To blog or not to blog

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 stolen some photos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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Welcome to Friday 13^th.

Now I wouldn’t say that I am an especially superstitious person, and I didn’t wake up this morning with a feeling of impending doom, as some may have done, overwhelmed by the sinister stigma of the date.  My relationship with superstition is pretty much on a par to my relationship with religion. I can’t say I’m a fully paid-up card-carrying member, by any stretch, but by the same token, I’m not going to shit on a crucifix ether.

I tend to not believe that burning ears mean someone is talking about you; there is almost always a more scientific explanation, like you just fell asleep with your head against the radiator.

Some so-called superstitions are really just a way of wrapping up common sense advice, like not walking under a ladder for fear of something dropping on your head – paint, nails, slates, window cleaners, lesbians with power tools etc. Not stepping on the cracks in pavements is logical – with the state of British paths these days they are fraught with tripping hazards and badly laid slabs are just a liability. See a pin, pick it up and all day long you’ll have less chance of standing on a pin.

Some are more sinister. Literally. The idea of throwing spilt salt over the shoulder is to ward off the Devil, who is said to sit at your left side. Why the left shoulder? The Romans used to march with the regimented left, right, left, right chant we recognise in modern soldiers, but the Roman words were ‘sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter’ and hence the word has taken on its evil undertone.

Opening  umbrellas indoors is seen as an unlucky thing to do, but that probably stems back to the times of ancient Egypt where umbrellas were used to provide shade from the sun; opening them indoors was seen as an insult to Ra the sun God, who would punish the offender. You really wouldn’t want to upset Ra, or his wife, She-Ra.

Why is Friday 13^th also considered unlucky? Friday was execution day in ancient Rome and therefore Christ is thought to have been crucified on that day. Following the trend, Friday used to be Hangman’s Day in Britain and some believe it was the day God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden (although the National Trust say there is no specific reason why a garden should be closed on a Friday so that is a largely unsubstantiated claim). There were 13 people at the Last Supper and the 13^th Tarot card is Death.  Oh, and Margaret Thatcher was born on Friday 13^th, so that seems as good a reason as any to fear the worst.

Amusingly (or not) the houses on our side of the street take the odd numbers, so 1, 3, 5 etc and next door to us one way is number 11, meaning that we SHOULD live at number 13. Our house is actually 15 and to the other side is 17. Somebody thought ill enough of the number 13 to miss it out although I can’t help but wonder if this is a bit like the premise of the Final Destination films – trying to skip the number is flawed logic and the bad luck will happen anyway. Would we have bought this house if we had realised it was really number 13? I am not so sure.

I’ve never held with the idea that having a bird poo on you is lucky though – seems damned UNlucky to me (especially if the bird in question is a forty-something, thick-set, heavy-hipped Brummie called Barbara). The whole bird poo thing just smacks of being one of those things that an anguished parent once said to a distressed child who had just been targeted by a defecating duck. Parents say some terrible things to their kids and should be ashamed of themselves.  If you eat apple pips a tree will grow in your tummy. If you swallow chewing gum it will get wrapped around your lungs and suffocate you. If you keep shaking your sister her head will fall off (it never did). They still do it these days too – apparently if you eat runner beans you will turn into a runner and if you eat Green Giant sweetcorn you will turn into a slightly camp version of the Incredible Hulk.  Telling a child that ‘if the wind changes, your face will stay like that’ is just pure evil. As is the notion that picking your nose will cause your head to cave in.  It hasn’t, despite many a pleasurable rake out.  It is however, a well-known biological fact that if you unscrew your belly button your bum will fall off. Warts are a sure sign you have kissed a frog (despite the fact that kissing frogs is the only way to snare yourself a prince – methinks Camilla was a vivacious herpetologist in days gone by).  Don’t get me started on Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Bogeyman or the tooth fairy. Any parent who tells their offspring such lies should be put away for inflicting mental cruelty, although I guess it could be argued that these are just preparing kids for the adult equivalents, the lies and concoctions that society throws at us every day – politics, weather forecasts, DFS sales, train timetables and religion.

Some superstitions are mostly harmless – I see no point in NOT saying hello to a magpie, and touching wood is a useful ‘just in case’ tactic.

We have a horseshoe above the front door, but that is just to counteract the fact we should be number 13. (I figure that IF these things are to be believed, one should neutralise the other and thus we can carry on with life untouched).

A specific superstition that I know to be true however is one that I was introduced to at school and has stayed with me ever since. It isn’t really a superstition, more a complex conspiracy theory, woven in a mesh of misinformation and sprinkled with just a little secrecy to keep things interesting. The enchantment goes as follows: If you sneeze three times in succession and nobody says ‘bless you’, you can be taken by the fairies. I feel the time is right to now expose the full truth of this spell, and that the world is in fact ready to know of our master plan. This is the way that the homosexual community has been recruiting for millennia. Three sneezes and you become a fairy. Forget all your theories about genetics or environmental conditioning.  Forget biological predisposition, familial tendencies or possibilities that early trauma causes people to be gay.  None of that is correct. It just takes three sneezes without a ‘bless you’ and you are ours! We can come and get you at any time. We don’t always convert you straight away, of course. That would mean a disproportionate recruitment peak in flu season (we invented flu too, by the way, just to make you sneeze more. And pollen) – no, you just get tagged and we can take you any time we want. We find this method of recruitment to be much more effective than TV commercials, newspaper campaigns or leaflet drops. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Graham Norton used to be married with three kids you know, until he sniffed a particularly pollen-filled tulip, and look what we turned HIM into. John Barrowman used to be a dustman.  Sandi Totsvik and Sue Perkins were both straight porn stars in their youth – Sandi, you may recall, also performing as the stunt double for Jessica Rabbit many moons ago. Yet, one squirt of Fabreeze too many and they were sneezing like troopers.  (We do apologise for the Touch And Go “Poo at Paul’s” commercial, but we needed to attract a younger apprenticeship and those things really do make people honk out some hefty sneezes).

Matt Lucas used to be a bricklayer from Luton and, prior to initiation, Julian Clary was a docker called Pete. Don’t think that marriage will protect you either. Elton John was, after all, a happily married heterosexual man, as was David Beckham (you’ll see what I mean when he eventually ‘comes out’).

You will have noticed the increase in gay activity in your neighbourhood of course, as we further our plans of world domination. Although we have to be careful. The last time we tried anything on this scale was way back in the 1660s when one particularly enthusiastic boffin tried to make a new type of sneeze-enhancer distribution system, which was to be deployed by miniature percussion cartridges strapped to the back of rats (working on the assumption that no person is ever more than 10 meters away from a rat). Sadly the spray was too potent and ended up causing some nasty side effects. We covered it all up, of course, by calling it bubonic plague, and setting fire to London as a distraction, but it was a close call!

In case you were wondering, yes, swine flu is ours, as was its precursor, bird flu but we’ve not quite got the dosages right yet and we’re rethinking the whole animal deployment programme, mainly because such schemes seem less effective on vegetarians. If ever you see pink Pepsi though, remember, you heard it here first.

If you mention any of this to anyone, we will deny it, and you have no proof. But watch out next time you pass through the perfume section in Debenhams – it isn’t always eau de toilet that they spray and it is best to travel in pairs so you have a ‘bless you buddy’ just in case. On puff and you’re ours!

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What to do with a wet Wednesday that holds all the promise a bowl of soggy muesli? It’s there; you just have to wade your way through it, knowing that eventually it’ll be gone and maybe, just maybe, things will improve. It’s hard to be enthusiastic, effervescent and charming when you’re knackered. I didn’t sleep well, as is sometimes the case. I don’t know if this happens to you, but I can lie there for a while, life buzzing through my head, thinking about things I need to do the next day, crusades to be fought, cooking to be cooked, and I am fine, starting to drift, feeling a little dopey, nicely relaxing. And then I get an itch, or a cough, or go all sneezy and I’m wide awake again, not sleepy and that is the point of no return. Once I’ve had that thought then there is no going back. And when I’m not sleepy, by definition I tend to not be happy either and get quite grumpy, made no easier by my apparent dwarf fetish – I’d go see the Doc about it, but I’m too bashful!

Last night, while trying to sleep, I was waging a personal battle and trying to work out exactly where I stand on a particular topic. In the end I had to admit defeat and agree to disagree with myself.  It is a real dilemma when you can see both sides of an argument, made worse by the fact that supporting either side with any degree of conviction can result in social stigma, rejection, hatred and possibly the daubing of a red cross on our front door. But we’re friends here right? I can confide in you? You’ll stick by me through thick and thin? As Shakespeare once quoth:

“Love is not love that alters
when it alteration finds”

Will you still love me? Deep breath. Here goes: It is grammar and the use of the English language that is bothering me. There is a huge part of me that believes that the degradation in literary and spoken standards is a bad thing. I’m a pedant when it comes to English. I get annoyed when I see inappropriately used punctuation, badly composed sentences, rules broken and structure disassembled. I shudder if I pass a greengrocer’s shop with a notice saying “Potatoe’s on special offer” or “Kid’s shoes on sale”; are they really selling the shoes belonging to a single child?  I refuse to use a supermarket checkout marked, “10 items or less”, when they really mean fewer. “There were less people at the match today.” Really? In what way were they less, of a more lowly background perhaps or maybe they were all below average height?

I risk the danger of re-writing “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” here, and my inner-stickler is nowhere near as honed as that book requires, but really, sometimes I do get quite frustrated. So many people just seem to not care about grammar these days, and I find that to be a terrible shame. There is a photo I saw on the internet the other day of a sign displayed by Susan Boyle’s neighbours in anticipation of her return from “Britain’s Got Talent”, which read, “Susan your a super STAR in our EYE’S WELL DONE”. One has to commend the intention, but condemn the execution.  I think they meant to write, “Susan, you’re a superstar in our eyes. Well done.” Even allowing for an intentional reference to “Stars in their eyes” they could perhaps have managed, “Susan, you’re a super ‘Star In Our Eyes’. Well Done”.  Maybe I sound snobby, and I risk being branded for a high and mighty attitude, lording it over people who know no better, but our language is such a critical part of our lives, it is a tool that has such power and creativity, and misusing it is on a par with daubing the Mona Lisa with Emulsion or playing a Mozart concerto off key. I’m not angry with the people who misuse language, just with the system that has left them not knowing any better. Surely in this day and age there is no excuse for anyone leaving school without an understanding of the basic rules of punctuation? The state is letting people down, and it matters. It is not snobby to want to see the correct use of bus, bus’s, buses and buses’. (Singular bus, belonging to a bus, more than one bus and belonging to more than one bus.)

We have these rules for a reason. A punctuation mark tells us so much. It expresses ownership, where to stress a sentence where to take a pause, where to breathe. Consider: “Let’s eat, Harry” and “Let’s eat Harry”. The punctuation mark gives us a clear understanding of what is meant and avoids confusion. So why not use these dots and squiggles correctly?

I see red when people use ‘into’ incorrectly. “I am going into the bank”, or “I am going in to deposit some money”, but not “I am going into deposit some money”.  And when did ‘upto’ become a word? My pet hate at the moment is the use of ‘invite’ as a noun. Please feel free to send me an invitation, or to invite me to your party, but I suspect you may struggle if trying to post me an invite, as nouns are notoriously difficult to coax into envelopes!

In one of my earliest blogs I told of a letter I had written to Sainsbury’s (note their trade name does take the apostrophe, whereas no apostrophe is associated with Marks and Spencer, but they have cheated and started to call themselves M&S anyway). This letter complained about a television advertisement for new potatoes and an offer which would be available “for a few short weeks”. This was perfect bull vs. red rag territory for me and so I wrote asking what right Sainsbury’s had to truncate the length of our weeks, from exactly which part of the week they intended to subtract time (explaining that if they had to shorten the week I would prefer they did that between 0900 and 1700 on a Monday through to a Friday, leaving the weekends unadulterated), whether they would give us the stolen time back at a later stage or whether this was a cunning plan to fiddle with the laws of relativity. To their credit, I received a suitably tongue-in-cheek reply and I think they got my point. An advertisement on national televisions, seem by millions of people, from a company as influential as Sainsbury’s should at very least employ correct use of our language.

On the subject of TV ads, I do enjoy the ones which proclaim that “Nothing works faster than [product X]”. So use nothing; it is cheaper and it works faster! And, “Nothing makes the sun safer”; no shit! It is a boiling maelstrom of super-heated gasses; suntan cream won’t make the sun safer. The best you can hope for is that it may protect you from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Ill-considered language in commercial advertising is nothing new though; it has been a slippery slope from the days when Beanz Meanz Heinz. Is it any wonder that spelling standards are falling? Weetabix in not much better. And less said about Nutz magazine the best I think.

There is a café we passed the other day which proclaimed, “New opening hour’s” and also has a list of “Todays Special’s”. Never-the-less, it is gratifying to know that they are now “Open Sunday’s til 23:00pm”!  Does anybody ever proof-read this stuff? Does anybody care? Are children not taught the basic rules of grammar anymore? I am no linguistic expert, I don’t have qualifications in the subject beyond O’Level but I do know the difference between they’re and their, I understand the positioning of the possessive apostrophe (most of the time) and I like to think I have some ability to inject commas, colons and semi-colons in roughly the right places. I welcome any of you to inspect my colon use, and let me know if you see an inappropriately placed semi-! I mentioned the possessive apostrophe before and admit that it can be a bit confusing. If the car belongs to the Jones family is it the Jones’ car or the Jones’s car? Are they collectively the Joneses?

Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses

The house of Mr Jones = Mr Jones’(s) house

The house of Mr and Mrs Jones = The Joneses’ house

‘Keeping up’ with the practices or possessions of Mr and Mrs Jones = Keeping up with the Joneses

English throws us all sorts of challenges to keep us on our toes, especially since it borrows words from different languages and is a compound of many different roots. Technically it is a West Germanic language (Dutch, Afrikaans, Low German, High German), with a good smattering of Norse, Viking and Norman for colour and a fair peppering of Latin and Greek. No wonder even the English get it wrong! Consider words such as sense, age, clue, direction or hope; these can all be negated with the addition of the suffix ‘less’, so hopeless, ageless and so forth, but what about “ruthless”, meaning cruel, callous, without mercy? Who killed off Ruth? She sounded nice! Someone who is not inept isn’t said to be ept. What is the opposite of dishevelled, shevelled? Would one mantle something that has been dismantled? I used to be disgruntled, but now I’m perfectly gruntled. What do you have to be doing to be frivolous? I demand the introduction of the word ‘frivle’ with immediate effect! I want to be able to go into a room and start to frivle.  Exceed has no opposite, which seems a bit unfair in respect of traffic offences where you can be fined for exceeding a speed limit but those dithering Sunday drivers who always drive far slower than necessary don’t even have a word for what they are doing! And we have those blessed words that take opposite meanings depending on their context:

• to clip: to cause to be together; to cause to be apart
• to consult: to give advice; to receive advice
• fast: not moving; moving
• to lease: in exchange for money, for a time to give up possession of; to gain possession of
• a strike: a hit; a miss
• to wind up: to start; to finish

Another word to avoid, especially if you are advertising an event, is bimonthly; it means ‘twice a month’ or ‘every two months’; ditto biweekly and biyearly.

Sometimes the rules just get out of hand; ‘uni’ generally relates to a singular aspect of an item, unicycle, unicorn, but not in respect of unisex, where both genders are involved!

We use once, twice and thrice, but thereafter the pattern stops, but not so with primary, secondary, tertiary, where the sequence continues quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary – I bet you didn’t know that!

We can’t even stick to basic rules about plurals; you can’t assume that ‘s’ on the end of an object will turn it into more than one:

cow becomes cows;
pig becomes pigs;
but what about the sheep in the field? How many, one or more?

Conversely, what about all the things that already carry an ‘s’ at the end? Bellows, binoculars, forceps, gallows, glasses, pliers, scissors, shears, tongs, braces, briefs, flannels, jeans, knickers, pants, pyjamas, shorts, tights, trousers. ‘Scissors’ is a word guaranteed to fry the brain of anyone who considers it for too long. If I have one of these items, should I say, “The scissors is in the drawer”, or “The scissors are in the drawer”? Maybe I try to circumvent the problem with. “I have a pair of scissors in the drawer”, but even that could mean that there are two of them.

I was once challenged (and failed) to come up with a sentence which contained the word ‘and’ five times in succession, with no intervening words. It had to obey the laws of grammar and make sense. The answer was as follows: The sign-writer had left no space between “Pig” and “And”, and ‘”And” and “Whistle”.

There is a (probably apocryphal) story of a bar in Kentucky or somewhere with a sign “Ladies Welcome. Liquor in the front, Poker in the Rear.” At least that brings a smile to the face.

I cringe when I see Americanised versions of our words, such as color and favorite. I can forgive them for creating their own words for things, with lorry becoming truck, a chemist becoming a drugstore, a dual carriageway becoming a freeway and a pavement turning into a sidewalk. Even lift to elevator is okay by me, since we used to call them rising rooms so have no cause to complain. But why do they butcher so many of our words for no reason?

colour > color
humour > humor
favourite > favorite
theatre >  theater
kilometre > kilometer
cosy > cozy
realise > realize
dialogue > dialog
traveller > traveler
cheque > check
jewellery > jewelry
tyre > tire

In England we go to hospital, we do NOT get hospitalized, although that is a term that seems to be creeping into general usage, along with many other ‘-ize’ bastardisations.

But herein is my dilemma: Language has to be allowed to evolve or else it dies. Words are constantly being re-worked to have different meanings. The obvious example is the word ‘gay’, which have moved from meaning ‘happy and jovial’ to ‘homosexual’ and even now seems to be mutating further to mean ‘bad’. When the yoof [sic] of today say, “That’s gay”, they just mean ‘bad’ and probably don’t even reference ‘homosexual’ in their thinking at the time. I can’t hear ‘gay’ without the ‘queer’ associations, but I genuinely believe the meaning is moving on from that. Language does that, it messes with meaning, sometimes to the point when the original sense is totally reversed. Something that is wicked these days is good. This is not a new phenomenon; try these words that have reversed their original meanings:

Artificial
This originally meant ‘full of artistic or technical skill’. Now its meaning has a very different slant.

Nice
This comes from the Latin ‘not to know’. Originally a ‘nice person’ was someone who was ignorant or unaware.

Awful
This meant ‘full of awe’ i.e. something wonderful, delightful, amazing. However, over time it has evolved to mean exactly the opposite.

Manufacture
From the Latin meaning ‘to make by hand’ this originally signified things that were created by craftsmen. Now the opposite, made by machines, is its meaning.

Prove
Originally this meant to test. The old meaning survives in the phrase ‘proving ground’.

Tell
Its original meaning was ‘to count’, which is how we came by the term ‘bank teller’.

God alone knows what qualities to expect from something that is claimed to be cool, hot, bad, or even radical!

So often I hear data used incorrectly – data is the plural of datum, so “the data is correct” should really be, “the data are correct” or, if a single piece of information then, “the datum is correct”.  We do the same mangling to media (plural) so we should talk about the newspaper medium as being one type of a larger group of media.  We play sports in one stadium or several stadia (not stadiums although again, this is now becoming a more widely accepted pluralisation).  In the same way I get stressed about the plural of cannon, for which the rules seem to be changing. A cannon is a piece of artillery, a big gun. The plural is also cannon, in the same way as aircraft drops the ‘s’ when found in multiples. These days you will hear reporters telling you they hear the sound of ‘cannons’ firing in the distance and I wonder if I have any right to demand the language should not adopt this form. Maybe with language there is no right or wrong, just current use, whether that deviates from accepted rules or not.

I hate txt spk to my core and thankfully it does seem to be dying a pretty rapid death, as mobile phones offer increasingly sophisticated predictive text and reduced prices for messages, so there is no longer the call for the same degree of brevity. I am delighted though that Twitter does not seem to fall foul of txt spk too much, despite the limitations of 140 characters per message. It is an interesting discipline to try to convey news, feelings, concepts in such a restrictive space and yet few seem to resort to abbreviation beyond the occasional ‘&’. These days there is just no excuse for poor spelling, with spell-checkers attached to every type of technology. MS Word will help you with grammar, correct mis-spelt words and even suggest alternatives via its synonym and thesaurus technology. So if you can’t spell, run it through a word processor first! That said, beware and remember to proof-read everything at least twice. In earlier versions of Word my surname was auto-corrected the Pervert and therein lies a tale or two.

We add new words all the time, mostly derived from technological advances, such as blog and blogosphere, but did you know that these have also now mutated into Vlog (a video-blog) plus Vlogosphere and you can watch a Webisode of a ‘programme’ made especially for web-release? You can take a staycation, which is a holiday taken at home, and you might do this with a frenemy – one who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.  On your staycation you might become a locavore – one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.  To google is now a recognised verb in the Collins English Dictionary, but has yet to make it to the OED. I suspect that Twitter will soon receive its own recognition soon, with new definitions for Tweet and possibly the inclusion of Twitterati!

There are a few words that I think should be added to the dictionary. In big department stores quite often the escalators going up are in a different location to the ones going down, so I think clarification should be provided by the introduction of upscalator and downscalator.

My niece once came up with a brilliant new word.  She was asked to make a round of teas and coffees, with people giving their ‘orders’ as she wrote them down on a pad, being a proper waitress. She put sugar in my tea, which I hate, and so I asked her if she knew she had done this. She checked her pad and looked up at me, and sad, rather guiltily, “I’m sorry Uncle Adrian, I must have misunderheard”.

I’ll not delve too deeply into the issues I have with the way we write numbers these days! 24/7 is 3.428 and please will someone tell me, how long is 3.5 minutes? Is that 210 seconds (3 1/2 minutes) or 230 seconds (3 minutes and 50 seconds)? I guess THAT is a debate for another day!

So you see I am torn between a desire to maintain the traditions and structure of English as I was taught it, full sympathy for anyone trying to make sense of it, and a recognization [sic] that we need  to embrace a language that needs to change, adapt and grow. What is wrong and what is right? Language is a tool of courtesy. It has been created to aid understanding. Punctuation is about clarification, making sure the meaning is unambiguous. To not bother with such things is discourteous and, in some cases, dangerous. Evolution with courtesy, and if error is inevitable, let it at least be through ignorance rather than laziness. Oh, and will someone give the National Curriculum a kick up the arse and bring back a few of the old values. As Winston Churchill once said, “That is the type of grammar up with which I will not put, innit”!

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