To blog or not to blog

The few days of sunshine we have had of late have at very least given me a chance to take a few photos that at least give the impression that Spring is here, and the clock change is a pretty good landmark. I remain unconvinced about daylight saving and its costs/benefits. Part of me really just wishes we could stick to one time and stop all this temporal confusion. We (the Brits) created GMT, it runs through our country and from it every other time on the planet is measured, yet for half the year we don’t even use it ourselves! Oh well, the plants and wildlife isn’t bothered by such man-made contrivances, although our cats just see it as an opportunity to moan on for twice as much food (in which ever direction the clocks jump).

One thing I haven’t lacked over recent days is company. Usually it is a somewhat hermitic existence that I endure, and beyond David my only mortal contact seems to be with the Postman (who is the stuff of 70s sit-coms meets Hammer House of Horror) and the two cats. But the last week or so has been a veritable overflowing of visitors and a maelstrom of activity.  I am reminded of an episode of “To The Manner Born” where Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton is feeling more than a tad lonely but sates her need for human contact by employing an endless stream of tradesmen (you could call them tradesmen then, none of this tradesperson malarkey) to provide her with quotes, measurements, estimates and designs for work she had no intention of ever commissioning.  In the course of the last month we have had so much work done on and around the house that at times I have felt like we were living in the middle of an episode of Property Ladder, minus Sarah Beeny’s latest baby bump and billowing boobs, of course.

The boiler (I refer here to our heating system, NOT Ms Beeny, in case you were wondering at the somewhat inelegant conceptual juxtaposition), as recently reported, was the first to receive attention, has now been upgraded to a combi and is wonderful. But that lead on to us buying a new bathroom suite, thanks to some extra money that landed in David’s lap. Sales prices, pre-VAT increase benefits, extensive ‘shopping around on t’interweb’ and a good deal of bartering landed us a pretty good deal and we ended up with bog, bath and basin residing in the back bedroom for a few weeks. Brian, the plumber, was off sunning himself in Tenerife (presumably on the proceeds of our boiler installation) and seemed strangely reluctant to curtail his holiday to spend a few days in our ‘smallest room’. Some people have no sense of urgency!  This however did give us time to fill the remaining floor space in the spare room with tonnes of tiles and gallons of grout and eventually Brian succumbed to the allure of a semi in Salford and commenced demolition. Brian comes complete with his sidekick somewhat inevitably called Charlie. They are both local people. Obviously the bathroomectomy meant long periods with no water but I remembered my boy scout training and has sufficient bottles filled in advance to still be able to provide endless brews (builder’s strength with a mountain of sugar) throughout the day. I have to say my water storage abilities were second only to a camel although with much less spitting and far fewer Arabs.

We had a few challenging moments with no loo, but having spent a couple of months in hospital I am no stranger to pissing in a plastic container (although did take care to ensure that the ‘in’ bottles were never mixed with the ‘out’ bottles – or at least I think I did). Thankfully we were flush-enabled before any greater urgency required for more creative waste disposal solutions.

Why do people associated with the building trades always think that they can drop plaster, nails, bolts, screws, grout and polyfiller down the loo and expect it to flush away? All you ever get is some sort of modern art sculpture in cement and metal stuck solid to the bottom of the pan which requires scooping out or plunging to the brink of extinction? At least that isn’t such a bad job with a new toilet; maybe it is their way of paying you back for whatever they found in the U-bend of the old one. Those dentures were NOT mine!

A bathroom stripped of all its ceramics is a sorry site (sic) and it just shows how shoddily modern buildings are thrown together. Slowly though the new suite migrated from the bedroom to its new home to a fanfare of blow torches, clanging wrenches and clattering in the loft as the wiring for the shower was moved. Apparently the loo fittings are ‘a bugger’ and the bath outlet is ‘uncommonly low’ resulting in more holes being bashed through the walls and I had to shift all our patio furniture, bins and garden paraphernalia to allow external access. I don’t DO furniture removals! Do I look like a Bernard Cribbins song character?

Right said Brian, outlet is a bugger, couldn’t be much snugger,  little room you know
Tried to budge it, couldn’t even nudge it, he was getting nowhere and so
He had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, gave a shout to Charlie, up comes Charlie from the floor below
After straining, heaving and complaining, we was getting nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Charlie had a think and he thought they ought, to
Take apart the cistern
And the thing that’s like a piston,
But it did no good,
Well I never thought it would

Right said Brian, have to make a new hole, right behind the new bowl, wouldn’t take a mo
Took his hammer, hit it with a clamour, should got ‘em somewhere but no
So Charlie said lets have another cup of tea and I said right-o

Right said Brian, have to get my ladder, sod your straining bladder, you’ll have to wait to go
I was cursing, insides nearly bursting but it got us nowhere and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Charlie, that’s the waste disposal  that I just suppose’ll really have to go
Into the soil pipe, but the fitting is the wrong type and so
They had a cup of tea

Right said Brian, climbing up a ladder, with his crowbar gave a mighty whack
Was he in trouble, half a ton of rubble, landed with a thwack
So Charlie and me had another cup of tea on the patio out back

I’ll said to Brian, thanks a lot for trying, but I really have to poo
He said he ought’a reconnect the water and that’s the thing that he would do
If it wasn’t for the leakage, the risk of major seepage and so
I had to hold my pee

Right said Bri, gotta sort your ball-cock, think it’s got an airlock that’s blocked your overflow
But when he started flushing, the water started gushing
So with much relief to me I got to have a pee and then they went home

Now nepotism rules on the Avenue and Brian had organised for his son-in-law to do the tiling for us. Just to explain the intricate family relationships involved here, Charlie is Brian’s son and he lives on the estate. Brian’s daughter, Ruth, lives diagonally opposite from us, about 20 yards away, and she is married to Rob the tiler. Rob couldn’t come round to tile our bathroom for a week, so we were left with naked walls, no shower and old grout in all our crevices.

But this was not a week of rest by any means. Having shifted the patio furniture for Brian to access my soil pipe (Matron!), then moved it all back again when he had finished, we found that it all had to be moved yet again! A while ago we were approached by a man in a fluorescent jacket and gruff tones with an offer to fill our cavities as part of a council scheme. Never ones to turn down such an offer we agreed (who would turn down a man with a big hose offering to pump you full at no cost at all?). It’s amazing what the council will subsidise these days. I wasn’t aware that my cavity was in need of such attention, but he drilled a test hole and announced that I was in need of a good lagging, so who am I to argue? He left, promising to return with a team of burley workmen (again, a bargain) and we have been waiting to hear his gang bang at my front door. They chose this week to arrive, and so we had to shift all the patio stuff yet again, to give them the access they needed. When you have a gang of men coming up your back passage waving their hoses, you really want to ease their entry as much as possible. Now, the noise of several men going flat out with hammer drills and a huge foam-spewing nozzle is enough to give anyone a headache. Add to this the fact that the integrity of my cavity had been compromised by Brian bashing through an extra hole and we ended up with foam ‘snow’ drifting into the bathroom and it has been quite a fun time. Still, they promise that we should be 30% more efficient (or I assume that equates to a 30% increase in green credentials – if we go much greener we’ll be positively vegetative).

And on the subject of all things green we have now also welcomed a new greenhouse to the back garden. My seedlings and propagators were taking up all available window space in the house (we had even cobbled together a second tier on the kitchen window), so that looking out was much like peering through a jungle. B&Q had a sale. Say no more. To be fair we bought a greenhouse frame, base, glass, all the doings to make the foundations, weed barrier and slate chippings for less than the frame itself was supposed to cost. And they supplied a better model than the one we reserved.

So, at one point we had boxes of frame, base and glazing also piled in the back garden, along with bags of sand, cement and slate, all of which were included in the items that had to be constantly moved around to allow Brian et al to position their ladders.

Now, neither David nor I naturally gravitate towards DIY tasks (hence the need for plumbers, tillers and very odd job men). Our relationship with DIY is much like our ability to fly – we don’t have the right tackle, if we tried to fly unaided we would hurt ourselves and anyone around us and we are better off paying a man with a machine to do the flying for us. God chose to give us the gay gene, not the DIY gene. (Only lesbians get both).  But just occasionally we get overwhelmed with a sudden feeling of ‘how difficult can it be?’ which more often than not ends in disaster. We don’t do tiling because once a hammer decided to miss the tile targeted for removal and appeared again in the next room. We don’t do plumbing because indoor fountains are only cool when you plan them. But a greenhouse foundation – that’s just some holes in the ground, right?

Well, yes, and no. Remember too that I am very limited in energy, stamina, flexibility and strength. Picture a somewhat gnomic figure sitting on a stool, hunched over and picking away at the lawn with a trowel, stopping every ten minutes for a rest and wazzed up to the eyes on pain killers and you’ll not be far from the truth.  Two years ago the work of levelling the plot and digging a few holes for concrete foundations would have taken me an afternoon. Now though, picking away with a trowel and having to stop whenever anything needed lifting, shifting or manoeuvring was a somewhat herculean task.David has the muscle that I lack, but has no idea of how to go about things; I have the planning skill but not the execution. In true Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt style we ended up with the required number of holes in the right places, dug to the appropriate depth.   I invoked all the Gods of trigonometry, geometry, calculus and advanced quantum physics to ensure that the base was both square and level. I was only one step short of sacrificing a virgin to appease the heavens but they are only available in Salford by mail order (– or is that male order?). The foundations, unlike the virgin, were duly laid. We were committed (probably should have been years ago). Once that concrete set there was no turning back. Even a slight wonk at this stage would mean that the frame would be twisted and the glass would not fit. You want excitement in your life, you want pressure? Build a greenhouse!

A weed barrier membrane and slate chippings were added, as per the best gardening advice websites I could find. No way were we up to laying a concrete floor and I don’t think my nerves would have stood for slabs. I have read so many websites on the subject that my eyes are crossing and the only conclusion I have reached is that no two gardeners seem to agree on a single method of doing anything. At all. Ever. The slate will be fine and looks quite good, at least for now. How well it will stand the test of time remains to be seen.

Now, as a kid I was much more in the Lego camp than Meccano; an opinion which the frame construction has only served to strengthen. I turn cold at the thought of anything that needs a spanner and somehow scaling up Meccano to full greenhouse size did nothing to make the job any less fiddly or frustrating. But slowly and surely a structure began to form and I can say that for a moment I felt the same sense of pride that Isambard Kingdom Brunel must have felt when he tightened the last nut on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I just wonder if he too shared that awful sinking sensation when he realised that Strut F2-4 was suppose to be fitted with the recessed flange pointing towards the apex (on Model £4552D only) or that he had forgotten to insert bolt E12-6 into slot G (Fig 2)?

With the skeletal frame balanced tentatively on the base our next task was to glaze the beast. A few ‘challenges’ awaited, not least of which was that the boxes containing the glass had been left outside at B&Q so were sodden. Place two identical panes of glass together with a film of water between and try parting them. Go on, I dare you! They were laid out on the lawn to dry off but even after a good few hours it took extreme persuasion to force them apart. None of these panes were labelled at all, or if they had been the wet had obliterated all trace. It would have been ok, but some of the panes differed in size by just 2mm – that is 2mm that meant they were either fractionally too big or too small for all but one specific place. This fact was buried very deep in the minutia of the installation diagrams and I can’t believe we were the first people to have practically dismantled the frame thinking we had somehow got that wrong, when in fact the ‘square by all but 2mm’ glass was the wrong piece.  Four panels were cracked, but not so much as we couldn’t fit them temporarily but we’ll have to get them replaced at the weekend.

Fitting the automatic opener for the ‘window’ required a degree in advanced mechanics. I say ‘window’ because the term is somewhat redundant in an already fully glazed building – the whole thing is one big window, which is why the term ‘ventilator’ is often used. Of course I can’t test that the vent will open at a suitable temperature until the greenhouse reaches such a tropical clime, and with snow forecast I guess that won’t be for a while. Typical though, isn’t it? I was getting all excited about sowing out some veg directly into the garden in soil that has been fed, manured, nurtured and generally had more products thrown at it than a queen getting ready to go out on a Friday night, and still I dare not actually plant anything for fear of frost!

The base was, if I say so myself, perfect. The frame fitted without so much as a wobble or a twist – I don’t think an experienced foundation-digger could have made a better job. I shall be writing myself a letter of appreciation. You see, all those lessons in geometry at school were not in vain after all. Although I confess that at 43 years old I have still found no sensible use for the Quadratic formula!

I take more credit than I should for managing this wondrous erection. I certainly could not have done it myself and believe me, where the instructions say ‘best with two people’ they are not kidding! We managed with one and a half! David has had to do all the lifting, carrying, reaching and clipping, and I have been reduced to the position of navvy, handing tools and trying to fathom the instructions. His patience has been unparalleled and for all the trials and tribulations we never once mentioned divorce, murder or even creative insertion of a screwdriver. I have to say that David has been brilliant throughout – he’s magnetically repulsed by DIY so how he has kept his temper and good humour I shall never know.

We dismantled the old plastic greenhouse thing and, in a stroke of eco-recycle-brilliance with a few well placed hacksaw cuts it now forms staging and has saved us about £80 if we had bought new. It is certainly as good as anything we can buy custom made for the job, and we’d only have thrown it away.

Over the last day or so I have been transferring plants and seedlings from various window ledges to the new greenhouse, amid the comings and goings of Rob-the-tile. You may remember I said he lives over the road, about 20 yards away? He turned up yesterday morning having DRIVEN HIS VAN here! It isn’t like he had much equipment to bring – a spirit level, trowel and chisel – everything else was waiting for him here.  He did the same thing today; it will have taken him longer to get in the vehicle, belt up, drive here, unbelt, disembark and lock the van than it would to walk over the road. He did walk home for lunch – I was tempted to offer him a lift!

It is looking good so far – when he finishes today there will just be the grouting to do in the morning and hopefully we can get the shower back up and running. I hate having baths; I really don’t see what people like about them. The water is always the wrong temperature, they hurt my bad foot like crazy and you lie there wallowing in your own filth. But by the weekend all that will remain is the addition of a shower screen, decorating the bits that are not tiled, laying a new carpet and buying a new cabinet. Oh God, when I say it like that it sounds like we may never be sorted again. Oh, sod it, at least now I can go hide in the greenhouse and pretend I really am a garden gnome!

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March has sprung with all the zest of Zebedee on valium or a slinky trying to boing its way back UP the stairs, but at least made an attempt to be springy, and the last few days have been glorious with sunshine and blue skies. It makes a change from the rain and cloud of recent weeks, but I suspect that winter is but playing possum. We have finally managed to edge the veg plots – a cunning plan to try to ensure that we don’t end up mowing more crops than we get to eat – and we eventually got round to digging in several bags of well-rotted manure.  It frustrates me that I have to rely on David for the manual labour, but any physical effort still leaves me exhausted and panting for breath. I sound a bit like Darth Vader making a dirty phone call! I did manage to cover the two plots with fleece though, so that should start to warm the soil and hopefully get seeds off to a good start when eventually I can sow outdoors.  I’m looking forward to being busy in the garden – I can potter for hours and when there is an end product I don’t feel like I have wasted my life so much.

I have a few seedlings already coming up in pots on the kitchen window – peppers and tomatoes mainly, although today I also started some plugs of sage, parsley, basil and chives, to get an early crop of herbs. I’ve run out of window sills now though. There are really only two in the house that I can use – any put on the others would fall foul of the cats, who have no respect for anything if it is in their way, and Solo has secured his vantage point both downstairs and in the bedrooms. He sits on guard chattering away to himself as though he is giving a running commentary on life in the Avenue. Maybe he is. Should I float the idea of “Desperate Felines” with the BBC? There IS a ginger cat on the street – who I shall have to refer to as Bree from now on.  I digress.

Most of my bulbs are now at least showing signs of spring and we have had the crocuses in flower; they bring a little cheer into an otherwise overcast existence.  I have hyacinths, tulips, daffs and grape hyacinths all yet to come to flower, although they are at least shooting so we should get a nice display. I should really be using the pots and tubs for veg, but a little splash of colour in the garden is an indulgence I think I have earned.  Speaking of colour, I’m also planning to plant some nasturtiums amongst the veg this year – they should look pretty and are not totally against the whole ‘Good Life’ ethos as they are edible and lovely in salads. That is if the slugs don’t get them first.

I hate slugs. This year I have bought some slug traps to sink into the soil and hopefully lure them to their deaths. I normally don’t like killing anything – I would shoo a wasp or a fly out of the house rather than squish it, but slugs are the exception and they should die with exquisite agony in the full knowledge that they are an affront to Mother Nature and all things good.  The only thing they are any use for is target practice – load a few into a hand-held catapult and see if you can hit a tree/wall/bus etc.  You may remember that last year I managed to cover the tennis courts opposite with splattered slug innards, and this year I may have to up the forward attack in my war against the little slimy bastards. Copper is supposed to give then mild electric shocks. I think copper, wired to the mains, would be an even better idea. Let them spit and frizzle if they try to get at my spuds! There is some satisfaction in the look of terror in their stalky little eyes when you approach with a large tub of salt or a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays. I’d live and let live if they buggered off to someone else’s garden. It isn’t like they NEED to eat my peas and carrots – there is plenty of other vegetation available, so I have to conclude that they do it out of spite.

I am taking the war airborne next – or at least off the ground as I’ve decided to grow strawberries and tomatoes in hanging baskets thus hopefully elevating them above sluggy reach. The sneaky gits will probably find a way to foil even that plan – probably bribe a thrust or two to parachute them into the baskets. But I am steadfast. I shall not flag or fail.  I shall fight them under cloches. I shall fight them up the walls. I shall defend my land, whatever the cost may be.  I shall fight them in the baskets, I shall fight them in the plots, I shall fight them in the greenhouse and in the tubs. I shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this garden or a large part of it were subjugated and withered, then our vegetable plot, armed and guarded by the best slug pellets money can buy, would carry on the struggle and, step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the potatoes, new and old.

We are still getting frosts and it is way too early to move any seedlings outside to the greenhouse-thing we have. (It is really just a plastic bag on a frame, looks as cheap as it was, can’t be heated  and only holds a handful of pots, but its better than nothing) With the cold we have also had blue skies and yesterday I did have a meander round the estate taking a few photos for a community website we have been designing. This is the so-called community which is rapidly transforming into a Lancastrian version of Palestine, and all over the issue of the blessed swimming pool repairs. Since the proper last residents meeting the sides seem to have declared outright war on each other. I fully expect reports over the next few days that one group or the other has developed WMDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if I see Kate Adie and a BBC crew dressed in khakis and trying to file a live report from behind one of the hedges amid the screech of percussion shells and grenades. A small faction of pool protestors has already lodged complaints with parliament and Watchdog, in an attempt to remove the current residents’ committee and managing agent (who are walled up in a fortress of bureaucracy and legal protection. Others are simply refusing to pay for the pool repairs, withholding funds, meaning that there are further delays and I doubt we will have the facility back in working order this side of summer at this rate. I just want to swim. Was that mortar fire and a rocket launcher I just heard?

To be honest, I went out to take the photos yesterday as ‘busy work’ to try to take my mind off the fact that I had another hospital visit scheduled for that afternoon, at which a decision would be made on  whether to start the next phase of my treatment. Now that the cancer is in remission (touching wood) there are still some residual problems that need to be addressed, including damage to my liver. My kidneys are also under close scrutiny as some of the medication I have been taking is known to cause renal problems. Because my liver is one step away from best being served lightly fried in butter with onions and a nice bottle of Chianti, that has huge detrimental impacts on lots of other bodily functions,  even if indirectly, and could be the cause of my sickness and mood swings. My pancreas is also not a happy bunny, but again this may be as a result of medication or my lily-livered liver. So the upshot of all this is that following more poking, pricking, prodding and postulating they want me to start treatment to fix my liver ASAP.  That is likely to be at least a year of injections, tablets and generally feeling ill. Allegedly it is ‘a walk in the park compared to the chemo you have been through’ but still not something I am looking forward to.

I knew this would be needed, so it was no real surprise, but I had hoped we would get a little bit more time before it all kicked off. Knowing about something and it actually happening are two different things and this is not a situation I face gladly or with anything but a heavy heart. I have the rationalization that going through this is better than the alternative but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish it were avoidable. I really wanted to be able to go away on holiday for a week before we were plunged back into the helter-skelter of medical mayhem. I owe that to David, who has been my rock over the last two years and who I am now asking to go through something similar all again. He deserves a holiday; we both do. But this next phase is a pretty unsubtle spanner in that particular jet engine. We wanted to go to the Maldives – tropical beaches, minimal intrusion from other tourists, sunshine and white sand, books to read and lagoons to snorkel, children only available spit roast as a course for dinner, no mobiles or interweb or TV or stress. We have been saving like squirrels for the last 18 months, but prices are extortionate and we were just a few months away from having the pennies. But that is all blown out of the water now as I expect to start treatment in the next fortnight so our tropical tranquillity is now unattainable. So I’ll be starching my stiff upper lip and soldiering on with grim determination, facing whatever this treatment throws at me with good old Dunkirk spirit. I shall fight it in the hospital, I shall fight it in the wards and I shall not be defeated. But if you go on holiday to somewhere sunny this summer, don’t send me a postcard.  I hate to see a grown man cry, especially when it’s me.

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I’ve been somewhat remiss in not having blogged for quite a while now; I think my muse has finally succumbed to the need for hibernation, and with the cold weather who am I to deny? And to be honest, there hasn’t been any major event of interest worthy of its own journal. So today I will aim for a catch-up of what has been happening and share with you the few insights that the last few months have brought.

I last left you  with our house in disarray as we were in the middle of having our boiler replaced. All went remarkably smoothly, despite having chosen to undertake this challenge when the country was colder than the chiller cabinets in Asda, and still in a state of panic due to ‘the coldest winter since the last time it was this cold’.  But despite the ‘idiosyncratic’ nature of the old heating system, and fears that every pipe would explode under the pressure of the new one, all went to plan and we now bask in the comfy warmth of consistent heating, a thermostat that actually works and the savings of not having to heat a huge tank full of water every time we wanted to take our coats off indoors. Let’s hope the fuel bills reflect all our efforts and at least we can enjoy the smug inner- glow of knowing we are now several shades greener with smaller carbon footprints.

I talked also last time of our Residents’ Association and the fated pool, which was leaking faster than a cabinet enquiry and in need of much TLC (aka money).  The various interested parties did indeed meet and, as expected, we spent a good few hours in heated debate, name calling and tantrums the like of which I have not witnessed since primary school. We really were back in the realms of, “My dad’s bigger than your dad”, “You kissed her behind the bike sheds”, “He stole my sweeties” , “…’cos…”, “I don’t want to play any more”, “I’m telling on you” and, “You’re smelly so there”. The playground bully demanded most of the attention (and our dinner money), employing the tactic of just repeating the same thing over and over and at increasing volume, then staring with an “I’ll get you” menace at anyone who challenged that point of view. When the representative from the Management Company tried to answer questions he was pelted by verbal eggs, and the incontestable argument of “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”  before he could actually make his point. And reason was thrown out the window long before the bell went for the end of play time and the various gangs skulked off, presumably to either set off stink bombs in the lifts or at least nick off down the 7-11 for some fags and a bottle of Lambrusco.   Needless to say, nothing was resolved, progressed, or promised and our pool remains as empty Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard the day before her child benefit’s due.

I have also suffered the annual indignity of the ‘birthday celebration’ which, for anyone over about 20, serves only as a reminder that you are just another year closer to oblivion, that your mortal coil is showing grave signs of rust and that your allotted ‘Three score years and ten’ [*] is sounding much more like a marketing ploy than any sort of promise.

* [Figures based on recent  Bureau of Statistics survey in association with Hello Magazine and Laboritoire Garniér – sample of 32.7 people surveyed, 8.92 responded and of the responses, 83.4% said that they were not dead. Oh, and 8 out of 10 cats prefer not being dead too, which is like, over half but they have nine lives anyway so what do they know?]

I tell you, I think myself lucky to get to the end of the week, let alone having any aspirations to reaching retirement age. Which is a shame as I think I’d make a very good grumpy old man and have no problem at all with being a burden on all around me. I’m practising slurping soup, afternoon napping, wearing slippers and complaining that music is too loud, but the TV too quiet and pointing out random things that were better when I was your age. Of course, with medical advances average lifespans are increasing and with stem-cell research we’ll soon be able to re-grow any bits of us that drop off, fail or turn to mush. Soon enough we will become real life examples the indestructible stars of the cartoon world. No plummeting  anvil will stop us. No head-on collision with a rocket-powered train will derail us for long. Falling from a mountain precipice into a near-bottomless ravine, with an enigmatic ‘pfuutt’ of dust to mark our demise, will not in fact mark anything but our exit stage left in the direction of the nearest Acme Stem-Cell and Burger drive-thru. “A new left leg Sir? Certainly, and would you like fries with that?”

I mention this on the anniversary of the announcement of the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep (1997) and a recollection of the amusement that I felt back then at the negative propaganda and scaremongering that surrounded all things genetically modified. We would all soon be growing third ears and x-ray vision! We’d be creating designer babies by the crèche-load and mutating into human-triffid monsters. But that was such a knee-jerk reaction when you consider that we have been playing around with genetic manipulation since the first farmers realised that certain types of crops grew better than others, and that they could breed fatter livestock with better pelts if they only mated the ‘best’ of their animals.

We have been cross-breeding plants and animals for thousands of years, to steer production towards the characteristics we felt desirable at the time. We breed grain for certain conditions or for its resistance to certain disease. A cultivar by definition is a cultivated variety of a plant that has been deliberately selected for specific desirable characteristics (such as the colour and form of the flower, yield of the crop, disease resistance etc.). When propagated correctly the plants of a particular cultivar retain their special characteristics. THAT is old school, Ladybird book of Agriculture, Farming for Dummies.

Travelling on the train last Autumn I was struck by how much shorter the wheat seemed to be in the fields we passed, compared to what I remember from a few decades ago, as farmers have bred short-stemmed varieties much less susceptible to wind damage.  This is nothing new – agriculturalists pick the crops most suited to their needs and prevailing market forces. We used to call it ‘cross-breeding’ – these days we opt for the more sinister connotations of ‘genetic modification’ but what difference does it really make if the process happens  over a few generations in a field or a few months in a laboratory? The end result is the same. As are the risks and the benefits. If we are going to survive as a species we will have to embrace these technologies, find ways to increase yield and grow crops in ever-more inhospitable environments.  We can’t afford to take some hippy moral high ground based on ignorance and a fear of the latest buzz word. It is stem cells today, was genetic modification last week and cloning a fortnight ago, but they all amount to the same thing: a scientific development to which the public have a pre-programmed reaction – fear. These days social network sites are blamed for sparking public outrage, but the process has been happening ever since mass communication allowed viral spread of such hysteria. It is just a bit quicker with Twitter. We seldom stop to consider how much the media colours our opinions on all matters from politics to science, the weather to Cheryl Cole’s relationship challenges. I remain undecided whether we need quite the amount of ‘news’ with which we are bombarded, especially when that news is heavily weighted with opinion and commercialisation. And I wonder if this doesn’t sometimes negate us from the responsibility of making up our own minds.

When we are told that “Thousands sign petition to stop embryonic stem-cell research” are we not then almost incited into adopting a similar opinion? It is easy to get enraged with the rest of the mob.  Sometimes just reporting a thing is an act of influencing opinion. We used to call it propaganda and we used it as a weapon.

This dalliance with genetic engineering isn’t something limited to food supplies either. There are plenty of examples through history of our experiments in Eugenics – the selected breeding of humans to try to improve the race. The obvious example is, of course, the Aryan experimentation programs of Nazi Germany and the killing of disabled (or otherwise ‘broken’ people) through involuntary euthanasia. But similar thinking has been applied in countries across the globe, from Australia to Japan, Scandinavia to the USA. We do it every time we terminate a pregnancy on the grounds of likely disability or illness. Even going back through time the writings of Plato and his stories of Atlantis are based around the concepts of Eugenics, with the Atlanteans  representing a Nordic super-race at war with the Athenians. (And there is some suggestion that Hitler was trying to recover the genetic purity of Atlantean blond-haired master race.)

Taking a wider perspective, it could be argued that any medical interference is unnatural and a disturbance to the order of life. Be that through medicines to prolong life to prenatal embryo scanning. How is the mother who decides to abort a Downs child any different to the farmer who plants wheat which has been cultivated for its yield, or indeed the child who is inoculated against polio? What about the patient who accepts a heart transplant or chemotherapy for cancer? What about the couple who can’t conceive without medical intervention – I remember the frenzied news reports of the first test-tube baby, although the practice is commonplace today and hardly newsworthy. These are all meddling with the natural order but all provoke different emotional responses – usually depending on how close we are to the discovery. The mark of civilization is surely how we deal with these things and how we ensure that they are focused for good. And we WILL come to terms with cloning, genetic modification and stem-cell organs because these things can never be un-invented. Pandora has a very leaky box. We can’t go back, we can’t undo the research so surely better we embrace it and look to the future with open eyes and considered safeguards rather than drive the experiments underground?

Maybe I am biased – after all, I have taken many medicines in my times, to prolong my life (some of them were tested on animals, all of them were tested on other people), I have eaten bread made from cultivated corn (but I have not yet mutated into some horrendous carnivorous UK version of Audrey II), I have chomped on a steak or two which were undoubtedly sliced from farmed cattle (yet I show no signs of growing horns, hooves or a second stomach), I have grown carrots known to be unaffected by fly, and, heaven forbid, I have even eaten battery-produced eggs.  When I was a kid, if someone in the neighbourhood contracted mumps or chickenpox they held a ‘party’ with all the local children attending to try to catch the disease – these illnesses are much less dangerous in pre-adolescence than if contracted in adulthood and offer some degree of immunity if caught as a child. Is that not just a primitive form of stacking the medical cards and trying to outsmart nature? I have taken inoculations against tetanus and to allow me to travel to foreign lands without fear of dying of some local pox. I’m guilty of having chosen both the seasonal and swine flu jabs, preferring that to the potential ‘natural’ risk of death. Not content with that though I have also been guilty of using ocular enhancements, removable devices to correct my failing vision, without which I would almost certainly have fallen off the aforementioned precipice in my near-blind state to land at the bottom of the ravine with a billow of dust – which is just as well as there are so few Acme stem-cell drive-thru establishments in Salford. I was born prematurely, in a time when the chances of survival were much lower than they are today and practices were barely one step up from casting spells, pointing bones and sacrificing baby lambs to appease the Gods of midwifery. Without medical intervention I would not be alive. The same can be said of my battle with cancer. If the natural course of events had been unhindered I would not be here now. As an individual I guess I make a mockery of Darwinian Theory – I’m certainly NOT the fittest by any measure, but in that there is also some hope – as a species we are finding ways to adapt, to survive and to overcome the current challenges we face; this starts at valuing and preserving the life of an individual and is then expanded exponentially to benefit the whole race.

In historical terms, a few centuries ago someone who administered potions to cure the sick was seen as a witch, a Sharman, one who conjured magic and fear. Then they became apothecaries, chemists and medics and held in the highest esteem. Our attitudes change as benefits are proven. So too will they change with body-part replacements. After all, we have organ replacements now, and even whole face replacement, as macabre as sounds to our current sensitivities. But how many of us would refuse the surgery if we found ourselves in need? Moral high grounds are very dodgy places to build an ideology.

I have not yet commented on the other factor which comes into play as part of the argument for or against scientific advancement. Sooner or later someone will raise an objection on the grounds of religion, usually citing arguments that we should not try to play God, or that what we are doing is sacrilegious and a corruption of God’s will. I guess the stance taken by Jehovah’s Witnesses is an extreme example, with their religious refusal to undertake life-saving blood transfusion treatments. My religious views are no secret but I wonder how a Jesus known for having found a way to feed several  thousand people with a few loaves and fishes, would object to us looking for modern equivalents. This also was the man who healed the sick, drove out madness, returned sight to the blind and raised Lazarus from the dead. Surely there can be no serious religious argument against medical research and if we are guilty of interfering in God’s great plan, then so is his son.

On the subject of Jesus, i was amused to read that Elton John has recently expressed an opinion that Jesus was in fact gay. Wake up Elton – that conspiracy theory has been going around since people were first nailed to trees for being different! I assume you are basing your argument not just on his sense of compassion and taste in open-toed sandals but also for the fact he spent most of his life getting pissed with a bunch of twelve other blokes and singing Tim Rice Lyrics? Way to go Elton. That is almost as funny as the hype and fanfare which preceded the live episode of EastEnders last week. Was I the only person in the country to be completely underwhelmed?

Why all the fuss? What was SO special about the BBC broadcasting live television? After all, it isn’t so many years ago that ALL television was live. I wonder what percentage of new output from the BBC is live – a fair amount I would speculate, when you consider news and current affairs programming, sports, coverage of major events, political debate and even phone-in shows. Live drama is hardly a new concept – THAT has been going on in theatres for centuries. Combining drama with a live broadcast isn’t new – look at the early soap operas, sketch shows and so forth. Okay, so drama is faster paced these days, but current technology, sets, lighting should all be able to cope with that. And EastEnders was far from a totally slick production – I noticed camera goofs to rival anything seen on Acorn Antiques, and it was very clear where spacing shots had been written in to allow for time slippage. Did I see Miss Babs loitering behind the bar in the Queen Vic and was that Mrs Overall poised just off camera with a plate of macaroons and a fresh mug of coffee?

Still, as Marion Clune, AA producer [*] once said: “We professionals notice – Joe Public never clocks a darn thing”

[* Thanks for the correction!]

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As I write this I have the eager attendance of two strange men who are currently gauging the size of my flu, with the intention of giving my pipework a good seeing to, for, after three years of saving, we are finally getting our central heating system replaced.  Of course our old boiler just scraped through as being ineligible for the government scrappage scheme (it is rated F and would have to be G to qualify). Goodness knows what a G rated system must be – an open camp-fire maybe, a candle over a pan of water, or perhaps just sitting round an exposed kettle element. I thought the deal sounded too good to be true, and Mr Brown didn’t let me down.  This was all supposed to happen a few weeks ago, plumber booked, loft cleared, but the country was at the time crippled and helpless under a blanket of white unpreparedness.

I read an interesting article the other day that echoed my thoughts on the scaremongering prevalent during the snow – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8460245.stm – It questions the mathematics behind claims that the bad weather cost the economy hundreds of millions of pounds, and takes a somewhat more balanced view noting a few key points:

• Some businesses will have suffered, but others will have benefited. Our plumber says he was rushed off his feet with call-outs to burst pipes and broken boilers. Ditto panel beaters and the supermarkets who’s shelves were stripped in a frenzy of panic buying.
• Some businesses will simply have deferred work and whilst they had a lean time a few weeks ago, they will be doubly busy catching up with a backlog. People who, for example, didn’t get their hair cut then will need a cut and blow job eventually. The industry didn’t loose out – there is no less hair to cut in total. Manufacturing orders won’t have been cancelled – just delayed.  After all, the whole country was frozen so cancelling an order for Blivets from one company and placing it with another would have gained nothing.
• Other sales will have rocketed – warm clothes, anti-freeze, road salt (which probably had a higher street value than cocaine!) and of course fuel.

So whilst yes, there will have been individual losses and hardship, I doubt that this will show as more than a minor blip in terms of impact on the GDP. I can’t help thinking that there is something very English about making things out to be far worse than they really are. I have always thought that there is an inherent optimism in being pessimistic; if you expect the worse then you will be prepared for it, and if it doesn’t happen you will be pleasantly surprised. Maybe that is the English way. A stiff upper lip is only any good in a crisis. That said, you’d have thought the apocalypse were upon us with all the moaning and gnashing of teeth, prophets of lost profits and every news broadcast pre-empting the end of the world as we know it. Scares were mongered and the gloom of doom was upon us.  Yet we survived against the odds and life returns to its routines.

Over the past few weeks a bit of a row has broken out in our little local community. All the houses, along with two blocks of flats More about them in a minute), in our estate are tied in to a contractual relationship with our Management Company. The land is all leasehold (contractually we have to pay a peppercorn a year to the estate) and is administered by the Riverdale Management Company which is also responsible for upkeep of common ground plus the Leisure Centre. Last summer, the pool developed some problems and it transpired that many of the pipes had to be dug up and replaced. The upshot of this was a bill for £39,000, shared between all the properties (over £150 each) and demanded by the Management Company before the work would be completed.  Obviously this was a lot of money to find just before Christmas and resulted in an eruption of emotive reaction from the residents. We now see a community divided. Forget Northern Ireland, forget Iraq or Afghanistan – it is quite likely that WWIII will be fought in the hinterlands of Kersal Dale.

This seems to be a battle being fought by about four different factions: the management company and their legal representatives, the people who refuse to pay, the people who have already paid and are furious about any further delays and the resident busybody who is whipping it all into a frenzy yet refusing to show her hand. In among all this are demands that the company books be reviewed, accusations of skulduggery, insider dealing and extortion. People are up in arms and spitting blood. Families in one email distribution list are forbidden to speak with neighbours in another list. False personas abound, as people fear to reveal their true identities. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else amid accusations of being a spy for the management company or a blackleg who has broken the unofficial picket line. Of course, every niggle going back 20 years is now being raised, above and beyond the pool repairs, and we see added into the mix issues about parking, television reception in the flats, key fobs and the hours worked by the caretaker. Why do the residents of the flats pay the same as those in houses, when their upkeep is clearly more costly? Why has the intercom not been fixed?  Who are the members of the residents committee and why have they not been arguing the cause? Is Iris Robinson involved? If not, why not?

There is a meeting scheduled next week between the residents and the solicitors. I expect there will be blood. And it is all pointless posturing anyway. The terms of the contract (which you have to sign to live here) give Riverdale the right to charge “any sum they deem to be reasonable” to cover “any repairs they deem to be appropriate”, so I expect their legal position is significantly more watertight than the actual pool itself! I agree that we have a right to know how the management fee is being spent and why provision was not made for repairs but, like with the snow, this is a massive over-reaction. Don’t mention the pool. I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it. People speak in code, not willing to reveal on which side of the barricades they wish to hang their flag. “What do you think about the pool?” – “What do YOU think?” – “Well, I can see both sides.” – “Me too, I’m glad it is all out in the open.”

All this prompted me to look back through our deeds, to check the details of the contract and also to try to understand how Riverdale came into being. It seems Riverdale Management Company (in various previous guises) took over the Kersal Way estate when our houses were built. When we moved in we knew that this area had been flats but I had no idea of quite what had been here. My curiosity took me to a number of resources including a website chronicling the history of this estate – http://www.kersalflats.co.uk/index.html from which I have included some photos with kind permission of the site owner.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This area was wasteland until the late 1950s, prone to flooding and little more than marsh bog, overlooking the old racecourse and nestling in the vale created by the crook of the river. Following a boom in manufacturing in the city and as a response to the post-war housing crisis, the government hatched a plan to provide high-rise housing in what turned out to be a massive experiment in social engineering. In what was one of the largest developments of its kind in the country (and a “model for future living”), twelve blocks of flats were commissioned along with a parade of shops, community and health centre, pub and play area. Building work took place from 1958 through to the late 60s. As they rose, the flats became a major part of the skyline, visible from miles around. The land was cheap as it sat in the flood plain of the river Irwell so was thought to be unsuitable for development, but needs must and the flats were raised on stilts, a double-edged solution which meant that when the river broke its banks in 1980 the flats remained dry but each was surrounded by its own moat.

At its height, the estate housed 3000 people, but declined from the mid 80s and became “A dumping ground for problematic persons, criminally orientated individuals, and the socially and economically dispossessed*”.  Families were relocated and crime flourished.  The thrill and promise of living in these new modern homes, with hot water and ‘space age’ lifts brought together a community, but it was not sustainable, investment dwindled, neglect set in like the mildew on the walls. Kersal Dale moved from des-res to dump, its reputation plummeted and in October 1990 eight of the twelve blocks were demolished amid much media attention.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

At the time the controlled destruction represented the largest explosive demolition ever undertaken and made national news. I have a vague recollection of seeing footage at the time, and copies of the videos are still available on the website. The intention was to refurbish the remaining four blocks which were passed into the hands of a development company, but even that plan was ill fated and a further two buildings were later demolished. All that remains are two of the twelve blocks, originally called Shakespeare and Shelly (they all took names of poets, as Byron was born and lived in Kersal), re-skinned, refurbished, revitalised and renamed.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

You can see from these two photographs how the flats sat in the landscape. I have marked the remaining buildings on both the old and new images, plus the location of our house. We would have occupied the ‘green’ area in the middle of the development.

When we were looking for properties in Salford I remember checking the Google satellite image for here and remarking how green and undeveloped it looked, never realising that until a few years previously it had been such a ‘metropolis’- not so far distant from Fritz Lang’s futuristic “city sharply divided between the working class and the city planners.”

Whilst I can easily map the old onto the new, see evidence of where the flats once stood, relate to the buildings on an academic level, I find it impossible to stand in our back garden and really feel what it would have been like to be surrounded by touring concrete skyscrapers. I can look at comparison photos and understand the layout, but I just can’t relate on an emotional level.

(c) S.K.Sullivan

This place was once the home of thousands of people, a community, families with lives and stories and experiences. They lived in flats which had open fires (no central heating) and windows that in winter were an inch thick in ice (a far cry from the minor inconveniences we suffered a few weeks ago).  Here I am getting a boiler fitted, where they had to lug sacks of coal up the stairs when the lifts were broken. They will have had a very different relationship to this piece of land than the one that David and I now court.

Much of the land remains vacant, decisions to redevelop now retracted following the current economic depression. Plans made a few years ago are no longer viable, and parts of Kersal are being reclaimed by nature, returning to the way they were only 45 years ago, with nothing but fading photographs to show the high-rises were ever here, but at least we have our leisure centre with its empty, leaky pool. I just hope that history is not repeated where someone decides it is not worth the effort or money to fix and it, like the flats, will fall into ruin.

* quoted from http://www.kersalflats.co.uk

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Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

If a UFO arrived in the skies above the United Kingdom last week the small green fluffy creatures from Alpha Centauri would be forgiven for thinking that we had never seen snow in our country before. It always amazes me how everything grinds to a frozen standstill and we fail completely to cope with what is, after all, an annual occurrence. Supermarket shelves are stripped bare, like an eviscerated carcass in a post-apocalyptic locust attack; road salt and grit pass hands with a black market value greater than cocaine; emergency services are stretched to their limits by calls to attend idiot drivers who have spun off the road having driven at speeds far too fast for the conditions. Accident and Emergency wards are bursting at the seams with ice-related fractures, sprains, broken hips and dislocated shoulders. I bet 90% of the injuries sustained were on people who didn’t really need to go out in the snow anyway. Trains get stranded in the Chanel Tunnel and Gordon Brown sweeps in, superhero cape aflutter, to coordinate Britain’s grit reserves. One assumes the bat-cave war bunker under Downing Street has sprung back to life and Mr Brown is seen saving the country from his twat-mobile. Schools are closed for health and safety reasons – presumably to ensure that the kids don’t slip on the ice. These are the same kids who are then left unsupervised to run amok, throwing snowballs at motorists or careering down hillsides on plastic bags to brain themselves on the brick wall at the bottom.

Maybe I am uncharitable but I have little sympathy for the people who put themselves forward for the Darwin Awards, by venturing out on frozen lakes and rivers. Clearly they fell into our gene pool by mistake too.

Quick tip: if anyone ever wants to invade Britain, do it when we have a light covering of snow, you will find us completely paralysed and at your mercy.

Our friendly Aliens must be pissing themselves as they watch us panic and thrash around, when our neighbours in Scandinavia are no doubt equally bemused by our inability to cope, as they simply lock on their snow tyres and throw another copy of Mamma Mia on the sauna fire.

Every year we are dealt the same rhetoric: we don’t get these conditions frequently enough for it to be financially viable to change our infrastructure and planning contingencies. So every year we are left with a metaphorical trousers round our ankles while our government has pissing competitions in the snow.

But our leaders want to have their iced cake and eat it too. On one hand we are told that it would not be economically viable to better prepare for these ‘freak’ annual conditions, but in the same breath they protest the billions of pounds lost to the economy caused by the snow. (That is, of course, fuzzy mathematics. Yes, some industries will have suffered due to lost production or revenue, but I suspect that just as many will have gained – I bet the AA has seen record uptake, the power companies will be rubbing their hands with glee and whilst bin men may not have been collecting rubbish, I bet they have been gainfully employed by councils for clearing roads. Panel-bashers and heating engineers will be quid’s in. If we haven’t bought bread, we HAVE bought de-icer. If people have been eating tinned or frozen food this week, they will replace those supplies next week. I expect the real costs to Britain.com will soon be smoothed out again.) There is much we could do to prepare for such conditions, which climatologists tell us will increase. In a world of advanced telecommunications, home computers and web-casts there are many businesses which could operate adequately with their employees working from home. We are told to not clear our paths for fear of prosecution if someone believes a driveway to be ice-free but slips on the patch we missed – maybe we need to look at more appropriate legislation which encourages people to clear snow.  Maybe if school catchment areas were limited to walking distance, for teachers and pupils, then there would be less need for closures in all but the most rural areas. I remember that if it snowed during my childhood we just took boots and a change of shoes, but still walked to school. We had snowmen competitions on the playing field, even if there were only a few teachers about. And that was before the mothers all had 4×4s and kids could raise a claim for negligence if they grazed their knee.  If we ran out of bread, there was always yeast and flour in the cupboard. Mother always had a couple of pints of milk in the freezer and the skills to cook up a fortnight’s worth of decent meals from the contents of her pantry.

In Germany there is a requirement for every household to clear the pavements outside their property and keep it clear of ice and snow during daylight hours. In fact, in many areas of Europe there is a legal requirement to fit winter tyres during the coldest months. People buy anti-slip pads for their shoes and wear a few more layers.

We don’t even require British drivers to undertake skid-pan tests experience before they are allowed to drive, so most people have no idea how to react when roads are icy. I was trained by the Cumbria Police Driving School and to gain my licence I had a full afternoon on a skid-pan, and had to show two things: firstly, that I could recover from a skid and secondly (more importantly) that I could drive at a speed and in a way that minimised the chance of skidding in the first place. There is no requirement to demonstrate these skills to get a UK licence, nor is anyone taught and tested on motorway driving, or how to deal with poor visibility. Is it any wonder that Mr Muppet ends up shunted into a ditch at the first sign of a frost?

It doesn’t help that our weather forecasts are so inaccurate. I appreciate that it is a very complex field, with conditions changing all the time, but if any other industry produced such poor results and offered such limp excuses, then they shouldn’t be paid their massive annual bonuses. Maybe bankers freelance as meteorologists, and use the same bit of seaweed to predict financial storms as they do approaching weather systems.  Arthur C Clarke famously said that any technology sufficiently advance is indistinguishable from magic. I wonder if the Met Office has not misinterpreted that as ‘if your technology is pants, bamboozle them with hocus-pocus’. In their defence, the Met Office do say “we can never create a perfect forecast system because we can never observe every detail of the atmosphere’s initial state. Tiny errors in the initial state will be amplified, so there is always a limit to how far ahead we can predict any detail.” So a ‘Barbeque Summer’ is rained off and nobody seems to have seen this cold spell coming. It seems that even short-term forecasts are as much guess work as science and just a few days ago we were battening the hatches ahead of more record-breaking low temperatures due to continue to the end of the month, and yet today it is a positively balmy 2 degrees above freezing and the ice is all but gone. If when working on IT contracts I had put together an estimate that was so far off track, I’d have been sacked on the spot. No wonder people still take bets on white Christmases – if it were anything other than guess-work, Ladbrokes would not take the odds.

But it is not all doom and gloom. We had a wonderful hour out on Saturday, taking photos in the snow. I stumble along as best I can and we can’t go far because I still can’t walk any distance. But the photos are all from just a few hundred yards away from our home and it always amazes me that this area is so rural when it is in fact in the middle of a major city.  Of course, blue skies and crisp white snow makes it easy to take a decent photo.

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No one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that our world was about to end. As men busied themselves about their various concerns, worked and studied like the creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency, men went to and fro about the globe, confident of our empire over this world. Yet across the gulf of night, forces vast and cold and unsympathetic regarded our planet and slowly, and surely, drew their plans against us.

I was there the day that England fell. I, alone, bring witness and hope that someday, somehow, my words will be read and understood.

Lingdale in the 1940s

Our mystics had foreseen it, bent over their charts and globes, reading the signs, interpreting the ancient symbols but we ignored their warnings. Age-old lore told that this had happened before, many moons ago, in the days of our ancestors, but the wisdom of the elders was lost and we would never know what magic they used to survive, to withstand the menace, or how they endured the darkness to carry on the human race.  Their stories were legend, tales of how communities came together to face the danger, sharing food and shelter, managing to survive without the comforts we take for granted in our modern age. That was in a time gone by, a time of wonder and comradery and now our scientists and philosophers spoke in hushed tones of something terrible on the horizon, a gathering of forces beyond any man’s control. But we had closed our minds and dulled our senses, never really believing it could happen to us.

As the night drew closer, slowly and with the inevitability of a ticking clock, a great darkness descended and it began. It came from the sky in the North, devouring starlight and eradicating the winter moon. Our eyes turned to the heavens and our hearts filled with dread. The beast approached and its breath froze the land to iron, a frosty harbinger of the terror yet to come. We felt it sting our skin, bite at our clothes as we huddled together in terror. Some of the younger ones were excited, they thought it all a big adventure, never guessing the torment that lay ahead.

As the world was bathed in a milky light we turned our eyes to the night above, and gazed in wonder at the advancing menace. Some of us were gripped in awe and fell to our knees in prayer as it all began. The Parson gave thanks for our deliverance, for surely Armageddon was at hand. He threw himself to the ground and made the sign of the angels, praying for deliverance.  The Artillery man stood helpless, knowing that no weapon would offer even the slightest protection.  Our healers and leaders scrambled amidst preparations which were woefully inadequate. And in our stupor we found ourselves paralysed, unable to take action to protect ourselves, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide as the devastation rained down upon us.

Word passed around, from community to community, messages sent, warnings given. I was there, like everyone, capturing the scene, recording the events and trying to warn those at the edge of the destruction, willing them to get away while they still had time. Save yourselves! But of course there was no retreat for there was nowhere to flee. How stupid to think there was any escape from this almighty threat.

We heard reports that London remained free, and many set off in that direction, only to perish on the journey. Small pockets of resistance, brave souls against the forces unleashed upon us. We knew that we would never make it to the capital; the roads were blocked and travel was treacherous. And even if London stood today, it was only a matter of time. The London Eye would close as surely as we closed our minds to the destruction falling on us from above. News came in of small groups, families, friends found huddled together, trying to gain shallow comfort from shared body warmth, and physical contact as the blackness closed in around them.

For hours it continued, through the depths of night, relentless, and as the morning came those of us who survived the first attack gazed out upon a changed world. All that had been familiar was gone; all that we had known was buried. Nothing was recognisable. The places of our childhood wiped from view, our lands lay smothered, our homes buried beneath a shroud of despair. No crops would grow in our fields and our factories lay desolate and empty. Those weak of will had raised effigies to our invader, trying to appease the spirit that wreaked havoc among us. All around vehicles were abandoned, as their drivers had made a final run for safety, their tracks just visible as another wave of destruction swept overhead. In the distance a light, a sign that someone may have survived the night. But it guttered and died, along with our hopes.

As I write this now by the dying light of my final candle, I know I only have enough rations to last a few more days. I doubt I will survive much longer. A while ago I thought I heard a signal on the radio, but that has faded now and I know I am alone.

Lingdale in the 1940s

There was news of some survivors near the coast, but I doubt that their story is any better than mine. I have family in the Northern Wasteland, but they will have perished as reported conditions there were worse still. The last contact I had just brought news of their suffering, isolated without food and struggling to survive, terrible conditions deteriorating every hour. I heard the locals had fought to keep a track clear, so that vital supplies could be shared, although by now the community will have fallen, unable to withstand the onslaught but brave to the end. If only we had learned the lessons from history, tried to understand how our ancestors had coped. Maybe the outcome would have been different, but instead our world ground to a halt, falling apart, unable to function.  We remember those heroes who fought on against the odds, warmed by the flame of self sacrifice: the men of medicine who tried to calm the wounded; those who battled on in our power stations, trying to keep the fires burning; farmers in the fields.

Yet, in the stillness there remains a beauty and I see a lone creature out hunting in the wilderness. Life, of a sort, goes on. And while our own race may not survive to live and love, to sing and sigh, to dream and dance, perhaps somehow our world will recover. We may never really understand the forces that bore down upon us over these fateful days, and it is too late to wonder what we could have done differently, what actions we could have taken, what preparations may have been effective. The summer sun is fading as the year grows old, and darker days are drawing near. The winter winds will be much colder… oh, hang on a second. The sun is coming out. I think there’s a thaw on the way and the snow is melting. Ooops, false alarm. As you were.  Business as usual. Don’t know what the fuss was all about really.

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I received a letter this morning, special delivery from the North Pole, and I thought I would share it with you all:

Dear Adrian

Thanks so much for your letter, which arrived today and compelled me to put pen to paper myself. I am sure you will be as sad as I am about my news, but I thought it only right that I should break it to you myself. I’m sorry to say that Santa Enterprises Inc and its subsidiary, Rein-Air, will stop trading on December 26^th this year.

As you are probably aware, the business has been operating at a loss for some years now and we have been forced to realise that we simply do not have the means to continue into 2010. All outstanding orders will be honoured but the official receivers will arrive on Boxing Day to value the few company assets we have left and will then wind up the business.

There have been a number of factors which have contributed to our demise and I feel it only fair to explain some of these to you and our other loyal customers. Obviously it will come as no surprise that we have been hit very hard by the economic downturn: people just don’t have the money to buy expensive gifts anymore. That has a knock-on effect to production and we have had to lay off almost half the Elf workforce. The price of raw materials has rocketed too, making it uneconomical to manufacture key items at the North Pole. We did try to leverage the global markets and even sited a few factories around the world, in places like Africa, China and South America, but the Elves just couldn’t stand the heat and we found that the smell from their body odour was tainting the products.

The new landing strip we had to build turned out to be a bottomless money pit – you will recall that fuss about the old strip not passing Health and Safety regulations and being declared un-sleigh-worthy. We took out a loan to build a new sleigh-port closer to the coast, but we had not anticipated quite how quickly the ice cap was retreating and within months the runway was not on permafrost but on dry land!

Rudolf caught a nasty virus while holidaying on Mexico and so was unable to meet his responsibilities for stock control and materials distribution. This left us with his work to be distributed amongst his colleagues but they involved the unions and the whole matter got out of hand. To top it all, we had a bunch of climate change protesters demanding that we measure the reindeer for methane output, which apparently exceeds international standards and we have had to get them all fitted with ‘emission collection bags’ before they can undertake this year’s deliveries. That just added insult to injury after I had to fork out for special anti-glare visors for them, following that damning report by the Chief Medical Elf that their eyesight was being damaged by the increased light from all those blessed house decorations.

We have seen a massive tail-off in traditional toy orders over the last few years – kids these days just don’t want the sort of product that we are set up to produce. Oh, we tried re-branding but with very limited success. It seems that simply prefixing a product name with ‘i’ is not enough. We thought we might get away with iCandy and our new Post Office themed board game – iQueue – looked promising in market research but they never really took off. A huge linguistic misunderstanding left us with an over-order of iGlue, originally destined for the Eskimos – we were stuck with that for ages! The” iSaw,  iScrew, iBang” carpenter set failed to capture anyone’s imagination.  And of course, when we tried to branch out into consumer electronics we were sued by iTV.

Our traditional ‘main crop’ products are all now pretty much redundant – people just don’t buy their music in any tangible form these days and I defy anybody to wrap up an mp3 file with paper and a ribbon. Even the Christmas Number One (originally a marketing ‘opportunity’ that I came up with years ago) is now all electronic with hardly a vinyl disk passing hands. It is a travesty! Our long-running contract with Grannies Ltd was not renewed. We used to supply 93% of the world’s knitwear to elderly folk around the world, so that they could pass it off as their own, to the delight of nieces, nephews, sons and daughters, but who wants an Aran cardigan any more?

The divorce from Mrs Clause cost me dearly too. She is now living with her Civil Partner, Brenda, in Basingstoke. She claimed irrevocable breakdown of marriage after that nasty incident with the Elf – he really was helping me zip up my new Santa costume, that WAS a carrot in my pocket  and his eyes were only watering because of the cold. And how dare she claim that I showed her no warmth? It’s living at the pole that is frigid, not me!

I’m not entirely blameless in the demise of my business I suppose. I haven’t kept up with current trends as I might have, but I always thought that tradition and family values would be enough to keep us going.  I’m just not a creature of the 21^st Century. For example, I received this letter the other day and have absolutely no idea what it is on about:

I’m going to send him an Airfix model of the Eifel Tower and a yo-yo, but I expect they will be returned! I mourn for the days when a box of Lego and some plasticine could keep kids amused for hours – but even commissioning that Top Gear bloke to do some extra promo hasn’t increased sales in traditional toys. Nobody is interested if it doesn’t plug in or download. Take last year, for example, we had over a thousand apples returned because they didn’t come with the latest version of iTunes!

My SOS (Save our Santa) appeal was a wasted effort – we had very few donations and those that did arrive were all in incorrectly stamped envelopes which ended up costing us more in postage fees than we made in total. We tried, we failed.

Anyway, we must look to the future. I know I will leave a gap in the market, but commercialism moves ever onward and I suppose I’m no worse off than that profiteer from Nazareth who thought he had the Winter monopoly a couple of millennia ago – and look where that got him! So I expect that next year you will be able to get everything you need for Christmas as a podcast.

I’m relocating to some new accommodation in Dubai – I heard there is plenty of property there going for a song. And even though the Christmas market has collapsed, I fancy trying my hand at oil prospecting – I’m sure that is an industry that will remain buoyant for many thousands of years to come.

Have a happy Christmas, and thanks for all your support over the last 42 years. Love to David.

Santa xxx

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Dear Santa

As is customary I shall be leaving your annual bribe (two mince pies and a glass of extremely cheap sherry) beside our non-existent fireplace. I’m sorry that for the second year running I can’t afford to run to the extent of a carrot for Rudolf, but there is a recession on, and with adequate boiling I can feed both David and me on the carrot for three days.  We all have to make sacrifices and I’m sure you understand. It is just as well Rudolf doesn’t run on unleaded, the price of which has sneaked up again, although if he did, I guess the nozzle insertion would go some way to explaining his perpetual look of surprise! Is there something you are not telling us? Has Rudolf been running on petrol instead of the carrot-based bio-fuels as you claim? You’ll soon have to get him converted and there are many decent hybrids coming on the market, although I have yet to see any mileage stats for reindeer and it may be a bit disruptive to you if you have to stop every 200 miles for a recharge.

I gather that Top Gear will be doing a Christmas Special and the Stig is scheduled to roadtest the new Volvo VT20i sports-edition Sleigh, so you might watch out for that.  Clarkson was raving about Sleighs being the next big thing in transport solutions – they solve so many congestion problems although, as James May pointed out, Air Traffic Control are raising a right fuss about increased workload.  I don’t know why they complain, so many airlines have gone bust that their radar screens can hardly be bipping at all, and BA probably won’t be an issue much longer either. On a positive note, Gardeners’ Question Time the other day ran an interesting article from Kent (you know, where the UK Sleigh Research and Development Company is located) saying that reindeer shit is particularly good for rhubarb so there could be a decent side-line there for you if you can just perfect the delivery system.

I digress, so back to the point of my letter. As I say, your ‘payment’ is available for collection as usual and this year I shall, in light of the economic climate, scale back my demands. Clearly last year my request for world peace was beyond your abilities and if the best you could manage was a Nobel Prize for that damn yank, then I really think you could have tried a little harder. Still, I make allowances for your increasing age and senility.  Let’s try something a little easier for 2010. It would be really good if we could have some proper seasons – you know, in the traditional pattern, and of appropriate duration. Last year you seemed to opt for the ‘four seasons in one day’ approach and it all got very troublesome.  I have tried to perpetuate the cover story you suggested about climate change and global warming, but to be frank, people are not falling for it in the way you had hoped so I really think it is time to return to the old system. Don’t you?

Last year I think I was a little imprecise in my list and as I recall I asked that health-wise you make me better. No complaints – you did just that and I am indeed better. Better than I was though, not completely better.  It is my fault for being less than specific. What I should have asked for was for you to make me well again, and so that is how I shall phrase the request this Yule.

I am gratified that you continue to be so active in your charity work and I’m sure I have seen your influence in a number of this year’s major events. All those years of asking and finally you made one of Susan Boyle’s wishes come true. Maybe 2010 for the other one hey? (I’ve heard the old silk purse/sows ear trick is one you’ve been teaching the elves!)  I assume you were behind Jedward too? You know, you must learn to be a bit more selective in the wishes you grant and you did those two no favours at all really (but thanks for the laugh)!  And congratulations on getting your own choice of song to Number 1 for Christmas – When you said you wanted the F-word in the top position, I thought you meant Gordon Ramsey in the TV charts. (Although it isn’t the first song to feature the F-word that has reached No. 1 – The Beetles “Hey Jude” has it at about 3-minutes in, if you listen very carefully!)

When I said last year that I wanted something hot from Mexico that would make my eyes water I was thinking more along the lines of some fajitas and guacamole not Swine Flu. Getting Rudolf to distribute it was a masterstroke, and this year I shall leave a box of Kleenex Balsam along with the mince pies, as I’m sure his nose will be even more sore than usual.

I must say you caused a bit of a kafuffle too – I told you that giving all those MPs such extravagant presents would cause no end of bother! I mean, honestly! Who needs a duck island? What were you thinking? And a moat? Hardly appropriate for a suburban semi in Surbiton! I wonder if they will claim for decorations on the duck island – or might that give the geese too much of a clue that they are destined for a good stuffing?

And you were right about JK Rowling, although I refused to admit it at the time.  Obviously it was worth her asking for “inspiration and narrative creativity” on the years when she wrote the early Harry Potter books – quite why she chose to change her wish from those to “a cliniqué gift set and some bunny rabbit slippers” on the year she wrote Deathly Hallows is beyond me. But the film, out this year leads me to hope she enjoyed the slippers more than I enjoyed the movie, which was both deathly and hollow!

I do implore you to grant Mr Brown his dream of retirement in 2010 and hope that he has learned the lesson that he needs to be careful what he wishes for – Leadership maybe wasn’t quite all he thought it would be. Any chance of him and Hazel Blears in the Celebrity Big Brother house? On similar lines I have picked my selection of people for the Jungle next year. They include Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and Andrew Sachs. I’m also thinking Jan Moir and Westlife. How about Derek Acorah and the spirit of Michal Jackson?  I’m not sure how well Jacko would cope with the Bush-tucker Trials though as I suspect that Michael eating grubs in actually the reverse of reality, but you could film it from the maggot’s perspective? You’ll probably find that David Tennant will be looking for work around that time too.

Thank you for giving me Twitter. I’m now best friends with all the major celebrities (and Paul Daniels). I know what they all eat for breakfast, what colds, bumps or headaches they have endured on our behalf, and their views on big issues such as “coffee vs tea” and “minimum wage needed to get a decent butler these days”. My celeb mates (and Paul Daniels) have all shared in great detail the tales of their exotic holidays, gluttonous dining habits, neurosis, psychosis, psoriasis, cirrhosis and necrosis.  And their views on hats. Who needs fame when you can live it vicariously in the comfort of your own home whilst stroking your pussy?

Kirstie Allsopp is a sweetie and brilliant at finding obnoxious people homes they don’t want and can’t afford, but you need words with her about her Christmas Special. ‘Normal’ people [for reference, I define ‘normal’ to mean “don’t have a father who is a Baron and are not entitled to call themselves ‘The Honourable Kirstie Allsopp’”] tend not to have the time or resources for blowing their own glass baubles, quilting festive stockings, making a teddy bear from scratch (ditto chutney, candles, crackers) and all of this less than a fortnight before Christmas. Still, what else can you expect besides gargantuan effort from a woman who’s kids middles names are Atlas and Hercules!

I hope you and Mrs Clause have sorted out your differences. You are right, the crabs probably just got caught in your , eh hum, ‘beard’ when you dropped off the Christmas presents at the GUM clinic. You may be getting on, but there’s still life in you yet, eh?

I bet you are glad you didn’t outsource deliveries to the Post Office.  You can never be sure they won’t try to strike! And I assume that you are responsible for the Channel Tunnel debacle? I know you were concerned about French Postal Services encroaching on your patch, so blocking their main supply route was a stroke of genius, but you could have thought a bit more about the poor commuters too. The snow has been fun all round, and SO unseasonal for December – are you moving back into your more Dickensian approach? If so, dump a load more snow on London; they like it down there and always cope really well in bad conditions  Oh, and can we maybe start Christmas in December next year, instead of July? I know you need to advertise, and it’s a dog-eat-dog commercialised jungle out there, but you DO kind of have the market cornered, having pretty much beaten the Pagans and that Jesus bloke out of the bazaar.

You’ll have no trouble finding our house this year – we are the one without any festive lights flickering furiously outside. We are making our stand for CO₂ reduction, energy conservation, taste and tradition. Also we know that those flashing snowmen throw Dasher and Prancer into a rutting frenzy and Donner and Blitzen end up trying to shag the rope light reindeer. It is often not Santa coming down the chimney, but a randy reindeer getting rude with a radiant red robin. You should take them to the V-E-T and have them de-snowballed!

So, for 2010, my wishes are simple. Please will you make me well again and please can I have David for another year? He’s been wonderful in 2009 and I don’t know what I would do without him.

Love to the Elves

Adrian xx

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I don’t want to come over all Dickensian with an outpouring of ‘ bah humbug’ but sometimes I really have to wonder what the world is coming to.

I know Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and tradition, happiness and sparkle, but there is one thing that has the opposite effect on me, and that is the terrifying increase in outdoor Christmas lights which seems to be spiralling out of control. In previous years I have been just about able to cope with the odd garden decorated in a single colour and with taste, but it seems more and more that taste is the one thing that these illuminated eyesores leave far behind.  This is not what Christmas is supposed to be about.  It seems to be yet another Americanism that we have adopted, coerced into by an ever-increasing commercial pressure to buy tat that we neither need nor, if we sat and thought about it for a few minutes, want.

I fully appreciate that some streets do it with the veneer of a good cause, as per the example here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/somerset/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8405000/8405690.stm but that is an exception rather than the norm – and if people really want to do something for charity there are fare better, more direct and more appropriate ways.

As far as bringing ‘fun and joy’ is concerned, well, I’m afraid that these monstrosities do the exact opposite for me.  The sight of a semi-detached house emblazoned with neon notices wishing me a “Merry Xmas”, fighting for space with multi-coloured ‘icicles’ of light or inflatable snowmen with a 60w bulb stuck up their arses somehow fails to fill me with festive fun. It is, at best, vulgar and at worst totally irresponsible. I’m lucky, we don’t live opposite such a property but I pity the poor people who do.  It seems every other house is trying to out-do its neighbours and the result is the visual equivalent of a cacophony of screaming babies, fingernails down blackboards and caterwauling mating moggies. It is a form of pollution as much as sound or smoke or litter and yet, to protest against it is mean-spirited and grumpy. I’m not – I love the spirit of Christmas – I just wish that the values we place on this time of year were more about thought and caring, less about commercialism and ersatz glitz.

We have the Copenhagen COP15 Climate Change Summit currently debating the impact that humankind has had on the planet. The Stockholm Environmental Institute at the University of York has calculated that Christmas in Britain generates nearly 40 million tonnes of CO2, over one-twentieth of the nation`s annual output. Roughly one-third of this is due to lighting and nearly half is due to Christmas shopping.

For a topic about illumination, it is amazing how dim some people can be, even such denizens of common sense as the BBC in this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8412332.stm To paraphrase:

A householder in Lanarkshire is drawing crowds to his quiet cul-de-sac with a festive display that includes 45,000 lights that dance in time to music. David Grant, 49, from Blantyre has spent 20 years building up his “winter wonderland”… He is also doing his bit for the environment by only using low-energy bulbs and not running all the lights at the same time

No, Mr Grant, you are NOT doing your bit for the environment, unless by “your bit” you mean helping to bugger it up completely. You would have far less ecological impact by NOT erecting this monstrous display!

The big ecological get-out this year is that people are being green by only using LED lights. What tosh! Yes, they use less power, but they still use more power than ‘no lights’. Plus, consider all the manufacturing overheads, the plastics and glass and metal used (and presumably destined for landfill in a few years time), the packaging and the transportation requirements.  Those LED lights were probably produced in China using their coal-burning power stations!

I even read an article where someone claimed that Christmas lights were ecologically sound because they “use electricity at night-time which otherwise would be wasted”.  Of course, this shows no understanding at all of the balancing operations of the National Grid or the concept that energy production levels can be increased or decreased according to demand. I’ve been to Hydroelectric Power plants where water is stored in high lakes, released at times of peak demand to generate additional power and then pumped back up to the lake when electricity to do so is much cheaper.

The National Grid provide up-to-the-minute readouts of current UK power consumption at http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Realtime/Demand/demand24.htm

Indoor lights are arguably not so bad, as most of their energy output is in the form of heat and any thermostatically controlled room will see a balancing against central heating output – but that is to ignore the manufacturing costs which I suspect tip the balance.

I know we all like to feel Christmassy, and things like town centre lights all add to that but maybe it is time to change attitudes. I say, “Well done” to Horsham in West Sussex (where the budget for the festive lights has been cut from £70,000 to £14,450) and indeed any council that has taken what is probably a quite unpopular step in curbing such expenses. Oxford Street has, to their credit, adopted only LED bulbs and the lights are powered from solar-charged batteries. I can forgive places like Blackpool, where the illuminations are a key to their tourist industry. I understand their reliance, but not ‘every-other-town-centre-in-Britain’ – who offer the argument that people come to see the lights and it increases retail turnover: No, they will still come and do their Christmas shopping even with just normal street lighting – we manage to buy Chocolate Eggs without ‘Easter lights’ .  These are big and unpopular decisions, but we should be able to rely on our leaders to make them for us – THAT  is their job. And if we can’t make the obvious and relatively easy decisions to protect our environment, heaven help us when we have to face the really tough issues, like population control! And whilst I am on a kamikaze crusade which is bound to make me about as popular as cold vomit on toast, how about this: if we HAVE to wire up our windows and festoon our fences, maybe the Government should consider slapping a huge tax on rope lights and pre-formed flashing reindeer, dedicating any money made to research into renewables? But of course they won’t – that is hardly going to be popular with the people who buy such things and there IS an election coming up.

I somehow doubt that if three wise men happened to be passing through Salford they would be able to even see a bright new star in the sky for all the light pollution!

We three kings of Salford are
Somewhere above us is a new star
But we cannot see it, where could it be, it
Must be behind that Sant-ar

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

On the roof, a flickering sleigh
Dazzling bulbs – you’d think it were day
Lit forever, ceasing never
Adding to our dismay

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Over there I think it’s a tree
Festooned in rope light for all to see
Icicles dangling,  jingle jangling
Sod the nativity

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Walk much closer: damage your eyes
Radiant beams sweeping the skies
Piercing the air – shafts bringing down aircraft
Makes us just wonder “Why?”

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

Never mind the price we all pay
Energy used in this frightful display
Carbon rating we’re forsaking
Our future we all betray

O Star of wonder, star of night
Totally hidden from our sight
Neon lighting, really frightening
Flashing reindeer far too bright

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Captain’s Blog Stardate 07.12.202009

Our ten Quabble mission to explore the distant Sol system is drawing to a close and we will soon be heading home to Kizotrix IV. The exobilogists and archaeologists are beaming back on board with their last few samples and our databanks are brimming with gigaQuimms of information. But what lessons have we learned from our study of this system, and its remarkable third planet?

> Planet Sol 3 from geostationary orbit

The only planet in the system capable of sustaining life is a beautiful place, green/blue with majestic mountains and sparkling seas, much like Kizotrix used to be, before the Great Exodus, rich with vegetation, abundant with a myriad of lifeforms. But it is the archaeological record that interests me most and our scientists have done a great job in piecing together the story of the civilization which used to live there.  They were an amazing people, these inhabitants of Sol-3, with beautiful architecture, a network of transportation systems and social communities.

> Crude data pod

Much like the aracnians on Gat’nk Delta, it seems they relied heavily on a web structure, which, by the height of their civilization, had spread to cover most of the planet.  It’s all gone now, of course, beyond the ruins that our scanners have mapped and the few trinkets we collected.  Nature soon wipes out her mistakes and leaves little for us to study, but I have a good team on board and  we were lucky to stumble upon a set of files on one of their primitive data storage pods, which at first we overlooked. Mr Wallik, my chief of Sciences, recognised its significance and developed a method to extract the information.

They named their planet ‘Earth’ and organised themselves into hive-groups which they called ‘cities’. Their social structure seemed to align with the hive mentality too, with individuals designated workers, soldiers, builders, farmers or breeders. Huge farms, or ‘Tescos’ supplied them with food. Each hive had at least one of these Tescii. They enjoyed art, music, poetry and had many recreational activities – something called soccerball which involved chasing a sphere around a rectangular playing area, much akin to our game of Pong, and they worshipped a God they called Cowell to whom they prayed every seven-rotation cycle. A favourite pastime was ‘clubbing’ which apparently involved baby seals. All of this was underpinned by a crude bartering system, where they exchanged their produce or services for plastic credit tokens.

> Example of typical meal

Their favourite food was a type of bovine meat, pressed and formed into a disk shape which they ate between two ‘buns’ – similar to our Sarg-cakes but made with crushed seed powder.  These were called ‘Kentucky Fried Mac Pizzas’.  This meal was often accompanied by something called ‘Coke’ which was either drunk or sniffed, depending on the requirements of the social gathering. They had at least one queen, although the record shows an increasing number of queens as their civilization grew.  Within the hives, social structure was dominated by factors such as hide-colour. These strange little people came in four colours: White was the dominant class, followed by yellow and then black. The Reds, it seems, were hunted to extinction in their indigenous super-hive, called The Untidied Stains of America, although their history books suggest that some survived and moved to the area they called Russia where they set up a red army.

> Evidence that humans ate their young

Our studies show that they reached level 4 on the Jitrov Civilization Scale, which is remarkable for a species that still ate its own young. We see proof of this infanticide in digital advertising of the time, for such products as ‘Jellied babies’ , ‘Jelly tots’ and ‘kid’s mix’.  Similar promotional material that Mr Wallik has been able to decipher, provides key insight into the biology of this species, as we have been able to glean that they must have had a cobalt-based circulatory system; we know for certain, from audio-visual ‘advertisements’,  that females had blue blood which they collected every 28 solar cycles in winged pads and we assume they used this to make a local delicacy, ‘black pudding’. Allegedly somewhere called ‘Britain’ had talent. For reasons our meteorologists have yet to understand, there was a predisposition for canine and feline precipitation.

To their credit, there is evidence that they had developed rudimentary nuclear technologies and had embarked upon the early stages of space travel, although we are unable to detect more than speculative evidence to suggest that they made it as far as their closest moon.  Nevertheless, they showed a great deal of promise, and had they not made some fundamental mistakes their people could have developed to be equal to our own great race.

> Polution from a single domestic stove could be seen from miles around

It seems that the indigenous mammalian bipods ran into difficulty towards the end of their First Industrial Revolution, as so many other civilizations we have met on our travels have done.  This all happened about 200,000 Quabbles ago by our time standards.  Mr Wallik has pieced together a tale of how these ‘humans’ (as they called themselves) were little more than highly developed apes who based their technology on hard-fuel-burning engines, and combustion. Now of course, our scientists know the folly of such action, but these were an underdeveloped people for whom science was little more than guesswork and magic. They still had Religion, for FarcQ’s sake, and could only travel in four dimensions. They took the apparent abundance of carbon-based compounds for granted; never thinking these would run out. They thought ‘fire’ to be their greatest discovery, and then spent the remainder of their time on the planet finding different ways to burn things! There is evidence that they ritually burned their own people in annual sacrificial rituals – especially anyone designated with the name ‘Guy’.  They used liquid ‘oil’ for everything, based their whole civilization on it, turning it into fuel, and plastics, medicines, cosmetics and something they called ‘sticky-back-plastic’, from which they could make almost anything. But like a Gippol beetle in a dwang fruit, they had no thought for what would happen when there was nothing left to use as raw materials and their obsession with burning things for power, heat and light was their biggest mistake. Maybe a few more Quabbles and they could have amounted to something special. They were barely starting to investigate the basics of quantum mechanics, which we take for granted, and were too busy burning things to really study photonics.  Black matter was little more than a theory for them, although there are a few traces of recorded evidence to suggest that they were on the brink of unravelling some of its basic properties; they might have even discovered the Higgs-Bosun Drive, had they not messed up the science.

> Relase of toxic gasses

We have seen news-pods recorded at the time that tell how the emissions from their industry and the smoke from their obsession with burning things, became trapped in the atmosphere and started raising the planet’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect – it is the same process that our terraformers use when they want to raise the ambient temperature of a seed planet.

On the Earth, ocean temperatures started to rise and this caused changes in climate, melting the polar ice caps, turning fertile rainforests to desert and raining on the bonfires.  Of course, we understand oceanic flow and its correlation to weather systems – it seems almost unimaginable for us that these humans never built weather farms, and never developed oceo-engineering to control their seas.  Perhaps, given a few more decades, they may have started to realise the relationships between sea and sky, but their focus was on other things, like burning their resources, territorial fighting and the development of ever-more barbaric ways to kill each other. Our doctors say that even today some of the mammalian life on the planet carries antibodies to a type of influenza that we believe the humans used in a form of biological warfare against each other.

> Severe flooding in many capital hives - this 'city' was known as 'the big smoke'

Of course, with all the burning, they suffered terrible climatic disasters as a result of their short-sightedness, with whole communities being flooded, crops wiped out, their city hives in coastal areas or near rivers under constant bombardment by storms and tornadoes – our civil engineers know the folly of building on flood plains but the humans were blind to the risks. Our geologists tell me that there is evidence that they tore down vast swathes of forest and polluted their seas. They showed scant regard for the other forms of life which lived among them and those creatures which were not slaughtered for food were kept as pets or exhibited in massive stadiums to be ridiculed by their masters. We read a report of a conjoined entity (perhaps even a genetic mutation of their own species) which was ritualistically made to perform terrifying feats of endurance on a regular basis, while they watched and listened to its pitiful, tortured, wailing; the ‘humans’ then had a form of mass election process whereby they decided if the creature should live another week or be slaughtered to the God Cowell. We can only assume that this poor being, a biological rarity by all accounts (having four legs, two heads but only one brain) was hunted to extinction and wiped from the face of the planet, as we found no evidence to suggest the ongoing survival of the Jedward.

At one point, near the end of their reign on the Earth, it looked as though there might have been hope. The hive leaders all came together on the summit of a hill in a place called Copenhagen, in an attempt to address the ecological problems facing their species. We have seen pod-pics and read reports of a growing realisation that relying on fossil fuels was causing immeasurable damage to their environment, but their culture was based on a theology of economics over ecology. How strange that they rewarded their economists and financiers far more than their healers, their teachers or their scientists. Being a “banker” was the most respected and highly paid of all professions, although we see little evidence that these individuals contributed at all to society. For a hive species they seemed to exhibit a disproportionate level of individual greed. Our ice core samples tell the story in terrible detail. By the time the human race realised the problems it was causing, they were too late, doomed. Their fossil fuels lasted only about another 20 solar cycles, despite rationing, and their futile attempts to develop ‘clean fuels’ failed due to a lack of global cooperation.  They simply ran out of things to burn and by that time the bankers had made off with all the money so their economic infrastructure collapsed.

> Location of nuclear waste dumps

They played with other options; hydrogen extraction, geo-thermals, bio fuels and power harnessed from radio waves, but investment in the development of these technologies was obviously not seen as a priority as we can find little proof that these were ever adopted on a global scale.

If they had realised their dependency on fossil fuels sooner, they might indeed have ploughed resources into developing other options, but a growing population is a hungry beast and they had only one viable route when the oil ran out and so we can see the evidence of a brief increase in the use of nuclear power. We have found a number of radioactive dumps, some deep underground, and we believe that in a twist of irony they used the empty mines as repositories for spent nuclear rods. When the mines were full the ‘humans’ must have jettisoned their waste into orbit.  Much has since fallen back down to the surface, but some remains, circling the planet where it still poses a danger to space traffic.  Mr Wallik has recommended we leave a warning buoy. We calculate though, that even after the move from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the planet’s supply of radioactive compounds lasted only a couple of generations – and within one hundred solar revolutions, their industry and civilization had collapsed. When they had nothing left to burn, they just ended up burning each other.

> Solar farm in Stockholm

I have seen images from the planet’s surface which show the arid, sandy ‘Ikea Desert’ of the region they called “Scandinavia” where, even today, there is evidence of huge solar farms, which we believe may have been a last-ditch attempt to move to renewable sources.  There is no doubt that this would have been a woefully inadequate solution when compared to the population explosion which remained unchecked.  Giant dams still remain in other (now) tropical regions – the Gamburtsev dams show proof that hydroelectric power was at least considered, and this may have been viable for the few decades that the ice cap, which once covered the mountain range, was melting.  But climate change soon evaporated the lakes and the power plants fell silent.

> Sahara ice plain wind farm

The Ice Flats of Africa are peppered with the ruins of what our archaeologists think were wind turbines. Our simulations support the theory that these would have had to be adopted on a global scale to have any impact, and now they stand rusting and decaying as a sorry testament to what must have seemed like a valiant attempt by the humans to survive. But this was all too little, too late. The tipping point had been reached and there was no way this once promising race could save itself.

Whenever we set out on these missions of exploration, we always hope to find evidence of intelligent life. Sadly it seems that Sol has little to offer on her eleven planets (we are pleased to have discovered the hitherto undetected outer gas giant, now labelled Sol 11). Most of these planets are too distant to support life, and even the one designated ‘Earth’ is now of little interest beyond an historical curiosity. On our travels we have encountered evidence of many species who have died out through natural disaster, planetary collision, even the devastation caused by an untamed spacial wormhole, but no tale of mass extinction has touched me quite as much as the one of the humans of Earth. Of course, the planet has now fully recovered and is flourishing with an abundance of vegetation and wildlife. But nothing that shows the potential of its once so promising human inhabitants.

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