Calling All Game Developers

It seems to me that the more the world goes to pot – WWIII threatening in Ukraine, another holocaust threatening in Iraq, Cloud storage going up in smoke – the more the masses are going to want to escape from the unending media misery by diving into digital worlds of their own making. And being an opportunist kind of chap I figure I could make a fast buck or two and thus escape the impending Western Armageddon for real by cashing in on this virtual life-hacking industry by coming up with my own digital games.

Having little or no hard programming skills I see myself more as the conceptual engine behind the venture and will be looking for a few code monkeys to actually copy and paste all the binary gubbins into a working software platform. Or whatever it is these Visual Basic nerds do when they’re not checking their emails on their Androids.

I’ve already come up with some amazing games concepts which I am convinced will effortlessly fly off the shelves at Steam or Game. Or even Argos.

Moancraft – people are randomly spawned into a world where they have to dig for the resources to survive by moaning and complaining themselves into ever deepening holes and pits of despair. The more they moan about their lives the deeper they drop until they either reach the Epiphany Layer or plough on through the bedrock of misery and drop completely out of the world to the sounds of cheers from the other inhabitants.

Grand Theft Otto – this is a World War II simulation game. Sort of. You play Otto, a blond despot who goes on a violent retail spree across Europe and much of the world (kind of shopping with menaces) and accrues as many of the world’s treasures and artefacts as possible. This is a sandbox game where you can drive the vehicle of your choice (a tank is a good option) and do pretty much whatever the hell you like, destroy what you like and kill whom you like. Imagine a pre-United Nations world unfettered by any kind of global moral compass. Or if you can’t imagine that read the newspapers and imagine it’s the real post-United Nations world. There is very little difference. On the bright side your tank is very shiny. With the blood of countless innocents. And you can give your avatar a very severe moustache. Older version of the game may also be available: Grand Theft Ottoman.

Skyeram – set on a sprawling but illogically tiny Scottish island you play a male sheep who battles dragons, runs around through vast underground burial cairns fighting the undead and who frequently dies by jumping off massive cliffs whose height you have totally miscalculated. You can either join the Blue Coat faction and fight for independence or join the Old Empire and fight to keep the masses under the unthinking yolk of traditional oppression. Or you could just kill everybody and mess up every quest contained within the game as you say no to life both real and virtual and submit yourself to solipsistic armchair autocracy.

Other games currently in mental development are:

Assassin’s Crud – an assassin with OCD cleans all his weapons daily and collects all the resultant smeg, blood and gristle and stores it in a jar that he keeps on permanent show on top of his highly desirable Venetian sideboard.

BO Shock – a man who hasn’t bathed for 17 years shuts down a chemical weapons plant by wandering through the front doors by accident and rubbing himself off against an air conditioning vent.

Unreal Tourniquet – you have to invent the most unlikely and useless bandages possible. The player with the most resultant deaths (frags) wins. Ingredients will include Blue-tack, a fax machine, a nude photo of Jennifer Lawrence and a Muller Crunch Corner.

Super Mario Bros (Real Life Edition) – 2 normal plumbers come round to your house, overcharge you for fixing your blocked pipes and then freak out when you show them your pet terrapin.

Now don’t worry guys, there’s plenty more where they came from – I’ve hit a rich seam – there’s more than enough to go round. If anyone is interested in coding these up just PM me on Facebook. Or Pinterest. Or Twitter. Or some other social networking platform that I am currently not allowing to connect me to the outside world.

Year Zero

This post has been inspired by “Year Zero: A History of 1945” by Ian Buruma.

Being born in 1969 I grew up with the Second World War.

This possibly seems an odd statement to make but it is true.

Throughout the seventies WWII was there. Ever present through the medium of the comics my dad used to buy me – Battle and Action – through toys like Action Man and model Spitfires which, despite the air superiority of the Hurricane, was the one that caught everyone’s imagination. And through the good old “war film” that the BBC and ITV would roll out every Sunday afternoon. Before I was familiar with algebra I was familiar with The Guns of Navarone, A Bridge Too Far and Von Ryan’s Express. My grandfather occasionally showing me his medals and my Nan’s reminiscences of working in a munitions factory during the 1940’s made the myth making very personal.

Although WWII faded from my mind during the 1980’s – my teenage mind finally progressed to the Cold War and the imminent threat (or so we thought) of nuclear holocaust – there are those who argue that WWII did not end until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In reality, the world we have all been born into – all us post war babies – has been and still is shaped by the ongoing strifes and struggles that WWII either created or did not amply settle. The guns of WWII might be silent but the rumbles still produce shellshock in the unfortunates around the globe who found the taste of liberation merely a slightly less bitter pill to swallow than occupation.

In my mind, as a boy, 1945 must have been a great year. Celebration. Relief. Freedom. The end of suffering, death, starvation and chaos. The beginning of a better world.

In fact, 1945, even after the capitulation of Germany and Japan, was a horrific bloodbath. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in reprisal and revenge attacks all across Europe and Asia. In some cases the Allies made attempts to keep a lid on it; in others they supplied the means – be it guns or a temporary policy to turn a blind eye. Thousands of German women were raped every day by the Russian Red Army – and this went on until 1947 when the Red Army was eventually confined to barracks. Thousands of POWS and Death Camp survivors died after liberation – not through maltreatment – but through well-meaning ignorance. Soldiers and medical teams would give them food not realizing that a body, in an advanced state of starvation, cannot cope with rich food. Women across Europe who were accused of being “horizontal collaborators” were tarred, feathered, beaten, publically humiliated and in some cases executed. Others, male and female, were accused of collaboration with the fascists, or the communists, or whoever was out of favour that week and executed in almost endless rounds of reprisals as those who perhaps were not as brave as they felt they should have been during the actual conflict crawled out of the woodwork to flex last minute muscles and do their bit for glorious freedom.

And there were, of course, the political betrayals which were ultimately no less bloody. The Cossacks sold back to the Russians, disarmed both martially and emotionally by false promises spouted by the mouthpieces of the West and executed within hours of being loaded onto the trucks. The Koreans who within days of declaring their independence found themselves occupied by the communists in the north and the western powers in the south; years later the entire country would be split into two – an absolute travesty of liberation. And there were the Jews – who nobody wanted and whose true suffering at that point in time nobody bar a precious few really understood – who were still being treated as pariahs.

1945 was bleak.

But humanity did begin to exert itself again. Within days of the cease fires the Allies were mobilizing themselves to save Germany and later Japan from starvation. It was at least understood that the economy of Europe and later the world depended on their survival. Less charitably it was also understood that leaving them to completely collapse would make them ripe pickings for communist ideologies. Because despite the uneasy alliance with Uncle Joe Stalin, the battlefronts for the Cold War were already being drawn up and marked out.

The big idea – the big ideal, in fact – that emerged from the chaos of WWII was the United Nations. A means to prevent such a costly, disastrous war ever happening again. A means to exert and make sacred globally certain human rights and essential freedoms. Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear. High ideals. But even at the time the Allied powers would only go as far as making these rights a “declaration” and not “a guarantee”. How could they with Korea occupied? The Shinto religion banned in Japan? The communist zone in East Germany already closing like a suffocating fist? National re-education programmes put into place in both Japan and Germany to “civilize the brutes”. And a hundred other nudges, pushes and pressures as the Yanks and the Commies divided up the spoils of war and created the world in which we all currently live.

The modern world then, our world, was borne out of good intentions and unholy hypocrisy. And the guns of its collective war machine, it’s collective peace machine, rumble on and on and on.

Sobering to acknowledge as we take stock of the world around us in 2014, both at home and abroad, that although good intentions can never cancel out hypocrisy, hypocrisy can and does fully cancel out good intentions.

Are those four freedoms really so unobtainable? So unmaintainable? Is it time to admit defeat and present each one of them with a single white feather?

World Wars, it seems, never end but the peace we as individuals make with them sometimes, sadly, does.

Mother Russia

I don’t, I confess, have much in the way of political acumen so my grasp of the situation might be slightly awry but even I can see that the situation is at best tense and at worst explosive.

A country divided ideologically by the people who live there. One half wanting a split that defies geography, the other wanting to keep governance the way it is with a few tweaks for the better.

Foreign troops carrying out in-your-face manoeuvres on the sovereign soil of another nation; foreign soldiers right in the face of the native populace.

Centuries of bad feeling, grudges and old bloodshed threatening to bubble over into a whole new round of the same.

All the good – the partnership working, the shared achievements, the decades upon decades of neighbourliness which surely can’t all have been forced all of the time – on the brink of being swept away in a hysteria of media induced patriotism.

The politicians of the West giving forth disapproval and frowns, casting doubts on what is ostensibly a democratic process, voicing reservations about the abilities of the ordinary people on the street to know what it is they really want. David Cameron’s face is coming more and more to resemble the Lurpak butter man suffering from a bout of bowl bursting constipation.

But I can’t help thinking that it is really nothing to do with us or anybody else. Nothing at all.

If Scotland really wants to split from the Union and become part of Russia surely that’s their business?

D’ye ken, comrades?

Wall Of Noise

Noise has long been acknowledged as a weapon of war.

Apparently the American army has utilized a banging speaker system during many of its global gangster wars to pummel the resolve of its enemies by blasting out the best of Whitney Houston, Beyonce and probably Justin Bieber but amazingly not Edwin Starr which would make far more sense. And although I can see that a full-on Justin Bieber aural assault would have a fair chance of encouraging me to reach for my AK-47 just to perforate my own eardrums (I could do it with one bullet – I’m that good a shot) there is always the risk that, as with the Blitz spirit of the 1940s, it might have the opposite effect and harden my determination to remove America and all that it stands for, imperialistic capitalist pigs, from the map, from history and from the great god television itself forever and ever amen.

The first recorded use of noise in war (and I don’t mean in the context of a BBC special effects team strapping a C90 cassette recorder to a carrier pigeon during the Battle Of Britain) is probably the battle of Jericho in a long time ago BC when the Israelites conquered Canaan and decided to smite the city of Jericho by blowing their own trumpets once a day every day for 6 days and then 7 times on the 7th day climaxing with a great shout. It was undoubtedly one hell of a party that resulted in every man, woman, child and animal in the city being killed by the invading Israelite 24 hour party people.

That’s a lot of hummus going to waste and to my modern way of thinking the “complete death and destruction thing” seems a tad OTT. Did they even kill the snails and the butterflies? Geez! That’s damned scary and not a little bit pyscho. No wonder Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Contest. Who would have dared vote against her?

So history is telling me that without a shadow of a doubt my next door neighbours are trying to kill me. Kill me and ethnically cleanse my family from the neighbourhood. And kill my cats.

Their last party a couple of weeks ago (which I have only just recovered from – and I wasn’t even there) lasted a bong shattering 24 hours. I’m not kidding. It went through the night – climaxing like the Israelites at around 4am when I couldn’t even hear myself attacking the partition wall with a cricket bat – and carried on at a lower volume throughout the morning and the afternoon before finally ending with a Euro-disco whimper in the early hours of the following evening. I’m guessing that by this point the students next door had consumed so many intoxicants they no longer had the necessary motor neurone skills to position the needle properly on their industrial warehouse-sized twin-decks. Or, as I’d much to prefer to think, they had suffered life threatening blood loss from their shattered tympanic membranes and had fallen into drug unassisted comas from which they never arose… Which might well account for how quiet it’s been since that ill-fated apocalyptic party night a couple of weeks ago.

I am, I admit, at a loss as to how to return fire. Their bombardments are not constant. They lack the discipline of the Israeli army to conduct a prolonged and consistent war of attrition. It’s almost as if they only launch their salvoes on special occasions. And they do send round an air raid warden to warn us beforehand to head for our Anderson Shelter in plenty of time.

They are very, very polite. Almost nice in fact. And I suspect at heart they are just like us.

But I want Canaan to be for the Canaanites.

Is that very un-PC of me?

Are Yow Larfing At Moi Bruvva?

It's rare that Birmingham - capital of the UK Midlands - gets to feature in any kind of television drama. Most of the time film crews avail themselves of the city because it is undoubtedly cheaper to film there than the nation's capital and then represent it as actually being London. The BBC's Hustle is a case in point. Most of the exterior city shots were filmed in Birmingham but sold to the world as being London.

So it's rather satisfying to see Birmingham featuring in a BBC costume drama and being sold as itself. Noisy, grimy, rough, tough and with that unmistakable Midland's twang that I grew up with. Not that Leamington Spa has much of an accent. Compared to the true son of Birmingham, the Leamingtonian accent is rather poesh and nice (as opposed to "push" and "noice").

Peaky Blinders kicked off last week and is the fictionalized account of the Shelby's, a gang of Birmingham crims who held sway in the city just after the finish of the first World War. I daresay the writer's have taken numerous liberties but I am not in a position to point out any factual inaccuracies as yet; I'll leave that to the numerous "Brum" academics who'll not be shy in voicing their complaints as and when any Birmingham based misinformation hits the slagheap.

Knowing parts of Birmingham well and others not at all I can at least say that there is a clever mix of real location and CGI that brings 1920's Birmingham to life; not to mention heavy use of the canal yard at The Black Country Museum. The accents, for those of is the know, sometimes veer from the true Birmingham "yam", but on the whole hold true. The actor with the toughest accent to crack is Sam Neil as Chief Inspector Campbell who has nailed his oracular flag to the mast of the Reverend Ian Paisley. Sometimes it jars but the script is cracking enough that you overlook the occasional dip into Walt Disney Oirish.

The star of the show is Cillian Murphy as Thomas Shelby (or Tommoi as he is referred to in our house), the leader of the Shelbys. The Peaky Blinders were so named for the razorblades they concealed in the peaks of their cloth caps that were then transformed into slashing weapons in a fight... but in truth Cillian Murphy could cut a man wide open with his cheekbones alone. He's a powerful presence on the screen and exudes an air of calm, urbane, gentlemanly violence that is somehow the more brutal for being measured and calculated. Helen McCrory too is a strong backbone to the rest of the cast and manages to slum her vowels into Birmingham's street talk with aplomb.

The show has everything; horses and bet rigging, stolen army munitions, pub fights, gypsy warfare, blood, sex, cheekbones and exortations not to "larf at moi bruvva." And best of all it is bigging up Birmingham.

The city up the road from me has a history that is just as magnificent and nasty as the one to the south.

Only our accent is better.

If yow can't get a rowm at the Premi-air Inn then jus' yow tyoon in to the Beebeeceee of a Thursdaaay and it's like yow is proppa in the Bullrinnng. Jus' down't look at us funnoi. Cos we down't loik it.

An Itch You Cannot Scratch

It is official.

Our cats are agents of pestilence and biological warfare.

I can only surmise that my enemies – of which I have many, (some highly placed in both the Royal family and the television industry – how else do you explain my non-starting TV career and being forced to break up from Kate Middleton just so she could marry William?) – conspired to enlist my own cats in a dastardly plan to lay me low.

In a plan as fiendish as strapping nuclear warheads to dolphins and training them to swim into Chinese ports my cats were laced with some kind of highly active flea attractant. Before they could say “Whiskas gives us the shits” they were complete little insectoid biozones carrying the flea payload equivalent of a million megaton atomic bomb.

Detonation occurred some weeks ago in an undisclosed location somewhere in the house. The explosion was despicably silent. We didn’t even know the thing had gone off until we started to get hit by the fall-out: horrid red blotches and welts began to appear on our lower limbs. In themselves they were quite painful and annoying but these were only phase one.

Phase two was the constant irritation that these welts (or bites if you prefer) engender in the weltee. Suddenly, our own unconscious and subconscious mind was being used against us. We began to scratch. Scratch whilst performing other tasks. Scratch in our sleep. Scratch when we knew without a doubt that we were scratching and knew that we really shouldn’t… because scratching only made things worse. Welts turned into open sores and wounds that wept blood.

And. Still. Itched.

We hit back. Chemical warfare. The cats as unwitting agents had to take the full blast. Both of them got Frontlined to within an inch of their feline dignity. They weren’t happy. They were inexplicably moist and experienced a chemical odour between their ears that they could not shake off.

I don’t know how many fleas we wiped out with that first strike but I do know it was us that scarred the sky so that the sun could not shine. No wait, that was from The Matrix. Sorry.

It wasn’t enough though. Frontline failed. And the front got pushed back and back until we found we had been overrun.

And now we have no choice. No choice at all.

It’s dirty bomb time.

We have an appointment with a vet on Saturday. A veritable veteran of inter-household hostilities such as we are experiencing at the moment. We are going to drop the big one. We are going to wield the power of the gods and unleash the power of a thousand suns.

Well, maybe not quite that but we are going to gas the entire house. We are going to wipe out all insectoid life within a range of 40 metres.

I’ve posted warning signs to give them one last chance: "Pack up your powerfully sprung hind-legs and head for the hills while you still can. Signed Dr Oppenheimer."

What a pity the bitey little buggers can’t read.

Mwah ha ha!

Prince Harry To Lead Native Americans In Open Revolt

The great thing about the modern world and social networking is that news can be delivered instantaneously in sound-bite form so that it is quickly and immediately digestible. I no longer need to wade through hours and hours of news channels or column inches of newsprint to get the gist of what is going down out there in the big wide world.

Some news today has had me smiling wryly and inflating with slightly irreverent pride for the latest achievement of one member of our Royal Family.

It seems that Prince Harry has qualified to become an Apache Commander.

I'm assuming that sometime over the last year he befriended a descendent of Cochise - maybe saved his life in a bizarre bingo accident on a reservation somewhere in America's mid-west - and that the relationship developed to that slightly awkward point where it was necessary for them both to nick the palms of their hands with a sharp knife and rub the wounds together so that they became blood brothers.

I guess after that it was just a small leap of ideology to thoughts of uniting all of America's scattered  Native American tribes. How Prince Harry managed to fit that into his Las Vegas itinerary without the world finding out, I don't know, but clearly the ginger Prince conceals many hidden abilities and skills the like of which his brother can only dream of. And by brother I mean, William, not his new brother Cochise who by now must surely be aware that Harry has heap strong medicine.

Once the First Nations were again re-established and as one behind their new leader, He Whose Hair Dances With Fire, the next step was quite naturally declaring war on the white European usurpers and taking back the lands and buffalo that they had stolen from their ancestors. I'm assuming that at this point traditional ties with Prince Harry's Germano-British family back home in the UK may have become strained unless Prince Charles has developed a sudden yen to sell Ye Olde Duchy Buffalo Mozzarella but Harry is plainly a man who likes to push his envelope out as far as it will go. And after all, blood is thicker than the monarchy especially when your palm is itching like buggery.

In the absence of John Wayne to act as an honourable counterpoint to the glory-hungry appetites of the US I fear this latest career move by the young Prince can only lead to bloody conflict and strife. The war on terror may have to take a backseat and bingo may have to be outlawed. It is unknown at this point whether Johnny Depp has abandoned his moderately successful movie career and his frequent on-screen liaisons with Helena Bonham-Carter to honour his Native American heritage and join the confederacy of First American tribes in their fight for emancipation under the gingery auspices of He Whose Hair Dances With Fire but it is certain that most of the cast members of Last Of The Mohicans are already paid-up blood brothers.

The tomahawk of war has been thrown, Obama. Or to paraphrase Shakespeare: the bow has been bent and drawn. It is time to make from the shaft of the ginger Prince.

Pitch Mandible Stone

If I have been absent from blogging of late it has been for the best of reasons. I have been busy compiling material for no less than 3 books ready for e-publishing on Kindle.

The first of these is now ready and available for purchase at the un-princely sum of £1.36. I apologize to those of you who are boycotting Amazon for their tax avoidance practises and hope that you won't hold their malpractise against me. I don't think my sales are going to line their pockets overmuch... but you never know.

Pitch Mandible Stone is my first proper collection of poetry. I've had the odd poem published elsewhere over the years - 30 or so in small magazines and various UK small presses - but this is my first anthology that solely comprises all my own work.

Pitch Mandible Stone is made up of 18 poems that are a fair representation of my poetic repertoire. I'm hoping that enough of you good kind people will buy a copy that I might be able to buy myself a pint with the royalties. Even if poetry isn't your bag or you don't have a Kindle to download it to I am hoping you will at least follow the link and hit the "like" button.

It's always difficult to describe a collection of poetry so instead, as a show of good faith, I'm going to offer you a freebie. A free poem taken from the collection. If you like it or find it sufficiently interesting to want to read more, well, you know what you have to do. Thank you in advance.


The First Casualty Of War

They come ferreting through the bindweed
Dropping bobble hats and gloves in the rush;
A line of duffle coated warriors
Slogging over terrain rough as new landfill.

The cemetery erupts with the bold
Lung explosion of shrill voiced mortars
And invisible grenades. Right arms carried
Like automatics judder with school yard kick-back.

What foes there are drop by the thousand
But there are some who do not die easy.

Ranks of guanoed seraphim stand
Against the advance goading the crosshairs
To collect and dog them like midge flies.
One squaddie more astute in his brutality than the rest

Pistol-whips the neck of a submissive angel
With a club of wood. He is saving bullets.
There is a god shattering crack – real not voiced -
And every tongue stops.

What crows there are fester upward
And offer amused catcalls to the air.


Some are too wise to the ways of death.

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.

Halo

So Prince Harry’s in trouble again.

He kept his butt-cheeks under wraps but was a might loose with an insensitive tongue. I haven’t read any of the offended write-ups or seen any of the worthy TV interviews with the usual round of for-hire-experts. I’ve caught a few newspaper headlines, caught the odd sound-bite and therefore deem myself as well equipped to offer an opinion as any UK tabloid journalist (with the advantage that I won’t hack your mobile phone – Lord knows I can barely get into my own).

From what I can glean Harry’s been taken to task for talking about how he, along with his army chums, have taken a few Taliban fighters “out of the game” and even compared the action he’d seen to playing video games.

Right-on righteous people the world over are up in arms (ironic) over his gross insensitivity and callous, off-hand dismissal of taking another human being’s life.

And they’re right. Of course they are. I can remember feeling outraged at hearing stories of American helicopter crews listening to loud rock music as they shot at insurgents and again, made comparisons to playing computer games. It was as if they were treating modern warfare as some kind of leisure pursuit which totally devalued human life until the people they were fighting impinged on their consciences no more than a pixellated sprite on a computer screen.

That is plainly wrong. Dreadfully wrong.

But who is at fault here?

Let’s look at it another way. We train our armed forces to do many different tasks – but no matter how you dress these tasks up politically, they are trained to kill. Their goal is always to kill more of the enemy than the enemy kills of them. They are trained to do it without thinking. Without breaking down and needing counselling five minutes into a fire fight or even five weeks. As horrible as it sounds conscience doesn’t come into it. And yes it is desensitizing. I imagine when you’re in a battle zone the last thing you want is to be feeling a bit sensitive. You would not be able to function and as such would be liable to get yourself and your colleagues killed.

We expect our soldiers to go out and kill. To kill with honour, yes. To kill “viable targets” (what a horrid expression), yes. To not kill children or innocents. To not kill for pleasure or needlessly. But ultimately, when the need calls for it, to kill. It’s a big part of soldiering in the modern world, alas.

I daresay the soul searching, the emotional breakdowns and psychological payback comes later. But at the time, when you’re in the theatre of war, you keep all that touchy-feely stuff as far away from you as possible and by using whatever means necessary.

That’s what I imagine Prince Harry is doing.

And then we have the video game thing. Heaven knows I have complained myself about computer games which purport to replicate the “real war experience”. My granddad fought in WWII, I don’t imagine he’d have thought much of his experiences being the basis for a living room based computer game which involves the participant sitting on their backside twiddling a few buttons on a handheld controller and staring at a TV screen.

But these games are out there and proliferating in huge numbers. Our kids, siblings, partners are playing them. They play them for entertainment. They play them for fun. The realism element is a selling point, a way of benchmarking the quality of the game.

This is highly questionable.

This desensitizes us all. Cheapens us all.

As a society we condemn warfare while at the same time making it a significant element of most of our entertainment choices – computer games, movies, literature. It has become enmeshed with fashion, rock music soundtracks and the way we gauge our own status.

Not all of us, I know. But enough that in any high street in any town you can go into a Game store (for example) and immerse yourself in the war of your choice.

Who is at fault here? The individual soldier or the society that equates war with play and then sends that soldier out to play for real?

Just think for a minute of all those people who help design and create those ultra-realistic computer war games... how much blood is on their hands?

Real, not salaciously imagined.

Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Large Print

Even those who view eBooks and Kindles with suspicion, hostility and derision will, one day, come to see them as having an invaluable saving grace. Though this brave proclamation does very much depend on the vanity of the Kindle-hater in order for it to come to pass.

See, time was, many moons ago I worked in a nursing home for the elderly. It was without doubt or the word of a lie the happiest time of my life career-wise. Even the many sad departures of the inmates did little to dent my blind, arrogant comfort in my own youth and immortality. I was young and untouchable (sadly a rare condition in this day and age).

But one thing did give me a little wobble at the cellular spiritual level.

Large print books.

The home had its own collection which was augmented by a travelling library. Awful abridged Catherine Cookson-esque tomes with print the size of the shop sign outside Specsavers. Stories of days gone by, stories of balls, horses, steam boats, emigration to the Americas and the redemption of cross-class love during the futility of war. And Wooster-ish men with nicknames like Chippy or Tiddler.

One day, that little voice in my head used to say, you’ll be reading books like that. You won’t want to but you’ll have no choice but to ‘cos there’s no way they’ll have large print sci-fi or large print fantasy. All you’ll have is ladies in ball gowns and men in tweed jackets with shrapnel in their left leg called Rupert. The men are called Rupert, by the way, not the shrapnel.

And you won’t die of old age but of shame. There’ll be no way to hide it. The books are so big and the print so large everybody will know. Everybody will know that you are reading large print OAP “period” romance and quite probably re-reading the same sentence over and over again due to the onset of dementia. And that will be worse because it means the shame will be forever fresh and you’ll never ever get acclimatized to it, instead you will discover it anew each time you re-read that single sentence. Over and over again. God, this print is a bit big. And who the hell is Tiddler? Oh God. Please tell me I’m not... oh God, I am... I am... I... ooh this looks an interesting book. I may as well give it a go to relieve the boredom. Here we go, chapter one, page one. Tiddler? That’s a funny name for a hero... Is it a kid’s book?

And so on.

Enter Kindle and its ilk stage right.

You can now set the text size to positively cinematic and only you need to know. You can read whatever you want, however you want. Pot boilers, Pentecostal treaties or porn. Nobody can tell what the hell you’re reading and you look cool. You’re own little private reading world. And best of all Kindle always knows which page you’re on so even if you don’t know that you’ve already read page 43 Kindle does which gives you some hope of eventually getting to the end before you, er, get to the end.

Marvellous.

And sales of Catherine Cookson may even very well go up as the younger generation decides to bite the bullet early without fear of discovery and ridicule...

It’s a win-win situation.

Sorry. I said: it’s a win-win situation!

Private Review Club

Well, it’s that time of year yet again when we pull up a chair, swill a bucket sized glass of brandy around in our hand, enjoy the burlesque dancing girls and reflect meaningfully on the year that was and the year that is to be.

And what a year it has been. 2012, for all it had some magnificent personal highs (solely comprised of family holidays and time away from work, funny that), felt very often like it was the straw determined to break the donkey’s back. A straw made of kryptonite, as locatable as the Higgs Boson and as irritating as John Sessions on QI. An itch that just couldn’t be scratched but was nevertheless going to follow you around for the entire year and make everything hard work and dreadfully miserable.

I confess, I have come close to giving up on the dream.

After the highs of completing what I would consider to be my first ever proper, publishable novel I found myself tumbling into the slough of despond. The mental Slough of Berkshire in fact. It was that bad. Agents and publishers were not fighting themselves to rip the manuscript out of my hand. The rejection letter pile was swelling like an infected bladder. I began to wonder what the point was.

And then the ol’ blog began to fail as well. What was the point of that, I began to wonder? My sacred, little platform for free speech and opinion expressing (as is my inalienable rights as an Englishman) had been compromised and curtailed. It’s proud borders had been eaten away and annexed by the Nazis of censorship, suppression and bowdlerization. Lord knows I had tried to go on with the fight. To keep the flags of satire and sarcasm flying aloft.

I maintained a sly campaign of guerrilla warfare for years but in the end I was beaten by a war of attrition.

Those who objected to my writing made life outside of the electronic ether difficult and miserable and in the end concessions were wrung out of me.

If I am honest my soul felt compromised and sullied.

I tried to move on. I tried other tacks.

I tried to court the blogging audience I had found for myself. Tried to style and cater my output for their eyes. I don’t regret this. It was a good writing exercise. But such exercises can only be good in the short term. If you sell too much of yourself to others you end up with little left over for yourself.

So it was that I came close to chucking it all in, literary speaking. Censorship and self-editing were not what this blog was supposed to be about after all.

Grand visions.

I now realize that, actually, any kind of writer has a responsibility to the words they write which is a little more subtle that simply “it’s my opinion, therefore I have a right to express it”. None of us exist in a vacuum. Sometimes the most honest and effective expression is that that expresses an idea without seeming to express anything at all. Like that last sentence in fact.

And I found I couldn’t quite turn my back on writing.

I need to do it. It keeps me sane.

But there has to be a purpose to it. An end in itself is not enough for me. So that means reclaiming some of my old joie de vivre...

To that end then, not a Resolution but a resolution. My aims for the coming year are to commence writing a new novel whilst continuing to push the previous one onto an unwilling public and to blog a little more the way I want to. I make no apology that forthwith some of my posts are going to be self indulgent, minority interest, selfish exercises in self expression.

I’m not going to advertise or review products and services for material reward. I’m not going to court attention or approval. Audience participation would be lovely but I’m not begging for it or chasing it. I’m going to write about the things that matter to me, no matter how trivial and inconsequential they might be to the outside world.

I’m reclaiming this blog and my writing for me.

Everybody is invited but the party is mine.

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 War Against Plants

There are plans afoot to remove all greenery from my household.

Shrubbery, foliage and photosynthesis have been designated public enemy status.

There are those – the powers who have come to be – who are working hard to turn the green and pleasant land of my living room into a desert. The windowsills, once a tropical paradise courtesy of B&Q, are already denuded. Deforestation is occurring at such an alarming rate I am thinking of launching a campaign on Facebook and asking Bono to perform a charity gig.

Yes. It’s that bad.

Our kittens – now at the feline teenager stage – have taken it upon themselves to munch, push, kick, pounce, harass, eat and slash every single plant organism we own to the point of death. Their favourite tactic is to turn themselves into a feline ballista. They launch themselves at the curtains, climb up and then, when they have reached optimum height and can guarantee that, with the help of gravity they can reach terminal velocity, they re-sheath their claws and freefall onto whatever hapless spider plant is basking innocently beneath them.

Should the triffids ever attack their nemesis is right here.

Were I to let Missy and Kiah loose in Brazil I fear the loggers would soon be out of a job and the rain forests would be out of existence. They would see Kew Gardens as a bit of light lunch.

Nothing we can do seems to stop them. Our carpets have had so much soil deposited onto them I could throw down seed potatoes and grow a decent crop for Christmas.

We’ve tried shouting, tapping their little nosey-wosies gently, even removing them bodily from the room.

They laugh in our faces. Or rather they stare at us without blinking, ears back and then carry on their carnage like we don’t exist. This, as you all know, is the cat equivalent of laughing.

So we are down to mechanical warfare.

Weapons of war. Something with a trigger.

A weapon of mass inundation.

We have accepted that it is now necessary to spray our cats with water whenever they do something naughty.

I feel a bit uneasy about it. It feels too much like water-boarding but really the only other option is the electric chair... and despite their destructive mischievousness we love them both to bits and don’t want to stamp down too hard on their feline rights.

And who knows?

Should a jet of cold water to the mush work without too much psychological damage we may even try it on the kids...

Class

The way it was always told to me, not long after Chamberlain had declared war on Germany, my grandfather – barely 19 years of age – had hotfooted it around to the RAF recruiting office to sign up. He no doubt fancied himself kitted out with one of those stiffened scarves and leather goggles and chewing on a choice cigar from the comfort of his cockpit as he strafed a few Heinkels with a careless flick of his thumb on the joystick.

And who wouldn’t? The RAF, even before the Battle of Britain, had an air of the glams about it. I mean, dash it all, but those chaps were just plain dashing. Why yomp across France when you can sit at the controls of possibly the best plane ever built and let a Rolls-Royce Merlin carry you all the way to the theatre of battle in style?

But the RAF didn’t want my grandfather. They told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the brains to be a spitfire pilot or any other kind of pilot. He wasn’t made of the right stuff, see. He wasn’t educated properly. He’d made it through a decent enough school but he was indelibly working class. As far as the RAF were concerned he was a yomper if ever there was one. They no doubt looked at him through their steely monocles and muttered under their breaths, “Not one of us.”

And so despite, the urgent country-wide call to arms, the RAF declined my grandfather’s enthusiastic offer and the legend of The Leamington Baron was shot down before it even got off the runway.

If my grandfather was ever embittered by this show of classism he never showed it. He was resilient and perhaps just plain pragmatic enough to depart the RAF recruiting office with a cheery wave and an “Okay gov’nor” and hop over the threshold of the recruiting office immediately next door and find himself signed up by the Royal Navy. They snatched his hand off and had him rated as able-bodied before you could say “hard to starboard”.

He loved his time in the Navy. He loved the travel. He loved the camaraderie. Not that he was blinded by his love – he didn’t like the torpedoes, or the magnetic mines or the time his ship had its stern completely blown off and they had to rely on luck and the skill of their captain to limp them miraculously to the dicey safety of a Maltase port – but I can see from his war photos that the Navy changed him. It broadened his outlook. It completed his education in a way that a stint with the RAF would never have done. So he was never a member of a gentleman’s club or got a nickname like “Squiffy” or “Ack-Ack”... but he got to see India, North and South Africa, Malta, Iceland, even a few Russian ports.

He saw parts of the world that a boy from the working class slums of Leamington Spa would not ordinarily have got to see. And though the officers on board ship were just as high born as those of the RAF there was a closeness and equality (of sorts) born of spending months and months together in the equivalent of a tin can with no other company than the burly chaps around you. The respect that was engendered went both ways. In that respect war is a great leveller.

If it wasn’t for my Nan’s reluctance to travel I have no doubt my grandfather would have left these shores far behind him after the war and I’d be writing to you from South Africa. My grandfather loved his shore leave there and often spoke fondly of it in the years before his death in 2009. Not that he particularly regretted staying put in Blighty – he and my Nan gadded about quite a bit during their retirement years and saw as much of the world as they could – but I’m sure he occasionally dreamed of what could have been; if things had been different.

For all that though my grandfather did well for himself after the war. Yes, he did manual work but he was well paid for it. He aspired to be comfortable and he achieved it. He ended up owning his own house and car and was as far removed from those childhood slums as it was realistic to expect to be.

At the end he could have looked those RAF officers in the eye and got a polite nod in return. He’d earnt his wings.

The first casualty of war might be innocence but one of the last was class.

Suicidal Tendencies

No, don’t worry. I’m not thinking about attaching a hoover pipe to the car exhaust and gassing myself. Or indeed casting myself into the River Leam with my clothes left by the roadside accompanied by a note reading “goodbye cruel world”. (Given the Leam I’d be more likely to die by poisoning than drowning anyway).

I’m talking about that urge that most of us get at one time or another to stick your head above the parapet. To go “over the top” in World War I parlance. To deliberately step into the gun sights of assassins that you know are just waiting for an opportunity to take a pop at you.

For years, man and boy, I’ve been one of the shrinking violets. One of those conscientious people that, if alive 200 years ago, would have doffed their hat to Dorcas Lane and spoke in hushed tones of the quality toffs that lived in Candleford. I’d like to blame my working class upbringing. I know my place and all that crap. But actually that’s rubbish. When I was a kid being working class was already about cocking a snook at the middle and upper classes and speaking of them scathingly in the snug of the local pub.

But nevertheless I was brought up to respect those in authority over me. Not just to respect but also not to question. That’s quite a telling distinction.

I’ve never been able to rid myself of that whole thought process – that mind trap – until recently.

I don’t know what’s happened over the last few years – well, I do: I’ve had kids, finally got my University degree, had experience of running my own fledgling business – but suddenly that invidious bit of mind programming has been broken. The algorithms no longer work for me.

And the inherited fear that was part and parcel of that mindset has also dissipated.

I’m suddenly thinking so what? I’m suddenly questioning not just why but also why should I? Why me and nobody else?

And best of all: isn’t there something better? Why not do what I want to do?

It’s a heady brew all this jumping around with a big target painted on my chest. Years ago my natural sense of self preservation would have had me diving into the nearest Anderson Shelter. Now I want to just shit down the air-hole of everybody else’s.

I’m starting to realize that in some [bad] situations you actually have very little to lose if it all goes tits up. So why worry? Why care? Why take it?

Dangerous thinking.

But don’t worry. I might be mooning at the enemy troops out here in No Man’s Land but I have no intention of putting a pistol to my own head either.

I’m just saying that the smile on my face is a knowing one. Not an insane one.

Laters.

Survival Tactics

Welcome fellow hunters to the wancid world of big game hunting in the office enviwonment... Now this is a dangerwous activity, not for the faint hearted or for those of you with a nervous admin portfolio. So be warned. Things could get vewy twicky.

So. Popguns at the weady, pith helmets firmly ensconced... let’s pwoceed on our way deeper into the office undergwowth...

First off, let’s see what we can spy at the watering hole. Shh, now. They’re easily spooked and you don’t weally want to be caught in the middle of a buffalo stampede. As Simba fwom Lion King well tell you, a violently thwust bulldog clip to the face can quickly end anybody’s woyal ambitions.

Ah, here we have the lesser spotted Stationewy Cupboard Gazelle... a nervous and flighty beast that is easily startled and that can often be seen gwazing on Bic Pens and those Tippex mice things that make your cowections look like they’ve been snogged by Michael Jackson. This beast is welatively harmless and is perfectly happy pwovided it has a steady supply of paperclips and camewa battewies. At the first sign of twouble it will merely wun and wun and wun. It’ll just wun away, take my word for it. It’s a big softie and hardly worth the twouble of hanging it’s doe-eyed head over your mantelpiece so we’ll move on.

OK. Now we’re in dangewous tewwitowy. The office mangwove swamp. This is cwocodile countwy, folks, so watch where you step. In fact, there’s one there, wight now. Lurking by the photocopier machine. Its big career mashing teeth weady to wend any wary twesspasser limb from limb. The photocopier is a much sought after wesource in the jungle and the beast that contwols the copier contwols the entire food chain. You set off a pwint-wun without the say-so of the cwocodile and you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of those big flesh wipping teeth before you can say “photocopy subsidy”. It’ll be no good you complaining that evewybody takes fwee photocopies evewy now and then, that some beasties pwint off entire web sites of shoes and handbags... you cwoss the cwocodile and you’re gonna get cwapped on from a gweat height. Twust me on this, fellow hunters, it just ain’t worth the wisk.

Let’s climb up now into the twopical wain fowest. The lair of the Stabu-inthebak Snake. This particularly venomous serpent is never ever seen until the last few seconds before it stwikes and even then you may be so blinded by the clouds of venomous mist that it exhales awound itself that all you'll see is the pitiful flutter of your own blood dwenched P45 as it splatters down to the undergwowth. Game over. Cuwiously the Stabu-inthebak Snake doesn’t actually eat the prey it kills but pwefers to munch on Müller fwuits of the fowest. It kills purely for the fun of it which makes it a far more dangewous animal than those cweatures that do actually kill for food.

Lastly, we have the kings of the jungle. Those at the very top of the food chain. Now, I know you’re all expecting it to be a lion. A mighty lion like the one Elton John sang about that had the voice of Darth Vader. But you’re wong. Completely and utterly wong. The jungle is wuled and contwolled by a team of monkeys that spend the entire day chattering and arguing and picking fleas out of their own backsides in air conditioned offices poised on the tallest peaks of the fowest and never actually weach an accord about anything. Hence all the tumultuous chaos and wecidivistic naughtiness that occurs among the lower orders of the jungle. It’s totally wild in here, folks. Wild and fewociously dangewous!

The only option is to get the hell out of the office environment and take a job in much less vicious suwoundings. Guantanamo Bay perhaps or even as a bodyguard to Osama Bin Laden.

Trust me: your chances of survival will impwove gweatly.

This concludes your tour with Corpowate Jungle Tours. Please tip the dwiver as you disembark from the shit covered vehicle.

Pre-Ops Briefing

OK, soldier.

You better listen up and listen up good. You've had it easy so far. Trips to the beach. Trips to Birdland in Bourton-on-the-Water. Trips to Legoland. You've lived the high life and battered that ol' credit card pretty good.

But now it's payback time.

Here's where you start paying in sweat - and I ain't talking 'bout no dirty dancing with Irene Cara.

Tomorrow, you're going in. Behind enemy lines. Deep into enemy territory. You knew this day was coming. Hell, we knew this day was coming; that's why we cut you some slack. But the leash is back on now and yanked tighter than a nun's gusset.

Now, don't panic none, soldier. We're gonna get you kitted out with the finest hardware the military can buy.

I'm talkin' an assault action poker-face that you can don at any time. Any of those admin lovin' mofo's try to slide some red tape up your ass... well, you just don this and stare the suckers down. I guarantee they'll buckle and shit staples.

I'm talkin' ACME "couldn't give a shit" body armour. We got you the full body suit straight off the production line, son. You got balls to brain protection. Shoot, those tie-pin wearing nerd-busters can spend all day firing 'high responsibility' rounds at you and you ain't gonna feel nothin' but a pin-prick. You give them the finger and send them home to mama.

But most of all, I'm talkin' secret weapon. I'm talkin' something so ball-breakingly big and meaningful those mealy-mouthed sons and sonesses of bitches are gonna lactate pure devil-deep frustration. I'm talkin' life and drive and ambition for something way beyond that hell box they call the office.

And we're giving you that in spades.

So you dig deep, boy. You dig deep and tomorrow... you go back to work.

Nerf Gas

Don’t mistake me. I hate those Nerf gun adverts on TV.

You know the ones. A group of all American teens (the wrong side of 16) who aren’t quite emotionally mature enough to dispense with the fantasy of being Bruce Willis in Die Hard, who rampage over an unbelievably clean urban landscape playing Nerf tag with their pump-action, fast loading Nerf guns and speaking like movie trailer voice-overs.

“You’re going down!”

“I’m locked and loaded!”

“Take that with my Nerf telescopic sniper rifle!”

“Eat foam Velcro-tipped dart, towel-head!”

Yeah. That kind of thing. I hate those adverts. Really hate them. And the kids in them. Nerdy jocks with too much testosterone but not enough to put away their toy guns and get themselves a proper girlfriend. They really get on my Nerfs.

So it was with much trepidation that we bought a couple of Nerf dart guns for the boys. The eldest was going to a Nerf dart tag party and hence had to be appropriately tooled up. So my wife, Karen, who’s knowledge of toy weaponry is worryingly superior to my own did the deed via Amazon and within a couple of days we were the proud owners of two gleaming green and orange pump action Nerf assault rifles.

The boys – including the youngest – have barely stopped playing with them.

It is disconcerting to see a 3 year old wearing eye goggles and operating the pump action on his Nerf gun like a ‘Nam vet. More worrying to discover that he got his eye in very quickly and, though is content to fire at everything and nothing most of the time, can still shoot the balls off a gnat when he wants to. Even the eldest boy – usually capable at missing a barn door whilst inside the barn – has discovered hitherto untapped reserves of accuracy.

The guns feel and look... er, good. They make the holder feel instantly macho and empowered. And I hate to say that. Because I like to think of myself as a pacific kind of guy. Not particularly marshal. But even I took great delight in bouncing a Nerf dart off the back of my wife’s head at 8 metres. It was a fine shot and took account of gravity and wind speed and the erratic movement of my target.

Technically it was friendly fire but, hey, with those credentials maybe I could get a job with the UN?

Joking aside though, I can’t help but see this affinity that we have with weaponry as deeply sad. And troubling. I’d like to put it down to the sportsman’s simple joy of launching an object through the air and hitting an aimed for target – a test of skill, accuracy and judgement.

But it isn’t, is it?

It’s about power and prowess and machismo. And even 3 year olds get it. Even when half an hour later they’re snuggled up in front of the TV watching Waybuloo.

It makes me feel like Sarah Connor’s son in Terminator 2 when he sees kids playing with guns in the desert and says, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”

‘Cos even if you don’t buy toy guns and toy swords for your kids they’ll go out and find an appropriately shaped stick and pretend one into being. What do you do? Place a limit on their imagination?

Denying our affinity for violence and aggressive is dangerous. The way I see it, it needs to be confronted. Marshalled, controlled, given a safe and constructive outlet.

And I guess this is where products like the Nerf guns come in. And believe me this is not an endorsement or a review – just my observations.

The darts are foam and relatively harmless. The guns come with protective goggles and vests. The vests have target areas on them. The competitive element has been ramped up rather than the murderous (though you can never expunge it completely).It’s just a game with a capital G.

So maybe those all American teens will grow up to be balanced individuals who channel their aggression into paint balling weekends or clay pigeon shooting precisely because they embraced their aggression in controlled play?

It’s certainly better that than them going on the rampage at a school or a town centre somewhere near you with an Uzi and a shotgun.

But ultimately, who knows?

I just feel like I have hypothetical blood on my hands this morning and it doesn’t feel too nice.

Apocalypse Maybe

When I was a teenager I put much store in predictions. Particularly predictions about the end of the world. And that kind of stayed with me throughout my twenties. I’m not talking about grizzled old men pacing the streets in sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Is Nigh”. I’m talking Nostradamus. I’m talking that weird Bible Code shit a decade or so ago where some enterprising Jewish people entered every syllable and character of the Old Testament into a computer and basically turned it into a giant word search.

I sucked all that up. I was never sure whether I really believed it but I kind of fed on it in the same way that teenagers feed on horror movies. That strange pleasure you get from being temporarily scared (and then you go back to looking through a top shelf magazine and everything is OK again. Er. When you’re a teenage boy, that is.)

I can’t remember now whether Nostradamus attributed any specific dates to his predictions but I’m aware that Prince put much store by the year 1999. Well the party might be over (oops) for Prince but we’re still here, aren’t we?

As for the Bible Code... well, I’m pretty sure it was debunked on television. I seem to remember some “expert” stating that if you entered every character from War And Peace into a computer and applied the same set of algorithms you would also find linked words and phrases that would be “highly suggestive” and “open to interpretation”.

But one date that the Bible Code came up with for the end of the world stuck in my mind. 2012. To be fair I think it came up with several possible End Of The World dates. 2006 was one I’m sure. These guys were plainly hedging their bets. I don’t know why they just didn’t foretell that the world would end sometime between now and, well, the end of the world. That, at least, would have been loosely accurate.

So. 2012. It’s a date my logical mind has pooh-poohed since I hit my sane and discerning thirties and forties. The worst thing that is going to happen in 2012 is us, the UK, hosting the Olympics and undoubtedly ballsing it all up.

But then all this shit kicks off in the Middle East and my illogical brain suddenly hauls out 2012 and mutters, “What if, dude, what if? What if it’s true?” (Yes, my illogical brain talks like Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted).

It doesn’t keep me awake at night but I’m really annoyed with myself that there is a small rogue element of my psyche that still gets sucked into this “End Days” crap. It’s nonsense. It really is. End of the world? There’ll be wars. There’ll be death. There’ll be destruction. Somewhere, somehow in any given year. It’s a lottery and one we’ll all lose at some point in our development as a species. But the end of the world?

Nah.

But I might look on eBay for an Anderson shelter just in case. If nothing else I can hide there while the Olympics is on and miss the entire debacle. Win-win, right?