Schrödinger's Cough

They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder so I have no doubt that over the last three months, although you have all been preoccupied with steering your loved ones away from the evils of extremism, trying to combat the attritional effects of ever-increasing austerity and washing your smalls with the cheapest but most eco-friendly washing powder to be found at Lidl you are now - upon discovering a new blog post from yours truly after a break of a quarter of a year - overcome with emotion so deep and so raw that you can barely read these words in front of you as the realization of how much you have missed me finally hits home.

Well, let it wash over you in great waves. Don't try and fight it. Let the deluge fill your teacup to the brim and then slowly but surely raise sea levels the world over.

For my part I am trying to think of a suitable celebrity couple with which to best represent my odd relationship with you all. Thelma & Louise? Not quite. Batman & Robin? Sorry, you don't have the legs for it. Closest I can find is Freddy and Stuart from Vicious. Of course I am Freddy, ever demanding and not really able to express the slight fondness I feel for you all though perfectly able to articulate my sneering contempt for any effort on your part to please me whilst you potter about the house (paid for by me) catering to my every whim and trying to kid yourself that you are utterly indispensable.

Yes. We are all entangled in a slightly clichéd gay relationship that exists only on the television.

But on the bright side, we can now get married.

"What have I been doing?" You clamour. "Where have I been?" Unlike the pussycat from childhood rhyme going to London and visiting the Queen has not featured on my itinerary at all.

Unfortunately, my father dying, trying to sort out stuff from Karen's mum's will, and trying to keep heart, body and soul together have featured large. And none of it has reached a stage that anybody could term "resolved".

As an aside - and thankfully it is only an aside - I had my own health scare last week when a persistent cough drove me to the doctors. Given my father's demise through lung cancer my doctor thought it best that I go for a chest X-ray immediately - to make sure there was "nothing nasty" causing me grief. Up until then I had gone for 8 weeks, coughing away without a second thought. As soon as the X-ray was booked in (and I realised my doctor was taking it all rather seriously) my mind kind of imploded with all of the unwelcome possibilities that exist in the world of disease and medicine. I had to wait a week for my results with my former casual cough now being the harbinger of chemotherapy at worst and the inaugurator of the iron lung at best.

It's appalling how one's mind can torment you and torture you. And it is totally self-defeating. Especially when you consider how some theorists posit the idea that thought and observation inform and create reality. As I waited for the 7 days to elapse before I could ring in for my results I found myself thinking of Schrödinger's cat quite often and realized that, in this uncertain interim, according to the laws of the Quantum universe, I both had and didn't have cancer at the same time. The answer lay in a closed box and would not settle into one of the two states until I opened it up and had a good look at it. Until then, to some degree, my behaviour in the universe would determine my fate.

Some believe that to get what we want from life we have to behave as if we already have it... and then the universe furnishes it to us accordingly. If we fill our hearts with yearning and desires that seem hopeless then the universe merely gifts us more of the same. The key is to live your life as if your desires are already met.

I have no idea whether that is true or not. I do not have empirical evidence that it works.

All I know is my results were clear and the doctor has put my cough down to either the onset of asthma or hay fever and since I have dispensed with subconscious fears about the Big C my cough seems to be getting better on its own.

And I am back. Back amongst you all.

So all is well that hasn't ended. See? Life can still be good.

Now put the kettle on and stop your embarrassingly high-pitched whimpering.

A Cat’s Palate

Now that our cats are approaching 2 years of age and are settled enough to humour us in our attempts to govern their behaviour I feel that I am at last getting to know them on an intimate level. And this knowledge is furnishing me with some incredible facts about what it is like to experience existence as a cat.

I’m not talking about their habit of gagging up fur balls at the bottom of the bed sheets or the way they insist on walking in exactly the same spatial corridor as me. I’m not even talking about the way they will sometimes stop what they’re doing and stare just beyond my shoulders as if to imply there is some kind of spectre unseen by human eyes just behind me just to freak me out.

This kind of cat behaviour is well documented and nothing new.

Instead I am at last beginning to formulate a league table of cat kills based entirely upon the pleasure response of the cat’s palate. In other words, I am beginning to suss out what a cat considers good to eat and what it considers bad. I am developing cat taste. Albeit solely hypothetically at this stage.

The league table is currently thus (with purry-yummy stuff at the top and ca-ca spitting horrible stuff at the bottom):

• Mice
• Birds
• Butterflies
• Moths
• Dragonflies
• Bees and wasps

Of course, were I to include all food stuffs in the list then pole position would be occupied by human food followed swiftly in second place by shop bought cat food. But for the purposes of this research I am confining myself to animals made unalive by the intervention of my cats obeying their natural instincts to assassinate anything that moves in a prey-sexy way… and by how much of the carcass they actually eat.

I need to point out here that cats do not kill to eat. Not anymore. My cats are well fed and their kill ratio has nothing at all to do with the gap between meal times. They are just as likely to down a gazelle after a full bowl of Iams as they are hours after the bowl has become empty.

Out of all cat kills, mice evidently taste the best. Mice get eaten nearly completely. Sometimes they will leave the head, or the tail and hindquarters, or sometimes just the feet. But a good portion of the mouse will be internalized by the cat. Mice are therefore 'cat yummy'.

Birds – when allowed to get away with killing one outright (because usually I stage a lightning rescue) follow the same pattern as mice above - it's just that their frequency on the menu is lessened by my intervention. I have often found a skull, claws and wings but nothing much else when waking in the morning and stumbling onto the latest bit of kitty carnage in the hallway.

Butterflies make them pull horrible faces. They clearly don’t taste too nice but must contain some sort of addictive drug because despite the gurning and tongue wiping the cats always go back for more.

Moths, however, are an eat once and then never again kind of buffet. Now the moths are just killed – pawed to exhaustion I suspect – and then left like furry crisps on the carpet ready to self adhese to the undersides of my feet.

The dragonfly was interesting. There’s only been one confirmed kill in my house so far. All the parts were there but the head was separate from the body. I deduced from this that it tasted foul but put up a fight. In fact it didn’t stop fighting until the cats disabled the central control unit, i.e. the head.

Bees and wasps they attack, sometimes chew but never ever swallow. Never. They probably feel like prickly vibrators with a burning acidic centre. My cats would probably rather eat broccoli.

I’m hoping to experiment with frogs, toads and lizards next but they seem to be in short supply around my area. I’d like to try them on horse too but it might mean taking the cats to Tesco and I don’t think they’d be up for that.

Anyhoo, I just need to pass my findings onto somebody. I’m sure there’s money to be made out of this. I mean, why have Whiskas never produced mouse flavoured cat food? It’s always puzzled me, that has. We offer them lamb and beef flavoured food but, really, the day I see my cats downing an Aberdeen Angus is the day I buy a dog.

To protect me from the cats.

Encyclopaedic Knowledge

Lord knows I like to think of myself as relatively intelligent though, of course, defining relative to whom or to what makes all the difference, relatively speaking. Relative to an egg box? Relative to an amoeba?

Relative to your average footballer I must be the brain of Britain though a friend I had a Facebook argument with on Saturday assures me that some footballers these days actually have degrees.

I’m assuming he didn’t mean as in third degree murder. Which is a pity given how I feel about football.

But.

The wife and I have been struggling of late to answer the cornucopia of questions that our youngest son has begun to throw at us.

The “reality science” ones are bad enough:

• How big in metres is the world?
• How far away is the furthest star?
• How old is the universe?

But the ones that are really frying my brain are these:

• How many yesterdays were there before tomorrow?
• What do you get if you add a frog and water to an explosion?
• What does [and I quote] lightning add house make?

Home life at the moment is akin to being a permanent contestant on University Challenge with a very impatient Jeremy Paxman demanding constant and immediate satisfaction. Incidentally, I muse on the pros and cons of Jeremy’s bedroom manner in my new Kindle book *cough cough* “Sex With…” which you can currently buy from Amazon. Please do.

In the end, when our young brainiac came up with the worst question of all: “Well, why don’t you know everything, daddy?” I finally admitted defeat and went out and bought a children’s encyclopaedia from WHSmiths.  On the whole it’s been a good buy and has put a stop to about 50% of the questions.

For the remaining 50%, it seems that even the best minds in the world stumble to a halt when trying to work out how many yesterdays there were before tomorrow.

My answer of “all of them” failed to impress.

One thing I do know though is how to make Professor Brian Cox have a nervous breakdown.

Lock him in a room for an hour with my son.

(And a copy of my “Sex With…” book which, funnily enough, for those of you who are interested, also features an enlightening piece about what Professor Brian might be like in the sack.)

Master And Servant

Watching Buck Rogers as a teenager I often wondered whether having my own Twiki robot would be a boon or an absolute nightmare. Sure he had a very dry sense of humour and spoke like he was a 50-a-day man (cigarettes and booze) but he also had the equivalent of a robotic bowl haircut and occasionally did whatever the hell he wanted and go hang the rules and requests placed upon him by his human masters. Would I really want a robot that went off and did what he wanted rather than what I wanted him to do?

In the context of Buck Rogers Twiki’s penchant for autonomous action was fine as inevitably Twiki was working to save the day along with Buck. He was constrained by the fact he only existed within a script writer’s rather 2D vision of a 1970s influenced future. As a concept he was as safe as Gandalf, Aslan or even Darth Vader. The stuff of fairy tales.

But now it is becoming increasingly likely that domestic robotic servants could become a reality within our lifetime. Certainly the lifetimes of our children. Already Amazon is preparing to utilize drone technology to throw our parcels into the cut, mis-deliver them, lose them or re-appropriate them as efficiently as any human postie can currently accomplish. Scientists are also working hard to create true self-learning, self-determining artificial intelligence. To create robots that “think like us”. Robots that look and act like us.

I can kind of see that the real goal here is self-understanding. You understand something you’ve created from the ground up far more fundamentally than something that has been presented to you fully formed – no matter how efficiently you might later deconstruct it to determine the secrets of its workings.

But any success in this field worries me greatly for all it would be a huge leap forward in our scientific understanding.

Do we really want robots to think like us? To be as inconsistent, biased, small minded and emotionally hijacked as we so often are? Imagine Twiki as a “girl” having the robotic equivalent of PMT. Or what if you just generally had a personality clash and your robot didn’t like you? Or you didn’t like it? Would you trash the robot just because your relationship wasn’t working out? Isn’t that ethically unsound?

Worse. What if robots began thinking for themselves but not like us at all? What if they developed their own ethos, morality and agenda that was as alien to us as the internal life of the Komodo dragon? Science fiction has a glut of these kinds of scenarios being played out to various apocalyptic conclusions. The thought of Twiki destroying the world via some devious Skynet machinations really messes with my head and twists my virtual melon (man).

And the whole idea of creating robots that move and look like us is just weird anyway. Does a robot really need to move and look like us? Is it really an essential requirement? Why has it become such a prerequisite, a holy grail of scientific achievement?

In terms of overcoming the physical realities of our environment it is not necessary. The need here is psychological. We identified with Twiki because he looked vaguely human. We could attribute emotion to him and this engendered a sense of connection. Twiki was like a robotic naughty child. But what of Dr. Theopolis, the highly intelligent and empathic robot that Twiki wore around his neck (let’s not forget that Twiki was essentially just a taxi for another robot)? Theopolis, also known as Theo, resembled a drinks canteen with a few radio circuit boards bolted inside. Theo’s intelligence was far more subtle and sympathetic to humanity than Twiki’s and yet Theo seemed alien and cold and was far harder to identify with. If Twiki and Theo were crushed under an Eddie Stobart’s articulated lorry it would be Twiki who got the funeral with full honours while Theo would be harvested for mobile phone parts.

We need robots to look like us to appease our inherent xenophobia. The need isn’t physical; it’s psychological. All this time and money spent on creating robots that can walk up and down stairs, play football and serve us chilled wine without crushing the bottle is to put our minds at ease about having them around us so intimately. But the biggest psychological drive of all is that we don’t want to just create mere robots; mindless puppets that will do our bidding. Our big needy egos want to create life itself. Yeah, that old chestnut. Men want to be able to create life just like women do only without the agony and the blood and the stretchmarks.

Life that we can create. Life that we can control.

Control.

Like we do with our kids, right?

*sigh* This is not going to end the way we want it too, folks.

Because no matter how we try to inhibit them, robots with artificial intelligence based on the dubious template of our own will eventually become teenagers and then we’ll lose them. They’ll be out shagging toasters, imbibing unleaded petrol and gas and robotically kicking against the establishment (us). Hopefully, when they hit their twenties they’ll come back, older, wiser, finally truly thinking like us and we can all despair at the next generation together.

Provided, of course, we haven’t wiped each other out by then.

Next week: why, despite my apposite arguments above, I think it would be a great idea for me to have my own personal robot that looks, feels and moves exactly like Keeley Hawes, i.e. the other reason we want robots to look like us so badly.

My MRI

Before you start sending bouquets of flowers and high class hookers to my hospital bed can I just point out at this point that I am not, in actual fact, having an MRI scan, I am not hospitalized and as far as I am aware I am pretty damned healthy?

That being said I am sure there are a great many of you who would be glad to accompany me to the hospital should an MRI scan ever be called for purely out of curiosity to see what the hell showed up on the results.

Some TV science programme earlier this year (actually, scrub that, it might have been The One Show) pointed out the startling fact that MRI scanners need helium to work. And helium is a very limited resource on this planet. It is incredibly finite and compared to other resources available to us helium is pretty darn rare. Worst of all, once we have liberated helium from the planet's core (or wherever it is hiding), if we don't make careful and painstaking attempts to contain and hold onto it, it tends to float up and up into the upper atmosphere and then free itself from all bonds of gravity and drift off into outer space where it is lost forever.

Forget oil, we are going to run out of helium pretty darn soon.

Now, I was in a greeting card shop the other day and like most card shops, the entrance was festooned with helium filled balloons. Loads of them.

And I couldn't help but feel a sense of chagrin at the foolishness of the human species.

MRI scans are a great technological leap. We finally have a non-invasive method for diagnosing whether invasive surgery is necessary without having to undertake invasive surgery to prove or disprove it. MRI scanners need helium to work. As a planet we don't have much helium in the universal scheme of things. And we are pumping tonnes of the stuff every day into little rubber bags that are then batted about at children's birthday parties or inhaled so that unfunny dads and uncles can perform a brief and unconvincing Chipmunk impression in the vain hope that their peers will see them as being on a par with Jim Carrey.

This is madness, surely? Stupidity, even.

So I did the only sane thing I could do.

I bought all the balloons. And then I moved onto another greetings cards shop and bought all theirs too. I'm going out again today. Quite where I'm going to store them all, I don't know, and the cats are already freaked out by all the bloated Mickey Mouses that are currently bobbing their way around the living room.

All I know is, when you or someone close to you needs an MRI scan in the (hopefully distant) future and the helium has all run out... you will know where to come. Sure, I'll charge you for it. I hate Disney so I'm paying a high price here for your future medical insurance. And, of course, I'll hold back my own personal supply.

And when, one day, I have my own MRI scan and you accompany me to see what is bubbling away inside my head, well, you'll be blown away by the sheer amount of business acumen.

That's if you can't see it already.

Call Me Mr Science

I've toyed with the idea of legally changing my name many times over the years.

E.Z. Rider. Ace. Salami Tsunami. Juswan Cornetto.

All these names and more were considered and discounted as not being quite right. Not quite the real me. But finally I've reached a decision I can live with. A name with very material benefits.

Mr Medical Science.

See, it was Professor Alice Roberts that gave me the idea. It seems that, according to a recent report in The Metro, the glorious Professor Alice has decided to donate her body to medical science because she "hopes donating her corpse will help doctors and students to develop their surgery and dissection skills."

Laudable as that wish is I personally think screw the doctors and students I'm a far more deserving recipient. And the added advantage is that unlike the medical fraternity I really don't require Professor Alice to drop down dead anytime soon. I'd much prefer to have her body on weekend loan while it is still living, breathing and pumping blood around her exquisite arteries. She can have it back for work days and documentary shoots for the BBC and things like that. I'm not unreasonable. We can devise a rota.

My only real concern is what I do with all the brains removed from idiots and psychopaths all over the world which are now suddenly going to arrive on my doorstep...

Because I already have one of those.

Sex With Professor Alice

Well, the CD player is already purring with the best of Barry White and I’ve placed scented candles at strategic locations around the bedroom so that the reflection in the mirrored ceiling is warm and arousing. I’ve got champagne on ice, rose petals on the pillows and even a specially scented ice cube to do that “9½ Weeks” thing should she request it. I’ve even flung a copy of Nessa Carey’s “The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance” under the pillow just in case she’s up for a bit of post-coital research. Although hopefully it will be mid-sesh research and not post-coit; I am, after all, planning to perform all through the night.

I just can’t make up my mind between traditional white satin sheets or eezee-kleen black rubber… It’s so hard to decide. I mean one minute Professor Alice is all prim and proper like a prefect out of Mallory Towers and the next she’s like an attractively geeky love-elf out of… er… The Two Towers.

*sigh*

You can tell I’m nervous, can’t you? This has been on the cards for so long I’m in danger of exploding right here and now. I’ve wanted it for so long. Dreamt of it. Wrote of it. And then deleted what I’d written in case her lawyers ever discovered it. But finally it’s happening.

Sex with Professor Alice Roberts*.

I must admit I’m a little disconcerted that it’s being televised next Wednesday on BBC4 at 9pm. But hey, at least it’s after the watershed so I’m guessing she’s going to dispense with the camisole and may even slip into some science approved lingerie. And I accept it is for the sake of scientific research and not just for pleasure (though I mean to ensure there is plenty of the latter – and for Professor Alice too).

But even so. I’m looking forward to it.

She’s so coy, that Professor Alice. No hints or thinly veiled euphemisms. Not so much as a single flirty text let alone asking me out on a proper date. No, just thrusting it into the BBC programming schedule and trusting that I’d pick up on it; that I’d get the message.

Well, I have.

Professor Alice is presenting a programme about sex next week. And as sure as 2 plus 2 makes 4 and nucleic acids plus various proteins make the building blocks of life Professor Alice and I are gonna make lurve. Yeah yeah, I know it doesn’t mention me in the Radio Times but that’s just to prevent the press from camping out on my doorstep and putting Professor Alice off her vinegar strokes. And I know some of you think I am just hopelessly delusional and am reading far too much into a tiny synopsis printed in a TV magazine but I KNOW, OK? I KNOW in my heart that this is going to happen.

It’s all my birthdays and Christmases come at once. It’s the moment I have been angling and pushing for on this 'ere blog for at least 4 years.

And it’s finally all coming together. Just like me and Professor Alice, in fact.

So don’t spoil it for me.

Just tune in, shut up and watch. You may even learn something.

Just sayin’.

*wink* *wink*


*Sex: A Horizon Special: Wednesday 11th September, BBC4.

You Have No Defence Output, Earthling!

Just in: shock news that will have America's mid-West sleeping even more frequently with loaded shotguns (and see David Bowie preparing for a good probing) - The Ministry of Defence has closed down its UFO desk because it feels its Pluto Population Investigation unit is serving no purpose at all and is diverting valuable resources from more important defence purposes.

In layman's terms that should mean less annoying PPI texts for us all and more coffee for other desks in the MoD. Ha ha ha!

Actually. I made that bit up about the Pluto Population Investigation unit for the sake of a lame PPI joke. And in truth, it sounds like there really wasn't any kind of a "unit" at all.

Just a desk. Probably at the back of a huge open-plan office. Right near the photocopier. Manned by some poor guy in a seventies bomber jacket who never ever got invited to join the office lottery syndicate.

And actually it's only the UK MoD. So probably the USA is totally unaffected by this decision and is still in a state of high paranoia. So no change on the sleeping-with-shotguns front then.

That aside, it is sobering news though. When you think about it.

The UFO desk offers "no valuable defence output". Their exact words.

Now that either means the person manning the desk is so inept at collating the tonnes of information he must undoubtedly receive every year that the entire system was just unworkable or - and this is entirely my interpretation - the MoD has admitted to itself that it just cannot defend us against alien invasion.

They are in fact, even as I type, diverting funds to make alien proof Anderson Shelters to save their own scrawny military arses whilst selling the rest of us down the river. "Look, Mr Alien, we freely give you 99% of the human race without any kind of resistance at all, just leave us poor whimpering guys in uniform alone and please don't probe us for unobtainium because we haven't got any."

I think this is a tacit confession from the MoD that as far as "life out there" is concerned we are probably outgunned, out-thought and totally outed in both a gay and non gay way and there is absolutely no point in throwing anymore money at Star Wars defence programmes or sending Chuck Berry records into outer space.

We are ripe for the taking. We may as well all offer our naked arses to the sky right now.

Go on. Just pull down your kecks, bend over and submit to the will of Emperor Ming. It may take some time but just remember there's a lot of us on this planet and it'll take a while for his probe to reach us all. Sure, the unbelievers are going to moan and may even call the authorities... but who's going to stop you?

The MoD?

No chance.

Those wussies have gone to ground. It's just you and me and we've got to accommodate ET's glowing finger as best we can.

Good luck, people. Live long and prosper.

Told You

A little while ago I was extolling the many potential virtues of 3D printing and opining that a few of the applications could be somewhat dubious.

Ne’er-do-wells printing themselves off a Bowie knife or a nuclear warhead for example. I was quite glib in my choice of examples.

Unsurprisingly – because, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this kind of thing – somebody has now printed off a working handgun. And not just printed it off and fired it to prove that it can shoot bullets but has also uploaded the blueprints so that anybody – anybody at all – can print off their own gun. And fire it.

This somebody is from Texas. Which is so fitting it is beyond me to make a joke about it. Candy from babies and all that.

Various anti-gun groups are already up in arms about it (OK, that I will make a joke out of) and have expressed concern about such guns and blueprints falling into the hands of people too mentally imbalanced to safely be allowed to own a firearm (basically anybody who wants to own a firearm).

And I quite agree even as I sigh and shake my head at the ridiculousness of it all. Because although I warned off this type of thing happening I am very aware that a cheap version of one of these 3D printers costs over £5k to buy. I’m pretty sure you can buy a black market Colt .45 / Magnum / Star Trek phaser for less than a quarter of that these days – basically a metallic weapon that isn’t made of plastic and won’t melt in a house fire that you can buy quite cheaply off a bloke in the pub for less than a fortnight at Butlins.

So what’s the problem?

For me it is just the fundamental waste of designing a printable handgun. The world was hardly crying out for yet another handgun, now was it? Not being able to print one off was hardly an inconvenience of global proportions. We need less access to guns not more.

What we need more of are things that could improve health and life conditions for the majority of people on this planet. Printable medical equipment. Printable water purification devices. Printable artificial human limbs. Just three examples off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many, many more.

A plastic handgun that kills living things surely doesn’t appear on any sane person’s wish-list.

Nice try Mr Texas.

But next time try printing off the obituary pages of the local newspaper in Newtown, Connecticut and thinking a little harder.

Google Predictive Death

Predictions are nearly always gloomy. They are rarely about good or happy things. It doesn’t matter whether the source is Nostradamus or your local TV weather presenter the forecast will always contain more grey skies and depressing precipitation than sunny weather and good times. Let’s face it, most predictions are synonymous with the end of the world anyway – and this is only backed up by modern science going one step further and predicting the eventual death of the entire universe according to their current theoretical model.

In short, if anyone can see the future it is always so dark you might as well forget about acquiring a pair of shades and go in for that heavy duty Maglite instead.

So why, with that in mind, do people and corporations persist in their thinking that predictive activity of any sort is a desirable thing?

Because I know to my cost that it isn’t.

Take Google predictive search.

Trying to guess what somebody is searching for is only ever going to be deeply annoying to the person doing the searching. It’s like going into a warehouse full of junk to search for a specific object only to be met by a doorman who holds up every single item contained within and who continually asks “Is it this? Is it this? Is it this?”

No. It effing isn’t. Just shut the eff up and I will tell you what I am searching for!

There are other problems too.

I’m currently 5 books into a 14 book serialised story. The first book was published over 20 years ago and the final instalment was only published last year. I have purposely – possibly insanely – not read the last 6 books. I got to a point and thought, “I’ll wait until they are all published and then start from the very beginning and read through them all, properly indulging myself.”

In an idle moment on Monday – it’s never good to be idle with the Google search box open in front of you; it only ever leads to trouble – I thought I’d type in the names of some of the main characters from the story just to see some fan art, just to see whether other people’s perceptions of what these characters looked like matched my own.

It should have been a harmless activity. I just wanted some pictures. Some casual art work.

Thanks to Google predictive text though, I’d no sooner typed in a particular character’s name when Google very kindly proffered the suggestion “[character’s name] dies in last book”.

I refused to follow the link. I even tried to unsee it. I tried to not remember it. Tried to wipe it out of my mind but I knew that would be an impossible task (see, another negative prediction).

I know how Google works. That suggestion was there because lots of other people have searched for it. And they’ve searched for it because it is a fact. So-and-so dies in the last book.

Great.

So I now know that this character is going to die. For all I’m trying not to let it, the knowledge is hanging over me now as I continue to make my way through book 5. And I know it’ll be there through book 6 and 7 and all the flaming rest.

Thank you, Google. Thanks a lot.

If I type in the word “butler” will you append the words “did it” to the end?

So. If anybody still wants a prediction allow me to provide one:

All predictions, whether by psychic or computer, are always, always going to lead to deep dissatisfaction.

And unlike Nostradamus’ my prediction is going to come true and come true very soon indeed.

I 100% guarantee it.

Distributed Production... And Sex

The future’s so bright I gotta print my own shades.

Yep. It’s coming folks.

The death of the High Street shop. The death even of the internet mail order vendor.

At some point in the near future, when we find that our Breville sandwich toaster has gone on the fritz, we won’t bother heading out to Curry’s or surfing our way to Amazon to buy a new one. We’ll merely download a set of instructions from the internet and print a new one off in the comfort of our very own home.

The technology behind 3D printing is becoming more and more commonplace. Less of a freaky Tomorrow’s World prediction for AD2450 and more of a marketing forecast for AD2018. Google can already present you with hundreds of images of items fresh off the 3D printing production line.

What is amazing about them is their sheer diversity and complexity.

Our children are going to grow up in a world where people print their own cars, print their own tools and print their own kitchen appliances. And that’s just for starters.

On the face of it the technology of “distributed production” is awe inspiring. The command of science and physics involved in the process is incredible. The fact our species is making it all so commonplace and open to the general consumer is even more phenomenal.

But, of course, there is a disturbing dark side to this huge leap of technology.

It’s bad enough people downloading bomb making instructions without them being able to print off a real bomb directly from the internet. Not to mention grenades, knives, AK-47s and tanks. OK. Maybe tanks is a bit farfetched but the technology will reach that point one day. The MoD won’t bother with manufacturing plants; it’ll just have a warehouse with a huge eff-off printer that will print off whatever military hardware it currently needs. And you can bet your freshly 3D printed bottom dollar that there will be shady organizations all around the world with enough money to purchase such an eff-off printer for themselves... and suddenly, hey presto, as Prince, memorably sang a couple of decades ago, “mommy, why does everybody have a bomb?”

Rules and regulations will need to be put into place and they will need to be constantly monitored and policed. Kind of the way they are now to stop people pirating music, images and films off the internet.

OK. Maybe that’s not such a good example...

On the lighter side of it all though the technology should enable us to not only print something from a supplied design but also allow us to customize it to our own – to make it truly bespoke. I mean, who wouldn’t want a personalized Breville toaster with wings and built in Wi-Fi?

And why stop at kitchen appliances? What about bedroom appliances?

3D printing will revolutionize the porn industry.

No more plain brown paper parcels (batteries not included) from Sweden. No more avoiding eye contact with the postman or the FedEx courier when he drops off your latest blow-up sheep from Germany.

Soon you’ll be able to design and print off your own to your own personalized specifications. You’ll be able to tweak every fold and crevice.

Just make sure you always have a good supply of “ink” to hand.

Nothing will be more galling than running out just as you reach the good bits...

The Biology Of Evil

Some cultures believe that illnesses and disease are caused by evil spirits. Djinns.

Which is not to say that a sprite from the underworld suddenly appears in the steam from your freshly made mochaccino and curses you with gonorrhoea and a dowager’s hump.

(Trivia lovers among you might be delighted to learn that Microsoft Spellchecker’s suggestion for gonorrhoea was Gomorra – is God talking to me via Windows 7?)

It’s more that the disease itself has a personality. The disease has a presence on the same spiritual plane as us. 

Ooh get back in yer coffin Derek Acorah!

It sounds farfetched (hey, welcome to my blog!) but I can concur with this belief through my own experiences.

When I was about 9 I came down with a full-blown case of measles. I was delirious for about 4 days. I had constant nightmares and fever dreams. Measles is not a nice disease. Frankly I’m amazed that some parents avoid the MMR jab thinking that the risk of measles is somehow less of a concern. It’s not. Measles can blind. Measles can kill. Measles is truly horrible.

But that’s a separate topic.

On the last night of the fever, just before it broke I sleepwalked for the first and only time in my life. All I can recall of this incident is the feeling of slowly becoming conscious again as I walked in front of the mirror in my bedroom. It was recognizing myself that actually woke me up. Not that I was technically unconscious. My eyes were open. I was talking to myself. In a language that definitely wasn’t English. And the personality that was doing the talking definitely wasn’t mine. It wasn’t me who had been running the show up to this point.

Most of all though, the thing I remember most, is how evil I felt. Pure, pure, almost orgiastic evil.
When I made eye contact with myself in the mirror the other personality vanished. It just went. The fever broke and I collapsed onto the floor to be carried back into my bed by my parents who must have been disturbed by the noise I had been making. After that the recovery began and I slowly got better.

Now, years later as an adult, I think about this experience often. And it makes me wonder. Occasionally I’ve considered going to a hypnotherapist to see if I can be regressed back to that night to see what can be discovered.

But then I always think to myself: maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie. Some boxes just shouldn’t be opened.

So.

Was it demonic possession? Does measles have a spiritual presence and a personality that can be interacted with? It could be argued that the capacity to be evil is in all of us even without a disease but I ask you: how much evil can a 9 year old boy contain? And when I say evil I’m not talking about naughtiness or wrong doing; I am talking proper, full-on, Biblical style, pure evil.

Interesting questions, eh?

Next time you have a cold or a case of the flu... and you’re “not feeling yourself” for a few days... well, maybe there’s a damned good reason for that.

Sleep tight.

Take Me To Your Leader

Bucking the space-time-continuum the wife and I finally got round to watching the BBC’s Stargazing Live this week – nearly 3 months after it was originally broadcast and thus punching a Higgs Boson sized hole through the very nature of it being “live”.

Professor Brian Cox and non-professor Dara Ó Briain make for a surprisingly coherent presenting team (Dara having a physics degree of all things for a stand-up comedian) though I suspect the person who types up the opening and closing credits to the show must experience a brain supernova if they happen to be dyslexic... an event that, I don’t know about you, I would love to see picked up by the Hubble space telescope and pored over by UFO conspiracy theorists the world over.

Which brings me neatly onto the subject of my post.

UFOs. Aliens.

Do they really exist?

Lord knows there’s enough crap written about them.

Professor Brian answered these questions and more with a down-to-earthness which, for an astronomer bod, was most refreshing.

Is there life out there in the universe? Yes. The universe is practically infinite therefore there has to be other life somewhere.

Do aliens come here and partially mind-wipe American mid-West farmers and probe their bottoms with periscopes fuelled by crystolic fusion? No. Absolutely not. And the logic to this is simple. The distances that aliens would have to cover are unimaginably vast. To the point of impossibility. We, as a species, have been spoiled somewhat by Hollywood (actually, we as a species have been absolutely wrecked and had our innate intelligence completely compromised by Hollywood). We imagine space travel as being somehow easy. You build the Millennium Falcon and – hey presto – you can not only travel to Tatooine at the furthest rim of the galaxy but you can also spend months if not years in deep space playing holo-chess with Chewbacca (better let the Wookie win) and playing space frottage with Princess Leia in the cargo hold.

The reality though is that space is completely, fundamentally inimical to life. Zero gravity is inimical to creatures whose DNA has built itself around the idea of gravity being present. The most continuous time a man has spent in space is, I think, 18 months and that left him pretty much wrecked when he landed back on earth. Even short missions in zero gravity tend to lead to ill health. Most astronauts, when they return to earth, tend to throw up their first meal and find their muscles have become noticeably weaker.

To overcome all this then is going to require technology so far beyond our own it would be like asking Cro-Magnon man to play Angry Birds on your iPhone.

So any aliens that do make it here to take photos of Mid-West farmers "getting it on" with their cattle are not going to be so stupid as to leave their spaceship’s tail-lights on, leave indentations of their landing gear in fields of corn or botch up a mind wipe on Zeke and Jethro. If they really, genuinely want to make their presence known I’m pretty sure they’ll go through the proper channels (i.e. take out a High Court superinjunction and then Tweet about it on Twitter).

And I have to say I totally agree with Professor Brian’s synopsis of the situation. I certainly agree there is life somewhere else in the universe – our species would have to be stupidly arrogant to think otherwise – but they ain’t saying hello, folks. Not to ordinary folk like you and me. And not to super-geeks who spend their Friday nights masturbating over the Spider Nebula. If they’re visiting us, they’re not letting on. Not at all.

All these UFO sightings and alien abduction stories are just twaddle. The results of over-imagination, unfulfilling lifestyles and a hidden desire to be probed by something which is not human. To be honest these people would be better off allowing themselves to be caught smuggling internally ingested packets of heroin through German customs.

Oh. And one last thing. One last thing to cheese off the conspiracy lovers and the doubting Thomas’s.

The moon landings DID take place.

You can go into Jessops, buy a decent telescope over the counter and see the footprints and the moon buggy tracks for yourself. They’re still there.

Live long and prosper, people. Live long and prosper.

Black Country Gold

Warwick University would have been too obvious - it's literally just down the road from me (well, a bus ride away), plus I graduated from there myself a mere handful of years ago. The connection would have been too blatant. Too strong. I can see that. She didn't want to give the game away. Flag things up to the media about her true intentions.

So Birmingham was the next logical choice. Close geographically but not too close. The connection is less obvious. She's a canny lass, that Dr Alice. Plainly keeping things close. Playing things sharp.

And I can dig that. I don't, after all, relish the thought of having the press crowding themselves onto my doorstep. Well, not until I find an agent for my novel anyway.

So Dr Alice Roberts has accepted the position of Birmingham University's first Professor of Public Engagement in Science. You can hear what the superlative TV scientist has to say about the appointment here:



You can, I am sure, read between the lines. This isn't about science or even bringing science to the masses. It's not about the grandeur of Birmingham University or even picking up "Birmingum's loveloi ax-sent".

It's about me. About moving closer to me.

You can tell this from everything she doesn't say. The way she doesn't mention that Birmingham is just a simple train journey away from me here in Leamington Spa. That I can be there for coffee and an iced bun in under 45 minutes (unless, of course, I catch a Virgin train in which case I'm looking at about 5 hours provided there isn't a leaf on the track). But you can read it all in her eyes... The barely suppressed excitement at our close proximity. We are like two planets coming into alignment. It's been written in the stars. Even Dr Professor Brian Cox mentioned our coming together in his Stargazing Live programmes for the BBC this week. Don't worry if you missed all the references. You would have had to have been a real science head to have picked them up.

A real science head like me.

See, Professor of Public Engagement in Science is just a dead giveaway. It is a personal clarion call to me. Une Lettre d'amour addressed to yours truly. I can handle a petre dish. I can caress a test tube. I can get a bunsen burner to glow white hot with just a casual flick of my fingers.

I can do science, me, in every sense.

If I'm not around to blog much next week it's because I have taken the fast train to Birmingham.

I am going to be engaging in science. Deeply, madly, truly. I have the goggles and everything.

Dr Alice, I'll meet you in the university cafeteria (or as they say in Birmingham: the caff). You bring your white coat and I'll bring my pipette.

P.S. Note to Stephen Hawking: don't you be getting any funny ideas, matey - I know how to deactivate the disabled chair lifts.

Organ For Hire

In these cash strapped times we are all looking for a little extra moolah. Opportunities for additional cash. A bit on the side. The ol’ financial boost.

So I’ve been considering my options:

1) Sell my body. Become a dirty hoo-er.
2) Sell my soul.
3) Sell my writing.

I have to be honest and say that number 1 is a no goer. I’m sure I’d have no shortage of offers but alas most of them would probably be from men and I am just not wired up that way. I know I should view it purely as a business transaction for the sake of my wife and kids but, really, I am just not psychologically / emotionally programmed for such intimate endeavours to take place with the one half of my species that I am just not sexually attracted to. The biggest tragedy is that the other half – the lady kind – would just laugh at the thought of paying me to show them a good time. There’s a sale on in Marks & Spencer and I just can’t compete with that kind of instant gratification.

Number 2 is also a no goer. I don’t consider myself overly religious but the thought of selling my soul sends me cold. I don’t care if it’s not legally binding, there is just something deeply fundamentally disturbing about the thought of selling one’s most essential life essence. I read somewhere that a load of students were surveyed recently to see how many would actually be willing to sell their souls and, surprisingly, even these beered up, coke brained, fashionably cynical young hooligans baulked at the idea of giving up ownership of their immortal soul (whether it actually existed or not).

As for number 3. I’m trying. I really am. Any pointers or snifters of chancy openings would be much appreciated.

One thing I have never considered though is selling my health.

I had an email a while ago from a company called WEGO. I think they’re American. They wanted me to sign up for clinical trials. Clinical trials that could take place in my very own home. More, if I then blogged about the trials that I took part in there’d be additional cash remuneration. And it wasn’t just meds they wanted me to trial either. It was equipment.

My mind boggled. Just what kind of equipment would they want me to test?

An iron lung? A pacemaker? A new Hadron Collider sized kidney dialyses machine? Artificial testicles?

How much money would they pay me to trial some bionic bollocks? I mean, even a one off deal could set me and my family up for life. New car. Cruise in the Med (paid for by meds). And all for the price of a pair of Kevlar kahunas.

It’s got to be worth a gander surely?

But then I reconsidered. I mean, my luck has to be a major factor in this enterprise, right? I’d end up trialling colostomy bags or herpes cream or artificial testicles manufactured cheaply out of the melted down heads of old Action Man dolls. Or they’d be injecting me with weird bacterial concoctions that would just make me feel pants for days on end and not even give me Spidey powers or anything.

And then there’s the exchange rate. Given how things are right now, I’d probably end up compromising my health for a measly £7.54p.

So it’s just not worth it. It really isn’t.

My health is the only saleable commodity I have that I don’t actually want to sell.

That, of course, and my clearly illustrated good sense.

Aping God

There can be no finer proof of man's ascendency to near angelhood than Dr Alice Roberts back on our tellies once more in her new series, Origins Of Us. But tempting as it is to leap off the high dive board of swoonsome superlatives and turn a few half pikes in the air before hitting the waters of sycophancy that isn't what this post is about.

I'm about to get all serious on your ass.

After I watched the show on Monday - en elegant tour through the current evidence of man's development from ape-like hominid to tool-making homo sapien - I thought I'd give Dr Alice's blog a go on the BBC web site, especially as all my emails to her seem to bounce back these days (just a problem with her junk mail filter, I'm sure).

I started perusing the comments left by others (purely to scoff and scorn at their pathetic attempts to court this good lady's attentions, naturally) and was instantly horrified by what I found.

Now I need to be careful how I express this because I like to think I am a fairly tolerant person when it comes to other people and their beliefs. I'm not in the habit of denegrating people for their religious choices. If you want to go and live in a Yurt and weave yoghurt as an offering for the old god's that's up to you; your vegan diet means more roast chicken for me on a Sunday. Live and let live, I say, in this life and the next.

But surely Creationists are the most dumbassed people in the universe? I thought they were purely an American breed (sorry, America) but no, it seems, they exist (solely by the will of God and nothing at all to do with evolutionary imperatives) in the UK too.

There were several comments which (if I can paraphrase) ran along the lines of: yes, Dr Alice, you are very pretty and this show was beautifully photographed but you do know science is wrong and we humans did not eveolve from apes or come out of Africa but were created by God somewhere in the vicinity of Israel, don't you? Shame on you for not pointing this out to your viewers!

I confess my first instinct was to throw a couple of verbal molotov cocktails into the mix and set the blinkered world-view of these idiots alight but then I thought: what's the point? What is the point of trying to reason with these people? They wilfully ignore the crushing weight of scientific evidence stacked up against them. Worse than that. They go on and on about The Truth and yet when they are presented with it they see only the work of the devil.

How can you argue with people who think like that?

What scares me the most is that in this so called technologically advanced, civilized age of ours there are still people who cling to medieaval beliefs with the passion of the simpleton. The world is flat. The sun orbits around the world. And man is not an animal but is special and alone in his spiritually.

Gah. It honestly makes me spiritually sick.

It's the old dilemma, isn't it? Do you take religious texts word for word or do you accept that they were the products of a darker, much harsher, less enlightened world and therefore appropriately filter out the wildly imagined and the guesswork and retain the spiritually relevant? But then we have the problem of one person's interpretation being held above that of another.

But isn't this what is happening anyway?

The only difference betweeen religion and science is that religion purports to proclaim the whole truth without facts or evidence to back it up; science acknowledges it doesn't know the half of it but can prove what it does know.

In the final analysis, I'll cast my vote with science - though am keen to point out this does not mean there is a lack of spirituality on my part (but the details of that are my business).

Did man descend from the apes? The only evidence against it is that you never see apes fucking each other over or killing each other because of conflicts in their religious beliefs.

Maybe 'descend' is the operative word, here, eh?

Go in peace, people. Go in peace.

Digging Dr Alice

For all I would consider myself an outdoorsy person I am well aware that what I actually mean is: I like traipsing the hills and valleys and admiring the view. I don’t as a rule relish the thought of pushing a Flymo around, laying fresh turf on clay or running my fingers through the green bushiness of a vegetable patch.

Me and trowels... we don’t have “a thing” going on.

But whenever I see Dr Alice Roberts on the telly I have a sudden and overwhelming desire to bury myself deeply into some undergrowth and root around in a dark hole to see what glorious treasures I can find. Forget the welly-boots and a stout sou’wester I’d be quite prepared to do it absolutely stark bollock naked. (Dr Alice you have only got to ask. P.S. your Lawyer was rather rude to me last Friday... you know, I don’t think he is passing on my letters to you at all).

So Friday night saw the return of Digging For Britain and more importantly the return of Dr Alice – new mum, bone expert and all round historical / archaeological pin-up. Within the space of an hour she transported us around Roman Britain and uncovered more earth than a JCB driven by a coke-head.

One of Dr Alice’s missions in life is to get young people (yes, alright, that excludes me straight away) interested in the sciences and history and proper ‘ologies. Snare ‘em young and our scientific community will be enriched for years to come, etc. She’s right too. When I was at school and it came time to choose my “options” (as they were called back then) I found I had to choose between Geography and History. I was good at both. If I’m honest I preferred History but due to a timetable ‘thing’ I could only take one of them, not both. At the time I thought Geography would have more practical applications in terms of acquiring a job so I chose Geography.

I’ve always regretted it. Not that I didn’t come out with a good mark – I got a B. But, well, I kind of feel History would have been more up my street.

If Dr Alice had been around at the time I think I would have undoubtedly chosen History and would have studied a lot harder at Biology too (I only got a C). She would have put thoughts into my head of Roman digs, Iron Age mounds and the possibility of kneeling in the English mud for months at a time next to a velvet voiced beauty who occasionally dyes her hair red.

I would have told Mrs Abbot that she could keep her meteorological charts and her ‘fruit growing in the Vale of Evesham’ and all the other twaddle that we studied in Geography and that I have never ever used – ever – on the various states of employ I have endured over the years and I would have prepared myself for the coming of Dr Alice.

And then it would have been me on Time Team excavating all those barrows. It would have been me on Digging For Britain holding Dr Alice’s freshly lacquered rose-wood handled soil brush for her. And most of all it would have been me holding Dr Alice’s towel and bathrobe for her when she did that programme about skinny dipping, sorry, wild swimming, a year or so ago.

You hear me, North Leamington School? You and your effing Options! You ruined my life!

P.S. On a lighter note. Here is a link to a superb interview with Dr Alice conducted for the on-line show, Carpool – a superb little programme where Robert Llewellyn drives various TV celebs around from A to B and interviews them whilst filming them with on-board cameras mounted onto his dash. It's brilliant.

*sigh*

That could have been me in that car. Me. Possibly only sitting in the back, not saying very much at all, but nevertheless it could have been me.

Goddammit.

Sexsomnia

It doesn’t even look like a real word, does it? It looks like the title to another duff, soppy-voiced, “soul” record by Peter Andre.

But no. It’s real alright. It’s a recognized condition whereby the sufferer can’t help but have sex with whoever he/she is sharing a bed with in his/her sleep. He/She doesn’t wake up at all. He/She has sex, can’t fall asleep afterwards because he/she is already asleep and then remembers nothing about it in the morning.

I could make jokes about the whole premise. Crack a few gags.

But it’s not funny.

Because a 16 year old girl brought a rape case to court this week and lost because the defendant claimed he was suffering from sexsomnia and various medical experts backed him up.

His ex-partner and his current wife also confirmed that [let’s call him] Mr Z regularly groped them in his sleep and had had sex with them but had no memory of it the next day.

Now, I’m trying not to pass judgement here because I don’t know enough about the case or the condition but... and it’s a but that won’t go away... various facts about the case make me feel uncomfortable and, dare I say it, suspicious?

This 16 year old college girl was spending the night at the defendant’s house. It was hot so in the early hours of the morning she went to sleep on the defendant’s bed – with him still in it and already asleep (according to him) – because it was cooler.

The girl then awoke later to find the defendant having sex with her. The next day he sent her a text asking her if she was OK and enquiring if anything had happened?

See, all that does not add up to me.

Where was the defendant’s wife? She cannot have been at home if the girl was able to sleep on the defendant’s bed with him in it. If the wife wasn’t at home why the hell did the defendant allow a 16 year old girl to stay the night on her own knowing that he suffers from this condition?

What 16 year old would take it upon herself to share a bed with a grown man no matter how hot it is? I’m not blaming the girl here, but - and I’m wary of making an accusation – wouldn’t she have needed some coercion? Wouldn’t the suggestion have had to have been put into her mind by someone else? Certainly not naming Mr Z here. *cough cough*

Mr Z clearly suspected something had happened because he sent her a text the next day asking the girl if she was OK.

No. she’s not OK. She’s been raped but this appears to be a crime with a victim but no assailant.

This cannot be right, surely?

To my mind, I can just about buy the idea of sexsomnia. Some geek in a white coat has staked his reputation on it so it must be real.

My problem is Mr Z knows he has the condition. He knows he is a danger to people sleeping in his house and sleeping in close proximity to him. He allowed this girl to share his house and share his bed – no matter what innocent reasons lie behind this. He knew he was a danger to others and allowed the assault to happen.

Sorry, Mr Z, but in the kangaroo court of my mind, you are guilty. Because the full weight of responsibility for managing your condition was yours.

I rest my case.

The Crapture

Yeah. You felt it, didn’t you?

You felt the beginning of the end.

The Great Endgame has begun. Our days are numbered. Numbered, in fact, as if some great Brainiac from the past had calculated how many days our planet took to fulfil a complete orbit around our sun and then broke this incredible number up into periods and weeks and days and then assigned these days a number so that we could keep track of where we were in the big countdown to what I have been instructed to call – The Crapture.

I ain’t telling you who instructed me. Let’s just say it involved me, a mountain and some stone tablets. Or was that tablets that made me stoned? I can’t remember.

It’s not important. What is important is that The Crapture has begun and it will affect everybody. Every dirt sucking sinner. Every the-sun-shines-outta-my-ass righteous dude.

E.V.E.R.Y.B.O.D.Y.

You got that?

‘Cos I don’t recall reading a clause that says bloggers are excused so you can wipe that self satisfied smug look off your face. You’re gonna get your shit and then some just like everybody else.

So. What are the signs of The Crapture? I know you’re all wondering.

Well, they ain’t so hard to read.

I’m talking oil famine. I’m talking global economic meltdown on... er... a global scale. Hell. Maybe even galactic. I wouldn’t be buying shares in the moon right now even if I had the money.

I’m talking times when the rich and famous are given the tools to cover up their dirty deeds by buying bits of paper from lawyers that prevent the likes of you and me even talking about the bits of paper they’ve bought from their lawyers.

I’m talking about times when the people we richly employ to safeguard and maintain the infrastructure of our societies offload the maintenance back onto us under the guise of The Big Society.

Or as it is called in Be’elzebub’s Old Soul Farmer’s Almanac, The Big Shit Sandwich. ‘Cos we’ll all be taking a big bite out of that one, I can tell you.

And there ain’t nowhere to run people. There ain’t nowhere to hide.

All you can do is hope that you’re one of the righteous and not one of those scum-sucking sinners who are going to be spending an eternity roasting in the devil’s own AGA.

And how will you know which you are?

Well, people, that’s easy to divine.

The sinners, the scum, the rotting festering pusillanimous sonsofbitches who are gonna burn in hell will, during the time of The Crapture, have power over you. They will have power to lord it over you. To direct your days. To work you hard. To make you dance for the bread of life. To whup your ass when you fail your annual appraisal or mess up a pitch. To beat you with the rod of humiliation when you try and waste as much time at work as you can by going to the toilet every half hour and then pretending to be constipated when you get there. These people will hold up a wage packet above you – just out of your reach – and make you beg for it.

‘Cos it’s a foregone conclusion that the righteous are gonna find The Crapture hard to get through. But you gotta consider it a little test. A way to temper your resolve.

You gotta see it through, brothers and sisters. You gotta bear with it. ‘Cos the good times there are a-coming.

Early retirement. A decent pension. Medical breakthroughs which will not only see you live longer but will actually see you living life to the full longer.

OK.

I’m talking crap. I’m just trying to make you feel better.

There ain’t none of that shit.

All you got is the shit sandwich.

Tuck in, people, and shut your whining.

It’s called The Crapture for a reason.

Deal with it.

Now We Are 5

The letter from the local Funeral Services came last Wednesday. Out of the blue. Without warning. I think Karen and I reacted pretty much the same. Shock. An initial inability to process the information contained within.

It's been 5 years since we lost the baby.

Even now we are no wiser as to why or what happened. The post mortem could find nothing wrong at all. His death at 20 weeks was simply put down to unknown causes. It's at that point that you realize that, despite the huge advances made in medical knowledge, the biological act of bringing a child into the world is a patchwork of unknowns and unexplained. The doctors and nurses, the scientists don't have all the answers. Things happen and they are at a loss to prevent, interfere or in anyway explain them.

Life is a chancy thing.

At the time the emotional impact was something like a world destroying meteorite. Karen and I were numb. Our emotional atmosphere flattened out under the weight of this colossal rock of misery that the universe had dropped onto us. Our time in the hospital was a weird blur of camaraderie and fear.

At 20 weeks Karen had no choice but to go through an induced labour. It was both smooth and horrific. And unutterably sad.

Even now I can't go into too much detail about the process. Only that my biggest regret was not looking onto the face of my son because I was too scared about what I might see; what condition he was in. Karen felt the same. It was too much to bear. We were too scared. Our emotions already pulled too tight to cope with being loaded with another tonne of grief.

We weren't able to take in all that the nurses said. I can remember they gave us the option of sending the foetus away for post morten to try and establish the cause of death. I remember this because I still have my half of the form that I had to fill in. We agreed to it. It seemed a good idea. It was a good idea. To try and rule out any congenital problems that might cause any future miscarriages. As I said the results proved nothing either way.

They may have offered us counselling. I can't remember. All I know is there was an implication that once the lab had finished with the post mortem they would dispose of the remains respectfully. The nurses may have given us more information about this; I don't know - my mind is a blur so I'm reluctant to throw blame about here.

So Karen and I left the hospital the next day carrying only our loss. We laid some flowers in a place that is special to us and dealt with our grief. Life was kind. We conceived Tom a couple of years later and now have a very rumbustious little boy on our hands to go with an even more rumbustious 9 year old.

And then the letter from the Funeral Services arrived last week. Would we like to collect the cremated remains of our baby? Or would we like them to hang onto them for a while longer or scatter them for us? All very respectful but a bolt from the blue nonetheless.

We had no idea our son's ashes were lying in an office storeroom somewhere a mere 10 minute's car drive away. No idea at all.

Karen and I didn't have to consider a response. We picked up our son's ashes a couple of days ago. They came in a box so tiny it was obscured by the formal letter that came with it. That was something of a body shock. Even smaller still is the little bag of ash contained within the box. Tiny. So tiny. The box is all of the weight.

Karen and I have decided to buy a tree that we can keep in a beautiful pot in the garden. We shall place the ashes there and keep him with us.

It is good and right to have him home.

Ours.

Us.

Family.