To blog or not to blog

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

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

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

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.

And now, in ‘Other News’….

Seasonal News:

Life moves on with relentless repetition and I have little to report beyond a few observations. Advent is upon us. It used to be that Advent heralded the start of Christmas planning, but we have been bombarded with festive TV ads since the end of summer.  Maybe it is no coincidence that Advert and Advent are but a pen stroke away from each other.  I saw a billboard yesterday which insisted I should “Get him what every man wants this Christmas: A DeWALT power stripper”.  I presume this to be some sort of erotic performer who comes with her own batteries. Can you really Power Strip? Is it the exact opposite of Power Dressing? I didn’t realise I wanted one, but apparently I do, if the advert is to be believed. I don’t know where we’d keep her. Do they need feeding? And what if both David and I get one each this year? We don’t have the bedrooms. Please don’t get me one for Christmas – I really couldn’t cope with the lingerie.

In our Gardening Section:

We’ve been tackling a few outdoorsy jobs over the last few weeks, tidying and making plans for next year.  We have had some of the lawn dug up to give us a bit more viable growing land for veg. It needs to be left now over the winter to allow the frosts and rain to break down the soil a bit more,  although I am fighting the temptation to put in a few things now – Garlic can be planted to over-winter – but I shall listen to advice and leave the plot alone for now.

The spring bulbs I planted in tubs are all way too ahead of themselves – yesterday I added a layer of peat to try to protect them from the forecast frosts, but they seem to have shot too soon – which is always a problem!

We’ve cleared and tidied the shed. How much rubbish had we accumulated? Anything remotely physical is still really hard work for me and takes ages to do, but over the course of two days moving things round like one of those sliding-tile puzzles, it now at least has a semblance of order.  I hate having to rely on other people to help with jobs I used to take in my stride, but David is a good lifter, shifter and general pack mule.  Of course, any such job just throws up a list of other chores that need to be tackled and this one certainly delivered on that promise. So, in true “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue” style I can now report that following the discovery of a noticeable dribble, we eventually got felt up on the shed roof! Well, not strictly roofing felt, rather a rubber membrane to keep out the rain, but that doesn’t sound as rude.  Or maybe it does? We grappled with some rubber to protect our tools? We took protection to keep our dibbers dry?

I’ve sprayed the paths too – to clear some moss and get rid of a slight build up of algae – the last thing I need to do is fall on a slippery path, so hopefully this treatment will work. Failing that I could crush up, dissolve and spray some of the hundreds of left-over pills I have in a cupboard upstairs – they seem to kill pretty much any and every possible lifeform so I’m well equipped for biological warfare, albeit more of the Kim and Aggy variety than the International Terrorist model. Maybe I should just use a squirt of lemon juice and vinegar, which seem to be their standard arsenal against all things slimy.

Health and Medicine:

Speaking of biological warfare, I’m due my Swine Flu jab today, after what seems like a ceaseless battle with my GP’s surgery. They really have no idea how to organise themselves. They didn’t even have me on their list, even though I qualify on at least four different grounds. I didn’t have the right flag apparently. I didn’t know I was supposed to carry one. They have had the vaccine for a fortnight but couldn’t work out how to go about distributing it. Hopeless. Every other surgery in the country seems to have managed. Even the concept of inebriation in an ale house is beyond them, let alone the ability to arrange the metaphorical gathering. They don’t know their acne from their eczema, their aphasia from their epilepsy and indeed, quite probably, their arse from their elbow. If I went in complaining that I had acute angina they would probably call a gynaecologist!  I go there every time with the lowest possible expectations, which they consistently fail to meet.  All they have to do is stick a needle in my arm. Am I hoping for too much? If I don’t blog again for a few days you’ll know they messed up and injected me with Domestos or some such delight. They probably have the most swine flue-resistant nurse’s chair in the country where they have missed the patients completely!

International news:

I have to report that sadly Chinese-Woman-Over-The-Road has left, taking her unmentionables with her. You may find her Chinese Crackers coming to a bedroom window near you. The Avenue seems a somewhat duller (and essentially less ethnic) place without her daily display of dazzling dainties but I’m sure some neighbourhood will learn to love her laundry as much as I didn’t.  I have seen evidence of Extremely-Old-Chinese-Man-Who-Is-Probably-The-Landlord popping in to check post, absence of squatters and continued structural integrity.  There have been occasional Curious-Visitors-With-Clip-Boards poking around.  I’ve not taken to the look of any of them. I believe I should at least have some say in the contents of the knickers to be displayed in the window opposite our lounge; squat, fat, Chinese and female falls a long way from my preference.  It is possible to take the concept of a chink in the curtains a bit too literally!

Speaking of all things  Eastern, there was a programme on TV the other day which featured Chinese identical twins. I have to wonder, how could they tell? Don’t they all look the same any way? It’s a repetitive redundancy at least!

In our Science and Technology section:

It is good to note that the large Hairdryer at CERN has been turned on again. Not only is it working now, but it has already started to break records (as well as particles) – according to the BBC –

“The LHC pushed the energy of its particle beams beyond one trillion electron volts, making it the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator.”

Zap. Oh, it’s so butch! It is no coincidence that Hadron is an anagram of Hard On. It even has its own website – http://www.lhc.ac.uk/ which is suspiciously out of date. Maybe they haven’t bothered updating the website because they know something we don’t know…

Clearly the suggestion that the Collider was destroying itself from the future has failed to deliver on its promise though – well, not yet anyway. I was thinking about that and realised there was a basic flaw in the theory. The idea was that the LHC would create a Big Bang ‘event’ similar to the start of the Universe and in doing so would destroy our planet, so, a future version of it had come back in time to prevent the experiment ever happening. But, IF the experiment worked, then there would be no survivors to live into the future and come back to stop the explosion. If it didn’t cause ‘the end of the world as we know it’ then there would be no need for anyone to pop back and scupper the device. Non argument. Logic wins the day. I’m coming over all Vulcan!

Actually I was thinking about this time travel business a bit recently and came to a conclusion about temporal paradoxes. They only exist when there is time travel into the past. If the direction of travel is only forward then no paradox is created. It’s as soon as someone goes backwards that your head starts to hurt! Let me try to explain.  The simplest paradox is the idea that if I travel into the past and kill my grandfather, I will then not be born and won’t be able to travel into the past to kill my grandfather. But if I travel into the future, then so what? I could possibly meet an older version of myself there, but that’s OK. A bit weird maybe, but not a paradox as such. If I killed a future version of myself, well, that is just tough, and the end of his timeline – who is to say that isn’t what was meant to happen anyway?  This of course assumes that the current me stays in the future timeline. As soon as I come back again I would have the knowledge that, in the future, a me from the past would try to kill me and I could avoid being in that time and place. Which could then mean that the present me, who travels to the future, didn’t kill the future me, and maybe didn’t return to the present, so that the present me would know in the future that the past me was trying to kill me! Simples.

If I travel back in time
And kill my own grandpa
He would not have a child one day
To marry my dear Ma

They would not bear a son at all
If they were not alive
And I’d not come into this world
Time travel to contrive.

But if I travel forwards
And meet a child of mine
When he has grown much older
And seen the passing time

Then we could live quite happily
No paradox created
I’d be much older than my child
But still we’d be related.

I could kill my son one day
In the future years ahead
Who’s to say that’s not his fate
That I live when he is dead

But if I travel back again
To this time which is my present
I could tell my son of this
and make that future obsolescent

I could tell my son the date and time
That I will cause his death
And he can change his plans that day
And not breath his final breath.

But then I’d not have killed him
So could not have known about his fate
Nor travelled to this timeline
His future to relate.

So the paradox is created
Only on the backwards trip
Remember that, dear reader
If you invent your own time ship

So to all those esteemed scientists who say that time travel is impossible, I say, maybe it is possible, but only in one direction (We do that already of course – and I defy anyone to prove that we experience time at a steady rate or that each of us experiences time at the same rate as the others. It’s all relative, as Albert would tell you). And before anyone shoots me down with a barrage of quarks (that’s a Hadron reference there – cos I like gets phisiks an science stuff and everything  innit and don’t never say I doesn’t cos that’s lame an shit and anyway I got a note.) I know that Quantum Theory has a different take on things (ie at every decision point, every option is both available and taken and it is only the observation that determines the outcome). So maybe in another timeline the Hadron Collider did blow up and destroy the Universe. I didn’t see that coming. And I did.

Let me tell you the story Schroedinger’s cat
Kept in a box, all alone the pet sat
A lid on the box hid it from view
Along with the cat were some instruments too
A radioactive compound was placed by the pet
And a Geiger counter, its decay to detect.
The compound decayed at a very slow speed
An atom an hour, and thus we proceed
Attached to the counter, a can full of acid
Which does not a thing when the decay is placid
But when an atom from the substance decayed
Into the box the acid is sprayed

Because we can’t see it, and thus we can’t tell
The cat in the box could be dead or quite well
But Quantum Mechanics tells us in fact
That both possibilities exist for that cat
Because we can’t see it, both options exist
Until observation, when one choice becomes fixed
So the act of observing determines the state
And once we have seen it we have created its fate
The cat was fictitious but I’ll let YOU decide
If at the end of this poem it was dead or alive!

I’m thinking that maybe I should write to CERN though and tell them that there is a sure-fire way to ensure the safety of the planet, if they can just invent the necessary technology. Every sci-fi fan knows that all they need to do is send an inverse tachyon pulse through the main deflector array at a modified photon torpedo, creating a stream of chronoton particles that can then be slingshot around the sun, travelling back in time, with instructions of how to build a main deflector array through which to send an inverse tachyon pulse at a modified photon torpedo.  Just like that. Magic. And as Arthur C Clarke famously prescribed: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Er – does that mean that Paul Daniels and Derren Brown are from the future? Heaven help us!