Out on the perimeter fence
Lightly snowing
The big man up a ladder
Pulling the rusted wire taut
Levering the clips in place
So worn but it holds
Tomorrow they will tackle the chainlink

Sitting at the card table
Pulling old teeth from old jawbones
There is a trick to it
Even now, the table covered with teeth
Like a game of dominoes
He still sometimes forgets
The precise pressure and twist
Necessary to remove them
Whole to the root

Later, making coffee in a tin for them both
Restoring this place
Where he suffered so much
Most of it under the big man's hands and
Instruments
Stockholm syndrome it is called
But the name seems inadequate
For such a feeling of peace

I sit waiting
In the gallery
Watching the street and
Checking reflections for you.
A nearby recording
Explains Fluxus
Or something.
The French recedes into
The melodic honking of geese.

Whatchoo Readin' For?

The last time I was too lazy to post (most of 2007) I did manage a list of what I read that year. Well guess what…

“Econobabble” by Richard Denniss. Popular economics. Some good points and from an Australian perspective - which these things often aren’t.

“The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. China’s most popular sci-fi book. Won all sorts of awards. Mostly dreadful rubbish, although the bit set in the Cultural Revolution was interesting.

“The Long Utopia” by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. Fourth in a series set on a string of parallel Earths. Pretty enjoyable.

“Stoner” by John Williams. Easily the best thing I read this year. Seemingly simple story of a university professor’s life, but the writing is so accomplished it ends up building into a beautifully moving epic, yet built from nothing really.

“Under the Skin” by Jonathan Glazer. The film adaptation of this is one of my favourite movies. The book isn’t as good, but is still an unusual story of dog-like aliens harvesting hitch hikers in remote Scotland for consumption as a delicacy on their home-world.

“The Rachael Papers” by Martin Amis. First Martin Amis I’ve read. First one he wrote. A surprisingly amusing tale of a tortured teenager in early ‘70s England.

“The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson” by Jeffrey Toobin. This was the written accompaniment to the screen-binge I was on at the time here. Plenty o’ Juice. Crazy stuff. Good book.

“The First Forty-Nine Stories” by Ernest Hemingway. Great writer. Usual hijinks in bull rings and pursuing manly pursuits.

“Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. I re-read this one afternoon in Hong Kong while I was feeling a bit ill. A lot of obscure facts in Bill’s usual readable style, though I think I prefer “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” for its insights into the English language.

“Elric” by Michael Moorcock. One novel in a very famous fantasy series. I suppose a successor to Gormenghast, or even the original Conan novels, and a precursor to ‘The Black Company’ series by Glen Cook. “Eldritch fantasy in a dying land” perhaps? Anyway, a bit dire.

“Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders. Popular and ‘experimental’ hit of 2017. The experimental side of things didn’t do anything worthwhile besides inflating this from a short story into a novel.

“Bright Air Black” by David Vann. A retelling of Medea. It opens with Medea in the stern of the Argo, standing in the decomposing body of the brother she has just murdered, throwing pieces into the sea to slow the pursuit of her father, who must fish each limb from the water. Amazing prose and an amazingly fierce protagonist, unbound by the rules of her society.

“Victory” by Joseph Conrad. Enjoyable psychological thriller set in Indonesia. The protagonist was a bit too icily tortured, but there were some excellent villains.

“The Promise of the Child” by Tom Toner. Elaborate space opera which didn’t really grab me.

“Forensics and Fiction” by D.P. Lyle. Reasonably interesting read where various aspiring crime writers ask the author technical questions around forensic devices in their plots, e.g. “if my hero found the butler’s body buried in the cellar two months after he was killed, what would the body look like?”

“House of Names” by Colm Tóibín. Another retelling of Greek mytrhology, this time the story of the House of Atreus: King Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes and daughters Iphigenia and Electra. This is a very realistic take – no gods or magic – which made it harsh, but I think I preferred “Bright Air Black” for its touches of the divine, even if they were explicable.

“The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad. Lighter than “Victory” and not as good.

“New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson. New novel from one of my favourite authors. Fascinating examination of what city life might be like after massive global sea level rises and what it means to inhabit an ‘intertidal’ space.

“I, Claudius” by Robert Graves. Got a fair way through this before I realised I’d read it before. Still, an excellent book and I love a bit of Roman intrigue.

“All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy. The first in McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’. A young Texan cowboy travels to Mexico and falls in love. Beautiful, spare prose. Lot of Spanish. Lot of horses.

“The Crossing” by Cormac McCarthy. Second in the ‘Border Trilogy’. A young boy traps a wolf that is killing livestock on his family’s farm, then tries to return it to Mexico. Things end badly.

“Cities of the Plain” by Cormac McCarthy. The last novel in the ‘Border Trilogy’. The protagonists from the first two novels, older now, meet while working on a ranch, and travel to Mexico when one falls in love with a prostitute. Things end badly.

“The Many-Coloured Land” by Christopher Koch. A writer travels around Ireland to explore his family history in company with a musician. Pretty engaging. Made me want to see the Burren in County Clare.

“American Pastoral” by Philip Roth. Once it gets past the framing narrative, this was a great examination of a man’s inability to understand the decline of his business and the motivations of his daughter in bombing the local post office. It also had lots of technical minutiae about how to make really good hand-made leather gloves, such that I now want a pair.

“The Natural Way of Things” by Charlotte Wood. Ultimately stupid story about a bunch of ‘overly sexual’ women being kidnapped and held on a remote property for an unspecified purpose. Then they leave.

“The Misenchanted Sword” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Amazing fantasy book that I’ve read nearly every year since I was about 10 years old. No thought required but a good story nevertheless.

“Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood. Some novellas concerning Berlin in the ‘30s collected into one volume. Bit of old time scandal – abortions, women smoking – made more topical by passing references to Nazis. Some good prose too. Oh, and one of the stories was the basis for ‘Cabaret’.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” by John Le Carré. The first of Le Carré’s novels I’ve read. Unexpectedly meaty with some good characters, all set in a vanished milieu.    

Well, Well, Well

Songs of Love and Hate

I can’t remember when I first heard Leonard Cohen, but that deep, rich voice wells up from a long time ago. I’d heard nothing like it before.

The Songs of Leonard Cohen is that rare thing, a perfect album, every song polished and lovely. He could have just left it at ‘Suzanne’ and I’d still be in awe, but then there are another nine little masterpieces… and she feeds you tea and oranges / that come all the way from China. I’ve listened to that album so often as I went to sleep that it seems entwined in the process of my consciousness unravelling. The strange, circular narratives of ‘Master Song’ and ‘Stranger Song’ that your mind struggles to hold as you go down, Please understand I never had a secret chart to get me to the heart of this, or any other matter. Well, he talks like this, you don’t know what he’s after. When he speaks like this, you don’t care what he’s after.

He had such beautiful words. He was so fine when speaking of love and of the beauty of women. Every poem I’ve ever written to a woman felt pointless when compared to Walk me to the corner / Our steps will always rhyme or:

Beneath my hands

your small breasts

are the upturned bellies

of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move

I hear the sounds of closing wings

of falling wings.

I am speechless

because you have fallen beside me

because your eyelashes

are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I loved the way some of his songs would find me in unexpected places. ‘Seems So Long Ago, Nancy’ always put me in mind of a particular shade of green that I associate with my mother’s childhood bedroom in my grandmother’s house, and a picture of ballerinas on the bedhead there. It seems so long ago, Nancy was alone. A forty-five beside her head, an open telephone.

He had such power. I remember reading an anecdote about Nick Cave hearing ‘Avalanche’ when he was young and being stunned that music could be like that. Such violence and blackness, Your pain is no credential here / It’s just the shadow of my wound.

He seemed a remote figure when I first heard him, but then he began to turn up in strange places. Natural Born Killers, a cover on an REM b-side. When I became interested in Zen he’d already been there. When the poet Anthony Lawrence lectured me at university he knew his own debts. When I visit Greece I’ll make sure to go to Hydra. Once again it will feel like I’m following, but Cohen is always a path worth taking.

Christians: A Spotter's Guide

Christians can be divided into 5 families: the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. 

Although the first two are theologically distinct, they have less than 100 million members between them, so nobody really cares. 

The Eastern Orthodox Church has 300 million members, but isn’t that interesting from a spotter’s perspective as its various species usually have boring, self-explanatory names such as the Russian Orthodox Church or the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Be aware though, if you are keeping individuals from the Eastern Orthodox Church in a caged habitat they are prone to fight when placed in close proximity. 

While Catholicism is massive, with 1.2 billion followers, species are generally small and mostly concerned with variations on the liturgies used in different countries, usually based on slightly different scriptures or using a local language to the standard ‘Catholic’ rituals. 

For the dedicated spotter, Protestantism is the equivalent of the Brazilian rainforest. Why not try your luck against the following list of the most common, easiest to spot species:

Lutherans: the whole reason there are Protestants. Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with his whacked out ideas – basically that scripture, and not the Catholic Church, is the final authority on matters of faith.

Calvinists: Split from the Lutherans because they don’t believe that Jesus Christ is actually in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Presbyterians: Calvinists from Scotland.

Baptists: don’t baptise babies because babies don’t know what’s going on. If you want to get baptised you have to ask.

Anabaptists: same as the Baptists but they came up with the idea separately.

Anglicans: basically the broader name for the Church of England. It started when Henry VIII renounced papal authority so he could divorce Catherine of Aragon in 1533. It incorporated elements of both Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation via acts of parliament in 1558 and 1559. 

Methodists: split from the Anglicans because they don’t believe that all events have been willed by God.

Pentecostals: emerged from Methodism. They believe that the Bible is literally true and in such things as divine healing and speaking in tongues.

Quakers: Split from the Anglicans. They believe that you can access God directly. No priests are required as intermediaries.

Seventh Day Adventists: grew out of the Millerites (who grew out of the Baptists). Jesus is coming back in the very near future and Saturday, not Sunday, is the proper holy day.

Mormons: believe God revealed himself to Joseph Smith. Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830 as a complement to the Bible.

Jehovah’s Witnesses: look back to the early church. Believe Armageddon is just around the corner.

Unitarians: believe there’s just one God, not a trinity.

Global Warming and Freezing to Death

“Are you worried about global warming?” asked Gerry. The sun was approaching the horizon and the whole world seemed daubed in red. Behind him the Berg glowed pink.

“You do realise it’s minus fifteen?”

“You know what I mean. Climate change.”

“I don’t think so,” said the Berg. “I’ve been around a long time… but before I was me I must have been snow and before that, water. If I melt I’ll just be water again.”

“That’s very philosophical of you.”

“I can feel it happening sometimes.”

Gerry looked at the enormous mass of ice looming over the boat. “What? Melting?”

“Maybe…  You know water is just H2O. Well, H2O is a funny old molecule.”

“You’re in a funny old mood. What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s the sunset… “

Gerry snorted. “You were telling me about H2O.”

“Well there’s an oxygen atom, and two hydrogens, and they stick together because the hydrogens each share an electron with the oxygen – a covalent bond. They stick on like the ears on a Mickey Mouse hat. But the ears are a bit askew, and so the electrical charges are also a bit askew, so one end of the molecule is electrically positive and the other is negative. This means that each water molecule is attracted to those around it and they bond together with what are called hydrogen bonds. They’re not separate, but stick together in a giant cluster, a gel.”

“I think I’ve read this somewhere. More like one big molecule?”

“Sort of, but the bonds break and reform very quickly – under 200 femtoseconds. Anyway, all this means water has some odd properties – a very high boiling point for its weight, high surface tension… it’s why I float!”

The colour had drained from the sea and from the sky while the Berg talked. A cold wind made the suddenly slate sea break into chop. The hollow sound echoed up from where it slapped against the hull.

“That’s what I feel sometimes,” said the Berg. “The hydrogen bonds inside me are locked down, but on my surface, where I touch the water and the air, they’re fizzing away, spreading me out… ‘oceanic boundlessness’ as Freud might’ve said.”

Gerry regarded the Berg with sadness. “I’m sorry we’re melting you, we’re horrible sometimes.”

The Berg groaned and cracked like a gunshot. The water all around shivered.

“Ha! That’s very polite of you. I’ll last a bit longer yet though. My hydrogen bonds are very stable. It takes the same amount of energy to warm me from -160°C up to 0°C as it does to melt me.”

“Really? Wow.”

“Indeed.”

A silence fell between them. The sun was long gone. Hard, brilliant stars were appearing overhead. Gerry couldn’t feel his toes any more.

“You know,” said the Berg eventually, “you’re looking much healthier than you have been.”

“I’ve been eating O’Neill.”

“Oh.”

“When the lifeboat capsized his was the only body I could fish out. He’s been frozen down in the hold ever since.”

“Hmmm. What does he taste like?”

“I’ve got nothing to cook him with. Frozen, hairy, greasy, horrific pork? I don’t know. I can taste him in my mouth all the time but I’m trying not to think about it.”

“Sorry. I suppose it’s a bit like me and the water.”

“Just shut up, ok?”

Failing To See You're Freezing To Death

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You swore to me there was no more booze down there!”

“I’m not fucking drunk!” shouted Gerry miserably. “I had grease on my glasses and I started running them under hot water and one of the lenses cracked because it’s minus fucking thirty. I can’t see shit.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The Berg glinted in the sunshine. “I thought you ate all the grease. And hot water?”

“Not edible grease. Grease grease. For the engine.”

“Hmmm.” The Berg drifted away from the boat a little as if to get a better look at Gerry; wavelets sploshed energetically against the hull. “Your head doesn’t look oversized.”

“My head’s not oversized! What’s that got to do with it? You’re really being very irritating today.”

“Sorry. Something’s too big though, more likely your eye than your actual head. That’s why you can’t see. Your eye focuses light on a point in front of your retina. If your eye was smaller you wouldn’t have a problem.”

Gerry kicked a bulkhead. “Well I do have a problem! I’m starving to death and freezing to death. I spend my days talking to a fucking iceberg. And now I can’t see!”

The Berg trickled sulkily. “Well, if that’s the way you feel… we don’t have to talk. I suppose it means nothing that I could help you get a new prescription.”

“A new prescription?”

“That’s the spirit!” said the Berg, butting against the boat and sending a clatter of shards on to the deck. “Have you got a ruler?”

“Uhh… I’ll see if I can find one.”

Gerry returned twenty minutes later to find the sun had gone in and the Berg floating in a stew of sea ice that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. The temperature had dropped alarmingly.

“Got it? Great. Now measure the distance between your eyeball and the lens you have left in your glasses. Actually don’t! It’s pretty nippy out here. Don’t want the ruler stuck to your eyeball. It’s probably a centimetre. We’ll say a centimetre.”

“OK. Where did you learn all this anyway?”

“I’m made out of ice. I’m reflecting, refracting, all that stuff. Optometry’s easy. Now. Which lens is broken? Left? So hold the ruler up to your cheek and close your right eye. Look along the ruler and move your finger towards you till you can focus on it. How far away’s that?”

“About ten inches.”

“Metric, man! We’re not barbarians.”

“Sorry. Maybe 25cm.”

“Wow, you are blind. OK. 25cm is your farpoint. That’s the point your left eye focusses at when it’s resting. If you weren’t myopic that’d be infinity.”

“Infinity?”

“Technically, yes. The moon, the stars, they’d be in focus.”

“Oh.”

“OK. So you need a diverging lens, one that’s concave on both sides. That’s more bad news actually.”

“More?”

“If you ever need to start a fire in the wilderness you have the wrong type of lens. It won’t focus the sun’s rays to a point.”

“That’s OK. When I get too weak to move I’ve still got a few matches and a cup of diesel put aside. I’m going to set the boat on fire and be warm again before I die.”

The Berg groaned and cracked. A tern that had been perched out of sight on its far side flew off across the water with a mournful cry.

“That’s the spirit! Getting your sense of humour back – that’s good, just let me know before you torch the thing so I can drift off a bit.”

Gerry smiled. He didn’t want to admit it but the Berg’s high spirits were making him forget the sense of hopelessness that had descended on him ever since the lens had cracked in his numb fingers.

“So your diverging lens will make things appear to be at your farpoint. It’ll move things all the way from infinity to 25cm from your face. Neat, hey?  We just need to figure out the focal length for your lenses. That’s just your farpoint in metres, so 0.25, minus the distance of your lens from your eye, call it one, so let’s say 0.24. You bang a negative in front of that and there’s your focal length! Negative 0.24.”

“I thought prescriptions were in whatsits… dioptres.”

“No problem at all. Dioptres are just a bullshit measurement that optometrists like to use. They’re just one divided by the focal length. So… one divided by -0.24 equals... -4.16.”

“Nice mental arithmetic.”

“Thank you. Now optometrists like the steps to be in 0.25 increments, so your prescription, Gerry, for your broken lens, is… -4.25!”

“Wait I thought you were getting me new glasses?”

“Pay attention. I said prescription. Where am I going to get new glasses? I’m an iceberg. The North Pole is just there over the horizon.”

In the Night Garden

Simon watched Mum drive away. She reached the gate and disappeared left. Behind him Dad and the man, David, the man’s name was David, shouted in unison with the crowd on TV.

He was stuck in this room. For the moment he was hidden by the couch and erased by the football. To get to his bedroom he would have to pass in front of the TV, possibly blocking the game at a crucial moment, which meant getting in trouble. If he waited till quarter time his Dad and the man David would be bored. He would have to talk to them or get them a beer or sit with them or do something else he didn’t want to do.

Poking his head around the end of the couch, Simon watched the football. Often, when a player caught the ball, no, marked the ball, near the posts they would take a long time to psych themselves up before they tried to kick a goal. He waited quietly, a secret third spectator, while Dad and the man David shouted things like ‘ball’ and ‘kick it.’ When a player finally marked the ball near the goal, Simon waited - sometimes they marked too close to the goal and just kicked it straight away. The player bent to pull his socks up and Simon ran from the room. Halfway up the hall he heard shouting behind him. “Goal!”

He played in his room; then outside with the dog until it began to rain. Dinner was crumbed fish fillets and oven fries.

“What did you do today, Simon?” asked David.

“Nothing.”

Simon could see David watch him as they ate. He was bigger than Dad, nearly fat, but he had big shoulders too so he didn’t look fat. He had grey hair in a crew cut and a t-shirt with an ugly collar. Simon noticed he put tomato sauce on his fish, which was yucky.

“Hey Simon, guess what? David’s a policeman,” said Dad. Simon looked up in alarm.

“Don’t worry mate,” said David, laughing, “I’m not going to arrest you.”

Little bits of chewed up fish and chips sprayed out of David’s mouth when he laughed. Simon knew about policemen. Last month he and Gavin were playing in the hedge when Gavin spotted a For Sale sign on Mrs Fisher’s fence. The sign was tied on with black baling twine. They had found some sharp rocks and tried and cut through the twine. Simon realised he’d have more success if he separated the thin strings that made up the twine and attacked them one by one. Gavin was still sawing energetically when Simon made it all the way through his.

Suddenly there was a step behind them on the gravel and a hand on both their shoulders. The policeman, Bob Wilson, had snuck up and caught them. Simon was terrified but Bob Wilson had only delivered a very solemn speech about why cutting down the For Sale sign on Mrs Fisher’s fence was wrong – this seemed mainly to be because she was very old. Being caught by the policeman had been scary, but not for long. Two weeks later they found the roller door on the canteen at the oval had been left unlocked, so they snuck in and took as many cans of Fanta as they could carry.

After dinner Simon was allowed to watch TV for an hour; then it was time to go to bed.

“Goodnight mate,” said David. Simon worried he would have to give David a hug but it seemed it was ok not to.

He wasn’t tired and he wanted to find out what happened in the book he was reading, so once Dad kissed him goodnight he got out of bed and crouched in the slice of light that fell in through the open door. He was too big to have a night-light, but his parents left the light on in the hallway until they went to bed. It was cold and uncomfortable on the floor in his pyjamas. Even worse, across the width of the hall was the spare room. Once, reading like this, the door swung back to reveal a dead blackness and the smell of mothballs. He had run to his bed and hid under the covers with his feet pulled to his chest, convinced something living in that black space would devour him at any moment. Tonight though, after a few checks to see the door had not moved, he soon became involved in the story. Besides, the man David was staying in the spare room tonight. Whatever lived in there would not come out.

Simon woke up because he was cold and he needed to go to the toilet. He was sprawled on the carpet, his book an uncomfortable pillow. The door to the spare room was ajar, but that’s how it had been before. He got up and glided quickly down the hall to the toilet. The blue TV-light still flickered in the living room. He stopped when he reached the toilet door because the light was on inside. Was there someone in there? Did David know that when you finished you turned the light off? He reached uncertainly for the knob just as the door opened and David stepped out. Simon jumped and David brushed past him.

“All yours, mate.”

Simon stepped quickly inside, turned and locked the door. The knob moved as David tried it from the outside. The room was bright and smelled bad. David had not flushed and his pee was a dark yellow puddle in the bowl. Simon stood on the cold linoleum and held his breath. The doorknob turned back and forth once more and then David moved off down the hall. Simon flushed and stood for a long time before he could pee. Eventually he finished, unlocked the door and scurried back to his room, not flushing and not stopping to wash his hands.

When Simon woke up again everything was black and there was a horrible noise outside his window. The noise mewled and screeched and hissed, cycling up and down. His tongue felt like a dry stone in his mouth. He could not move. What could it be? His only guess was a demon that must surely be about to burst through the window and kill him. The noise went on and on. Surely Dad would come. If only he could cry out, but no part of his body would obey him.

After what seemed like hours the noise was still there, caterwauling up and down in the darkness. Simon decided whatever was making it did not know he was there and so would not kill and eat him straight away. He also knew there were no stories where the little boy stayed in bed and the noise went away. If he was to be part of a story he must get up and look. With more courage than he had ever summoned before he closed his half open mouth and forced himself to breath through his nose. Breathing right gave him the courage to get out of bed and, as quietly as he could, he crept across the room to the window. Awake, and staring into the darkness for so long, he could see enough to know when he reached the curtains. All the time the noise was still there, spitting and moaning like nothing he had ever heard before.

With infinite caution he parted the curtains and looked out into the garden. The moon was full and in the dead white light he could see two creatures crouched before the rose bushes. The one on the left, which he could see better, looked like someone had scribbled with a thick black pen until they had a scribble that was a little like a person and a little like a dog, cut it out and dressed it in a small set of clothes. The colours were hard to make out in the moonlight, but it looked like it wore a green pair of pants and a red jacket, a battered leather hat and carried a stick. The other creature was harder to see because it had its back to him, but it looked as if it were made from a lot of dead animals all joined together. Simon could see a raggy bit of mouse and what looked like a swatch of magpie forming its back. It had no clothes but was holding a long bone, nearly as tall as itself, by one end. Both creatures were no more than a foot tall and seemed to be having an argument – this was the sound that had woken him.

Simon watched the creatures for as long as he dared. The scribbly one was making the moaning and mewling noises, while the one patched together from dead things was making the hissing and screeching sounds. Although it all sounded terribly violent neither creature moved very much. They reminded Simon of two old men, querulously arguing with one another over a fence, one sometimes banging his stick on the ground, the other shaking its bone for emphasis.

It was cold next to the window in his pyjamas and when he could stand it no longer Simon wriggled a little to keep his feet warm. It made the smallest of noises but suddenly both creatures were silent and looking straight at him. The scribbly one vanished immediately, but the one patched from dead things turned and moved towards him. Simon tried to run back to bed but he couldn’t move at all. The creature came quickly to the window, dragging the long bone behind it. It moved strangely, as if it were an animation drawn in the corner of a book, slow then fast, jerking. When it was close Simon saw that its eyes were just holes with tiny teeth somehow suspended in them like blind pupils. It reached out with an arm that he saw was really the grubby leg of a dead lamb and tapped on the window. It had no mouth at all but it asked him a question in a voice that was wretched and dank.

“Who?”

The next morning Simon woke up feeling good. Then he remembered the creatures in the night and began to feel uneasy. The light under his curtains meant it was sunny outside, and there was a lot of birdsong. This didn’t fit with the strange creatures and the horrible question the patchwork one had asked him. Had that been a dream? The memory felt cold and hard, not like a dream at all, but it was so removed from the sun under the curtains and the birds outside that it didn’t feel like a normal memory either.

No one else was up so he watched cartoons until Dad came in.

“How did you sleep, chief?”

“OK.”

“Did you hear those cats? Bloody things.”

“I thought it was a monster.”

“Argh, I’m sorry Simon, I should have got up and checked you were ok. Did they scare you?”

“It wasn’t too bad.”

“Good boy.”

Dad let him have cornflakes with lots of cream and sugar as a treat. As he was rinsing his bowl gravel crunched in the driveway and Mum’s car pulled up outside the kitchen window. She waved to him and Simon waved back.

“Good morning boys,” she said, coming into the kitchen.

Simon ran and hugged her while Dad asked her about her night. Auntie Jo had been having something called a ‘hen’s night.’

“Were there lots of hens, Mummy?”

She laughed. “Yes darling, it was a veritable chicken farm.”

Simon didn’t know why this was funny or what ‘veritable’ meant, but Mum and Dad were happy and laughing, so he laughed too.

Dad told Mum about the cats. “Did you hear them, Simon?” she asked.

“I thought it was a monster.”

“Uh-oh,” she said playfully. “Alright now though? You know it was just naughty cats?”

He nodded and went to the fridge for some juice. Maybe it had been cats.

“David still in bed?” she asked Dad.

“Yeah, lazy city-slicker.”

But an hour later David was still in bed, even though Mum had started banging around in the bedroom looking for some shoes.

“Go and see if he wants any breakfast.”

A few minutes later he heard quick footsteps in the house and his parents whispering urgently to each other. He got up and went to the kitchen to see what was happening.

“We should still call the ambulance,” said Dad in a voice that Simon hadn’t heard him use before.

“Just call emergency,” said Mum. She was crying and when she saw him standing in the kitchen door she ran over and hugged him. He was scared.

“Oh darling,” she said. “It looks like Uncle David went to sleep last night and he’s not going to wake up.”

Simon wanted to ask if that was because David was very tired, but he knew the truth. “He’s dead.”

“Yes, honey.” Mum started crying again. “We think he had a heart attack during the night.” 

How to write a campfire scene | how not to write a campfire scene.

Sugar Rush

I eat a lot of sugar and it’s been figuring as a dietary demon in various things I’ve been watching and reading for a few years now. I’ve had a sweet tooth since I was a little kid, fuelled by the always reliable treat in the top drawer of a dresser in my grandma’s kitchen; crystallised in one of my few memories of early childhood when I made Russian caramels with her. Unlike many of my friends whose passion for alcohol has dulled their sweet tooth, mine remains keen.

What is sugar? Sugar is a very simple carbohydrate. Indeed, in biochemistry sugar and carbohydrate are synonyms. A carbohydrate is a large organic molecule composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Depending on how complex these carbohydrates are, they are referred to a monosaccharides (the simplest), disaccharides, oligosaccharides and polysaccharides (the most complex).

What we think of as sugars are actually the mono- and disaccharides. The more complex saccharides include things like starch or cellulose (which we think of as carbohydrates) and are both part of what we eat and what we are made of at a cellular level. This isn’t to say though, that simple sugars don’t also form a part of us. The D in DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic – in which the deoxyribose is a monosaccharide.

That’s a lot of syllables. Suffice to say sugars and carbohydrates are the same thing, and they aren’t just what you put in your coffee, they’re basic organic molecules that are absolutely everywhere.

But back to sugar:

Monosaccharides:

- Glucose. You can buy it as a syrup from the supermarket. Plants make it via photosynthesis. It’s one of the three sugars that are absorbed directly into your blood stream during digestion. I like to add it to home-made icecream to make it smoother.

- Fructose. Known as fruit sugar, it is found in fruit, root vegetables, honey and maple syrup.

Disaccharides:

- Sucrose. Table sugar. It is a disaccharide formed when glucose and fructose link together. Also known as ‘white poison’ in more hysterical circles.

- Lactose. Formed from glucose and another monosaccharide known as galactose. It is the sugar in milk.

- Maltose. Formed by joining two glucose molecules. It is present in germinating seeds and 1950s milk-shakes.

Pseudosaccharides:

- Smackose. The sugar you can’t stop thinking about. You try to ignore it with will power and clean living, then there’s a 2-for-1 special at the supermarket and you’ve suddenly downed a family block.

- Wankose. Seen increasingly at trendy cafes that don’t appreciate that if the coffee’s good you’ll have it black and unsweetened, but sometimes a latte with 2 sugars is nice… however not so much if their ‘raw organic Haitian cane sugar’ that looks more like dirty sand changes the flavour entirely.

- Chokose. Dusted over Greek pastries this can be easily inhaled by the novice, leading to rapid asphyxiation. Over 3,500 tourists die in Greece every year from inhaling chokose.  

- Artificial Sweeteners: you're eating them because you're fat, worried about the health effects of sugar, or both. Unfortunately sprinkling this shit on your cornflakes still leaves you a cancer-riddled pig at the end of the day.   

Bonus Level: My grandma Barbara Stebbings’s recipe for Russian Caramels:

Desiccation

The desert is in my thoughts.

Arid nature: the barchan dune; the thorny devil.

Desert culture: the West, the Outback, Islam.

That house where Levon Helm lives in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

The tombs of Ereth-Akbe.

Walt, burying his money.

Ballard.

I still haven’t seen Lawrence of Arabia.

The desert in Bolivia is vastly sublime. We crossed the border from Chile near San Pedro de Atacama, seven of us in a Landcruiser, strung into a dusty line with five or six other vehicles. It was like being on Mars. Huge plains and mountains, dry and red, baked under the blue sky, disintegrating under radiation. We were the only thing moving or living.

Then, around a foothill of Mount Juriques, we come to a salt lake, Laguna Verde: out into cold wind, thin air and harsh sunlight. Pale turquoise water laps powdery white sand underfoot. The sand coarsens; gains colour, ascending to umber mountains.

Later that day there are thin geysers, blown away in the wind, but which still leave the phantom stink of sulphur in your clothes. Cracks filled with boiling mud. Old volcanoes surround people and vehicle. Further on the mountains fall away into the distance. Plains of sand and gravel lead to the Siloli Desert where immense rocks have been scoured to sculpture by the wind. I climb their flanks, quickly breathless in the thin air.

That night I leave the others and walk alone up a small valley carved by a stream. It is freezing and the wind is everywhere. Eventually I find a draw and sit in silence. The little plants in the streambed huddle in silt. The upper slopes of the immense mountain that stands, thrumming, a short way across the plain are still lit by the setting sun. How can snow survive up there?

On the final day we reach the Salar de Uyuni. Prehistoric lakes have evaporated, leaving 50,000 cubic kilometres of salt behind. The spirit has flown but the body remains. It has rained two days before and huge, shallow puddles stretch to the horizon, bisected by the wake of our wheels, reflecting the world. Satellites calibrate themselves around us. Cold seeps through my shoes and salt crunches as I walk. Somewhere the Bolivians are extracting lithium for our mobile phones, but as we leave I see a man sleeping, propped against one of many small piles he has erected amidst the rain-summoned ghost of the dead lakes.

Most of me wants to swap my life for his; remain here and be eaten by the desert.

Breakfast Buffet

In Argentina you can buy your icecream by the quarter, half or whole litre. A lot of that icecream is dulce de leche flavoured. Argentineans are obsessed with dulce de leche, which is essentially condensed milk cooked down into a caramel with the consistency of a very thick glue. You can buy it at the local supermercado in tins big enough to send a class of 8 year olds into an insulin frenzy. At the breakfast buffet in your hotel there will be small packs of it to smear on your sweet cake (or on your very inferior croissant style pastry, the medialuna, which I would not recommend). Sweet cake smeared with thick caramel seems a strange breakfast choice but the Argentineans have yet to realise that a café can serve pastries, and so they have to work with what they’ve got. You can buy a coffee. You can buy a pastry. Just not in the same shop (medialunas are excepted - but they don’t count). Want to make a lot of money? Open a café in Buenos Aires that serves breakfast with pastries… but don’t forget to charge American dollars because the local peso inflates faster than a dead rat in the sun.

Speaking of breakfast buffets, perhaps one of the strangest I’ve ever encountered was in Buenos Aires, simply because it included small bowls of jelly. The man, let’s call him a chef, in charge of said buffet was more concerned with presentation than actual food, to the point where the remaining slices of bread would be rearranged immediately after you’d taken one. Not having made the conceptual leap to serving pastries, he must have been at his wits’ end as to what to serve the few foreigners who visited his buffet each morning, picking at their selections before exiting stage right; leaving behind a plate of cold toast and half eaten fruit, never to return. Jelly must have seemed like an inspired choice. It’s in a ramekin so you can keep it neat. If no one eats it you can put it back in the fridge and try it out again tomorrow. The lack of an identifiable flavour made it a little disconcerting, but overall I would count it a standout success amid the caramel smeared poverty of the Argentinean breakfast buffet.

Apicide

The bees are dying. They’ve died off before, but not in my lifetime. As far as we know, their deaths aren’t related to climate change, but it feels like that. It feels like an intimation of the sadness I felt when I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and realised all the animals had died.

The name for the bees dying is ‘Colony Collapse Disorder.’ In the past it has had better names. ‘Disappearing disease’ and ‘Spring dwindle’ are two of the neater ones. The current dying began in 2006 and we have yet to ascertain the cause. Probable contenders in descending order of likelihood are:

Neonicotinoids – these are a class of insecticide derived from, or chemically similar to, nicotine. They are useful in that they affect insects more than mammals, and because they can be applied to seeds and from there, provide protection to the whole plant, especially from sap-sucking insects. They are relatively new and their rise in agriculture coincides with the death of the bees, so they are a prime suspect. George Monbiot, an environmentalist whom I greatly admire, points the bone squarely in their direction. A more thoughtful view is taken by the American apiarist and biologist Randy Oliver, who keeps abreast of the scientific literature covering neonicotinoids and their effect on bees. He points out that there seems to be little correlation between the use of these chemicals and Colony Collapse Disorder, although more study needs to be undertaken on how long they linger in the soil, their effects when mixed with other chemicals, particularly fungicides, and their real-world application (when used correctly they seem to have a negligible effect on bees, when used heavily in home and municipal contexts they can cause harm, especially to waterways).

Pathogens – a high percentage of beehives can become infested with the Varroa destructor mite, which weakens bees by sucking their equivalent of blood. The mite can also carry viruses such as ‘deformed wing virus’ and ‘Israeli acute paralysis virus.’ The fungus Nosema is also thought to be a likely culprit in many hives collapsing.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup – is there anything it can’t do? Bees are often fed this syrup in winter when there are few natural sources of nectar. Such a bland diet may weaken their immune system. This may be exacerbated by bees feeding on a monoculture crop during Spring and Summer.

Apiculture – transporting a hive from one area to another can make it difficult for bees to find their way home; it can also spread the pathogens mentioned above. Other apicultural practices being touted as possible factors leading to CCD include the artificial control of queen bees, including selecting bees for breeding based on docility (and the concurrent lack of genetic diversity this has brought to bee populations); the use of antibiotics; the selection of which larva is to be fed royal jelly; introducing a new queen every two years (without interference a queen would normally reign for five or six); excluding the queen from some areas of the hive and clipping the queen’s wings. Lastly, the provision of such infrastructure as combs, wax sheets and ventilation, all of which can be taken care of by the hive itself.

Most likely Colony Collapse Disorder arises from a combination of all of the factors listed above, probably interacting in complex feedback loops. Although pointing at a single cause, for example neonicotinoids, is both emotionally satisfying and automatically provides a simple solution, it does belittle the effort being put in on an international level to pin down the causes of CCD and combat them. Bees are vital to our food supply. They don’t just provide honey for your toast, they provide free pollination to a vast array of crops. So, although “ban neonicotinoids” is a catchy slogan you may encounter over the coming years, and may prove to actually be the solution, bear in mind too that these chemicals have been banned already in France with no discernible effect. As yet there has been no reporting of CCD in Australia despite our use of neonicotinoids.

A summation? There appears to be no simple cause or solution for CCD. A combination of better beekeeping practices and more responsible use of pesticides would seem to be a good start. Until the crisis is resolved take a moment, next time you pass a plant covered in flowers, to appreciate the bees fuzzing its margins, their attention to each bloom, their tiny perfection. 

Solar Mathletics

A 1.5kW solar photovoltaic system in Melbourne is supposed to generate an average of 5.4kWh/day. Does it?

My 1.5kW solar PV system has, as of today, generated 4079kWh of electricity during the 9039 hours it’s been in operation. That’s 4MWh!

I’m a little stupid, so I used this table to figure out that the average day length in Melbourne is 12.10785 hours. Then I realised the average day length anywhere on the planet will be the same over a whole year – that is, 12 hours. That either means the table, Melbourne, or celestial mechanics are wrong. Possibly all three.

So, the 9039 hours my PV system has been operating is equivalent to 753.25 days.

If an average 1.5kW PV system is supposed to generate 5.4kWh/day then mine should have generated 4067.55kWh.

Only 11.45kWh off. That’s probably due to the strange error in the solar system, and/or Melbourne’s place in it, identified earlier.

Miru Miru Mega Yokunaru Magic Eye

Remember Magic Eye ™? Does it even need a ™? It certainly makes the question mark look awkward. Anyway, back when grunge and Hypercolor™ were cutting edge Magic Eye books spent a total of more than a year and a half on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was a simpler time, where staring at a nonsensical pattern for minutes at a time in order to perceive a poor quality 3D image was seen as a bit of a laugh. Now that we have computers you can build them yourself (or at least get a website to build one for you), so I thought I’d update them for the Age of Terror:

How Long Till I Get Some Fucking Marmite?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock I’ll summarise the situation:

February 22, 2011: the Christchurch Earthquake kills 185 people and destroys large areas of the city – the damage compounded by aftershocks in the coming months.

November 2011: Sanitarium shuts down production of Marmite at its Christchurch factory… the only source of Marmite in the entire world.

March 16, 2012: I buy one of the last remaining jars of Marmite from New Zealand eBay before Marmageddon.

February 18, 2013: I run out of Marmite

March 20, 2013 – Marmite production starts up again

Today, 3 and a half months later, there’s still no Marmite on supermarket shelves. Sanitarium have indicated they wish to stock the product in New Zealand before beginning export. Horrifyingly, I watched this video where, behind the cheesy comedy, you can see the new plant in action. It seems to produce a 250g jar of Marmite every 2 seconds, or 30 per hour. From this we can start to see the true scale of the problem:

Population of New Zealand: 4,468,200

Weeks that plant has been in operation: call it 16

Worst case scenario - plant operates an hour a day on weekdays: 1 jar of Marmite for every 31 New Zealanders.

Best case scenario – plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days week: at least 1 jar for every New Zealander

Probable scenario – plant operates for 8 hours per day on weekdays: another 46 weeks until every New Zealander has a jar and they can start exporting some to Australia.

Forty-six weeks! And this assumes that the filthy Kiwis are spreading the stuff abstemiously! What if they’re eating it by the spoonful? Slathering it all over their obnoxious, sweaty selves and then licking it off one another with craven delight? If this is the case there might never be enough to satiate their greed.

The solution? I propose we send the Australian Navy to annex Christchurch and divert all the Marmite that is being produced to Australia. Plausibly we could also send raiding parties into the surrounding countryside to secure even more of the delicious spread. If nothing else, now that Afghanistan is a peaceful democracy, it will give our armed forces something to do (other than demeaning homosexuals in between bouts of sodomy/hazing-the-new-guy).

I believe we have no other option.

Freezing to Death in a Gamma Garden

Gerry leaned against the binnacle and bit into the nectarine. Juice dribbled down his chin and he sucked frantically at the flesh of the fruit to avoid losing any more.

“Where on Earth did you find that?” asked the Berg.

“Below decks,” said Gerry, slurping greedily. “There’s a whole box of them.”

“But you’ve been eating nothing but pemmican for nearly two months now.”

“I must have missed them. Nooks and crannies down there. Yesterday I found a book of crosswords.”

The Berg cracked alarmingly. It was a sunny day and light blared back from its surface and hurt Gerry’s eyes.

“Nevertheless.”

Gerry shrugged and continued savouring the nectarine.

“They’re radioactive you know.”

Gerry spat the stone noisily overboard. “Bullshit.”

“Well, not strictly radioactive, but bred with the aid of radiation.”

Gerry, who had been about to go down to get another one, turned back. “Really?”

“Really. After World War Two everyone was trying to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. Just using it to vaporise Japanese people was giving it a bad name. They made atomic gardens to try and harness its mutagenic properties.”

“Wasn’t this a Simpsons episode?”

The Berg trickled furiously. The sunshine had made its whole surface run with meltwater.

“Don’t be facetious. It’s entirely true. They set up circular fields with a radioactive slug, cobalt-60 or something equally nasty, tied to a pole in the middle. The idea was you planted a wedge of a particular crop and let the radiation work its mutation magic. Close to the centre everything just died. Further back though you’d get weird effects like giant fruit or strangely coloured leaves and flowers.”

“Cool.”

“Actually, I’m finding it distinctly warm,” said the Berg.

“You’re very grumpy today. So what happened with the mutant plants? And how did they harvest this stuff?”

“The pole with the radiation source could be retracted into the ground, then workers would come in to examine what had happened to the plants.”

“Voila, radioactive nectarines.”

“Actually, peach trees mutated by radiation whose progeny are what, today, we know as the nectarine.”

“I’ll be damned. Any other successes?”

“Mint oil.”

“Mint oil?”

“Mint is particularly susceptible to a particular fungal wilt. The Americans irradiated hundreds of thousands of shoots and then planted them in wilt-infested fields. The resulting wilt-resistant cultivar, Todd’s Mitcham as I believe it’s called, is now the standard crop used in the world’s mint oil industry. You brushed your teeth with some this morning.”

“I ate the last of the toothpaste six weeks ago.”

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t when it comes time to get all those bits of nectarine out of your teeth.”

“Very funny. So, nectarines, mint oil… they give it up after that?”

“Oh, it’s still happening. Not as popular as back in the ‘60s and ‘70s but they still use it to try and breed new plant varieties today. The last success we know of was the ‘Rio Star’ – a particularly red variety of grapefruit.”

“That we know of?”

“It’s all very hush hush. Genetic engineering. Radioactive mutants. You know – things you don’t want associated with your product.”

“So how do you know about it?” asked Gerry, turning to head below deck again. The sun had moved and he was in the Berg’s shadow. When he tried to lick some of the nectarine juice from his beard it was already starting to freeze.

“A hippy who was down here in 1976 told me. They parked their boat alongside me for a few days. He used to like to come and and talk to me.”

“Talk to you? You’re an iceberg.”

“He was taking a lot of acid.”

  

Sodom and Gomorrah

On Thursday afternoon, by an incredible coincidence, I finished two very long books that I have been reading for a very long time. They are Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (or ‘In Search of Lost Time’) and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Proust’s is considered one of the greatest works of modern literature; Jordan’s a great work of fantasy. In nearly every respect they are the total opposite of one another. In one respect though, they are the same – length.

Oh, and they both have the word ‘time’ in their titles.

I started reading The Wheel of Time (or WoT as its hoards of devotees call it) when it came out in 1990, twenty-three fucking years ago. Robert Jordan actually died in 2007 and they had to get another guy to finish it, which he did in January this year. It ran to 14 volumes and a touch over 4 million words. In contrast, In Search of Lost Time clocks up only 1.2 million (War and Peace, for comparison, totals 587,000) across a mere seven volumes. Strangely, I read the first volume, Swann’s Way at university, counted myself lucky that was all I had to persevere through, had it itch at me for a while, then started the whole thing again in around 2008.

So, were they any good? They were, but they’re so different I can make no real comparison between them. ‘Exile on Main Street’ compared with Beethoven’s Ninth? ‘Terminator’ compared to Kieslowski’s ‘Blue?’ Jordan himself was an Episcopalian nuclear engineer who served two tours of Vietnam as a helicopter gunner (aside: Michael Herr to a door gunner in Dispatches: “How do you kill women and children?” Answer: “Just don’t lead ‘em so much”). Proust was an asthmatic social climber who spent the last three years of his life confined to his cork-lined bedroom.

The Wheel of Time was epic fantasy of a sort I don’t really read any more – I barely read fantasy at all these days. It was done very well with a big cast of nicely drawn characters, an interesting world, neat descriptions of sword fighting, a novel conception of magic and a satisfying resolution. There was a certain amount of disconnect as the years between each book meant that I started each one with the plot for the previous volume as a dim memory. I do remember that some of the latter ones penned by Jordan, say volumes 8-10, were pretty dull, and having a new author brought in after Jordan died (possibly from RSI after all that typing?) was a definite breath of fresh air to get the whole thing moving and finished.

In Search of Lost Time was vast and infrequently rewarding. It forced me to read slowly and carefully due to its dense, multiply compounded sentences, sometimes running to more than a page. It drew me in with accessible portraits of, and ruminations on, obsessive love, then pushed me away with the tedious minutiae at play between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie at the world’s longest and most boring dinner party. It left me with an impression of Proust as an expert on memory (and what a fantastic thing on which to be an expert), modestly possessing a huge vocabulary, preoccupied with class and with homosexuality (or ‘inversion’ as he calls it), a pettily jealous mummy’s boy, a tender child filled with love for his grandmother, and someone deeply affected by flowers, particularly hawthorn blossom.

So, let me cheerfully roll out the usual clichés regarding high and low culture. The Wheel of Time was a plot-driven, fun read populated by shallow characters and showing a shallow conception of the world. In Search of Lost Time was disdainful of plot; a difficult book populated by multifaceted characters and displaying an almost painful engagement with existence. I mentioned before that besides being long they also have the word ‘time’ in their titles. A good summation then is the thesis put forward by each about the nature of time:

The Wheel of Time: ages come and pass, history occurs in cycles.

In Search of Lost Time: people change so radically from day to day and throughout their lives that there is no consistent ‘person’ left by the passage of time and the process of forgetting. This is only counteracted occasionally when some chance moment throws us back to the memory of an earlier time in our lives – this gives birth to a new being who briefly exists outside time who can look at the past and the present simultaneously from an atemporal perspective.  

Culinary Nostalgia

Back in the year 2000 I lived with Tim Brennan and Conor Grogan in a filthy share house in Thornbury. None of us could cook, but I was still taken aback one evening when Tim served us up one of the worst meals I’ve ever eaten. Afterwards, in a spirit of horrified awe, I wrote down the recipe. For years I thought I’d lost it, but this morning, cleaning out some old boxes I found the recipe for….

Tim’s Terrible Tea

 1 – Boil potato and pumpkin till soft, mash, mix with raw onion and whole garlic cloves then press into base of casserole dish.

2 – Top with cauliflower and mushroom.

3 – Sprinkle with pumpkin seeds, linseed, pepper, garam masala and cardamom seed.

4 – Make dodgy vegetarian ‘white sauce’ by heating soy milk and adding cornflour till you achieve a lumpy liquid. Pour over vegetables.

5 – Daub with tomato paste and cover with strange chocolate coloured yoghurt you keep in the fridge.

6 – Bake in a hot oven until the top is black and the vegetables are hot, but have not begun to cook.

7 – Serve.