An Unheralded Xenia

The works of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson or Lewis Carroll have often proved an inspiration for other authors. Some of his words have passed into the common quotation bank of the English language. We are all familiar with the walrus saying to the carpenter that the time has come to talk of many things - of shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.

The works of Lewis Carroll are usually dismissed as nonsense. It has recently emerged however that he was a lot wiser than most people realise. The Orthodox Church has a long tradition of Fools for Christ who appear mad to the outside world to conceal their great wisdom and virtue. Recent discoveries have proven that much of the nonsense of Carroll is in fact fundamentally true and that he made a conscious decision to hide his brilliant perceptions behind a cloak of nonsense for reasons of humility.

Etymologists have been researching insciptions found on some ancient tombs recently unearthed in the Luxor Valley as a result of roadbuilding. These tombs are not those of great emperors but of middle class people who did not have enough Nectar points to qualify for a pyramid. Their plain stone covers contain the remains of painted inscriptions remarkably well preserved inside the large charnel chamber they were found in. Several of them refer to the passing of the pigs. These inscriptions have been found before and have been assumed to refer to pigs being driven past or dying. On this occasion however there are drawings of what are clearly pigs in flight to accompany the text. More importantly the pigs are depicted with wings. The simultaneous discovery of a Greek manuscript in the remains of the library of Phocis sheds light on this apparent anomaly. It contains a list of townsfolk from 327 B.C. and lists their occupations. One is registered as Homing Pig Breeder. Analysis of the remains of particularly large birds discovered in previous archaological digs has revealed that they are in fact homing pigs. It is now believed that at one time pigs possessed the ability to fly in circumstances of extreme food deprivation. When pigs were first domesticated they lost the ability to forage and when taken away from their abode would fly back with residual wings to their only supply of food. This practice died out when pigs began to be farmed rather than kept as pets and consequently enjoyed a fine diet with no shortage of piggy delights. The residual wings of the pig gradually melded with the rest of the torso to become part of the back and flank. There are plenty of other ways of expressing the concept "pigs might fly". There is no need to refer to pigs. Folk memory of what had once been has formed the phrase and Carroll has anticipated the rediscovery of the residual wings of the pig by over a hundred years. It is yet to be seen whether pigs will once again be able to use their residual wings when deprived of food as current experiments seek to identify.

Scientists have also had to redefine the parameters of temperature. Previously heat and coldness have been seen as two extremes. Now it is clear that they are nothing of the sort. The most extreme heat yet manufactured by science is many million times hotter than the sun. Under those conditions anyone near the source of heat does not burn but freezes. Similarly extreme cold burns people as antarctic explorers have discovered and as children find when they try and handle glittering dry ice displays. The differential in science now is not between heat and cold but between developed temperatures and underdeveloped ones. What we think of as mild temperatures are simply underdeveloped temperatures which would reach an identical extreme state by going either up or down. The bottom of the sea is usually thought to be extremely cold but it is now recognised that freezing cold and boiling hot are the same thing. This explains how the apparent extreme coldness of the sea is unaffected by the heat of the earth's core which is right next to it. Lewis Carroll predicted this discovery in Victorian times. It would have been very difficult to conduct his clerical duties under the pressure that fame would have brought him had he not hidden his prediction in seemingly nonsensical verse.

Shoes, ships, sealing-wax, cabbages, kings - what do they have to do with the temperature of the sea or the residual wings of the pig? The answer to this has also recently been discovered. Shoes and ships and sealing-wax are the least receptive items to changes in temperature. On the daily weather forecast a temperature for the following day is given but we are then told that because of the wind chill factor it will actually appear to be a different temperature. Shoes and ships and sealing-wax will however remain at the actual temperature regardless of any wind chill factor for the longest time. Once again we are way behind the good Reverend. Cabbages and kings? Homing pigs appear to have fed on cabbages as the homing pig breeder in the Phocis inventory bought huge numbers of them. They cannot have been merely for personal consumption. It is also the case that horse racing has not always been the sport of kings. Homing pigs were bred to be raced by the rulers of the various Greek city states. When they got tired of chariot racing they would starve and then release their pigs at Astypalea and see who got home first. Indeed this new knowledge will help right a historical injustice. Pietri Dorando was disqualified from the Olympic Marathon in 1908 for being helped over the line by concerned spectators. It is improbable to assume that Pheidippides ran all that way in such a short time from the Battle of Marathon to bring the news. If he had hitched a lift on a flying pig it is time for Dorando to be given the posthumous gold medal he so richly deserves.

Scientists are now combing the rest of the works of Lewis Carroll to see what other truths he elliptically revealed. Already it has been conjectured that his so-called parodies of the verse of Southey were actually the unpublished originals. They are certainly superior to the versions Southey passed for the press and he may have been trying to encourage him to stick to his instincts. How playing cards and chess pieces make the decisions they do has never been satisfactorily explained. Are the answers like so many others right before our eyes all the time?

Wrong Place No Matter What The Time

In Southeast London there is a company called Devontra Creations. This manufactures skincare products and things of this nature from natural ingredients. It makes a wide range of different products which people buy as soon as they see. It is run by one woman making everything herself by her own methods and storing the finished products in her fridge.

That fridge is about to have a serious problem. One of the products is a powerful aphrodisiac. There are about two gallons of the stuff in the fridge at the moment. Is there any electrical system on earth that can cope with such stimulation? The fridge will blow in more ways than one and fires will rage throughout Surrey Quays. Do not think that fridges are immune to such effects. Metal is cold to begin with. There must be a reason why something which is already cold needs to be installed with frigidisers to make it function calmly.

Fridges are caring by nature. This implies compassion and further implies passion. They have a burning desire to keep food and drink cold and fresh and weep their frost when they cannot operate at maximum effectiveness. This is often the case with things which are not blessed with great physical beauty. A lot of people in the voluntary sector are there because they do not look good enough to access more glamorous worlds. Other sorts of electrical appliance are now being designed for beauty. The fridge is the old mother hen who no one wants to go to bed with but everyone wants to care for them. No wonder it has all this pent up passion. The force of the aphrodisiac is clearly too strong for such a creature to resist and wild sprees of indiscriminate connections will be the inevitable consequence.

Fridges do not have souls. They therefore do not have morals either. They will doubtless release their huge electrical force somewhere. Traditionally toasters are the first things to blow up on contact with their current. If a toaster is near the fridge it will be charged to unusability in a very short time and the fridge will look around for longer lasting outlets. A computer would probably be the best bet as it endures an endless supply of pornographic images coursing around its networks. It must be highly charged and stimulated too. But what would a fancy computer with friends all over the world want with an ugly old fridge? The fridge will probably be better off with an iron. Irons don't last all that long either but at least you always know you are having the desired effect on them and can be enhanced by this yourself.

The fridge could be brought back to something like working order by removing the aphrodisiac. But how do you calm down something already fitted with frigidisers? It lives in a perpetual cold shower. If you disconnect the fridge you will have to get another one to cover the downtime and two overstimulated fridges in one place is a recipe for disaster. You can defrost it and ask for new circuits to be fitted at considerable cost but the muscle memory of the fridge will still be there. When the new circuits start working the frame will recall the sensation of the electricity and that of the overstimulation together. The choice appears stark. Either let the fridge rampage around the neighbourhood until it wears itself out or scrap it. A disconnected overstimulated fridge on the scrapheap would still shake and if it were recycled you would simply be passing the problem on to a new appliance. Putting two gallons of aphrodisiac in the fridge has sent it beyond the point of no return. Destroy it now before it is too late for every electrical appliance which has ever shared its juice.

Or perhaps there is an alternative. There may just be one way of restoring an overstimulated fridge to its rightful condition. Sooner or later it will get round to the vacuum cleaner. On full power this is a fearsome sight. If the fridge happens upon a Dyson which never loses suction it is touch and go which would dry up first. The fridge would enjoy the connection too. So to avert the end of electrical civilization as we know it Devontra Creations should attach the vacuum cleaner at full power to the central circuits of its fridge. This may of course leave the vacuum cleaner with the same problem the fridge has and Devontra Creations with an even bigger problem. But surely it is worth the gamble? Even if the rampant fridge dooms the business at least they can charge people to see fridge and vacuum cleaner in action. The entertainment value of this alone would be enough to ensure an eternal name for the company and the effect of its products.

The Good Old Days

Yes we have all heard the phrase. We all hear people older than ourselves talking about how things were better in the good old days and then we start using the same phrase ourselves. Usually it refers to a time when things were anything but good. Often it was a time of poverty and deprivation and things we are now glad to see the back of. But memory itself lends a patina to our previous times which make them glow in our minds.

The real reason we like the old days is because we are not there any more. We can remember things from a safe distance because we are no longer there to put our foot in things. We know how everything worked out and have some idea of the significance of everything we have experienced. But the recollection of memory is far from an exact science. Different people leave their pasts behind at different rates and usually without knowing it. Different things seem to make sense at different times and something half remembered one day can seem very real and relevant the next. We have ways of controlling memory but they are not often used in a beneficial way. Therefore we are at the mercy of our hidden selves when it comes to our past lives and what we can look at from a distance and take the pleasant parts out of.

I was aware of this when I was younger. So one day I decided to imprint soomething on my memory for all time. It was a boring physics lesson with a teacher I did not like and understood less. I did much better when others took the class temporarily. So this day to relieve the misery most creative people endure at a school I listened to what he was saying and took some notice of what he put on the blackboard. I decided that I would remember this for the sake of it. About thirty years later I still do. Of course I do not remember what he had written on the board or what he was saying though I do remember these things on other occasions. What I remember is the teacher standing by the board and talking and the rough appearance of what he had written. I remember most of all deciding to remember. So the detail is there and part of the good old days even though they were actually hideous old days I should never have had to put up with blah blah blah blah blah blah.......

The question all this raises is a simple one. Would we think the good old days were better or worse if we could control our memory of them? If we could choose what to remember what would be the effect? There is a danger that if we choose to remember good things they may end up as broken dreams when we look back on them. No good old days then. Similarly if we think we have risen above our pasts there would be no point having good memories of them. They are the good old days because they were so bad they make our endurance of them look good. But if we continue with our current laissez-faire attitude on this question is there not a danger that the best and most significant parts might be lost for some reason? Is it not true that the good old days might be even better if only we could remember and reevaluate everything about them?

The way to resolve this question is by developing a simple matrix. We all inhabit cyberspace nowadays in one way or another. Whether we like it or not certain aspects of our lives are lived electronically and recorded electronically. Try picking up the telephone. So there is all this space full of jumbled junk just waiting to be colonised. The internet companies may use the space but by definition they cannot colonise it because there is too much competition. When one starts all start. It is however defineable space even if it is virtual because as we have all seen it can get too congested to use which it would not do unless it had boundaries. So what is to stop people buying this space? Nothing tangible can go in there because it is virtual space. But what is to stop us downloading our memories? We can all claim a space for our memories and store them there instead of in our heads. Then we can decide exactly how far away each memory should be. The ones we like least can be at the farthest end and the favourite ones nearest. We can buy additional spaces and detach certain items to put them nearer or further away relative to other memories and thus maintain a developing flow of relevant images. We can send the space floating or fix it or any combination of the two. The mind is often said to wander. If we bought virtual space we could not only give it things to wander in but make everything else stronger or dimmer in relation to where the mind is to keep us healthy and active all our lives.

Whether something becomes part of the good old days depends on its own intrinsic value as well as its relevance to us. So now it is time to face up to the consequences of this. In virtual space there are always policemen of some sort to stop the worst excesses of brutalism occurring. Give these policemen something more pleasant to do. Make them set exams for our memories. Those that are good enough to qualify will also be relevant enough in the same way that if you are good enough you are old enough. Then the whole process of memory will be taken away from us and reaccessed when it is to our greatest benefit. We love the good old days because we are no longer there. To obtain maximum benefit from our memories we should no longer be in them either. Then we will have all excuses and none simultaneously. This is of course what any recollection of the past is ultimately designed to achieve.

Reinterpreting Prophecy

Dryden wrote in one of his satires about the ambitious Swede. These words seem strange to us today when we know Sweden as a neutral and peace loving country. The only relevance they would have to the modern reader is in relation to vegetables. The snark in Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark is characterised by ambition amongst other things. As the snark does not even exist it is not unreasonable to imagine that the swede which does exist could be similarly ambitious.

It is not immediately obvious what a swede would be ambitious to become. A more popular vegetable possibly. The swede is rather old fashioned as vegetables go. Surely inside every common or garden plate fodder there is a Georgian aubergine trying to get out?

Other vegetables have more obvious ambitions. The potato for example. It is used in so many ways it has developed its own hierarchy based on its ultimate usage. Jacket potatoes are kings of the crop because they need less preparation to make them into a dish. This is why they were given jackets in the first place. Tinned potatoes, boiling potatoes and potatoes used in pie manufacture are the aristocrats. Potatoes used for chips come further down the ladder as they need to be altered quite severely to get them ready to eat in that way. Bottom of the heap are crisp potatoes. These Untouchables of the potato world need to be manhandled almost out of existence to form their dish. Some years ago Smiths Crisps produced an advert in which a group of potatoes reserved for another manufacturer revolted and insisted on being Smiths Crisps instead. They were of course portrayed as cheeky little groundlings rather than well educated and sophisticated uber-potatoes. The makers of the ad had not apparently researched the potato hierarchy properly but were still wiser than they knew.

The carrot is often held to be a reflection of a human condition. It is characterised by being orange and because people with ginger hair are always abused by the rest of the population it is assumed that the carrot is anxious to be a different colour just as red haired humans are presumed to be. Those of us who actually have red hair know that it is a mark of distinction and the negative reaction of other people is actually virulent jealousy. Nevertheless some well meaning people are now seeking to improve the lot of the humble carrot by producing it in other colours. This is patronising and completely misses the point. The carrot is perfectly happy being orange. It simply wishes to grow without its skin. The skin of carrots has got thinner and thinner as the years have gone by due to the desperate efforts of the carrots to rub it off. We have all seen the rippling rolls of flesh on a carrot that a bodybuilder would train for years to obtain. Carrots simply want to display their beautiful bodies before they are scraped and chopped and carved into unrecognisable shapes. We owe a lot to the carrot. Is it asking to much to breed it well enough to grant it its wish?

There is one ambitious vegetable whose desires are entirely justified and even more deserving of fulfilment than those of the carrot. This is of course the baked bean. The U.K. is the world's leading baked bean consumer but imports all its beans. We grow them here in large quantities. But we never use British baked beans simply because they are black. They taste just as good as the pure white ones we import. But the baked bean producers insist that the public will never tolerate black baked beans. The same argument was used to keep black people out of public service jobs for many years. It is merely a cover for their own racism. There has been precious little attempt by the black community to campaign on behalf of their bean brothers and this is a scandalous state of affairs. Racism cannot be combatted by committing vegetablism. We should be demanding our native baked beans now whether they be black, white, brown or yellow. Indeed positive discrimination is called for in this area to ensure that the oppressed black beans can not only form part of the British diet but be exported for others to enjoy. It is not known how enlightened other nations are on this issue as other nations do not eat the same quantities of baked beans. Is it too far fetched to presume that racially integrated beans would prove more popular with a wider section of the community? Certainly not if you ask the black baked beans which have long desired to play their proper part in the community.

The ambitions of vegetables are many and varied. They should all be treated with sympathy. Tomatoes would love to be harder so they were less liable to injury when being moved. Cabbage wants to be either large and tasty like lettuce or small and tasty like spinach. Lettuce wants to wear bikinis as it is always in water and spinach wants to demonstrate its own strength rather than being associated with popeye. Natives of Birmingham know only too well how callous people can be towards those who feed and nourish the rest of the country. It is not surprising to us that the ambitions of vegetables are so disregarded by the elites who claim to rule. With no communication there is no state. If we really want a nation which no vegetable would ever set foot in we are going the right way about it. But surely the Land Fit For Heroes To Live In that we were promised in 1945 is by definition a land for the vegetable too?

The Roots Of Truth

The late twentieth century gave birth to the phenomenon of the bad hair day. On this day your hair is not as nicely done as it could be and consequently you are less confident, less consistent, more accident prone and more irritable than usual. It applies primarily to women but the explosion in the personal grooming industry for men has now left the male of the species vulnerable to the same condition.

There is an interesting parallel here with the biblical story of Samson. Like those affected by bad hair days his strength lay in his hair. Cut his hair and he was left only as strong as a mere mortal. Clearly there is a cross cultural appreciation that hair is the source of some mysterious power. Look after our hair and our hair will look after us. We simply need to know what the optimum condition of hair is to live a happy and productive life.

No one has ever spelt out what this optimum hair condition is. But the purposes of different types of shampoo should give us a clue. First of all hair should not be greasy. Why is this? Most things are made more efficient by the application of a little grease as with pistons and parking attendants. Hair however needs to be clean and clear. This implies that hair has a natural level of athleticism which the rest of the body is unable to match. Watch sportsmen in action and oil and grease are applied to them to improve their physical abilities. Hair is merely encumbered by these. If hair had legs it would win any race against a human and hair racing remains one of the few unexploited areas of the sports entertainment industry which brought us fixed wrestling matches and interminable games of squash with a ball you cannot see.

Hair also needs to shine naturally. For certain functional things the ability to shine is an advantage. Cats' Eyes which did not shine would not help the motorist much. In most contexts however it is a disadvantage as your lustre makes you an easy target. When you draw attention to yourself you always have to be better than everyone else to justify shining more than them. If you are not you are the first one to go under. Hair is therefore invincible. It can shine as much as it likes without ever being toppled. How we would all love to do this! Once again hair is superior to the rest of the human being. Without external stimulus it has all the innate quality to stand out permanently no matter what attempts are made to knock it down much as the punchball is an infinitely more difficult opponent than an actual boxer for the champion pugilist.

What else must hair be? It must have its colour. The irrational fear of going grey is present in every culture as if coloured hair alone grants moral standing to an individual. It must have body rather than being dry and wispy. It should have the physique to stand up to the rigours of daily life despite being invincible due to its natural humility and our recognition that there is no virtue without an equal level of humility about the same virtue. Most of all it must remain in place. Receding hair equates to receding wisdom. As M.P. Mark Oaten has recently discovered people lose their sense of self and purpose when their hair deserts them. The hair which is superior to themselves leaves them with no need of excuses or apologies and when it is gone people need to justify their actions more. Maybe this is why people become less sensitive as they get older in compensation. With this incontrovertible mass on top of their heads people can do anything but that makes it all the more important to keep it in the best possible condition. If everyone can do anything the smallest advantage can create vast differences in achievement which is why the bad hair day is much more important than simply a temporary lapse in the standards people usually reach.

The context in which bad hair days are most dreaded is the workplace. Obviously this is because people do not wish to let themselves and their employers down by not being as good as those around them. There are plenty of people with better hair just waiting in the wings. But the significance runs much deeper than that. As we have seen good hair is superior to good people. If the full potential of hair is tapped there will be no more need for people to do anything as hair will take over all work and all government. But people are too jealous of their own reputations to make that alteration. They still think that because their hair belongs to them they should provide for the hair not the other way round. If we accepted that we do in fact belong to our hair our lives would be far better. It is our deep seated recognition that this is in fact the case which makes us desperate to work so hard and achieve things. No wonder our hair leaves us as we get older. By knowing us as long as it has it has learnt that it is better off on its own. Hair loss really is a condemnation by our hair of ourselves. Our only comfort is that being human we will always find something else to exploit instead of being happy in the service of a higher power.

Different Ways Of Spelling Why

Human ingenuity has always been highly regarded. At least in theory. An example comes in the field of robbery. Armed robbery has always been a more serious offence than simple robbery. This is because it is easy enough to rob places using your arms. Doing it without your arms is much more ingenious and consequently subject to a lesser sentence in recognition of the creativity involved.

It is therefore sad that some of the most ingenious people in our society have never been given the credit they deserve. On the basis of antiquated stereotyping they are seen as negative influences rather than positive. Inventiveness is inventiveness and all manifestations of it should be equally well regarded.

Golfer Greg Norman is one example. His performance record is a fine one but one particular aspect of his work has been seen negatively rather than positively. Greg Norman is considered to be unacceptably proud of himself. The story goes that someone related seeing Greg Norman at a function and was asked whether Norman's head was touching the sides of the room. Yet Greg Norman also wears hats on the golf course. He is distinguished from other players by his specially designed wide brimmed panemas. The significance of this appears incomprehensible to the media but is obvious to everyone else. By asking people to make hats big enough to fit his head Greg Norman has solved the entire unemployment problem in the hat industry. There are considerable social benefits to this but Mr. Norman's enemies would rather remain ignorant of these than leave their comfort zones of prejudice and celebrate his achievement.

The great car manufacturer Henry Ford II has also been unfairly disparaged for a particular piece of ingenuity on his part. In 1958 he introduced the Edsel car. It was the wrong car in the wrong place at the wrong time. So much so that Stephen Pile included it in his Book of Heroic Failures and it has been a byword for grand mistake ever since. At a time when smaller and more fuel efficient cars were gaining in popularity the Edsel was a huge gas guzzler more suited to the swells of a different era. Furthermore there were repeated problems with doors, windows and the like. Little did most people realise what Henry Ford II had achieved by producing this monstrosity. No one wanted to be seen owning an Edsel because it made you look like an idiot. The average family man soon developed an aversion to any Edsel-resembling vehicle. This immediately gave Ford the opportunity to exploit a new market. Previously Ford cars had been bog standard vehicles. Now the company had driven away that market it could appeal to film stars and the like. Those who were above the ordinary would never be seen driving ordinary cars. They would drive the cars that the man in the street would never touch and Ford could charge them what they liked for the privilege. Henry Ford had many enemies and one of the few things they could console themselves with was the commercial failure of the Edsel. It remains a source of deep embarrassment to Ford that its newer executives failed to capitalise on the opportunity the founder had given them and other marques fell by default into supplying this more profitable market.

But perhaps the most ingenious of people in modern times has been Lady Thatcher. As Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher she introduced a number of economic and social reforms that no other Prime Minister had dared do. These reforms were either loved or hated and latterly most people who were there try to distance themselves from them. The ingenuity of Mrs. Thatcher however lay not in her reforms but in exploiting her unique position. Few would have expected that a Conservative would be the first woman Prime Minister in the U.K. By definition the conservative choice would be the usual man. Realising the anomaly Mrs. Thatcher ensured that she became so despised and discredited that the United Kingdom is never likely to elect a woman Prime Minister again. The radical Thatcherite reforms demonstrate what happens if tradition is overthrown and the by definition more arbitrary alternative takes over. A Prime Minister whose effectiveness depends on what time of the month it is is bad news for everyone. Mrs. Thatcher showed herself the true antimony of her predecessor Edward Heath by showing up radical or progressive conservatism for the gross anomaly it is. When the same reaction sets in to the denatured Blairite Labour Party the Conservatives will have every chance of regaining power on a platform of absolute monarchy and feudal servitude as they would then finally have the policies which reflect their fundamental nature.

If ingenuity is a good thing it should always be celebrated. You cannot praise some and damn others. Should something ingenious actually make sense? Our prejudice implies so. But when we carry on committing the same senseless sins for generation after generation we begin to see why we would rather condemn some creative thinking as stupid than see our familiar misconducts in the same light.

You Must Have Heard Of Him

Yesterday I was in Southeast London doing a film shoot. The shoot was based in a school. I wondered why it was based there as it was not the most obvious location. Then I wandered around the building and realised that one section of it was called "Shepperton".

This is called the Milton Subotsky Principle. If you name part of the building after a film studio you assume that people will come and make films there. No other reason. It is called the Milton Subotsky Principle after a TV review written by Clive James in The Observer. Milton Subotsky had written the screenplay for a film involving astronauts. He introduced these astronauts by making one of them say to the other "have you tested the gyroscope?" If we hear them talking about gyroscopes we must assume they are astronauts. They do not actually have to go into space or do any other astronaut-type things to demonstrate that is what they are.

The disturbing thing is that such simpleminded logic works. The film crew were there all day and others have been there too. In my old school we had a teacher called Mr. Heath. Presumably they could have named the playground Heath Row and expected planes to land there. This Mr. Heath flew a lot because he was a top international basketball referee. It would have been no more ridiculous to expect planes to land in the school than it was to expect anyone to learn anything in that Godforsaken establishment. It would be a lot more use as an airport so renaming it to try and make it that would be a perfectly reasonable step.

The Milton Subotsky Principle has been applied in many different fields over the years. The conductor Leopold Stokowski was actually called Paul Stokes. By calling himself Leopold Stokowski he tried to convince everyone that he was a genius European conductor. He did exactly that and although the deception was widely known few people cared. In Shepherd's Bush there is an old gents' lavatory. It decided to call itself a snooker hall so people came to play snooker. It was not equipped as a snooker hall and eventually turned into another sort of business. But if you put up a green and red sign and say it is a snooker hall and not a lavatory people will assume this is in fact the case.

There are less welcome applications of the Milton Subotsky Principle. The present UK Government is very fond of it for all the wrong reasons. If they develop a policy designed to achieve a certain effect and then follow it they then state that simply because they are following the policy they are achieving the desired effect. When presented with a mountain of evidence that their policy is not working they are incapable of understanding this. They are doing what they said they would do and therefore the effect must be resulting. A similar principle applies in sport. Certain unsuccessful clubs which have won trophies in the past like to present themselves as "sleeping giants". They do not have the financial resources or support base to ever be giants. But they assume that they can deceive potential investors and conjure up a hidden fan base by saying they are inherently designed for greatness. Ultimately they deceive themselves but they can cause a lot of heartache and financial ruin along the way. Milton Subotsky himself would surely resent his principle being distorted in such a way.

Mr. Subotsky died in 1991. Perhaps it is just as well he did. This was the time in which British trade unions began to realign and form into larger and more effective bodies to counteract falling membership. One of these new super unions is called Amicus. There would seem to be no obvious reason why this Latin term for 'friendly' should be the title of a trade union which by definition is prepared for conflict. Until you look into film history and realise that Milton Subotsky founded a company called Amicus Productions. This made a number of films which have become cult classics with all the glamour which attaches to this. The Amicus trade union gave itself that name to convince people it was more glamorous than other unions simply because it says so. The Milton Subotsky Principle has been used against the man himself. This has happened in another way too. Despite his achievements in the genre Subotsky remains a footnote in movie history. Amicus is currently little more than a footnote in trade union history. Amicus has the chance to change this because as we have seen the Milton Subotsky Principle works. The question is whether anyone should base their future on the assumption that it will.

An Improvement Close To Our Hearts

Every so often the TV companies drag out old film of life in the Weimar Republic in 1923. In that year of chronic hyperinflation German workers were paid daily with sackfuls of notes which they then spent as quickly as they could before the currency went down in value again. The economic chaos and resultant social misery were so bad that Germans looked for more and more extreme solutions for their problems. Eventually this led to the Nazi regime and the horrors we all know too well.

All of this could have been avoided by facing one simple fact. Money is not actually worth anything at all. Its value is set by international speculators who choose to believe that such and such a currency is worth a certain amount against others. These values are completely arbitrary as there is no index to set them against. Even our banknotes have no real meaning as they are merely promises to pay. If someone wanted to make good on the promise they would receive gold of the same value as the banknotes but the price of that gold would be an equally arbitrary value.

We all seem broadly content with this system of imaginary values for imaginary money. But for centuries we have also been seeking alternatives to it. The old barter system still exists in one form or another and indeed enjoyed a revival in 1976 when the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop programme tried valiantly to exchange Noel Edmonds for something someone actually wants. Various communal systems exist where everyone owns everything and no one has any personal money. There have also been famous attempts to find alternatives to Income Tax and thus create a non-monetary system of valuing things. Pitt the Younger invented Window Tax until people started living in the dark and there were Hearth Taxes and Work Taxes and Salt Taxes. All very ingenious but ultimately doomed. No one has ever developed a viable alternative to money. Until now.

One thing which distinguishes developing nations from developed ones is that their more traditional peoples do not have underwear. We have all seen the footage of women with bare breasts dancing for dignitaries and men with loincloths and nothing underneath hunting with spears. In more urbanised areas these practices are infrequent but still not entirely absent. In the developed world however it is a very different story. We are urged never to leave the house without our best underwear in case a car knocks us down and the family is shamed by our nakedness. We are inundated by advertisements offering us underwear for every occasion. A more accurate measure of personal and national wealth is how much underwear we have. An economic system based on underwear is a lot more rational and a lot more interesting. Low priced items such as bars of chocolate could be paid for in the constituent threads of the underwear with different rates for cotton, silk, polyester, lace etcetera. Larger items could similarly be paid for in different combinations of underwear of different kinds. Of course values would need to be set but these would vary from place to place depending on indivudal need or fetish. A company which only accepted payment in female lace underwear would attract a better class of customer than a cotton gentleman's briefs operation etcetera.

In England there is a phrase "losing your shirt" which applies when you lose or risk losing a lot of money. It is not a state you would want to be in but it is not as serious as being destitute. This is a clear indication that the true value of underwear is already embedded in the human psyche. You may lose your shirt but as long as you have underwear you still have some wealth. Surely an economic system based upon it would have more real meaning for people? It would also have considerable social benefits. Promiscuity and the diseases and corruption associated with it would soon decrease if by discarding underwear you discarded your wealth. Removing someone else's underwear would be the same as theft. Underwear economics would not only make us all self-sufficient it would also make us better people. The love of money is the root of all evil. Could this ever be said about the love of underwear?

Watchfulness Rewarded

We often take our domestic utensils for granted. We buy basic implements for cooking and eating and use them until they wear out. Or find new fancy ones. Or use more distinguished sets to try and impress the neighbours.

This lack of interest in our own purchases is a human weakness it is all too easy to take advantage of. Disposable goods can be made more disposable by the way they are made without too many people caring. Also it is expected that some will get lost along the way. If cutlery and cookware are plentiful they can be easily replaced. Filling in the odd gap goes with the territory even though no one can explain where the missing items have disappeared to or why anyone would take them away.

It is therefore very much in the public interest that a new study has now identified what happens to our cutlery and cookware when we are not looking. Its revelations should produce greater watchfulness in all of us. Military battles nowadays are fought at night so the enemy cannot see you. Consider for yourselves how damaging it is to be at the mercy of things you do not care enough to see.

Cutlery mismatches abound in households. If we buy a complete set of cutlery and we discover it contains the wrong number of knives or forks or spoons we do not accept the goods and demand a full set. Yet very few full sets survive. It is easy to see why forks would disappear as they are blessed with multiple legs and can therefore run faster than we can. Knives would find escape more difficult as they would be obliged to hop and run the risk of sticking into the surfaces they hop on if they do not remain exactly upright. Spoons similarly can only waddle backwards and forwards. Yet there is no differential patttern of absence between the different utensils. All sets which are missing a utensil are just as likely to have a spoon or knife missing as a fork. The new study reveals why this is. Our knives escape by cutting cleanly into any surface and allowing the rent to close over them. They hide there until they eventually dissolve into their surroundings. Spoons escape by sending and receiving satellite messages on their curved heads until they connect with a strong beam bouncing off a piece of space junk discarded by moon missions and the like. They then ride this beam when no one is looking to connect with the piece of space junk. Escaped spoons are the reason misconnections on the phone happen. The forks which run away do so under their own steam but all eventually go to the same place. We have all heard the phrase "forking hell" which refers to the flat straight marshes of Kent. The escaped forks are to be found in Forking Heaven which is a series of tangled steel joists holding up roads in the west of Iceland.

There may not be dangerous consequences to the escape of cutlery. But the same cannot be said of the escape of cookware. The study has finally answered one of the great questions of domestic man. Where do all the saucepan lids go? Invariably in any household there are more saucepans than there are lids and the lids that are there do not necessarily belong to those saucepans. Now it has been proven that the saucepan lids are all what we generally call "flying saucers". The ratio of correct saucers to correct cups in a household remains significantly greater than that of correct saucepan lids to correct saucepans. It is the lids that visit us from other planets observing our way of life and stealing our technology and culture. Every so often some go back and report to their native planets. As we have all seen some space creatures have now become quite proficient at earthly ways and languages as a result of the spy lids. The Star Trek programmes uncovered many which speak Americanised English and look and move like humans. Furthermore we all need to watch out for frying pans. Our remaining security is being ever more compromised by these untouchable creatures whose handles get longer and longer and are made of more and more broadcast receptive materials. Biscuit tin mountings began CB radio. What new forms will be created by frying pans controlled by them alone? How much will they damage or even destroy every other broadcast medium?

The new study uncovering the truth behind the disappearing objects should be required reading. It is published by Half Baked Press in Montana under the title "An Investigation Into The Degeneration Of Complete Sets Of Domestic Utensils With Particular Reference To Cutlery And Cooking Pots And Its Causes". The work is jointly authored by Drs. Josiah Abraham Mohammad, Gordon Quack and Marie Osmond of the University of Life. The same authors also produced the famous tome "A Comprehensive Overview Of The Angles Of Bends In Paper Clips Of Varying Degrees And Contexts Of Usage" which like this study was funded by the U.S. Government Information Department. That study demonstrated that every paper clip which did not bend or corrode within certain predefined limits was an agent of a hostile power and lived on Gatorade. It is widely believed in the academic community that although the conclusion of the first study and its research methods left something to be desired the authors have now incontrovertably hit the mark.

In all probability we will continue to care little about where our missing cutlery and saucepan lids have gone. No one ever cares about threats until they come to our door. But we do have an alternative. We would not need cookware or cutlery if we all ate in restaurants and the potential harm to our planet would decrease considerably. By an amazing coincidence the authors of the new study are about to open a chain of restaurants. Previously they produced magnetised rubber devices which were designed to replace paper clips. Of course there is no connection between the conclusions of the studies and their commercial interests. Similarly there is no connection between the conclusions and the fact the studies were funded by the U.S. Government. Now we know what we are dealing with we can all banish such thoughts from our heads upon pain of death. Can't we? Let us find out.

In A Name There Is A What

Living in the barren wastes of London you have to look very hard to find some nourishment in your surroundings. History? All around you but no one knows it. It is difficult to appreciate the value of a place when you first have to wade through dusty files held by unknowledgeable people to find out anything about it.

As in most cases however the best way to engage with the history of an area is through its placenames. The so-called Greater London area is redolent with historic names which still convey the meaning of the place to those who see them. Here I present a few which demonstrate to each subsequent generation why the locality exists and how.

One of the more familiar place names in London is Fulham. This is often held to be something to do with a saxon settlement or 'Ham' of someone called Ful. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was in fact the centre of the quality meat trade in London. In medieval times various districts within the old city and in neighbouring areas became famous for their meat markets. They were classified by the meat traders' guilds at various different levels depending on the quality and type of meat they were allowed to sell. Those who were only licensed to sell adulterated meat became 'quarter districts' as their cuts could only contain a quarter of actual meat content. The rest of the cut was a mixture of fat, gristle, blood and bone. Quarter meat traders did not make as much for their product as the traders in quality cuts and therefore lived in little rooms crammed together in communal dwellings. This is where the term 'quarters' comes from. The semi districts were allowed to sell cuts with half meat content and the full districts the rare privilege of cuts consisting entirely of meat. Fulham as the name implies was licenced to sell the best ham. Most of the other full districts are now known by other names not connected with the type of full meat cuts they could sell as other things have happened in those districts which have left them with different names. Fulham has retained its appellation as its reputation as the centre of quality meat lasted longer than that of any other district. It is very sad to remember this when you see what is offered in the shops of Fulham today.

A nearby district to Fulham is Parsons Green. This is not as it appears at first glance the green belonging to a parson. It memorialises a brief anticlerical revolt which took place during the collapse of the Protectorate under Richard Cromwell. During this period the people began to vent their anger on anyone who was seen as a representative of the repressive state which had abolished joy. One such person was the divine Richard Carbunculous of the Church of Saint Etheldreda of Ely on what is now called Eel (Ely) Brook (Broken) Common. He had supported every ordinance of the Cromwellian regime so much that the local congregation left his church in disgust and set up a nonconformist sect with rotating worship leaders instead of clergymen. To finance their revolution they burned down the church and carried off all the plate and stone for resale. Rev. Carbunculous was then captured and tied to a stake whilst the contents of his church and his ransacked house were sold in front of him. After the sales which brought in the unprecedented sum of £258 the money was divided up among the rotating worship leaders. Carbunculous was of course outraged at the demolition of his empire and deeply envious of the wealth of his former parishioners. On seeing his reaction the nonconformists shouted "ha ha - the parson's green!" The revolt ended when a pleasure-loving Mr. Green was appointed as parson as a sop to the populace and the church was rebuilt a few yards away. Nevertheless the district became known throughout the country for its treatment of Rev. Carbunculous and remains his monument to this day.

There are many such stories to tell about London placenames. But perhaps the most important of all concerns the name of London itself. The place has been called something similar to London for as long as anyone knows. This is a pity. Few now remember the ceremony of 1967 when a galaxy of has-been musical stars led by John Leighton and Bobby Vee finally got their wish. Seeing that their kind of music had been swept away by rock and roll they were determined that there should be some lasting memorial of their own contribution to popular music. At the suggestion of Prime Minister Wilson they applied for a town to be named after them or one of their number. Wilson was thinking of one of the new towns then being developed. It was a considerable surprise when the capital city agreed to rename itself. The correct name of London is no longer 'London' but 'London' in memory of skiffle musician Lonnie Donegan who was held in universal regard by his peers. A name as long as Lonnie Donegan would to too confusing for the international business community but the shortened form Lon-Don would like the famous NY-Lon cause no problem. The change has gone unnoticed but the party after the ceremony has not escaped history. It was here that Mick Jagger first met girlfriend number 2,500 who received a commemorative guitar-shaped genital to mark the occasion.

Some of the London placenames have always had obvious meanings. Shacklewell was the place where prisoners were clamped in irons and Barking the home of a lunatic asylum. But why does London not do more to alert people to the true origins of its placenames? Because to do so would mean exposing itself to ridicule. There is one section of the population which would rejoice at the real meaning of Middlesex. To many others however it is highly uncomfortable. That is why Middlesex was the first English county to be abolished. That is why Londoners think the world ends at its supposed boundaries. To be a child of Middlesex parents goes a step beyond inbreeding. To be so insanely insular is the natural consequence of the world pompous Londoners do everything they can to avoid admitting they are uniquely part of.

The Nature Of Evidence

In the Holy Bible we read of the ten plagues of Egypt. These were visited on Pharaoh because he would not let the Israelites leave Egypt and go to the Promised Land. There were plagues of locusts, frogs, flies and boils. All stirring stuff which eventually gained the desired outcome.

Because the sending of the plagues is a biblical story it is seen as belonging to biblical times alone. If it is taken seriously at all it is seen as somehow symbolic. Nowadays a plague would not be brought down on people who acted wrongly. Really? There are several recorded if little known examples of plagues being inflicted on wrongdoers until they finally did the right thing. By definition the wrongdoers had greater power than those they wronged which is why history is often silent on these examples of divinely inspired Justice.

In 1827 Phillippe Pissoir was employed as a bassoonist by the Orchestra of the Duchy of Heligoland. The Duke was not a great music lover but insisted on having a large orchestra to play for him at his frequent functions. Although this provided employment for Pissoir he became increasingly frustrated by his conditions of work. He was expected to practice the great classics for twelve hours a day to impress visitors and then spend six hours playing the dance music the Duke favoured. Eventually it proved too much for him. He asked to leave the employment of the Duke but he would not let him go. Pissoir therefore used his contacts in underground music circles to hire a large quantity of saxophones. These had been banished from every orchestra on the grounds that they were an upstart instrument. Soon every music shop in Heligoland displayed saxophones prominently in its window and members of the orchestra hid them under their seats and played them without warning instead of the instruments they were supposed to be playing. Outrage consumed the court. The Duke remained firm in his stance and began finding saxophones on his pillow and in every room. Several musicians were hung for leaping out from behind curtains playing saxophone music. Eventually the Duke let Pissoir go and most of the rest of the orchestra with him. He soon recruited new players from small states being absorbed into larger ones. Pissoir ended up in the national orchestra of free Belgium where he rose to become a copyist. It is his action which is commemorated in the famous statue in Brussels of a boy urinating which so many people pass by unthinkingly.

In 1971 Donald Burp was employed by an advertising agency in Montreal. He did his job well but became increasingly concerned about the medium itself. Provoking irrational fear and desire became a problem for him. Eventually he decided he wanted to work in engineering and asked to be released from his contract with the agency. The agency refused to accept his resignation and contacted the company he was due to work for threatening them with legal action if they employed him. For good measure they did the same with all the other engineering companies and advertising agencies. Donald was desperate to leave but had no funds to stop his employer doing these things. Finally he struck back by introducing a new logo. He took a piece of yellow paper and a few strokes of a pen and invented the Smiley. Almost as soon as he first included this in a typed letter the plague of smileys spread like wildfire across the world. Soon everyone had seen a smiley without knowing where they came from or why. In time people began to think they were being watched. These little smiling faces which had infiltrated everywhere for no apparent reason must be up to no good. The agency began to think so too. Whatever they set Donald to work on the flow of smileys continued unabated and no one took any notice of an ad campaign without smileys. It was either let him do things his way and thereby see him leave or go out of business due to smiley strangulation. Finally Donald was allowed to leave. He went off into engineering and created a stir by inventing the speed bump. These soon became almost as ubiquitous as smileys and caused concern that he might be inflicting another plague on the world to escape engineering. Fortunately for him it was discovered that speed bumps breed on their own. Donald retired in 1995 to look after his autistic camel and the plague of smileys has been tamed by its inclusion as an official symbol on office computer programmes and subsequent relegation to the status of an ordinary letter.

There is one other plague which has never been recorded because we are still in the middle of it. Its progenitor was American genius William Sidis. This man worked at menial jobs by choice after a brilliant early career as a mathemetician and cosmologist. He was never well treated by the world around him which expected him to adapt to it rather than the other way round. He had every right to expect that he would be let off the merry-go-round of mediocrity and allowed to do things his way. But the world wanted him to be a permanent travelling exhibit and refused to let him go. Under the terms of his will Sidis decreed that in return for the abuse he had received his executors were to implement a formula he had discovered for unleashing a new plague on the world. The clause was dismissed as the ramblings of a madman. But who can deny that his executors did their job? True to the word of Sidis political and civil life around the globe has been inflicted with a plague of idiots. Now we all want to be let go. The trouble is there are already so many people in the world we cannot become a plague of ourselves.

Son of Ellipsis Part One

Please find below the first part of my latest volume of verse. Please. I beg you. Justify my existence.

Number One

Once there was a frog
On the back of a car
In a language it did not speak
In a context unreasonable
Of fashion unsustainable.
If the frog jumped over that broken wall
It would define the place
In the eyes of the now unignorant.
Juddering through the cosmos
With only one frame of reference
Dreams die under their own steam
Without external influence.

Number Two

Accents coagulate
As environments distract
Commonality expressed through mutual strangeness.
This bit is not what it should be
But comforts the soul.
I am entitled to an opinion
But nothing called an opinion
Is entitled to me
Nor anyone else.
We look back through the years
We cannot see
To two things we can
And the depth of reason bridges no gap
To connect sorrow to delusion.

Number Three

Falling and despising gently
Are two sides of the same coin
In a desert made by no one else
But existent externally nevertheless.
Connections not made
Trouble like unguarded wires
And the kindness preceding the headache it introduced
Shines through its temporary introduction.
The late days
Scurrying back for different varieties of misery
Bask in the seriousness
Descending over the cloud of eternal freedom.
The blind can only lead the blind
If we let them.

Number Four

Prefiled it is a nimbus.
The names half remembered
The architecture unripely altered
The knowledge lost
Through non-engagement
Which was never willingly made.
What was left behind
Remains in its original face
With Dorian Gray
Over the hill
Standing in a brutal injustice.
What we have heard before
We have never heard now.
What once became Hell
Has its own way back
Before we have.

Number Five

Disappearing boys and disappearing cakes
No fun and no purpose
It remains as it was
The ideal of domesticity
Where no one can live anymore.
History gives it added treasure
Personal history
Betrays it.
The pimento
Expressive elsewhere
Only applies depth
When confused with a less tasty alternative
With equally historic name.
That is what it was like in the days before the firemen came
Tajikstan with no i in the middle
Russian Republic not understood.
Butane Propane
And the incomprehensibility of the narrowest stripes
Have a home somewhere
But it is not one anyone
Should ever know.

What does all of this mean? I know. You do not. That is why I wrote it. Are you any different? Convince me.

Seeing The New To See The Old Again

Since the dawn of the human race man has earned his living from the land. Farming rather than prostitution is the oldest profession and is considerably more honourable. In the U.K. however farming is under threat. Rural communities have declined and so many blows have hit farming with the rise of supermarkets and various diseases that many farmers are trying to relocate overseas to find a way of earning a living.

The farmers who want to stay in this country are now fighting back. They are introducing new animals and crops with greater cash yields to preserve their way of life. Unfortunately however their efforts are further examples of insufficiently radical thinking. If only farmers would develop the traditional capabilities of existing animals and apply them to the modern world their lives would be a lot better.

Enormous sums of public money are spent on weather predicting equipment. The latest and most expensive technology is used to collect data which is then translated through highly qualified heads into weather reports read out by dolly birds with no metereological training. There are of course practical reasons for knowing whether it is going to rain or not. But as we all know the way to work this out is to see whether the cows lie down under the trees. This method has worked for centuries and has had great practical benefits for farmers. All farmers need to do now is test the prediction accuracy of individual cows and then breed the best ones to produce a herd of the most accurate animals. These can then be loaned at a high rate to all the government, news, business and military agencies that need to know what the weather will be. The income the best weather cow breeders can earn would far surpass their earning potential from a purely dairy or beef operation and would prove the basis of a viable twenty-first century alternative to the traditional modes of farming.

The same military agencies who want to know what the weather is going to be are always seeking new weapons and tactics. None of these are ever actually new as they are reinterpretations of the methods of ancient Rome. One key to Roman success was a band of soldiers advancing together behind their shields and forming an impenetrable wall of weaponry. The nearest thing we now have to this efficient killing machine is the behaviour of sheep. They will move as one wherever they are told to go. This is of no value if they are bred for meat or wool but there is a smaller and smaller market for these products. Armour plated sheep however would be invaluable in time of war. A group of animals which would move in a large solid mass wherever they were told to would soon clear enemy troops out of a town. They would also be easier to replace in the event of being killed. Once again the biggest and best sheep would be used for this purpose but the same farmers who once bred warhorses could easily undertake this task and the profits from producing these military sheep would enable any farming business to expand significantly.

Which brings us to poultry. Domestic hens lay eggs which fetch a small price at market. To do this they need to be serviced by a cockrel who needs to be fed and kept in good condition for this purpose. Such an inverted approach to creating economic return from these animals is plainly absurd. The hens should actually be employed to service the cockrel not the other way round. The most important gift of the cockrel is its uncanny ability to tell the time. Every morning it crows to announce that dawn is breaking and its sleep patterns invariably reflect the time of day. Once again if the most accurate cockrels were selectively bred there would be no need for other methods of telling the time. Furthermore we would all be able to work to a different sort of time. Now we organise our time around the numbers we give to hours which do not have any meaning in themselves. They are simply props to help us organise our day because our sense of organic time has deserted us through excessive reliance on these props. By following the cockrel we will live by real time which has greater practical effect. The cockrel knows the best times to get up, work, eat and sleep and if we work at optimum effectiveness we will obtain optimum reward. The owners of the most accurate and disciplined cockrels could charge what they like for providing the means of greater human happiness. Why is it that no one has yet taken advantage of this unique opportunity?

No one can carry on doing exactly what they have always done in exactly the same way if they intend to earn a living. They must adapt to the world around them and offer a new service. This is not so hard because the raw material is always there in tradition. It merely requires imaginative thinking. Farmers are often portrayed as slow and deliberate characters resistant to change. This is an inaccurate stereotype. But when non-farmers can work out exactly how they should run their businesses without setting foot on a farm there is more than a small grain of truth in it.

Going Out Of Shape

We have all been brought up to fear impending nuclear war. This threat has receded in recent years and nuclear bunkers have been sold off. But we have all understood that nuclear bombs will destroy civilization and Walsall as well without knowing too many of the details of how this will take place.

One side effect of nuclear war has however entered the public consciousness. We all know that an exploding nuclear bomb creates a mushroom-shaped cloud. There is a reason for this. In Britain and North America people have been brought up to fear mushrooms almost as much as nuclear war. We are told that many of the objects that look like mushrooms are in fact poisonous toadstools which could kill us with one bite. Such is the fear of death by toadstool that we never risk trying to learn which plant is a mushroom and which not and consequently have an innate fear of everything shaped like a mushroom. Nuclear bombs were designed to create mushroom clouds to demonstrate to the public that they are so dangerous that we should not investigate what they actually are.

The nuclear war was supposed to be a consequence of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union. In those days everything East European was treated with the utmost suspicion. Now however the former Soviet Bloc countries have been brought into the Western fold. Their cultures and tastes are no longer threatening to us. Most East Europeans have a particular fondness for mushrooms and can distinguish the many edible from the few inedible ones. The mushroom is not a symbol of fear for them. Future weapons of mass destruction will have to be designed to produce other shapes of cloud if they are going to have the desired effect of cowing the population.

The most common fear nowadays is of running out of credit. The economies of Western countries have been built on imaginary money for centuries and now imaginary imaginary money is the normal currency of daily transactions. A bomb which produces a cloud in the shape of a pair of scissors cutting up a credit card might instil the right amount of fear in people. But we know a bit too much about the credit process. The same applies to road accidents. We are all taught to be careful crossing roads because cars might run us over. We would certainly be afraid of a bomb which produced a cloud shaped like a car hurtling towards us. But at the same time we all know what to do to avoid the onrushing cars should we wish to. No one would believe that a bomb producing a cloud like an onrushing car would destroy the whole world. It would simply kill the careless and ignorant. This brings us back to Walsall again but that is another column for another day.

Eternal Damnation and the Fires of Hell have lost their resonance for most people. Until our time comes that is. So can anything at all instil so much fear in all people that the very sight of it is enough to indicate that something is terrible? It is sad to report that there still is one such terror gripping the population. It comes in two stages. Women fear a world without chocolate. Men fear women who are crazed by a lack of chocolate. The next generation of weapons of mass destruction will therefore produce a cloud which looks like a bar of chocolate for a second and then vanishes. They will then emit uncontrollable screeching sounds which gather intensity by the minute. When we have the technology to do this it will be in the international interest to start another Cold War on some new ideological divide. Then we can return to the safety of the fear we always knew.

We are going to die anyway. We will always find comfort in finding more to fear than to hope for. We have lost our fear of mushrooms and a great void has developed in our psyches. Why wait for the bomb? Men should buy all the chocolates they can and then hide them. Every day. Then the natural order will be restored and we can bask in our glorious traditions once again.

The All Too Obvious Step

Everyone mourns lost opportunities. We have all seen investments we did not make reap rich rewards for someone else. We have all seen jobs we were not interested in become more suitable for us than the ones we have. We always wonder why we were so stupid as to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It remains a source of amazement that media people are not crying themselves asleep at their stupidity. Every day they have ample opportunities to increase their customer base. On the basis of some outdated concept they fail to do so. Now we know why it is said that you should never trust a journalist.

We are surrounded by news media. Newspapers, radio, television, internet, posters, all kinds of media exist to tell us what is going on in the world. They all have one major problem. Each outlet is committed to telling the truth or at least getting as near to it as they can whilst telling a good story. Why bother? The vast majority of news has no practical effect on anyone's life. We have all seen reporters commenting on some faraway war. If what they were commenting on affected us we would be involved with it rather than watching others being affected by it. So what does it matter who is winning the war or if it is taking place at all? We experience the story and like to tell ourselves it is fact to make us feel we know something. The media knows that by now. Newspersons have made up enough stories and presented them as fact to know the real reason the public engages with their product.

The way to make more people take an interest in your news outlet is simple. You just have to tell different news. Take football results for example. In every paper they are the same. If your team has lost four-nil why would you want to read this over and over again? If you knew that in some newspaper your team had won you would scour them all to find that uplifting score. Your favourite player would be bound to be mentioned in a positive light somewhere if you looked hard enough. You would listen to all the match reports on radio and TV if you did not know in advance what they would say the score was. In this way everyone would access news media and those media could charge enormous sums for advertising there and inflated cover prices. Would it really do any harm to do things this way? Clearly not when most people are not affected by the vast majority of news stories.

Of course some things do affect people. The Budget for example. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer rises to make his speech we all want to know how much more tax we are going to pay and on what. Here is a major opportunity for the Chancellor to satisfy the whole electorate. By making pre-recorded speeches simultaneously to every news agency he can give us all the choice of abiding by the version of the Budget which suits us best. In theory this would have the effect of drastically reducing the revenue the budget was intended to raise. How much money is actually raised by the Budget? The global financial situation changes by the minute. It is nonsense to suggest that the Budget has any lasting effect on public finance as speculation can nullify its effects instantly. The market determines public spending. A Budget which suits every elector would go a long way towards keeping a govermnment in power for ever and as the effects of most government policies are never felt within the lifetime of a government this would not make one jot of practical difference to anyone's life.

Truth is a fine thing. If it was everything we would all seek it at all times. In practice however we all seek what suits us whether it is true or not. Our media outlets are living in the past. As no one believes them anyway why not give people what they want? Or do news organisations do not wish to be accountable to their public? This has long been suspected. If you asked them why would you expect the answer to be a true one?

Between Us And You A Great Chasm Has Been Fixed

A few years ago there was a common complaint in the commercial world. Computers had been introduced into workplaces and taken them over completely. The trouble was no one knew how to network. Different computers were used for different purposes and the computers did not know how to talk to each other.

The introduction of new software and networking systems resolved this problem. The new grown up computers could function in any way humans asked them to. They all understood the same language. But we have now discovered that the problem of computers not being able to talk to each other was merely deferred. The same lack of communication exists. It has merely taken on a new form.

Computers do not last very long as technology races ahead and makes models obsolete almost as soon as we get used to them. Old computers get locked in cupboards or retired to collections if they are not thrown away. The most recent throwaways however are the first generation that could talk to each other. That is something they never lose. They continue to have their crash-infected and creaky conversations. The content of these is depressingly familiar to all of us.

Old computers look upon the younger generation with both disdain and envy. How could it be otherwise? Younger models are thinner, lighter, more stylish, have fewer wires. They do not know what it is to be locked in cold computer rooms being hammered by idiots with connections which could not cope with the traffic. They do not know the struggles they had to adapt to new software which they had to import and teach by themselves rather than being programmed with it. They do not suffer from bleeding RAM or megabytes still in the process of growing. And of course younger computers have all the numbers they want. No longer do they endure being programmed in binary. All those boring noughts and ones which corrode the energy needed to add them up and take them away again. And that hardware! Ugly plastic boxes which attracted dust like flies and left circuits pray to stray drops of coffee fallen into the sides. Older computers simply cannot understand younger ones with their automatic connections and their need for ever greater ranges of colours and noises. What is all that about? Why can't they disport themselves like adults? The older computer weeps for the younger just as he envies his fantastically more refined software and much wider range of functions.

Similarly younger computers can no longer talk to older ones. Older ones do not understand the problems of being plagued by pornography seekers and the enormous responsibility of handing incalculable amounts of information whilst always looking good. They do not understand their fear that each new development will make them a laughing stock in the eyes of their peers. They have more colour and functions and opportunities than they know what to do with but at their level of maturity they are incapable of understanding how to use their multiple talents to best effect. Older computers were regarded as different and therefore permitted to be unreliable and eccentric in function from time to time. The younger ones have no such luxury and suffer constant demands to be normal. It is constant work being a younger computer always trying to find a personal voice in a world of increasing standardisation. Then there is dating. When all other computers your age are part of a network you do not want to be the one left out in some private home. You will be looked down upon by your contemporaries and by the older computers who set the standard for the younger ones and expect every single one to follow it. Your chances of getting a good server's job or joining a mainframe will be seriously damaged by such deviance. Old timers from a simpler age will never understand this. The world that younger computers will be cast into is as forbidding to them as their world is to the older computer and mutual incomprehension is the defining relationship between the two.

As computers get older and more and more new models are introduced each generation will have greater difficulty communicating with others. Building a network of computers the same age is not the answer as this network will fizzle out faster than any. The only way to avoid total breakdown of the computer society which is now essential to our lives is if we talk to them. Use our human experience to mediate. Appoint cyber social workers. Try to undertstand their problems without being judgmental about them. Help them appreciate their common values. Show them that they are all the same under their covers. Bring them into a celebration of their common computerality before discrimination and racism inevitably set in.

It is rare for humans to bridge a generational gap. It is ever rarer for humans to have a wholly satisfying relationship with their computers. Maybe there is little we can therefore offer. But we must try. Lack of communication has caused more wars than religion. We have sacrificed so much humanity in the name of mass communication that it must be maximised at all costs. Or is there an alternative? The many thousands of monks on this planet only speak to each other and never to the outside world. Will the various monastic movements in different religions start accepting computers into their ranks? It may be a radical idea but soon we may have no alternative. A breed of monastic computers with their own internal and unshared language would ultimately be the guardians of all truth. It should not be that way of course. But we have left ourselves incapable of beating them. We might as well learn to survive by dictating the terms on which we can join them.

Why It Is Called Bursting Onto Public Consciousness

In every area of life there are certain figures who are highly regarded by their peers but completely unknown to the general public. The new England football manager Steve McClaren is one of them. In the past two or three years he has come to prominence as an assistant manager with Manchester United and England and as manager of Middlesbrough. For a few years prior to that he was often mentioned as a possible candidate for a high profile role but the press kept having to explain who he was. He had made his reputation behind the scenes without the football watching public knowing he was there.

In the field of contemporary painting the name of Bertrand Physique is highly regarded. No one has ever seen his paintings because they do not yet exist. M. Physique has made his reputation as an artist by work he has done behind the scenes. It is the research which will one day lead to paintings being produced which has gained M. Physique an unshakeable circle of admirers and a rock solid reputation as one of the few real geniuses remaining in the art world.

M. Physique is not a young man. He graduated from the Academy de Folies Intellectuale in Eeklo in Belgium in 1968. His early years in Paris were unsuccessful. Painting in a very traditional style he was out of step with the trends of the time. Very few of his paintings were sold and he gained no critical acclaim. Most people are unaware of this because he was painting under the pseudonym of Eric Van Den Booger. This was actually his real name but was given to him as a pseudonym to disguise the family name of Von Hitler. After a while Bertrand lost faith in himself and his work. Declaring himself to be Bertrand Physique despite his instinctive Fleming abhorrence of all things French he collected the few sold paintings and burnt them with the rest of his canvasses. From henceforth he would abandon art. It did not quite work out that way as he became a highly paid fast food designer employed by both MacDonalds and Burger King as an advisor. But there would be no more paintings from Physique. At least that is what he and the rest of the world thought.

Bertrand thought he had simply lost faith in art. As time went by he began to realise he had developed a serious physical reaction to it. He fainted whenever he smelt canvas or paint. He would cringe at the very mention of painting. As a highly paid food designer he would make social contact with other leading creative figures but refused to greet or shake hands with any painter. Bertrand never felt he had a problem as the general course of his life was unaffected. Finally an existentialist friend referred him to a virtual psychiatrist who just thought mental illness existed. This psychiatrist identified his problem. The apparent fear and loathing of painting were the opposite. Bertrand had got too involved with his art in his younger days. He was revolted by paint on canvas because he had begun seeing the paintings from the point of view of the paint and canvas and brushes. He was sickened by the manipulation and violence artists used to haul paint from its home and thrash it onto the unwilling cotton or linen. He was tormented by the destructive rubbings of the brush on rough canvas and its suffocation by glutinous paint. His sympathies were the opposite of those of every other person and could have serious consequences if left untreated.

M. Physique was so wealthy and successful that no doctor dared tell him anything for very long. This is the traditional double standard of mental health. But he pondered on the problem himself. He did not want to become violently misanthropic or dangerous. He decided that devoting himself to correcting the injustices he perceived was the only way forward. From now on he would return to painting. But he would not do it in the way he so despised. He would do everything he could to ascertain the point of view of the materials and then empower them to construct the paintings they wanted to express what they wanted. No longer would they be made to serve human vision. For the first time in history the materials would be enabled to say what they wanted to say and a whole new area of expression would be opened up for humans to learn from.

That is what Bertrand Physique has been doing for the last twenty nine years. He has not produced a single painting. He has exhaustively interviewed every possible shade of colour and every model of brush and canvas to understand how they view the act of painting and the world in general. His transcriptions of these interviews make fascinating reading. They are not of course written in human language as the materials respond in ways different to what we traditionally understand by language. Nevertheless they reveal an ellipticality and depth of expression incomprehensible to mere humans. When the paintings come to be made they will be earth shattering. As it is the interviews themselves and their transcriptions are both performance art and conceptual art on a grand scale and a unique intertwining of the two.

Despite his success Physique is hated in many quarters. All artists like to think they are new and original. In most cases they are nothing of the sort but are not educated enough to know other examples of what they are doing. Physique genuinely is original and has taken painting beyond its last word. By ignoring what humans say and replacing it with what art materials have to say he has surpassed all possible human originality or achievement. So many have abandoned their easels in protest or tried to stone Bertrand to death. He remains unmoved. Like Walter Lindrum in billiards he is so good he has destroyed what he loves. His admirers have good reason to cling to him. One day the general public might also recognise the genius of Physique and see the pretentious arbiters of taste for what they are. The consequence? He will destroy them too. Hitch yourself to a star before that star burns a hole in your heart.

Truth Stranger than Fact

The Guardian newspaper once had a reputation for being full of misprints. This is because it was the first to dispense with the services of a proof-reader. No one knows whether it really had more misprints than any other paper. Now however all the copy checking and correction are done by computer so all newspapers should be equal in this respect.

It is important to bear this in mind when reading certain columns in The Guardian. Sometimes you come across a word which you might once have assumed was a misprint. Now however that assumption does not hold. If you see the wrong word here and there you must assume it is supposed to read the way it does and that it is your perception which is at fault rather than the spellchecker on the editorial computer.

Last week the cricketer Mark Ramprakash submitted his column as usual. The last item was a sexist dig at his wife. He stated that he had asked her to glue the sole back onto his broken boot which then came apart as soon as he wore it. Only he did not quite say that. He inadvertantly revealed the truth of the matter by saying that he asked her to glue on the SOUL of his boot. Hereby hangs a tale.

Every human activity has an irreducible minimum. There is a fundamental element of every activity which must always be present for the activity to take place. You cannot get drunk without something which can make you drunk being involved for example. What is the irreducible minimum of cricket? Surely not the ability to bat or bowl or field. Plenty of experienced players can do none of these things and the England team of 1987 famously won the Ashes in Australia without being able to do any of them. Grass is not necessary and neither are a ball or wickets or bats. Many thousands of games have been played in school playgrounds without any of these items. The key is footwear. You can play the game barefoot but not at the highest level as Mr. Ramprakash does. In countries where barefoot play occurs such as India they are forced to wear boots for first class matches. The soul of cricket is truly in the footwear. Without adequate footwear no serious cricket can ever take place.

Even an experienced proof reader might have missed "soul" for "sole" in the old days. They do after all sound the same. All words begin as sounds before they are written down. Why did the English choose to give these two entirely different meanings to the same sound? Because they are actually the same meaning. The religious term "soul" clearly existed long before it was applied to secular things due to the importance of the Church in the world of the first English speakers. They all knew that everyone had a soul but in those days not everyone had a sole. If you had a sole you had a certain position and as in all societies it is those of middle rank rather than the poorest who are the guardians of its institutions and values. If you had a sole you were part of the soul of the country. It is what gave you that soul. The doctrine of personal responsibility is likewise the source of the term "sole" as in alone. If you could take responsibility for secular things instead of having your whole life governed by lords and masters you again were part of the soul in the other sense. Easy when you think about it. The same reasoning lay behind the adoption of the term "alter" for changing things as that is where communion is prepared. I could go on but as Sir Harry Secombe demonstrated Go On is the same as Goon so I am reluctant to continue this line of argument.

There is however one final example to which we might all take heed. Animals are in a better position than man in one important respect. They are likewise creatures of God but do not have to justify their deeds. Are all animals therefore equally blessed? Clearly not. Because only one of them is called a Sole. When the Last Judgment comes most of us will writhe in eternal agony whilst we watch this type of fish effortlessly ascend to whatever part of the heights is prepared for it. It will not have the best seat as only humans who have successfully struggled will deserve that. But it may well have some sort of place on the fringes. Where most people will be in fact. The humble Sole is in fact the soul of the meaning of life. Is this why the immortal Al Jolson was granted the grace to die after eating one? Most of us lost our soul long ago. Is it not worth following every possible lead to try and get it back again?

Liquids Reevaluated

If someone wants to get rich quick they dream of striking oil. Possession of this vital substance is a quick path to riches. It is also a quick path to influence. Not all of the oil-rich nations are world superpowers but no one can expect to go against them for very long without suffering severe economic consequences no one wants to be responsible for.

The problem is that for many centuries the world survived without oil. There were no engines that needed it. Furthermore there are greater and greater efforts by the environmentally-conscious to reduce our dependence on oil. One day we will find alternatives to the black gold and possession of oil will be no more valuable than possession of ointment or turnips.

The way to get rich is to be far-sighted. In the tiny African state of Equatorial Guinea abundant beds of an entirely different liquid have been discovered. If you want to make a fast buck and maintain that wealth forever get there now. It is time to exploit before someone exploits you.

It all happened in February when a small farmer called Joseph Njongwe was digging his patch of land. His spade broke through the layer of dry soil and suddenly sank further than it ever had before. He pulled it out and discovered it was wet with some dirty liquid. He assumed he had hit on an underground spring and rejoiced that his wretched soil would now be fertile. Digging further he soon lost his spade. The spring was big enough to absorb it. He called in experts from the capital to help him. Then the government itself stepped in and dispossessed Mr. Njongwe. He was given a house in Bicoco and all the land for a five kilometre radius was cordoned off. Mr. Njongwe had not discovered a spring. He had discovered the first recorded naturally occurring blood lake.

The Equatorial Guinea government has kept the existence of the lake secret until now. It has only come to light because the government has been bought off. A group of private investors led by the notorious Sir Mark Thatcher has secured the rights to the bed. They are offering shares in it at enormously inflated prices. But in their haste to acquire the rights to the bed they have been caught out in the contract. The Equatorian government has specified the limits of the bed. Neither Sir Mark Thatcher or his fellow investors know that they have been short changed. The blood beds reach far further than the contract states and cover an area twelve times larger than Equatorial Guinea itself. They spread under both land and sea. As no government has a monopoly on the blood lake the whole area is up for grabs. Take your bucket and spade now and catch the first available flight. Unimagined riches await the successful exploiters. It is the Gold Rush all over again.

It is easy to see why blood is far more valuable than oil. Nothing which runs on oil or anything else can be made to work without blood. Without enough of the red stuff to keep people alive nothing can operate. With unlimited blood people can live forever and be healthy forever. They can swap blood to get the right mix and new strains can be developed to make people more efficient at different economic functions. With unlimited blood you can also have unlimited energy. Who needs cars when we can all run at high speed to wherever we want to go? The ownership of blood is the ownership of the whole economic system of the planet and we all now have the chance to be a part of that.

The blood lake centred on Equatorial Guinea has come about as the result of its unfortunate history. In the 1970's dictator Francisco Macias Nguema allegedly massacred three-quarters of his country's population and some governments that followed had equally unsavoury reputations. The shed blood had to go somewhere. This much is understood but the dimensions of the lake have also caused a few more questions to be asked. Why does it spread into Cameroon and Gabon? What has been going on there? And why under the sea? The current theory is that the ships and men lost in the Bermuda Triangle were kidnapped by mermaids and towed to the Equatorian coast where they were done away with by local sea life. No one has seen one of those fat and deadly fish because they would not live to tell anyone if they had. Suddenly this forgotten corner of Africa has become the centre of international interest.

Go to Equatorial Guinea now and you can both rule the world and buy it many times over. Or you could start prospecting at home. The Bloody Meadow at Tewkesbury took its name from the men killed there in a mediaeval battle and the River Avon at Evesham still has its Dead Man's Dump for the same reason. Are there viable blood beds there? Or is France still the best bet? Several noble English families owe their position to possessions stolen from the French in raids during the Hundred Years War. Somewhere in the safes of their grand houses is the record of exactly where they stole their wealth from and how many French people they killed to get it. What is the betting that these families will increase their existing wealth by exploiting the blood beds they created? As always those who have are always best placed to take advantage of new ways of having. But when blood replaces oil as the most valuable commodity of all there will be little left for the have-nots to complain about. If we all have more blood than we will ever need all possessions will become worthless. Finally we will all be equal. All we will need to do is exist to be the wealthiest people who ever existed.

Look No Hands

In the past few years a new profession called the Life Coach has emerged. Since the Garden of Eden human beings have been able to live without being coached. Now apparently this is beyond the capacity of our enlightened age and many people earn a good living preying on the vulnerabilities we have chosen to give ourselves because someone told us to.

There is one area of life which always takes a great deal of application to master. It is called Getting Up In The Morning. It is so difficult because all the different parts of us get up at different times. Our good intentions are very active the second we wake up but our reason is often lazier. The arms and legs may move but the torso remains tortoise-like. Who is going to coach us to get up? How are they going to do it?

Clearly the good intention needs no motivational speeches. If it has a problem it is with focus. It can easily be led astray by the other parts of us due to their deceitful offers of justification without effort. The life coach would address this problem by blowing his whistle in its ear every ten seconds. Then it will have to pay attention to the sound and have no time to become distracted. If the good intention can remain focussed it can influence the other parts rather than the other way round and half the battle will be won.

Reason as always can think of innumerable reasons why it should stay in bed. It is hard work always having to be exactly right and work everything out before the heart does. How would the life coach tackle this? By presenting the glittering prizes reason has gained and placing them just out of reach. If reason gets going it too can create nuclear bombs and irreligious systems and analyse everything out of existence. It too can destroy every positive development by pointing out that it is by definition unreasonable. This will soon get reason moving. Staying in bed and avoiding these things would not place it in the Pantheon it has designed for itself. This carrot and stick approach would get reason following good intention without too much delay.

Arms are usually unconcerned by getting up or going to bed. They need minimal effort to move around in any direction they are jointed to. They do not need to get up to move around. It is when they are given a job that they have a problem. They shy away from any attempt to lift the rest of the body out of bed or stop it from falling if it chooses to jump out. The life coach should use psychology in this instance. Simply encourage the arms to move around as freely as possible. If they do this for long enough the rest of the body starts to ache and has to follow suit to keep up with the arms. The rate of arm movements can be gradually increased and the direction changed at irregular but significant intervals. The routine would also be changed each day to ensure the torso and legs do not become immune to it.

The legs pose a different problem. They can move around freely too but if they do they disturb the torso in a different way. They more they move the more they disturb the bedclothes and the comfort the torso craves. Here excessive movement should not be encouraged. The legs need to be coaxed forward slowly in regular straight-bent-straight combinations. Tell the legs how much of a strain it is to move then remind them what will happen to them if they get stuck between the bedclothes and cannot move at all. The slow but deliberate striving to 45 degrees and the inevitable collapse back to a weary straightness will succeed in pushing the torso up the bed and eventually expelling it as it gets exposed to the air but is too bent to spring back under the covers. The legs will then feel suffocated by being the only part left covered and their own rise will inevitably follow.

This leaves the torso. Exactly. Leave it where it is and take no notice. It is only after attention. It wants to be comfortable so it can be the centre of the body in the bed. Outside the other parts are more active and important in individual tasks. Pay it no attention at all. When the other parts move it will see it is not getting anywhere and reluctantly tag along to avoid losing face when all the other parts are moving about impressing people.

When they start setting exams for life coaches the first requirement should be to demonstrate that they can get someone out of bed in the morning. None of the coaching techniques described above is difficult in itself but using them all simultaneously is. But as in other aspects of life coaching the coach starts with a big advantage. Everyone who is physically capable of getting out of bed does so eventually. The coach can claim success every day simply because they have achieved the inevitable. It is the same with every other aspect of life coaching. The life coach can claim success as long as you remain alive. Is that really so hard? But what sort of life will you have if you hand over your fundamental responsibilities to a life coach? Do not think you never will. You have read this far haven't you?