. I’m not sure how it is now on the NHS because I haven’t been for a while, but my recollection was of a 15 minute check-up and polish then out the door to pay the receptionist about £20. The traumatic session in Sitia cost €70 but took one hour and ten minutes with every tooth meticulously cleaned. Next it seems I need a small filling and my crown replaced because my gum has receded – I’ll have the latter replaced with a ceramic job this time.

I’ve not talked much about other costs and changes here, and there’s a classic one I have to mention. Our nearby English neighbour outside of Papagianades looks after our car in the winter and, as well as taking it either for its MOT or emissions test, gets us our road tax. In its wisdom the Greek government has decided to save money on the printing of the sticky label to go in the windscreen showing that you have paid for your road tax. It’s now just a piece of paper you keep inside the car. This means that even less people will be buying road tax because now they’ve no fear of being caught not displaying it.

In response to the BBC-promoted idea that evil western capitalists cause building collapses in Bangladesh by buying cheap T-shirts, I hear that clothing retailers have teamed up in some ‘safety accord’. I despair. So are these retailers going to employ building inspectors to ensure the right amount of steel and cement has gone into the concrete buildings the manufacturers will base themselves in? Will they be scanning the walls and testing samples of the concrete in buildings every time one of these manufacturers starts up or relocates, in a chaotic country with a population of over a billion? No, of course they won’t, this is just another fillip to that good old white man’s guilt.

Thursday 16th May
Ah regarding that trip to Sitia on Tuesday. It was sunny but breezy with a scattering of cloud when we went down. As we returned the mountains were disappearing in cloud and were being crossed by curtains of heavy rain. When it rains here it rains. At one point on the road up I was travelling at about 10 miles an hour with the windscreen wipers going at full pelt and the road about half an inch deep in water all across. Of course, as is usual, someone wasn’t taking sufficient care – I had to circumvent a van sitting sideways across the road, past a mangled car and avoiding the fragments of both scattered all over the tarmac.

Hey, what a surprise in France? Vote in Hollande, a high-spending socialist twit, and the country ends up going into recession. What a shock that pissing more money up the wall and heavily taxing wealth generators results in the economy tanking. I think I made some acid comments about his election last year when he announced massive spending to regenerate the French economy. I can’t be bothered to search them out.

Tuesday 21st May
Penny Royal III is now past 140,000 words but, as I noted before, I’m going much slower now. As I approach the ending I’m finding I have to tweak quite a lot in the previous books. Certain characters have to be made more dangerous, others less moral while another one, who has only appeared in this book, needs to now be established in the previous two. In some cases this involves rewriting entire sections, in other cases it’s just a line or two to be added, subtracted or altered. However, every case requires a great deal of searching and rereading.

Meanwhile, on the Papagianades front, I stormed down to our noisy neighbour the other day and, with fists clenched and murder in my heart, politely asked him to turn his music down, which he did. The thing about this sort of problem is that you have to be smart. If I shout at him that may well stop him playing his music loudly, but it could also result in offended pride and a worse situation. If I drove the point home by punching him on the nose that could result in me ending up in a jail cell in Sitia or receiving a visit from some of his relatives. In the last case one has to remember that they’re so interbred here the relatives of one person can include half the island population. Therefore, the next time he plays his music, and if it is not loud, I’ll go down and thank him for being considerate.

Friday 24th May
Um, well, I don’t know when I’ll get round to posting this blog. The taverna in the village has wifi so I had decided to use it whenever I wanted to do something on the Internet with my laptop, like collect emails and post blogs. Both of these I don’t want to do on the Ipad because I haven’t found out if there’s a way to transfer anything other than pictures between it and my laptop. Now we’re spending more time in Makrigialos where I don’t like taking the laptop (I don’t like leaving it in the boot of the car where the temperature has to be not far off that for roasting potatoes) but do like taking my Ipad. I must make time, once a week, for that laptop internet connection.

Well, I’ve had my filling, which turned out to be two fillings, and I’ve had my old crown taken out, impressions made and a temporary inserted until the ceramic version arrives. It’s interesting to hear the dentists here (two of them – husband and wife team) using the word ‘caries’ which I’m guessing many English would not recognise even though it is an English word for tooth decay. It’s probably more commonly used in the dental profession. Also, following the advice given on my previous appointment I’ve been using those things that look like microscopic bottle brushes to clean between my teeth. This is all very well but, when you have all your teeth with hardly any gaps between them it’s almost impossible to get the brush between the back two. I guess I need this:

I opened one door of the cabinet and took out a small brushbot, inserted it into my mouth and waited while it traversed round my teeth cleaning them perfectly. Took it out and dropped it into its sanitizer, then went back into my room to dress.

Saturday 25th May
So, we walked into this bar where we met Mikalis the Psaris (fisherman). Stephanos, the owner of the bar, knows we’re not tourists and would be a handy addition to his regular cliental. His face was a picture when he saw that, ‘Oh my God they’ve walked into my bar for the first time in weeks and have got the nutter again!’ On the previous occasion it was a drunken Kurd of our acquaintance who fell off his motorbike outside the bar before deciding to join us. This time we had Mad Mike who was insistent on explaining to us that the two psychos who cut the head off a soldier in London should, ‘not live one minute’ and should, ‘die now’ apparently in the same way that they had killed, and that we ‘do not understand’. Well we bloody well did understand and told him so, but he had to continue his rant. Anyone not familiar with the Cretan man would have thought he was about to turn violent. It’s not that, it’s that they tend to get a bit excited. Then, before we could make our escape, he bought us each a beer we didn’t want, but we managed to divert him onto other subjects.

Back on the subject of the decollation: I saw that the police were doing a fingertip search of the area for evidence. Why? I would have thought two nutters covered in blood and wielding knives, a meat cleaver and a gun was evidence enough. Our taxes would have been better spent on a rope or, even better, the police that shot these two should have finished the job. To save on further bullets they could have used the meat cleaver, then found some handy spikes on the Tower of London...

Showers and Sharks

Monday 6th May

It’s been boiling hot lately – 25C up in the village and 30C down in Makrigialos – so on Sunday we decided to go for a swim. It being Paska we found that most of our usual haunts were closed so tried one called by some ‘the shack’ (I tried translating the Greek name for it and its comes out as something like ‘service’). There we had some souvlaki before venturing down on their sun beds where, despite the umbrella, we were soon frying. Into the sea for a cool off, therefore... I have a feeling that we have been in the sea before at this time of year and my recollection of the experience is the same. It was too hot not to go in the sea but the temperature contrast was almost painful. I got past that by throwing myself in head-first when the water was deep enough (about twenty yards out) while Caroline dithered standing on tip-toes with the water up round her waist. I later took a swim to the harbour, checking everything unusual under the water because of someone telling us of a nine-foot shark recently caught off the coast here.

Tuesday 7th May
Of course when I write about our time here on Crete it always reads like Paradise but, unfortunately, Paradise has its snakes. The first snakes we encountered where neighbours that just would not leave us alone until I finally got angry enough to shout at them. At the time we got on okay with another neighbour called Yorgos. Now things have switched around. The neighbours that were originally a pain are no problem at all now, while Yorgos is a dick. He plays his crappy Cretan music at ridiculous volume as if it his prerogative to ensure everyone in the village hears it. Meanwhile some new neighbours have turned up between us and him. Three houses next to us are owned respectively by three daughters but have only been used occasionally. Now one of the daughters, after a divorce/depression/affair saga three years ago, has moved here with her new squeeze. We’re hoping they’ll tire of Yorgos’s loud music and shout at him in his own language.

Wednesday 8th May
After I’d polished off my 2,000 words yesterday we went down to Makrigialos more in hope than expectation of a swim. It was a mistake. It was hot up here and as we drove down it got progressively cloudier and cooler. In the end we found ourselves sitting in Revans buggering about on the internet, drinking wine and watching hardier souls than us braving the sea. As we returned here the temperature steadily rose again and we ended up sitting outside until sundown. Later we returned inside and got all soppy watching Forrest Gump.

Thursday 9th May
We had a down pour yesterday but, even so, the temperature was up in the 20s. It was really needed because after a dry winter and the soil here was like powder. As usual I did my 2,000 words then spent the rest of the day finishing off Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger (brief review here). Later we started on the third season of Deadwood – it took me one episode before I even understood half of what they were saying.

This morning there’s a bit of cloud about but whether or not it’ll rain I’ve no idea. I wish it would. After just one day of it the plants out there are looking a lot better – rain always boosts things better than any equivalent amount of watering. And, regarding plants, as is becoming a bit of a tradition now, here a picture of how my salad veg is getting on just to annoy Heidi (next door neighbour in England) and my brother Paul:

Friday 10th May
Two days of cloud and a brief heavy shower and we wake this morning to rumbles of thunder coming from Sitia way. I suspect we’re in for a hammering but it’s needed. The downpour of the day before yesterday still left dry patches under various shrubs and other sheltered places where the soil remains dry and powdery. I am also still finding places for our waste water, while last year at about this time I was using it to wash down paths.

Writing: Penny Royal III is clear of 130,000 words but I’m now working a bit slower as I chop out large chunks of text and shift them around. It’s very unlike me to do this but yesterday I chopped out a whole space battle, shifted it off the end of the book where I keep such ‘spare’ bits, then wrote a whole new one at a different location. Why? Because there was something the Polity AIs had to know that would stop them dead in their tracks, while there was something a nasty AI had to know (not Penny Royal) that had to put it on a different course. There are fine lines to walk here. I am writing about entities with superior intelligences who won’t be fooled my something a dumb human would miss, so they have to be a few steps ahead of the story. Meanwhile I don’t want to insult the intelligence of my readers, but simultaneously I don’t want them to be confused by what’s going on.

Saturday 11th May
Yup, it did absolutely hammer down yesterday and I finally had to admit that two of our roof windows weren’t dripping condensation but are leaking. Off to Sitia today for shopping inclusive of a couple of tubes of mastic for repairs. Then down to the taverna this afternoon to put up this blog post along with the two book reviews prior to it.

Trading in Danger - Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon is a name I’ve heard in science fiction for a long time but I’ve never read one of her novels before. She’s American (and a former marine) and I may have come across her in Asimov’s. I guess the fact that I’ve now read one of her novels is down to the power of having a book, with an eye-catching cover, sitting on the shelf in a book shop. Now I have read one I’m happy to discover she’s written over 20 of them, and I’ll be happy to buy some more.

Trading in Danger has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it in that it could have been written 30 or 40 years ago. You’ve got the space ships, space marines and merchants, the needle guns and the ansible that were all staples of the kind of books I was grabbing from the second-hand book shop to feed my rapidly expanding teenage SF habit. No off-putting slide-rules are being used to calculate a ship’s course and there are concessions to the modern age in cerebral implants and advanced medical technology however, that there isn’t much detail about the tech you’ll find in the Hamilton GNR or in my books doesn’t matter at all, because this is about the characters and story. I began to care about the people quite rapidly, thoroughly enjoyed their interactions, and was engaged and dragged along in their story from page one. Highly recommended.

Great North Road - Peter F. Hamilton

    

It’s been a while since I picked up a Peter Hamilton book, mainly because of an aversion to great big doorstops. However, I really shouldn’t have let that effect me since I very much enjoyed his previous enormous tomes including a trade paperback version of The Naked God that made my wrist bones crunch every time I turned a page. My version of The Great North Road weighs in at over a thousand pages and, had I not started it in England and then finished it in Crete (with much ado between) I would have finished much sooner than now. Was there stuff that could have been cut without detriment to the plot? Well, yes, but that was world-building and thoroughly enjoyable. Did I find myself skipping any of this and thinking, ‘Oh get on with it?’ Not at all. Right from the start I enjoyed this look into this future and every time I put the book down it was with growing confidence in future enjoyment when I picked it up again. A great big sprawling enjoyable science fiction read. Does what it says on the tin. I finally closed it with a sense of satisfaction and the intention to now get hold of the Void trilogy...     

Into May

Sunday 28th April

The new taverna at the bottom of the village is a handy addition for us here. I’ve learned that it’s called ‘To Avli’ which translates as ‘The Yard’. We like chilled white wine in this climate while the old kafenion down there was limited to beer, coffee, raki and soft drinks, not so the Avli. We don’t have internet in our house here because, until recently, every option seemed to work out at about €50 a month. Our only internet connection was a 20 minute drive away, but not any more: it is now available just a couple of minutes stroll away. It’s free for customers, but purchasing a €2.50 carafe of wine, with free mezes, is no hardship. Civilization is now reaching Papagianades, which comes as a surprise since Greece as a whole is still falling apart, tourism is down, unemployment is 27% and money is tight.

Tuesday 30th April

Back to work today, which seems a shame what with the temperature having climbed about 10 degrees in the last week. When I say work I of course mean writing. I was going to start yesterday but I had one more thing to sort out for the house. Our way of stopping insects getting in through the terrace doors has been a bead curtain. After last Autumn, which I shall call the Autumn of the Wasp, I decided we needed something a bit better. The problem, however, was a combination of doors and shutters which, due to the thickness of the walls, only have 90 degrees of movement, while the gap between them in just an inch or so, which leaves little room to manoeuvre. So I spent yesterday constructing a fly screen hinged at one side and in the middle, secured with magnetic catches, and with chunks carved out to stop it snagging on various items. They work, but warped wood and some slightly haphazard sawing means they are still, ahem, under development.

Wednesday 1st May

Damn, not a very good day yesterday at all. It was over 20C in the house and higher outside yesterday but I felt cold and quite rough. Too much wine, too many cigarettes? No, in retrospect I realise I wasn’t treating the sunshine here with the respect it is due. Having spent most of Monday in direct sunlight with little in the way of protection my head was roasted. I believe I was suffering from sun stroke. Daft really, since we always warn visitors here of that and chortle at the lobster tourists on the beach.

After further work on the fly screen it is now past the development stage and working properly i.e. I don’t have to bugger about it every time we want to open and close it. Now I just need to tidy the thing up: fill in various screw holes where I moved hinges and catches, paint the thing, cover the rough edges where I cut the netting ... but I have to say I prefer this kind of work to mixing up cement to fill holes in the outside walls.

Thursday 2nd May

You gotta laugh at the white man’s guilt at the BBC. A clothing factory collapses in India and what do they concentrate on? Do they examine the rampant corruption in India, the politicians planners and local officials taking back-handers, the builders who increase their margin by putting just a bit less cement and reinforcing steel in their concrete, or the inspectors looking the other way either because they’ve been paid too or because they’re too lazy to get off their arses and step out of their air-conditioned offices? Do they buggery. No, in BBC land this cannot be the fault of anyone with dusky skin. It’s our fault for buying cheap clothing. What do they honestly think would happen if the price went up? Would the extra money in any way reduce the corruption and inefficiency? No, the people involved would just end up pocketing more.

In a partial answer to this a sour faced harridan said that the EU must place restrictions on such trade until such places get their act together. Oh yeah, that’ll work. The EU already has trade restrictions on other countries. Many African farmers, for example, cannot sell their goods to the EU. The result of this is less wealth heading that direction, and poverty. But that’s okay, because then we feed them money via the likes of the DFID making them dependent on charity. They can look admiringly at their fucking windmills while they starve. Gotta keep them in their place. Strange how those who are so active against racism cannot see how implicit it is in their attitude.

Rant over. I did my 2,000 words yesterday and I’m back on track. Penny Royal III has reached 123,000 words and I’m now into the end game.

Weeds 'n Stuff

Wednesday April 24th


So, we’ve been back on Crete for six days now, the first three of which were colder than in England and required us firing up the stove throughout. It is much colder than last year because then we only used the stove in the evening, and that was upon arriving here two weeks earlier. There was surprisingly little wrong with the house. Yes, the paint is flaking off part of one wall in the hall and there are patches of mould here and there, but we’re now a long way from the days of black ceilings and water features in our bedroom. I’ve also found a way to deal with that flaking paint/damp area. I’ll do what I did, and which seems to have worked, around the lower half of the kitchen arch here: after scraping it I put on a layer of waterproof tile cement. There have, however been other annoyances, some unexpected.

The car we left here over winter became the home for a mouse and the little bugger ate through the HT leads. This wasn’t too much of a problem as the guy looking after the car for me had them replaced. However, since then a warning light has been showing. The garage guy traced this to an emissions sensor on the exhaust and blamed water in the petrol. My concern is that it might not be that and that somewhere else in the car bastard Micky has chewed through some other wiring. I also recollect my mother having similar problems with cars she owned – in one of which the dashboard caught fire because the wiring had been damaged.

The garden of course was a jungle, as you can see by the pictures here:

No problem, thought I: I’ll just get out there and pull them up. This will be good exercise for me and a welcome change from my sedentary winter. The problem was that my sedentary winter had turned me into a wimp. After one day of pulling up weeds I was thoroughly knackered, aching all over and had the grip of a pack of wet sausages. Three days of weeding later and this is where we’re at:

We spent two days at the house working on the garden and tidying stuff up. Not having any shopping in we tried the new taverna that had opened in our village last year. Positive points and negative points there: It’s cheap – a half litre carafe of white wine costs €2.50, and a souvlaki €1.50 – they have internet down there, just a short stroll from our house, but the owner, with typical Greek lack of foresight, even knowing that we are here now for six months, overcharged us on both occasions we were there. First time a couple of €s went on the bill for no reason at all, while the second time he charged us for a carafe of wine we didn’t have. My inclination is to say fuck him and never go back there, but that would be shooting myself in the foot. Next time we go down there I’ll warn him, ‘Oshi extras’ and if he questions that I’ll show him the two bills and explain.

It’s warmer now and we’re venturing out in shorts. We took a visit down to Makrigialos yesterday, had something to eat in a cafe called the Obelix, played about on the internet and paid for the next level of that highly addictive game ‘Sugar Crush’. Interestingly, while checking Twitter, I found a tweet from someone claiming to have been about to buy my books but being put off by my ‘abhorrent political views’. As a guy called Jim Braiden pointed out on Facebook: ‘Remind me again which side of the political spectrum spends so much time extolling the virtues of tolerance?’

Quite.

Friday 26th April

In the evening here it was time for us to delve into the collection of DVDs we’d built up over the winter. The first film we watched was called Contagion starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. I usually enjoy this sort of stuff but the film was simply rubbish: disjointed, completely lack of emotion; completely lacking of fear. Oh look, people dying, sigh. Then, a couple of days later, I see a news story about bird flu killing people in China and now appearing outside that country...

The next film we watched was Passengers ... I say ‘watched’ in the sense that we looked at it for a while in a way one would perhaps experience Vogon poetry. I turned it off before my small intestine crawled up my spine and throttled my brain.

We did enjoy the first season of Alcatraz – in fact just about anything with Sam Neil in is good – however, after a few episodes and having nailed down the formula, we wondered if we wanted to watch about three hundred episodes to discover what the hell was going on. Perhaps those who financed this thought the same, since it was cancelled after this season.

And while I’m on the subject of films: I watched a clip of Robert Redford being interviewed concerning his Sundance film festival. Apparently, with the way the film industry is now, he wouldn’t have become an actor but chosen some other career. What a berk. So, you’d have been off to Waitrose to apply for that job at the checkout would you Robert? Seriously, these actors don’t live on the same planet as real people. Oh, and that reminds me of one of the presenters on BBC World talking to someone about pensions and investments. Even he flinched after coming out with, ‘But how does that apply to ordinary people like us?’

Snigger.   Update: Having just checked under ther bonnet of my car I see Micky did chew right through the wires leading to the emissions sensor.

Mrs T.

Martin Durkin’s excellent documentary last night perfectly outlined my thoughts on the dangerous subject that is Margaret Thatcher. You can see it here on the Channel 4 catch-up site.

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Many years ago when I received my first poll tax bill I of course did not like it at all. It was only in retrospect that I realised that there it was in black and white: this is how much your council, your police, your fire service … are charging to provide their services and here’s the bill. The knee-jerk reaction to this was to protest because of course it was all the fault of the evil Tories. I didn’t go to any protests because, unlike most of those throwing chunks of paving slab at council offices, I had a job to do. It was a stark reality check. The Poll Tax never went away and was just made more unfair by being rebranded Council Tax and then aimed at a target that couldn’t duck it: the home owner. No subsequent Labour government removed it. In reality it was as unfair as any tax to fund state-run organisations because you have no choice; all taxes are demanded with menaces. Which brings me to the 1970s.

A lot has already been written about how things were back then: just about everything state-run and inefficient, unions demanding ridiculous wage rises and striking at the drop of a hat, 33% and 83% income tax rates, rubbish piling up in the streets, endless blackouts, dead bodies going unburied and stacking up to the extent that one city even considered burial at sea, trains running a damned sight more erratically than they do now. However, one small thing can illustrate it better for people now: you didn’t even own your own telephone. We had the British disease; we were Cuba without the sunshine. Britain, prior to 1979, was under the dead hand of the state. And the British were sick of it, which is why Thatcher got in, three times, with majorities that today’s parties can only dream about.

So, Margaret Thatcher started closing down our industries and putting people out of work. She destroyed our country yada yada. Well, no, what she did was stop us having to subsidize moribund, unionized, inefficient, pretend industries that simply could not compete in the real world. We were living in the illusory world of twenty people building a crap car while hurtling towards us was the reality of one person and a series of robots building a good one. And yes, that did hurt and did put people out of work. However, that was because previous governments had been doing just what many governments are doing now with the financial crisis: kicking the can down the road. Reality was going to bite; it was just a question of when.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed our coal mining industry … except it was the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (managing to restrain himself from kicking that can) who closed three times as many pits as her, but that was okay, because Wilson was Labour, and a man. Never let it be forgotten that the coal miner’s strike was firstly illegal because Scargill couldn’t get enough miners to vote for it, and was secondly an attack by Scargill, and other left-wing apparatchiks, on the Thatcher government. It was about who ruled the country: an elected government that won three landslide victories, or the unions. That man used the miners as cannon fodder and, when it was over, it wasn’t him on benefits, oh no, he just toddled back to his 1.5 million mansion.

Anyway … the interesting thing that Durkin documentary highlighted was that Margaret Thatcher fought the establishment, both Labour and Tory, on behalf of the working class. The Tory ‘wets’ didn’t want the working class to have social mobility because, well, shudder, they didn’t want the plebs having the wealth to move in the same rarefied strata as them. Equally, Labour didn’t want social mobility because shit, if the oiks toss away their flat caps, buy white vans or mobile phones and start making money, where’s the sense of grievance and the client-base that gets Labour elected? The very idea of these people buying their own homes or buying shares in companies was anathema. In fact the unions told their members not to buy shares, and were ignored. Both parties had and still have their total snobs. You can see this attitude reflected in the term ‘yuppies’ and in Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character – this is the awful sort of thing that happens when oiks and plebs dare to rise above their station. Shudder.

In the end, of course, the dead hand of the state came back with Blair, Brown and the EU while, damn it, I would prefer to see people working in industries rather than as clients of the state – meaning either uselessly employed by it or on benefits – but how do you get round that? How do we get full employment in an increasingly mechanised world? A world which, in their way, the Luddites were right to fear? That’s a post for another time perhaps.