Chas Griffin

A Birthday Out

2009-07-10T20:07:00.000+01:00

We don't get out much these days. This is because we need to be on hand almost permanently to look after two aged and infirm (not to mention quite badly demented) parents. My Dad needs attendance three times a day for me to get him some food and his pills, and Anne's Mum needs more or less constant supervision due to her continuing obsession with her bowels and her inability to learn how to cope within her own powers.

So... Anne's birthday on the horizon! With a fair bit of foresight and a fair bit of luck, Anne had got her Mum booked into the local care home for six days' respite so we could have a birthday out together. My Dad would probably be OK on his own if I left him a ham sandwich and a piece of cake for lunch, all concealed under a mug of water with his pills balanced on top, and a note saying 'One O'clock Pills'. All on a chair directly in front of him, so he couldn't easily forget it.

We thought we'd go to Aberglasney Gardens to see what was blooming, and for lunch in their neat little restaurant. Something of a treat, this, as our normal meals out consist of bacon egg and chips when we go to the dentist in Cardigan every six months or so.

The weather held up, and the gardens were beautiful. Early lunch. Anne had the roast pork, and I had the ratatouille. Cup of tea.

Ten minutes later, after wandering through the little beech wood, I developed an itch on my chest that wouldn't be scratched away. Then it spread to my back. Anne checked... no rash on the chest. Then it spread to my backside, which seemed to have become completely corrugated with bumps. Then my hands began to feel nettled and tingly. Anne, being a woman, had a couple of potions in The Bag and gave me an antihistamine. We sat on a bench for a couple of minutes then moved on. Within twenty paces I was feeling woozy. Then went down on my haunches. Then had to lie down on the path, feeling very faint. When it was clear that this wasn't going to go away in a few moments, Anne fetched help and rang for an ambulance.

The lady from the bookshop (Vanessa?) gave me her coat for a pillow (thankyou Vanessa, for your kindness) and was clearly concerned that she ought to keep me talking. I felt my vision fading. The leaves of the beech tree above me were turning from green-against-blue to a strangely solarised or posterised effect. The leaves were black, each surrounded by a grey-beige outline. The sky was just... pale.
I remember saying to Anne 'I've been poisoned'.

I don't know how long it was, but the paramedics turned up with the sort of stretcher that would have served well as a trans-Antarctic sledge. Not that I could actually see it at the time. All I could see was the posterised filigree above me, and the face of the medic. He asked me a few questions. No, no breathing problems. Just... very very weak. Funny vision. Itchiness.
He checked my chest and confirmed that there was now a rash. He slipped a mask over my face and turned on the oxygen. I feel I ought to say that it helped, but it didn't. I just felt as though I was on the verge of... what? Sleep? Faint? Death? Well, if this was death, it wasn't so bad. Better than a poke in the eye, at any rate, and I speak from experience. But who would get Dad's pills? And how would Anne manage two geriatrics without me? And who would finish the book I was writing?

The paramedics were very kind. No rush, but constant appraisal. I think I began to feel a little better, although I can't positively remember this. I must have felt stronger though because I found the energy to roll onto my side and vomit into the hostas. Mmm.... a genuine pavement pizza, with little chunks of Mediterranean veg in a slew of tan gravy. I remember someone saying 'Do you want to lie back, Chas?' and replying 'No thanks. I'd rather look at my vomit.' Quite why, I don't know. It wasn't that interesting.

They lifted me onto the trolley and wheeled me off, past the little knot of visitors who had gathered round. Gentle concern. Gardeners, you see…

I was definitely picking up by now. Perhaps the oxygen was helping after all? I can remember the medics launching me and the trolley down a grassy slope towards the carpark. We agreed it was straight out of Last of the Summer Wine. When I say 'launch', I mean 'guided', really.

In the ambulance they hooked me up to a tube and Things That go Ping and we waited there for a while. Anne came in and sat in the guest seat, looking perplexed. I had a catheter in the back of my hand, accepting a drip of some sort, and an injection of, I think, hydrocortisol, to act as a further antihistamine.. but don't quote me on that. I've always had a gift for immediately forgetting or confusing everything I ever learn in the medical sphere. I'd have made a poor brain surgeon.

They got me back to Carmarthen Hospital, with Anne following in our car. We had eaten at about twelve, so I guess it must have been about two by now, but really I have no idea. Maybe it was three. They trolleyed me into A&E and then trolleyed me back out and into the ambulance again. 'Full.' We sat and sat. In my case, lay and lay. 'My' shift of paramedics said goodbye and left. Another shift arrived. We sat again. Eventually a doctor called Nigel turned up, and re-checked a few things, including my blood pressure. It was getting back to normal, at about 120. I gathered it was down to 87 when they first tested me. That sounded low. Later on, as I felt more like myself, I read the instruction note stuck to the ambulance wall, near my head. It said, if I remember rightly, that the Trauma Team may be called if a road crash victim's pressure dropped below 90. Oh. Right.

At 4.30 they wheeled me into a casualty bay. A nurse and her assistant, who looked too young to be out by herself, wired me up to a heart monitor thing. Electrodes stuck on everywhere. The nurse seemed to not have the information that the doctor had got about me. Why not? I wondered. Maybe talking is more reliable than notes. She took the catheter out and wadded the little wound. 'The doctor will be with you soon.'

Anne meanwhile had set off on the fifteen mile drive back home. She would get Dad's hot meal for him, and give him his tea-time pill. And she'd feed and pill her Mum, and clean up whatever parts of her needed cleaning up, hoping that Mum hadn't fallen (as in 'slid to the floor') again trying to get back from her commode to her chair. If she was on the floor, Anne would not be able to lift her without my help. No... wait.... Mum was in respite. No problem there. Just my anxiety speaking.

I was still in the ambulance when Anne left. The radio was on. Splutter scratch splutter... and a report of a traffic accident in Cynwyl Elfed, a village on the A484 that Anne had to go through on her way home. 'Too soon for it to be Anne?' I checked with the medic. 'It said 'a single male'.' I told him of how someone had once pulled straight out of a notorious junction in Cynwyl and had driven smack into the side of Anne who had the clear right of way. 'I bet it's that junction again'. 'No... it said something about trees and being trapped.'
Not Anne, at least. Some other poor sod.

I was feeling pretty chipper by the time they got me inside. In fact I wanted to go home, but they wouldn't let me until the quack had written me off, to coin an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Doctor Nigel did eventually return and confirmed that I was fine to leave. What had caused it? The best he could offer was a 'vaso-vagal event', which I think means.. 'Er... you sort of fainted'. But what about the itches? Surely this was an allergic episode of some sort? He agreed, but couldn't suggest anything helpful. After all, what could be wrong with ratatouille from a respectable establishment? What indeed? Incidentally, the joke about basil being in the ratatouille turned up three times in the course of the afternoon. Some gags will never die.

And that was that. Anne got back home late, as the accident on the A484 forced a long delay and then a long diversion. Dad didn't want his hot meal as he 'had that at dinner time'. This wasn't deliberate bolshiness. It was just his extreme conservatism showing through when Change loomed.
So Anne left him with a slice of bread and ginger jam, and at his request, a mug of tea.

I sat in the picture window of A&E, on a wheelchair, and went into a gentle meditation. I felt fine, if a little weak. What could have caused it all? I had no history of allergy. I had touched none of the plants, so it wouldn't be that. My breathing was fine, so it wasn't going to be pollen, and anyway I'd been to the Gardens several times before with no problem. What else? It could only be the rattytooey, with or without basil. Complicating factors might be the pills I'd been put on a month before following a strange five minutes when my wrist suddenly lost all presence. The GP thought it might have been a mini-stroke and stoked me up with pills and booked me in for scans on my head, heart and neck. So... pills plus ratatouille equals....what? Widespread itch, plus dramatic drop in blood pressure? Didn't seem reasonable. But the ratatouille wouldn't go away, except for the pizza I'd left behind in the hostas, which by now would have been discreetly interred somewhere less obvious, to return its elements to the elements.

Anne finally came for me at six o'clock. Rather than be officially diverted, she'd opted for the longer alternative route back to town from the start. She'd brought a bag with pyjamas (I own pyjamas?), my book of the moment (about the history of world empires; very good: I 'd already learned from it what made the Holy Roman Empire tick), my little blue netbook, and, bless her, my mp3 player. But not needed. Home James, and would you mind driving? 'I was going to, anyway.'

We went home, again via the long route. Anne had driven 70 miles that afternoon, sorting me and Dad out.

Dad hadn't eaten his sandwich or drunk his tea.

Still none the wiser. Aberglasney were most helpful and sent me a full recipe for the ratatouille, including the sources of their ingredients. Nothing to catch the eye. 'Mushrooms' would surely have meant 'Bog-Standard Mushrooms', and not 'Something Weird Picked by Trolls from the Swamps of the Styx'. 'Mixed Herbs' would surely not have incorporated 'Hemlock' or similar, or somebody would have already noticed the pile of bodies in the yard.

Our GP confirmed that it did indeed sound like an allergic event, but had no further wisdom to add, except that I should carry some antihistamine with me and call an ambulance if it happened again... Assuming, presumably, that I am within five minutes of a telephone (or am in a mobile-useable area, and can remember how to use my phone), and that the ambulances are not all parked up outside A&E because of another administrative log jam.

So where does that leave us? Should I be more careful? Of what? How? Should I never eat out again? Avoid ratatouille? Avoid herbs? Mushrooms? Aubergine? China bowls? Forks? Cups of tea? One of Anne's friends loves the Aberglasney ratatouille, and has it every time she visits. It's fine. It certainly tasted terrific. Yes, I recommend it.

It's a funny old world.

A Busy Sort of Day…

2009-03-14T14:52:00.001Z

Normally my days are quiet and very routine. Up at 7.30, junk about 100 spams; porridge and coffee; up the hill to wake Dad and get him breakfast and pills; back home and start work on The Book. At lunchtime a bowl of soup and a couple of last year's scrawny apples, then up the hill to get Dad his lunch and pills; back to the computer; tea time, up the hill again; eat; evenings crashed out: rarely anything on the telly, so it's reading or music.
Anne's day is similar except she's looking after her Mum.

But yesterday was different…

Some months ago we passed on our lovely old grey Fergie tractor to a friend who is going to renovate it and use it. Excellent. It was just slowly rotting in the open shed and there was no way I was ever going to do anything about it.
Doug turned up with his two neighbours, Orfyl and Arwel and kicked a few tyres as per normal. 'No way we'll get a trailer down here. My wellies are past the ankles already. Look… We'd be stuck. Sure to.'
So Ken next door came to the rescue with his big Zetor. I sat on the Fergie and steered while Ken hauled and slithered Fergie out into the yard. Even the Zetor got jammed in the mud once, but with a bit of intelligence (lengthening the towing chain by a couple of feet; think about it…) we got moving again. The tyres were virtually flat but Ken inflated them from the Zetor's built-in pump. Amazingly, they stayed up.

Doug and co turned up again a week later with a big posh flat-bed trailer with its own little winch and Fergie went off to her new home. I almost wiped a manly tear away. People get very fond of Fergies.

Doug sent snaps of the restoration process. It was just a little like watching an operation on your child. Pipes and tubes; things exposed that should never be; surfaces and areas that were clearly not healthy; tales of needing ever bigger hammers to free up the pistons; rumours even of welding pneumatic valves on, to force pistons free, a little like an air bomb (mercifully that idea was scrapped, as would Fergie undoubtedly have been if they'd gone ahead with it).

One or two bits of giblet in the gearbox looked over-tired, so Doug called me back to see if they could come over and collect the other Fergie we had bought in for spares some twenty years ago. It had always been called Scrapper, and had laid in the same spot, facing Fergie in her shed, festooned in huge swags and swathes of brambles for a fifth of a century.

Again, Ken came round with the Zetor to haul Scrapper through the mud. This time it wasn't so easy, as both rear wheels were locked and one tyre was a tattered rag. Still on, but cracked and utterly flat. This was to be a problem later. And, of course, to add to the fun, Scrapper was facing the wrong way and would need to be hauled backwards.

Ken hooked his chain up and heaved. Nothing happened, apart from the Zetor moving slowly an inch or two sideways through the morass. This was partly because Scrapper was on a bit of a slope. Ken re-manoeuvred his dinosaur and hooked up again. This time Scrapper moved a couple of inches, but those wheels would not turn. I was perched on the back, standing on very flimsy rusty footplates, hanging desperately onto the steering wheel. I should point out that Scrapper lacked a seat, so I felt a little like Charlton Heston in Ben Hur, except that I didn't dare take one hand off the wheel to grab the whip. Grunging noises; 'tunk' noises as the tow chain strained; gulping noises as I tried not to think of what might happen if the chain broke; … and inch by inch Scrapper moved. It took a quarter of an hour to haul it twenty yards to the point near the end of the track, where we were to leave it for Orfyl to back up to it with the big trailer. En route, Scrapper had collected behind its back 'wheels' a thick wodge of brambles, prunings, reeds, mud, and a small willow tree which had foolishly taken root in the boggy bits.

Two weeks later (ie, yesterday) Doug and co returned, along with Raymond, Doug's brother. A very smart move, as it turned out.
We'd fixed the date a week previously. Would you believe it, the day before Doug and co were due to come, we got a phone call from Heinz (yes, he's from Lancashire) and Vincenza his wife (Staffordshire, I think) to ask if they could come round in the morning to finish felling and logging a couple of trees they'd made a start on six days ago.
Well.. should they come or not? Our lane is narrow, twisting, and difficult. We wouldn't want anyone to be faced with the prospect of having to reverse up it, particularly with a trailer. On the other hand, Heinz might not be able to come on any other day for a month and the sap was beginning to rise already. It's hard work sawing a sappy tree, and, once felled, it's wringing wet and takes four times longer to dry out. 'OK Heinz… we'd love to see you.'

The woodfolk arrived at about ten, and set to work. We'd warned them not to touch the three 8" sycamores in the drive until the tractor gang had arrived and left again. That still left plenty to do for four of us. Heinz knocked 'em down, the women hauled the brash to a bonfire site, and I hand-sawed the pole-sized pieces that are a pain for the chainsaw.

At 11 the tractor team arrived. There were four of them which seemed like overkill. One to turn the dinky little winch and three to stand by and applaud, surely?
Not a bit of it. It took four of us, pushing against various points of the carcase to move Scrapper a single millimetre, and that was after Doug had hacked away all the trash from behind the wheels. The hand winch just wasn't up to hauling a dead weight through mud. And things weren't helped by that flat tyre that acted like a skid mat, absorbing whatever forward energy was generated and using it instead to slew the tractor gently sideways. 'Levers, boys! Chas? What've you got?'
Orfyl followed me to the woodshed and we hauled out a couple of handy baulks, about four inches square and six feet long (ex-floor joists, rescued from a demolition site twenty-odd years ago. I knew they'd come in handy one day, according to Rule One of the Smallholder's Handbook: 'Never throw anything away. Never… ')
Yes.. they helped. We moved Scrapper all of an inch and a half, but it was still slewing off beam. 'More levers!'
We found an old iron pipe, 2" by about 7', part of an old milking parlour. Arwel stuck it under the back axle. 'Good, boys.'
We fixed Doug up with an old railway sleeper (farms are treasure troves of social history…) and we tried again. 'Heave!'

Yes! Another inch gained. 'Heave!' four men straining moved the brute a further magnificent inch. 'OK. Rest…'
It took the best part of an hour to move Scrapper the necessary couple of feet onto the trailer. After every inch gained, Raymond twizzled the little winch to take up the pathetic amount of slack. More than once he had to flick the release thingy so Orfyl could adjust the level of the flatbed. It was only when you heard the safety lever snap off that you realised what a risky job Raymond had. A titchy little cable, under great stress…. We joshed him boyishly about whose job it would be to pick his head out of the shrubbery should the wire snap. Oh, what fun…

Yes, eventually Scrapper was hauled safely aboard. I would never have believed it could have taken so long. But we'd enjoyed it. We'd faced a silly problem and had beaten it through intelligence, strength, and perseverance. And we'd worked well as a scratch team. No bullying; no bossiness; no back-sliding. Great stuff. Everyone was listened to. Every idea tried. Perfect.

I left them to the final job of tying Scrapper to the deck for his journey to Doug's shed.
The woodworkers were in the kitchen, clearly glad they weren't part of the tractor circus and only had the mundane jobs of climbing trees with a chainsaw to deal with.
A quick cup of tea, and I'm off up the drive to get Dad's lunch. Orfyl was ever so gradually hauling the Land Rover and trailer round the 90 degree angle from the track and onto the drive. He had about three inches total clearance to juggle with. 'Whoa!! Back! You're going in the ditch!' Try again…' Whoa! Stop!! The trailer's climbing the bank… the Scrapper's going to slide….'
I left them to it.

Ten yards up the lane I met a new Vauxhall coming down with a beautifully coiffed young woman in it. 'Hello?' 'Oh.. am I in the right place? I've come to do Mrs Harrison's hair…'
Oh yes, Anne had told me about her Mum's hair appointment.
'Yes. Right place, but er….' And I pointed behind me to the Land Rover rig which had finally got itself straightened out and was slowly hauling towards us. 'Oh…' said the lady.
'Well, one of you is going to have to reverse,' I thought. 'And it ain't going to be Orfyl and his whopping great trailer.'
The hairdresser tried valiantly, but almost went into both ditches within twenty seconds. The next time she stalled. Clearly, she was about to panic. I did my best and calmly waved her back, but we both knew…
'OK, I'll have a bash.' Mucky wellies onto pristine car mat. Can't be helped. Easy to start… now where's reverse? Ah.. it's written on the gear knob.. right…. Blimey.. what a flippin gearbox. I'm used to my Kangoo box which is light and very positive; this thing was like a jam jar full of knuckles…. Push…pull… what gear's that? No idea. Lift and pull back for reverse.. Wow! Got it! And after only one embarrassing diversion, I wound the ten yards back up the pitted windy drive to Dad's entrance where I could pull out of the way.
The convoy passed, waving and tooting, as convoys do. Orfyl couldn't resist pointing out to the hairdresser that older drivers were better. He meant 'men'. She knew.

There we are then. All we need now is for me to reverse onto the track and let the hairdresser continue down into our yard on her mission of mercy. But could I find that blasted reverse gear again? I tried six times. Lift, pull back; pull back, lift. Lift harder and pull back…. Not a chance.
In the end the lady got back in, fluttering about whether she'd broken her nice new car (I don't think reverse had ever been used before, frankly). And lo… in first time and away…..

Today has been very quiet.

Chapter 12 and serious drive troubles

2009-03-07T11:34:00.000Z

Hello again, if there's anybody there!

I've been meaning to write something else for ages, but simply haven't had the time. We've

had health and family problems (we are now caring for two 89 year old parents) and

maintenance problems around the farm.

We had a freak storm a month ago that completely washed out £60 worth of tarmac that

we'd just spent a whole morning tamping into the worst of the pits and potholes on our

drive. The force of water was so great that a mass of stones, up to 4" across, was swept

right down to the bottom of the yard, and left there in shoals. It looked like Brighton

beach in places. All this scouring meant that the holes in the drive were now even more

cavernous than they had been before. How could we fix them? There was no point in

spending hundreds of pounds on more tarmac, as another storm would just wash it all

away again. It needed more profound attention.

The problem is that the drive is in the wrong place and can not now be moved somewhere

else. Back in the Good Old Days, someone decided that it would be a good idea to divert

a natural drainage runnel into a concrete pipe or two, and turn the age-old water-cut

groove in the landscape into a useful tarmacked track. Perhaps it used to work back in the

Good Old Days, but since we've been here (some 27 years) we're spent more time on the

drive than on any other part of the establishment. Mainly, putting in bigger pipes to carry

the run-off from the field on the right (which is not our field) under the drive and into a

big ditch; and in filling and patching potholes further up the drive, also caused by runoff

from the field on the right... but also, occasionally when the drain at the top of the drive,

at the junction with the council lane, gets blocked, and, well... you can guess where all

the storm water off a hundred yards of road goes, can't you?

Our efforts have all helped the problem, but it'll never go away. My fear is that one day

we'll have another super-storm which will wash the drive out so badly that we won't be

able to get the car out or a van in. It could happen. And even quick fixes will not be

quick, and will cost a lot of money, and will by no means be permanent, and might need

expensively repeating a fortnight later. A 'permanent' solution would need a hydraulic

engineer (I'm not kidding...) and would cost a fortune. It's a bind....

But Kevin-up-the-road has been a terrific help. He borrowed a JCB and spent an entire

morning hacking out the reeds and shrubs (trunks up to 4" thick) from out of the ditch by

the wet field on the right. That should allow the most urgent runoff to reach the Big Pipe

inder the drive, and let it rush away to the river, about 200 yards away, steeply downhill.
Another small step forward... we're hoping....
And Kevin wouldn't accept a penny for his labours, skill, time, or diesel. Ain't living in the

country wonderful!

***

The other reason I've not been a-blogging recently is that I've become engrossed in writing

The Book.
I think I was just starting Chapter 3 when I last blogged. Now I'm up to Chapter 12. It's

hard work in many ways, but also enjoyable, seeing the ideas slowly trot out onto the

screen, and checking them over for cohesion and reason.

So far, no snags. I still can't find anything that calls my main thesis into question. If

anything, more and more things are tumbling into place, which always seems to me to be

an indication of being on the right track ('Only connect'.... as EM Forster said).

Chapter 12 is proving to be a bit of a challenge in that so far I've needed to read the

Koran, the Torah, and the Four Gospels. What extraordinary documents they are. If

you've never read them, I do recommend trying them. The first five books of the Old

Testament are sometimes called 'the Pentateuch', and are the basic Jewish holy book: the

Torah. The four gospels are the original writings of the New Testament.

My special interest at the moment is in the paranormal elements contained in these three

whoppers. Here's a couple of samples:

•The Koran mentions various angels, including personal guardians for every soul; djinn

(spirits created from 'subtle fire'); the creation of humanity from clay, 'moist germs', and

breastbones; 'those who conduct the universe'; possession; Houris (ever-virginal

non-carnal maidens); the fact that God is the Lord of Sirius; the notion of multiple Satans;

a competition between magicians;

• The Old Testament is packed full of paranormalities. Here are just a few, pretty

much at random, from the Torah: God planted a garden and walked round it, talking;

there were giants in those days; the Sons of God bred with humans; Jacob wrestles with

someone he thinks is God; a rod turning into a serpent and back again; a hand that turned

'leprous as snow' and back again; magicians producing hordes of frogs;

• The New Testament: just a few examples from the four gospels, again, pretty

much at random: baptism with fire; disease cured at a touch or at a word; remote healing;

possession (quite a lot of possession and dispossession); becalming a sea storm with

words; 'devils' trying to bargain with Jesus; multiple possession discharged into pigs;

raising the definitely dead, amidst laughter from the crowd;

That's enough to be going on with. There are many more. What I find incredible is that

nobody seems to have picked up on these phenomena as a launchpad for further

investigation into the paranormal at large.
Perhaps it's simply that our current intellectual masters, the Materialist scientists say 'It's

all rubbish' and that shuts everybody else up.
I do wonder why the various Churches don't investigate though. After all, even the staid

old Church of England has a couple of exorcists in every diocese. They don't do that for a

purpose that doesn't exist.

Next on the list is the Hindu 'Bhagavad Gita'; then something substantial from the

Buddhist canon. Don't know what yet.

When I've done all that, the fun will begin of finding the common threads between these

five great religous doctrines (and there are far more than most people think, it seems to

me) and in seeing if I'm any nearer to understanding what ghosts etc are.

Incidentally, I wonder why the Lord Yahweh forbade his chosen people the relish of a

mole or lapwing sandwich? Or a nice owl stew? And why was he so insistent on

specifying every tiny detail for the construction of the Ark of the Covenant and the

tabernacle that surrounded it, even down to the shape of the handles and the colour of the

curtains?

It's a wonderful world!

Have a wonderful day Chas

Big Bang goes OUT … Little Protons go IN (Homer Simpson would understand)

2008-09-13T15:01:00.001+01:00

Please sir! Sir! Sir!
Yes, Triffid, what is it now?

Please sir! I've had this spiffing idea sir!
Oh no. Not another perpetual motion machine is it?

Please sir, no sir…
Go on then… what is it?

Well sir… this Big Bang thingy…
Yes, what of it?

Well sir.. why don't we try and simulate it by banging protons together sir?
Say that again…

Copy the Big Bang by bashing tiny little things into each other. Like this… POW!!! POW!!!
Yes. Please. That's enough. Look, Triffid... Have I got you right? Do you understand what the Big Bang is?

Yes Sir. Of course sir. It's the theory that the universe and everything in it.. all the stars and everything… all suddenly came from out of nowhere in a huge big BANG! POW!! Whoosh!!!
There are how many estimated stars in our galaxy, Triffid?

Oh.. about a hundred thousand million sir. Everyone knows that.
And how many other galaxies are there estimated to be?

Another hundred thousand million sir! My cat knows that sir!
Making a total of about, say, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars?

And loads of gas and stuff…
Weighing about what?

Well… a whole universe full, I suppose.
Right. Now then Triffid… tell me what you know about protons…

Gosh! Tiny tiny tiny!
Billions would fit on a pin head would you say?

Never counted them sir!
So.. on the one hand a whole universe, and on the other hand something vanishingly tiny. And you're suggesting that whacking a few tiny tinies together is in some way relevant to how a whole universe suddenly appeared?

Well, yes sir. How else could we do it?
Now think.. a Big Bang is a colossal explosion, yes?

POW! BANNNG!!!
And.. please don't do that. And an explosion is matter travelling outwards from a single point at high speed?

POWWWW!!
Whereas colliding particles together is a matter of matter travelling inwards at high speed, yes?

POW!! WHOOSH!!!
Big Bang equals colossal matter moving outwards, whereas proton collision equals miniscule matter moving inwards? Can you explain how the latter might bear any relationship whatsoever to the former?

Erm.. well…. It would be a jolly big feather in the school cap, sir? I mean… St Darren's down the road have only got a wind tunnel sir. A new cyclotron would look terrific on the new school prospectus, sir..
Triffid… you are a moderately bright student as you are well aware. So I am surprised and a little alarmed to hear that you think that stuff moving inwards is somehow comparable to stuff moving outwards. This is the stuff of fantasy, Triffid.

But sir…
.. and I am not going to recommend the £5bn bursary you are asking for, plus God knows how much a year to run your ridiculous scheme, from the School Fund.

But sir..
No 'buts', Triffid. I do understand your youthful enthusiasm and your insatiable curiosity. Most commendable. But I strongly urge you to think out your experiments more clearly in future. When you grow up and go out into the big wide world, you will find that things are very different there.

Yes sir. Sorry sir.
No. Don't apologise. Just trot off and come back after tea with a list of ideas for, oh.. how about 'Ten Ways of Spending Five Billion Pounds Usefully'?

On science, sir?
If you like. Off you go…

Whee! Whizz!!!
Children, children…

Broadband and Richard Dawkins

2008-08-21T20:14:00.000+01:00

Hello again... if there's anybody out there…

Gosh it's been along time since I wrote anything for this blog. This is mainly because my broadband still hasn't arrived, after seven months of promises. It seems BT needs to dig up most of Wales before I can get even a very slow link. But 228Kbps would be ten times faster than my dial-up link, and I can live with that. I only need to access text, on the whole, rather than five thousand pixellated phone clips of drunken teenagers splattering each other with food in a like totally awesome kind of way.
Actually, the timing of the broadband is almost spot-perfect, in a like totally surprising sort of way. Here's why…

For about 15 years now I've been working on plans for my Great Work, which will, if I get it right, show how Religion and Science can be re-united once more. Nobody I've mentioned this scheme to believes a word of it, it must be said. Even people who know I'm not actually barking seem to suddenly remember a dental appointment or a funeral that they are expected at, so they can swig back their glass of Chardonnay and zoom away up the drive, waving furiously, and no doubt hoping that the ambulance will arrive for me soon.

But I'm quite serious. I really can show how this age-old split can be healed, and, what's more, I think I can show how the split arose in the first place.
Mainly it's just a question of simple logic; that's the essence of it, anyway. (Anyone who has read Scenes from a Smallholding will perhaps remember the last chapter, called 'The Tale of the Kale', in which I outline this logic. [A few first editions are still available from www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk])

Anyway… over the past couple of months I have amazed myself by actually making a start on writing this Oeuvre, instead of just worrying at it and letting it keep me awake at night. The breakthrough came when it occurred to me to write the text on the RH pages, while writing notes, extended arguments, a glossary, cartoons etc onto the LH pages. This would mean that the reader can pick and choose how to read the book. I will personally recommend that the reader reads just the RH pages for the first time through. If they've had enough by then, one way or the other, well that's OK. But if they find they want to know a bit more about say, the Aristotle/Copernicus split, or about papal infallibility, or about the link between Isaac Newton and the doctrine of Karma, or how the Enlightenment relates to science… well, they can re-read the book, picking stuff off the LH pages as they go. It's a sort of 'personally tailored' approach I'm after, the aim being to make the book as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

I sent the first chapter to my agent. To my astonishment, he liked what I'd written and wanted to read more. (Usually he doesn't like what I've written, usually because he doesn't think anyone will want to publish it. And usually, I suppose, he's right.)
That was the good news. The bad news was… that he didn't like the LH/RH thing.

Bah! I'm sticking with it. We can argue later. Meanwhile it helps me get a sense of proportion into the topics I'm dealing with. That's what has been bugging and delaying me for so long…. How much weight to give to each point I want to make; and also, maybe even more importantly, what order to put the myriad points into. What I'm nervous of is that I'll start at point A, which might interest a scientist, say… but which might be completely hopeless for a religious person, and put them off altogether. The LH pages can help me out here, as I can add reassuring little messages where I think someone might be losing interest or becoming confused.

Now I've written the first two introductory chapters, and am about to get into areas that need more close attention. This attention will involve quite a bit of research on the internet. And guess what… broadband should be arriving almost bang on the button. Great!

But first I'm tackling a tricky subject in Chapter Three: Richard Dawkins. This is a man of huge enthusiasm and learning, and indeed of intellect, but who has one blind spot, which is the cause of a lot of confusion among people I've talked to. This same blind spot has also been the cause of untold misery for millions of people, when viewed over the last hundred years or so.
What is this blind spot? Any offers?

It is this: neo-Darwinists, of whom RD is the most zealous, make three essential claims:
1. The bodies of living things have evolved and changed by very small increments over time, and were not created once off, perfect.
2 The mechanism by which Evolution operates is the grim and glacially slow process of Natural Selection, which is a process part random (genetic mutation) and part rational (the slow and feeble don't survive to pass on their feeble genes).
3 Life arose via some unknown incremental process of random self-assemblage of molecules.

Which is the odd one out? Please.. take a minute to look at all three points carefully before reading on….

Tum ti tummm ti tum tum ti.. tummm………

*********************

Yes. It's number 3.
While 1 and 2 have a lot of evidence to support them, and a logical framework too, number 3 is just a dogmatic assertion, based on no more than the triumphalism of having more or less proved The Church to be wrong about Creationism.
There is no evidence at all for Life having originated in this casual 'incremental' manner, and if you look at the statistical unlikeliness of even a few of the necessary conjoinings having occurred at random.. well, numbers like 10 to the power of 30, 40 and 50 turn up pretty soon. And even if all these grotesquely unlikely conjoinings and associations actually did occur by chance.. there is still no logical mechanism by which abiotic (un-alive) chemicals could have spontaneously transformed themselves into something recognisably biotic (alive).

Here's the essential point: in the tradition of science, any theory which has A) no rational basis, and B) no evidence to support it, should be discarded as fantasy. But neo-Darwinists continue to trumpet spontaneous creation as Fact and Truth…. Not out of malice, but because it has become a blind spot…
The blind spot has become so powerful that Mr Dawkins seems to have completely forgotten that his hero, Charles Darwin, mentions 'the Creator' several times in each of the editions of 'The Origin of Species', and then RD makes things worse by saying that the need for 'a Creator' is 'transparently feeble'. That's one in the eye for his hero, then. But again, RD doesn't seem to notice. Blind spots can take you over if you don't keep your wits about you.

This why anyone who watched RD's first tv programme on Darwin the other week would have noticed that some of the teenagers he was gently haranguing didn't seem to immediately fall into line with what he was expecting of them.
RD thinks: 'Natural Selection and Evolution are Truth. Why on earth don't people just accept it?'
The kids think: 'Hmm.. interesting. Lots of evidence.. fossils and so on… but I dunno.. something funny somewhere….'
Most people think the same way as those kids, to the total bafflement and exasperation of Mr Dawkins.

The 'something funny' that the kids aren't knowledgeable enough to pick up on, is that they don't see how Life Mind and Consciousness could have spontaneously generated out of mud, rock and lightning, never mind how many trillions of years these 'components' had in which to spontaneously assemble themselves.
The kids, and people in general, intuit that there's something fishy going on here, and they instinctively then transfer this suspicion to everything else RD tells them, fossil evidence or not.
This is normal sensible human behaviour: if you find (or intuit) one flaw in what you're being told, you quite rightly suspect everything else. Estate agents are slowly learning this.
RD can't see this problem however, and thinks that people who don't fall into line with his own (in his view) perfectly sensible explanations must be irretrievably stupid or wilful. Hence his edginess and niggly tone.

Presumably, neo-Darwinists think that this selfsame intuition that their critics feel, also spontaneously generated itself out of chemicals. What does your own intuition suggest to you about that?

Right.. back to Chapter Three…
If you, dear reader, would find it interesting to read about how the book is coming on, drop me a line and I'll post an occasional progress report on the blog.

All best wishes to all, including Mr Dawkins, of course

Chas

PS: RD also says that Darwin's explanation for all the improbable creatures we see in the world around us is that they came into being "by gradual, step-by-step transformation from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into being by chance".
This, I'm afraid is simply not true.
Not only did Darwin require 'a Creator' in all editions of Origins, but he also states quite unequivocally '…I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.'
Check it for yourself: 1st paragraph, Chapter 7, 1st edition; or 1st paragraph, Chapter 8, 6th edition.
Blind spots can lead you into error; sometimes into serious error.
The Materialism that underpins conventional neo-Darwinism has led us all into serious error. More on this some other time.

Why All Writers are Millionaires: (apart from a few who aren't): part 8

2008-04-23T19:55:00.000+01:00

My wife Anne, ('She who Understands Things'), has just done our annual accounts, and tells me that my earnings from writing for the last financial year were 'almost £1,300'.
This would buy a decent lunch for two in Chelsea, I believe, but it doesn't seem a lot for the hundreds of hours spent hacking away at the keyboard over the past twelve months. How did it come to be this way?

Firstly, my sort-of novel, called 'Your Dog as Philosopher' put my agent into a tailspin.
What I was trying to do was to write a funny story about a man left on his own for a week with his feisty toddler daughter and his flolloping dog, and to blend it with an easy-reading introduction to Yogic philosophy (a subject that I think every thoughtful person deserves to have access to).

Stan read it and said 'Sorry…'
I said 'Oh surely not..? I thought it was quite funny. Don't you agree?'
'Yes', said Stan, 'the book is funny; and yes, it is interesting and informative and stimulating, too.' But the problem was that no publisher was going to touch it, because you can't have a book about philosophy that is funny.
'Who says so?' I asked. 'That's not the point', said Stan.
'Did I succeed in what I was trying to do?' I asked.
'Yes, you did,' said Stan.
'Well then?'
'Why don't you listen: NOBODY WILL TOUCH IT.'
This exchange went on for some time. Stan was quite right, of course, once I thought it over a bit. Publishers and editors everywhere endlessly claim that they are looking for 'fresh' or 'original' material… but don't let them fool you. They are not. What they want is something very very similar to the last thing that fluked them a lot of money. Original is RISKY; and there's nothing a modern publisher hates more than the 'r' word.
Stan's solution was that I should remove all of the story element from the book and try again with it.
This depressed me rather, but I had a go. Stan played his part, and took the time to supply a bare outline for me to start from, and Anne had a go as well, but after a week of trying, I shelved it. I was just too close to the original to untangle the two strands of story and content. And I kept becoming unsure of what was 'story' and what wasn't. I ended up in a fuddle. The file is on my C drive, awaiting further attention one day.
A couple of people have read the text, meanwhile, and have reported favourable things back to me, but Stan is still adamant that no publisher will give it house room. I'm sure he's right, still.

So.. no success there, then.
My next effort was a self-help book called 'Guide Yourself to Happiness', a subject close to my heart, as I am endlessly happy and have long been puzzled why so many other people seem not to be. I sent Stan the first chunk, and he came back positive, so I went ahead and wrote the book.
Stan read it and was still positive. He sent it off to half a dozen publishers, including Piatkus, who we thought would definitely like the look of it.
Responses came back, slowly, which is never a good sign. One house said no thanks because only published a certain number of UK titles per year and they'd already filled their quota. I can only assume that this was a polite brush-off; otherwise it suggests that timing is more important to them than quality.
Two other houses said it was a good book (in fact nobody had a bad word to say about it, except one editor thought it might be a bit 'stronger', by which I think she meant 'more sensational'.. the very opposite of what the essence of the book is about) but they couldn't take it on as 'the author doesn't have his own radio or tv show' to launch it from.
Sleb culture rules OK?
We never heard back from Piatkus at all, despite several approaches.

So no joy there, either.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd try my hand at drama again, for a couple of Amateur Dramatic friends, and wrote a three-acter called 'Upper Nattem's Little Piglet: or Hamlet, the Panto'. I thought it worked ok, and sent off to a few friends to read. Reports back were positive so I sent it to my 'clients'. They didn't like it.

Three down. One to go.

That left something I'd been pottering along with over the year: a series of short stories, or vignettes, each based around a day in the life of twenty different dogs. The stories were loosely connected, and intertwined here and there. I asked an artist if she'd like to draw for it, and she came up with a couple of preliminary drawings that looked good.

'OK, Stan? What do you think of 'Dog Days'?
'Er… sorry, Chas… but no.'
'Well why not? I realise some of the stories are a bit 'dark', but they are realistic, I think. Don't you agree?'
'Well yes, I'm sure you're right.'
'So do you want a couple of more cuddly stories instead?'
'Er… I'll come back to you.'
In the end, Stan just didn't feel right about it. Again, he didn't think a publisher would want it.
In my heart of hearts I wasn't surprised. The stories weren't cuddly enough for conventional requirements. To publish them would be….risky.

So.. four up, and four knocked down! I guess that's why not all writers are millionaires! The message, for any wannabe writers reading this is.. if you want to sell a lot of books, study the market, and write something almost, but not quite, exactly like something that has already sold a million. It will probably be rejected on the grounds that it is too like the book you copied, but if you show any promise as a writer the agent will work with you and encourage you along suitable lines for your next effort.
If on the other hand, you want to do something original.. be warned. Unless you name is Wayne Rooney or Paris Hilton, don't even consider writing a funny philosophy book!

On Materialism and Idealism...

2008-04-10T19:39:00.000+01:00

Hello Omnist...

Good to hear from you. And thanks for all the information, too.

It comes as a shock to learn that Darwin used 'the Creator' even in the first edition of 'Origins'. I have clearly been misinformed by other sources, but upon checking in a couple of recent reprints (Penguin 85; Wordsworth 98) I see you are indeed correct. Thankyou for this.
However, I'm still left with the puzzle of why anyone should want to re-publish the first edition of a Great Work rather than the definitive last edition. I still smell a wish to mislead, I'm afraid.
The essence of the matter is that Darwin seems to have been a clear and honest thinker, and thus made a distinction between the logical need for an Ultimate Cause of some sort (his 'Creator') and the subsequent bafflingly irrational and apparently unfeelingly cruel 'God' of The Church.
It's my impression that modern neo-Darwinists have not taken this into account when they decided to abandon all non-Materialist elements from their dogma, and are thus embarrassed that their figurehead should mention 'the Creator' multiple times in the final edition of 'Origins', even in his famous last sentence: 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with it several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one…'.
By re-issuing the first and not the last edition they have reduced the damage to their dogma as much as possible, short of actually editing the embarrassing 'Creator' out completely. As it is, I've read (and heard) many a review of the great man and his book which quotes the last sentence as 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one..'. These reviewers have clearly read the reprinted first editions and have thus been subtly misled. By whom? The publishers? Or the scientists who write the introductions, and who presumably choose which edition should be published?

Of course, by showing a belief in 'the Creator', Darwin would not be eligible for membership of the neo-Darwinist movement, which ought to be a great embarrassment to Materialists, but never seems to be such. Certainty is not embarrassable, as history endlessly teaches us, from the Inquisition to Hitler and beyond!

You suggest that Materialism and Idealism are not opposites. I disagree. Of course, you are right in saying that under the terms of normal discussion A being wrong does not automatically make B correct; for example BigEndians being wrong does not make LittleEndians correct; and because 'Communism' is wrong, that does not make 'Capitalism' right; etc etc. No argument here.
But in such cases we are speaking of the relationship, or more accurately, 'non-relationship', between two separate propositions. My case is that Materialism and Idealism are not separate propositions, but are intimately linked and that thus A being wrong does (must) make B correct, by a process of logic. Why do I think this?

As ever, it depends upon our starting definitions.
Can we agree that the fundamental puzzle is 'How does Mind relate to Matter (by which I mean 'Matter/Energy' in the normal physical understanding)?'

Materialists claim that Matter came first and that Mind derived, by accident, from Matter. (I'm using 'Mind' here to include 'Life' and 'Consciousness' as well. Ridiculous, I know, but time-saving, and the distinctions are not necessary for the argument to hold.) There's the link I'm referring to: Materialists claim that Mind 'derived (or arose) from' Matter.
Conversely, Idealists claim that Mind came first and somehow created Matter. Again, the link between the two elements is stated.
Either way, the one, it is claimed, gave rise to the other. Linked.

Can we agree on these definitions, which might be summarised neatly as: either Matter → Mind or Mind → Matter? It seems to me that we must, as these equations state the barebone essentials of the question, and any attempt at modification of them is really only a fudging of the issue.
If we can agree that the above equations do state the barebones of the issue, then we are thus faced with a rare but genuine 'either/or' for us to choose between, according to the requirements of logic.
Thus, according to normal historical ways of thinking, we may choose via logic, whether Matter came first or Mind came first (I'll return to an alternative theory and way of thinking in a minute).

It is the link that matters in all of this. It is there, whether we like it or not. Either Materialism is right in its claim that Matter alone gave rise (spontaneously) to Life Mind and Consciousness from within itself alone, or it is wrong. If it is wrong, then there must, by definition, be an element involved which is extra to 'Matter alone'. That non-Matter element is the element Idealism is concerned with. Thus, if Materialism is wrong, Idealism must be right. What comes after this necessary recognition is another matter, of course.

To expose the falsity of the Materialist case again: if Matter came first, then Mind must have arisen spontaneously and purposelessly from within such Matter, because, and here's the point, there is absolutely nowhere else for it to have come from, is there?
Whichever way you try to twist it and think around it, you must invariable come back to this: that in a universe of 'only Matter', then Mind must have somehow arisen from only Matter.
The problem is that 'only Matter' is by definition, not alive, or mindful, or conscious. Thus, a Materialist is asking us to believe that our own fundamental qualities of Life, Mind, and Consciousness, arose spontaneously from Matter.. the same Matter which does not contain them.
This is clearly irrational nonsense, and requires at the very least that the universe be based on magic: ie a locus in which something may arise without cause, from nothing: the very thing Science itself is dedicated to scourging from our thinking, and quite right too.

Thus.. if Mind did not arise spontaneously from Matter.. where else could it possibly have come from? The only logical answer to this is 'not-Matter'… which is precisely what the Idealists claim.

However… given that what I've written above is just a matter of simple logic, and not a question of 'philosophy' or opinion of any sort…. Where does that leave us?

People are apt to leap to irrational conclusions, are they not? And many thus assume that because Idealism might be easily shown to be rational while Materialism is not.. they leap to all sorts of horrific assumptions, the main one being that if Science is wrong then The Church must be right. Not so. For a start, 'Science' is not wrong; only 'Materialism' is wrong; and The Church is not the only opponent of Materialism by a long shot. As you say so rightly above: A being wrong does not make B right.. in this case, Materialism being wrong does not make The Church right. There are many alternatives to be explored.

To most people, however, including just about all scientists I've met, 'The Church' is the sole perceived opponent of Materialism. Many people thus think that abandoning Materialism would mean having to adopt the wild flummeries of The Church. This is because they know of no alternative to 'The Church' as an opponent of Materialism.

For its part, The Church seems in general to have not distinguished clearly enough between Science ('Good'!) and Materialism ('Bad'!).
People in general are confused, and find no help in any of this, governed as they are by their own psychological tendencies to see the world in terms of black and white, right and wrong. Is Science right? Is Religion? Neither of these august institutions seems able to put a persuasive case to a genuinely rational thinker.

This mess puzzled me for a long time. Then I started to read around, and discovered that there is a way of thinking that is alien to most of us in the West, but bread and butter to Indian schools of philosophy (and various others). These understandings might be best labelled as the Esoteric view.
In a nutshell, the Esoteric view is that all Matter/Energy is alive in some sense, from the lowliest atom (and, I presume the quark and quantum) right up to Man and beyond. The creative force in the universe is Mind (coupled with Will). It is, of course, a profoundly Idealist (and therefore 'rational', as proposed above) view, but with a most interesting addition, as it provides a non-paradoxical hint of the nature of the connection between Mind and Matter.
What's more, the need for Will as a vital component in the creative process should be of considerable interest to a quantum physicist.
The Esoteric view also proposes multiple habitable dimensions other than our own local three dimensions, and thus dismisses the now-traditional notion of Time being a fourth dimension in itself.
I have also found that the Esoteric view makes sense of the whole issue of whether 'Science' or the 'The Church' is 'right'…. And much more besides.
You suggest that 'a compelling case can be made for a reality in which, like quantum particle-wave dual-unity, there is no actual difference between materialism and idealism, except in our limited and misinterpretive understanding of reality. It seems to me that the Esoteric view might support you in this.

From your letter, it seems you have not come across the Esoteric view of things. Might I commend you to it? I'll be happy so suggest a few references that I have found useful.
Incidentally, the Esoteric view is fully supportive of the 'freewill and reason' that you suggest that theologians of The Church have no time for. Anything that favours reason over dogma is worth looking into, in my book!

Thanks again for taking the trouble to write. Much appreciated… not least for correcting me on 'the Creator' in the 1st edition.

All best wishes Chas.

Gosh! A production!

2008-04-06T10:37:00.000+01:00

Hi again, Linz…

Wow! Somebody actually wants to stage 'How Come I'm Feeling Fishnet Tights and Rotten Cardboard Boxes?'! Great stuff!

What sort of production do you have in mind? Is it part of a drama school project? ('Director's log' sounds as though it might be.) Where are you based?

Yes, of course. If I can help in some way, please do ask.

Have you been to my website ( www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk ) ? The books are autobiographical, if that's any help.

Anyway.. I look forward to hearing from you and to hear about your production. Do you think it might be better to communicate via email (see website) rather than on the blog? Or do you think other readers might be interested in the ins and outs of putting on a stage production?

All best wishes Chas

Feeling so Rotten!

2008-04-04T19:47:00.000+01:00

Hi Linz…

Great heavens! I thought 'So How Come I'm Feeling so Rotten' had sunk without trace! How on earth did you come across it? It was languishing at number 1,786,000 in the Amazon Hot Million, last time I looked.
Just for my own amusement, I've recently changed the title to something I hope might be a little more encouraging to a casual reader, namely: 'Fishnet Tights and Cardboard Boxes' … I wonder if anybody will ever notice!

All best wishes Chas

ME, rats, & chemicals.

2008-03-31T20:08:00.000+01:00

Hi Michelle…

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to write. Sorry to hear that you too are bothered by ME.
I'm also sorry to hear you come into contact with rats.

Being on a farm it’s inevitable that we should be in second-hand contact with the dreaded rat. They pee on things, and leave no visible trace.
I don't think my own case is connected to rats though. When I was first diagnosed, they ran a lot of tests for things like brucellosis and Weill's disease and they all showed a negative. But who knows…
The chemicals may have been contributory, however. Anne, my wife, strongly suspects so, at least. Our smallholding is organic, but when we were keeping sheep we needed to obey the law of the land and dip the poor beasts. Sheep dip derives from chemicals developed as nerve gas, and I was not best protected from it. (I go into this a bit more in 'Scenes'.)

I think my own case probably followed the classic path of nervous exhaustion followed by a flu virus. The exhaustion lowered my defences, and thus the flu got a deeper grip than it should have. So it seems, anyway… but illness is a very strange business. Nothing would surprise me.

Thanks very much for the hospital tip. I think I'm so much improved however, that I would only be wasting precious time in seeking treatment now.

For what it's worth, I think a strongly positive mental attitude is one's best ally against the debilitation ME brings. This doesn't mean railing and forcing yourself, but relaxing, accepting, and doing what is possible and worthwhile, in a gentle and attentive manner. I guess a Buddhist would put it more elegantly, but that's near enough!
More and more, since my own experiences, I'm drawn to the feeling that ME is Nature's way of drawing one's attention to the way we are living our lives, and encouraging purposeful introspection, as in Socrates' famous saying that 'a life unexamined is a life not worth living'. I can see what he meant now, whereas I don't think I did before I got ill.
For me, the resolution is summed up in the phrase 'I am a human being, not a human doing'. This sounds very trite and Christmas-crackery, but deep within it, it contains what I now think is a very deep and valuable truth.

Thanks again for writing. Have a great day.. and try to keep away from rats!
All best wishes Chas

A few comments on M.E.

2008-03-28T19:39:00.000Z

It's come back again this afternoon, out of the blue. No apparent cause. No warning.
I'd been active in the morning, hacking and lifting some pretty heavy matted ivy off the yard, and carrying poles and posts around, and sawing a bit of firewood. But nothing excessive.
Soup and apples for lunch, as per usual.
Had a half hour sit, reading an old paper.
Went out to join Anne in sorting boxes of apples, as arranged. The apples have been over-wintering in the packhouse, and many of them have either begun to rot, or have been nibbled and destroyed by voles, or rats, or something. We wore latex gloves to protect against Weill's disease, carried by rat piss.
I carried a few tubs of damaged fruit to the compost heap, then suddenly felt weak and incapable. I recognised it as the M.E. paying a visit.
It's not like ordinary tiredness, or even ordinary exhaustion. I feel my energy just draining away, and I'm left in a sort of limbo. Not tired enough to sleep, but not awake enough to actually do anything. Physical work just seems impossible, especially if it requires attention or judgement. I'm likely to make mistakes and make silly decisions. I don't handle sharp tools at times like this.
If it's a bad bout, I can barely read. Well, I can read the words, but they don't make much sense. At the moment I'm reading a book called 'The Essence of the Gnostics'. It's not a particularly difficult book, but you need to be alert to cope with the ideas. No point in trying to read this now! I'd simply be wasting my time.
And I'm not alert enough to try the general knowledge crossword. I look at the clues and note that some of them I don't properly understand, although they're not in code or cryptic: just straightforward questions. Other clues I do understand, but I'm aware that although I know I know the answers, I also know that the answers will not be delivered up to me. My recall is on go-slow.
It's as if there's a sort of blind been half-drawn between my mind and me. Or should that be 'my Mind' and 'Me'? Yes, I think so. Or 'my brain' and 'Me'? Mmmm…
Nothing feels right. I have an overwhelming feeling that I ought to eat something that will make everything all right. From previous bouts I recognise that this is a snare. I find myself eating nuts or sweet things. Sometimes muesli. But nothing works. Sometimes a shot of scotch will do the trick, but it's not my favoured remedy, as I know it's only short-term, and if I have more than two shots I'll pay for it later by feeling extra drowsy in the evening or worse, waking up in the middle of the night, with a pounding heart and then be unable to get back to sleep for at least an hour. And quite often it only makes things worse, right from the start.
No.. nothing works. But all the time there is this powerful urge to seek out the magic mouthful that will bring energy and relief from the woozy fog within. It's very hard to resist. So I've just had two sticky bars. No.. they didn't help. Now I just feel stickied up and guilty too, as my weight has gone up again recently despite my previous triumph of losing three stone.
I wonder about picking up the 'Pickwick Papers', which I started last week… but I can't be bothered with it. This is no reflection upon the book, but upon the fact that I don't enjoy fiction much any more, not even now, when I can't read a 'proper book'.
This is another irritating effect of this sort of attack of 'M.E. Lite': a feeling of frustration that I can't be getting on with something worthwhile or meaningful.
So what to do?
Play my guitar? No.. don't be silly. You don't have the strength or focus (you know this from previous experience) and no inspiration will be forthcoming. You'll just scratch away at a few chords, but it will be unimaginative and unfulfilling: just more frustration.
Listen to a bit of music: 'Yes, but…'
'Yes but' is a very common reaction to all suggestions when the M.E. strikes. Nothing is quite right. Nothing will hit the spot. Not food. Not reading. Certainly not creativity.
Alright, let's try listening to some music.
My musical taste are pretty catholic, so I riffle through the CD's to find the right thing. Unsurprisingly, nothing seems to hit the right note. Lively or quiet? A sampler of African music picked up in Oxfam yesterday? No.. too… I dunno… too 'in yer face'. So what about the Schubert string quintet, also from Oxfam? OK… let's try it.
Yes, it's fine, but I feel myself being picky. Isn't that cello just a bit strident? And suddenly the whole piece seems to be merely trying for effect, whatever that means.

The good news is that this is just a mild bout, and I can be pretty sure that it will pass in a few days. It might even have gone by morning, as suddenly and mysteriously as it arrived.
If it were as severe as when I first 'caught' it, I'd be lying in bed feeling just completely bloody awful (a medical term). Curiously, though, I wouldn't be feeling frustrated, as I am at the moment, because I would know I was properly ill, and doing anything other than Lying in Bed Being Ill would not appear on the horizon.
The other good thing is that there is no pain, or any other symptom other than debilitation, associated with the sort of M.E. I get. I just need to ride it out, and smile.
So.. I smile, and ride it out.
It's a damn nuisance to Anne, of course. She's just come in after sorting all the rest of the apples herself. It took her a couple of hours. I could have saved her a lot of effort.
No.. no I couldn't. And that's that.

I wish I could pin down what brings these bouts on. Anne is very good at spotting trends and possible causes, but it's defeated even her over the past twenty-plus years. It comes. It hangs around. It goes.

I'm continuing this the following morning…because lo! The M.E. has retreated again. How? Why? No idea. But at the moment, 8.30 am, I'm feeling fine. A bit sleepy but not ME-ish. How do I know this? I cast my attention around my head, and can feel that the fog has shifted. I'm not positively thinking when I do this casting around; just sending a little shaft of focus around my brain. But somehow I can tell that it has turned up for work again.

Strangely, I sometimes have a feeling of gratitude associated with the M.E. For a start, all I get is exhausted. Some people have terrible headaches or joint pains, and heaven knows what else. This of course leads one to wonder what on earth 'M.E.' is, if it can present in so many different ways. Personally, I think it's just a name made up in desperation by the medics, as a great big blanket to throw over a raft of oddball issues they can't cope with. Thus, perhaps, you really can say that 'M.E' doesn't exist. The effects definitely do exist though, so perhaps what we need is a more careful analysis of the symptoms and a careful re-naming session or two.
Mainly, though, what we need is some sort of understanding of what brings it on.

This gratitude also shows up when I realise that I am currently much better that I have been for twenty years. These days I actually expect to be able to put in a half day's work, most days. I can mow the lawn, saw firewood, and help Anne to beat back the encroachments of Nature. This takes a bit of the work off her, and some of the responsibility, too. She has her own problems and needs all the help she can get. So I'm glad I can do a bit more.

I'm grateful too in an unexpected way. Before the M.E. arrived I was flogging away at all hours, growing top notch veg for an uncaring society, as represented by Tesco and Sainsbury, who paid rock bottom prices for top quality goods. We were pretty well trapped in this unwholesome relationship (I go into more detail of how this trap works in 'Scenes from a Smallholding'.) Was the illness a sort of breakdown brought on by overwork and stress? I think there may be some truth in this.
Anyway… once I'd got over the worst of the exhaustion, I began to read again, for the first time in many years. I remember deciding to read the hardest things I could, to keep my mind alive. This meant, to start with, Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson: books about anomalous events, and sheer weirdnesses, written by responsible writers. This led on to a decision to try to find out what Religion was all about, and why Science wouldn't speak to it. Any why, for heaven's sake, would Science not even talk to psychical researchers? That was ridiculous to my eyes.
So I did a lot of reading on science, religions, psychology, history, psychical research, philosophy, mythology, and anything else I thought might offer an insight.
And I'm very glad I did. I now feel more than a little wiser. In fact… I'm grateful to the M.E. for giving me the time to read and think.

Odd, eh?
And, of course, I'm grateful to the M.E. for making it possible to write my books. If I'd been growing veg all day every day, for peanuts, I could never have found the time to write anything.

It's a mysterious universe, don't you think? 'Grateful for being exhausted'!

I guess it's an example of clouds and silver linings.

Right. So. The M.E. has buggered off again, for which I'm truly thankful today. In fact, I'm grateful for it.
Now let's lift some more of that ivy, and saw a bit more firewood..

Brains and Mindsets and so on..

2008-03-13T19:52:00.000Z

Hi Duke...

Good to hear from you. Sounds like you're having fun with this one!
I'll interpolate my responses into your own text:

Hi Chas,
thanks once again for your posts, they really have switched on the old brain box and i find im finally looking into some of the ideas ive so far only vaguely held.

Here goes, ive been looking at your first post and starting at the beginning... "If Life arose spontaneously from un-alive chemicals (Matter/Energy), where did the Life in the living form come from? It MUST have been present (as some form of potential) within those un-alive chemicals, must it not?"

ok, my question is why does Life have to be present as a potential within un-alive chemicals? can't life be a product of the physical conditions which allow it to exist?

My point still stands:
Physical stuff certainly does provide the framework or 'conditions' within which Life operates, or is 'allowed to exist', as you put it, but where does this Life come from before it is 'allowed to exist' somewhere?
It always reduces to two choices: either from outside physical stuff, or from within it. There is no third option. There just ain't.
If it comes from outside physical stuff, then Materialism is immediately and straightforwardly wrong, is it not? So, for Materialism to hold, the ONLY alternative is that Life must somehow lie within 'unalive' physical stuff: and thus we're back to the paradox of something being both A and not-A at the same time; and 'paradox' means 'contradiction'; and 'contradiction' means 'non-sense'. Thus Materialism is, literally, non-sense.

This simple either/or split between Materialism and Idealism is a tricky one to come to terms with for most people (and boy, do some people kick and scream at the very idea of it!), and was certainly very challenging for me for a long time until I discovered that there IS a sort of third option, which seems to me to be logical and to thus make sense, albeit in a most unexpected way. Here goes:

Yogis (and similar) maintain that every particle of matter and quantum of energy in the universe is actually alive, each in its own way, with each being an expression of a life force of some sort as, for example, a daffodil is an expression of a daffodil-life-force. There are hierarchies of life forces, which somehow cooperate with other levels to allow for more and greater complexification of life forms (for example, what we call 'species').

This is, of course, an Idealist understanding, but it has the unexpected and welcome advantage of seeming to provide a reasonable (but not Materialistic) mechanism for how particles and quanta can apparently spontaneously produce Life: ie, they don't produce it, but express it, every single particle, in immensely complex combinations, from nucleons to elephants.
This 'third way' would also explain the mystery of how, say, a human body maintains its cohesion until the moment of death, when that cohesion immediately begins to fall apart. Creatures low in the hierarchy, like the billions of bacteria which digest our food for us, and the trillions of cells (those 'little lives' which allow DNA to do its stuff) which once made up the body of the Being-in-Charge (ie, the highest in the local hierarchy... that's you and me!) are suddenly released to behave freely and thus devour the flesh they once either served or were repelled from by the various immune systems, or to simply die, while the Being-in-Charge, who was until recently the life force that unified all the lower entities into its own service, abandons the body and pushes off to pastures new.

I can find no logical flaw in this idea. It is just unexpected, not illogical.
And the fact that it could explain so many observed facts-in-the-world inclines me towards investigating it further.
The implications of this idea are huge... reincarnation, for example, would no longer be 'outlawed'. Nor would ghosts, etc, which millions of people have reported seeing over the centuries, but which Materialism can not accept at any price.
It also raises all sorts of questions concerning God/ gods/ godlets/ buddhas/ intelligences/ dimensions etc
All big subjects...... no room here.

What im thinking of as an example would be human thought, allowable because of the way the human brain is.

Always the same problem: how can unalive and unintelligent matter (brain) produce alive and intelligent thought (mind)... unless this same unalive and unintelligent matter somehow contains Life and Intelligence within itself in the first place? This paradox ('non-sense') crops up at every Materialist corner.
And if this 'brain' is so clever as to come up with things like E=mc2 and Hamlet, why is not smart enough to stop itself from dissolving into goo the moment a person dies?
The reason most scientists are sure that brain produces thought (and spontaneously, at that!... quite an achievement for something that is made up of unalive chemicals) is that they have raised the unproved Materialist hypothesis up to the level of Proved Truth….. as has almost everyone else in society, thanks to the unquestioning acceptance of scientists' pronouncements by journalist-popularisers of science, and school teachers.
In elevating this unproved hypothesis from the status of 'possible explanation' to 'dogmatic truth', science has entered a cul-de-sac and locked the gate behind it. It is a very brave scientist indeed who dares to question the sanctity of Scientific Materialism.

The fact that the brain uses chemicals and electric pulses does NOT automatically prove that these physical artefacts produce thoughts. You might just as reasonably claim that the thoughts produce the pulses, which is, as I hope I've made clear, the only way round that makes logical sense.

So… if unalive chemical goo and electric pulses do not spontaneously generate thought from within their own unalive natures.. well.. where do these thoughts come from? Same old question, and the same old answer: 'somewhere else'. Thus, again, Materialism does not hold.
Where this 'somewhere else' might be is an entirely different question, to be explored once this preliminary either/or issue has been clearly thought through and understood.

I hope you understand, to follow your logic through your argument i need to agree with your statements along the way. So thats why im hanging around at the beginning

Absolutely! You are absolutely right to do this. Take nobody's word for it!
Everything hangs on that basic either/or, right at the beginning. Once you can accept the logic of the analysis I make (which you 'must' do if you can't fault the logic after carefully testing it yourself) then you can move on to the enthralling task of trying to make real sense of the universe. The key to all of this is to test that logical either/or as carefully and rigorously as you can.
Once you have satisfied yourself that YOU can't fault the logic of the case I'm presenting, and that YOU now have a trustworthy base to work from, all manner of unexpected things will begin to fall into place.
Conversely, if you can't be bothered to put in the effort to rigorously test my logic until you can HONESTLY accept it as your own.. then you will continue to be baffled and dispirited by the world, and especially by the bombastic pronouncements of Great Scientists!

Speaking of which, I was interested to see that Stephen Hawking has recently decided that the Grand Theory of Everything may take 'a little longer' than he had been anticipating. It's satisfying to see him tending just a little bit towards my prediction (last blog?) that this GTE will never be achieved. Thanks for your tentative support, Mr Hawking!

Is all this any help, Duke?
The issue is actually very simple... just unexpected! …because nobody at school or university ever seems to question scientists' certainty that Materialism is Truth.
Why not? Seriously... 'why not?'
I think it's because Science now wields the same power over society and how we think, that the Church once did... but that, again, is another story...

Please come back again if you wish. All good clean fun.

Jehovahs Witnesses : I too have been happy to think of them as trying to do me a good deed in their missionary, in fact half my family are practising JW's, quite liberal ones really, my Mum still expects Xmas presents. I think my anxieties with them were more about me not knowing enough about 'what' i thought i believed. I think this discussion has set me off on a path to sorting that out.

Yes... 'belief' is the enemy of 'understanding'.

There are three grades of 'mindset', for want of a better word:
1 Belief: unquestioning, comforting (or terrifying, depending), irrational, simple, often paradoxical, unquestionable, dogmatic, passed down by others.
2 Understanding: rational, logical, testable, non-paradoxical, intricate, non-dogmatic, worked out for oneself.
3 Direct knowledge: delivered directly to one by one's Intuition. (That sentence bears close examination for its implications, if it interests you). This is too big a subject to examine here. Suffice it to say that when you KNOW, you know. Eg, on an elementary level… you don't need an argument or a 'belief' or logic to 'know' that you're happy, or bereft, or hungry, do you? Intuition can deliver much more than this.
You and I, Duke, have either shaken off or are currently shaking off the Belief stage, and are learning to operate in the Understanding stage. Sooner or later, Intuition and Direct Knowledge begin to kick in... connections suddenly appear, light-bulb moments shine out, and pennies drop... stuff like that. They did for me, anyway, and I'm sure they will for you and for anybody else who's interested enough to give Understanding a bash instead of relying on the second-hand and jumbled mish-mash of 'Belief' that's been ladled into them since birth.

Something ive found really interesting is how doing a bit of research on what you've talked about has revealed my own belief 'prejudices' i guess you could call it. I read a book by Lewis Wolpert once were he talked about people hanging onto their beliefs, being prejudiced against new/other beliefs because its hard to let go of ours when we've invested so much work into them (he said its a hard wired survival thing). For instance i find i will happily search for errors or try to disprove an idea that contradicts my beliefs but dont try to do disprove what i already hold to be true. This seems like a weakness to me and im sure you've something to say about it (if any of that makes sense!)

Absolutely right again, Duke! You clearly mean business!
We are all victims of our upbringing, both in our social habits, and much more importantly, in our mental habits. We are most unlikely to have ever been taught how to think clearly, so most of us never do, and instead, we cling to our 'beliefs' as desperately as a drowning man does to a life belt, and thus remain just as confused and baffled as our parents and teachers were.
Until we realise we can do better, we waste no end of time arguing, and defending our 'beliefs'. What a pointless waste of life!
Why? Because a belief is not a fact. It's vague and ill-informed mish-mash, masquerading as a personal philosophy of some sort. It's rubbish, in other words, and there is no point whatsoever in defending it.
Beliefs are the enemy of clarity and progress. Chuck 'em out, says I, every one of them. Start afresh. Don't be frightened. The sky won't fall on you and you will probably feel yourself immediately rejuvenated.

The hard bit is to winkle out what our deeply held 'beliefs' actually are! But it's a job that needs doing and is a lot of fun. I found it so, at least. I was amazed at how much mental and emotional rubbish I was carrying around.

I'm glad Mr Wolpert pointed all that out to you. It's a shame he hasn't yet practised what he preaches, and looked within to examine his own 'beliefs'. He's another dogmatic Materialist, like Mr Dawkins, who has clearly never questioned his 'Truth'. Pity.

Anyway thats it for now.

Cheerio, Duke

Cheerio, Duke. Happy thinking!

On Darwin and Witnesses

2008-03-08T15:02:00.000Z

Thanks for your note, Duke. I'm looking forward to your comments.. but please restrict them to issues of logic, as I have. Discussions about virgin births, miracles, evolution, etc, really do seem like a waste of time to me. Much better to get to the heart of things, which is what I hope I've done with that simple little piece of logic.
Once one has accepted, by following the principles of logic, that Materialism is fatally flawed, then one must accept that Idealism of some sort must be 'True'. Then you can start digging deeper. That's what I did, anyway, and got surprisingly far.

On the question of the origin of life, do you remember (from the footnote in 'Scenes') that Darwin mentions 'The Creator' in all editions of 'Origin of Species' but the first? I'll quote the footnote in full, for the benefit of anyone else who reads this who might find it of interest…

*Quote: 'I may here premise, that I have nothing to do with the origin of the mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself.' Charles Darwin: second sentence, Chapter 8, sixth (final and therefore definitive) edition of 'The Origin of Species'. Does this quotation surprise you at all? If it does, I wonder why? Might you have been previously misled?
And just for the record, Darwin mentions 'the Creator' (yes, with a capital), nine times in the final edition of 'Origins'. Check it yourself. But make sure you are reading the '6th, final' edition. There has been a recent flurry of re-prints of the first edition, the only one which does not mention 'the Creator'. Now why would anyone want to re-print the first and not the last edition?

(A quick test: turn to the last page of your copy of 'Origins'. If the last sentence, ie, the very last sentence of the whole world-shattering book, contains the phrase 'There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator …', then you have almost certainly got the 6th, final edition.. ie, Darwin's final thoughts on the whole matter of Evolution. If, on the either hand that sentence does not mention 'the Creator' you are holding a modern re-print of the first edition. I repeat.. why would anybody print Darwin's first thoughts on the matter, and not his final thoughts? And why would the editor not tell us that he'd done this? In other words, why is Darwin being systematically misrepresented in this matter? Write to Mr Dawkins and ask him!)

I used to find Jehovah Witnesses annoying, as I think you do, until I realised the simple truth that these people were going out of their way to do me what they considered to be a good turn. They were being kind! Me being ratty at them was no sort of way to respond to kindness!
Now I just thank them (quite genuinely) for their kindness and concern for me, and tell them I'm very happy with my own understanding of the universe. We part on very good terms, and quite right too.
I don't think you'll ever get anywhere engaging Witnesses in rational debate. They are driven by belief and not reason. They simply won't hear what you are trying to clarify, and can only give pre-packed answers, as will most other belief-people, who take their rules and paradigms en masse from a book. Reason-people are quite rare in the religious world, and are most likely, it seems to me, to be found among Buddhists.
But that's another story, eh!

Have a great weekend, Duke.

On Darwin and Witnesses

2008-03-08T13:58:00.000Z

Postscript

2008-03-07T19:36:00.000Z

The piece I wrote about God/no-God the either day continues to exercise my mind.
I was brought up as a 'Scientist', which means, although I didn't realise it at the time, as a 'Materialist'. As a youth, I didn't realise there was a clear distinction to be made between the two terms, and nobody ever thought to explain it all to me, because nobody had ever explained it all to them.. and so on.
I imagine that a lot of the people who read this will have had the same experience. It is an unfortunate truth that to society in general 'Science' means 'Materialism', and this lies at the root of many of society's ills, it seems to me.
Everything from drug abuse to road rage, right through to pollution and global warming can be reduced to the same root cause: lack of respect.. for ourselves, for each other, and for the planet itself.
Why do we lack respect? Because we are constantly told by Science (via people like Richard Dawkins, and all of the media's 'science correspondents') that everything happened by chance and accident, from the Big Bang onwards, right through to Self-Consciousness. Thus, nothing can possibly have a fundamental or transcendental purpose as the universe itself is purposeless. Thus, purpose has been replaced by gratification (and consumerism, as a logical extension). 'Greed is good', and the vapidity of Thatcher's 'There is no such thing as society' follows on naturally from this. We become more and more miserable, purposeless, and socially isolated from each other, despite all the extra money that politicians think will solve 'everything'.

Mr Dawkins quite rightly points out that much of what Religions tell us is nonsensical, or contradictory, but I wish he would take time out to look at the huge contradiction which lies buried at the heart of his own philosophy (which I wrote about in that previous blog entry). It is this paradox ('How can Life arise spontaneously from solely non-alive Matter/Energy, which does not itself contain the potential essence of Life in some form?') which makes Materialism a fallacy, and I can find no rational resolution to this. I've tried very hard to falsify my own logic, and can't do it; I've asked a number of intelligent (and sceptical) friends to find the flaw, and they can't either. Perhaps you, dear reader, can find the flaw. Please let me know! (But only if you have found a flaw in my own logic; I'm not interested in other theories or expectations. See below…)

Meanwhile, it seems to me that every other argument and dispute about God/no-God, (ie, Idealism/Materialism), becomes unnecessary and a ground for misunderstanding and confusion. People have argued for centuries and clearly haven't solved the issue, or we'd all know about it by now.
To me, it's all a waste of time. What matters is the simple piece of logic I point out above and elsewhere.
For an opinion or argument in these matters to have any validity, it must cope with this simple logical challenge, and must either find a flaw in my logic, or accept the conclusion that Materialism is not a valid philosophy, and that thus Idealism (in some from or other, as yet undecided) must therefore be valid.

The implication arising from this is that Religions, for all their funny little ways and occasional gross abuses of humanity and reason, must, at heart, have something to be said for them. I've spent several years looking into all this, and I reckon I've found the solution. It's there for you to find too, if you have the patience, and the will to think clearly as you go!
As I said before, I'm working on a book which will explain what I mean.

Hey, Dook.. what do you make of all this?

Stores Wars

2008-02-29T20:36:00.002Z

Hi Ali..

Thanks for your comment. The Transition Town idea is a great one. I hope it catches on more widely. What matters in this initiative is to gradually de-consumerise people and re-engage them with their own creative imagination. Once the mass of ordinary punters see the point, they will become wonderfully empowered, and will do great things.
But at the moment people are pressured, ignorant, confused and depressed. You will need to be cheerfully persistent for quite a while, I would think!

It seems to me that people are very slowly beginning to catch onto the social and
international implications of global warming and the degenerative weather we all seem likely to get.
We're already seeing a start of something that is likely to burgeon in coming years. I'm referring to the increased rates of starvation in Africa, caused by the rising cost of aid-wheat, caused partly by poor crops (caused by poor weather), but caused mainly by the mad scramble for the quick money to be made by converting land from food-cropping to biofuel-cropping.
As sure as night follows day, the increased starvation rate will lead to more thousands of desperate Africans risking all to get into Europe somehow, with all that that implies.

I do hope this craze for biofuel is short-lived, as it is plainly a ridiculous option, dreamed up by people who have never grown a plant in their life. It's a question of scale, mainly.
I've never come across any projected statistics, (perhaps an informed reader might supply some?) but as a grower of plants myself, I have a good idea of how many grapes, for example, you need to squeeze out a litre of juice. It's more than you'd think, and that's for getting plain juice from a juicy fruit. To get an oil from a plant, you need far far more biomass. Again, I don't have any figures (can anyone help?) but to grow enough biofuel plants to run an economical family car for a year (never mind a Chelsea Tractor or a Hummer) would require many acres of land. And it's not a question of just squeezing juice out, as it is for grapes. The mass would need mechanical cutting, loading, transporting, shredding, and then would need multiple chemical treatments in enormous factories to turn it into fuel, leaving a mountain of waste to deal with afterwards. Every one of these steps requires energy to carry out. A tonne of crude oil produces far more fuel, and needs far less processing and brute shovelling than a tonne of biomass.
Making alcohol-fuel is a better bet, but would again require shifting around huge masses.

But here's the real point: for almost every acre hurriedly planted with biomass, we lose an acre of food.
Already food prices in the west are rising because of this (which in moderation might be no bad thing as it leaves less surplus cash to waste on consumer Straight-To-Landfill tat). However, it is likely that, left to 'market forces' (ie 'greed') there will soon arise a double crisis of not enough fuel, and not enough food. Government may need to intervene to ensure basic food supplies and, heaven forfend, may need to consider rationing. You can smell the black market already.

Biofuel is a madness. Just think it through... yes, of course, we should re-use 'waste' oil from chip shops but we can't all do that. There aren't enough chip shops. And we can't all have 'cheap' biofuel because there simply isn't enough land to grow it on. Maybe the government response will be to build more chip shops? (Why aren't I laughing?)
And monocropping biomass would give wildlife and biodiversity yet another severe
kicking en route.

The answer to the fuel crisis must be sought elsewhere. All the boring but commonsense things like lift sharing, bus use, walking(!), scooters, bikes, blah blah. Proper insulation required by law for all new (and existing) houses; deposits on bottles; wearing a thicker jumper; micro-generation; heat-pumps.... there are thousands of brilliant and simple ideas out there to reduce the 'need' for energy, and every one of them is a better idea than biofuel. Transition Towns can get stuff like this moving.

On the broader front, Ali... yes, I'm afraid I do see civil unrest as a possibility. The first rumbling signs are with us already. Since WW2 the advertising industry, and its allies the magazine and television industry, have consumerised us all, and made us dependent upon their throwaway fashion-items, from phones and clothing to sofas and entire kitchens, not just for survival, but for a sense of PURPOSE in our lives. Religion no longer supplies us with purpose. Science tells us there IS no purpose.. and so the admen and the rest of the 'B Ark' move in to fill the vacuum, yelling at a miserable and bewildered populus that happiness may only be found via shopping, and finally 'achieving' a £2,000 handbag.
Cut the fuel and you cut the shopping. People will be bereft, with their only hope of 'happiness' gone. Already people expect cheap flights three times a year as a RIGHT. And huge plasmas; and the right to drive anywhere anytime; and dirt-cheap clothes; and, of course, dirt cheap food. Cut this dependence on 'stuff', while not replacing it with something of genuine value, and you will have a population in crisis.
What comes from this is anybody's guess, but having noted the general low level of
personal responsibility that people exhibit, in the fields of, say, obesity, speed limits, drunkenness, drug abuse, and collossal waste of all commodities (including, apparently one third of all the food we buy)...
...I'm not very optimistic in the short term. I can see a scenario of riots looming, with race riots close behind, because it's always easier to blame 'Wogs', 'Them', etc for your own problems; under these conditions, we might very well see a sudden growth of the BNP and other neo-Nazi 'easy answer' parties; things unspeakable will emerge from the woodwork, from Mad Mullahs to Little Hitlers, with all that that will call forth in terms of 'policing'.

On the broader front, yes I can see a possible scenario for eg Water Wars. Wales has
water and England needs it. Wales still feels aggrieved by the English flooding Welsh villages to supply water for Liverpool etc. If Wales becomes further aggrieved by some clumsy oaf in Westminster putting Wales last (as usually happens) when resources start to get tight, then hotheads will demand retribution by cutting off the water. In go the troops.
Tensions rise. Protests are made and clumsily 'policed'. Massacres, real, manipulated, and imagined will follow, and you have another Balkans waiting to happen.
Ridicuous? I hope so. Exaggerated? I certainly do hope so, living in Wales myself! But water wars will almost certainly take place elsewhere in the world.

Other areas and social groups will have similar responses, egged on by our trashy 'news' media, who will feign horror but who will really take self-important delight in showing more and more videophone pictures of protests, riots, and looting, thus legitimising-chaos-by-exposure to hundreds of other distressed and opportunistic lost-and-lonelies looking for a bit of.. wait for it.. PURPOSE in their vapid and packaged lives. Now, at last, they will have a purpose! And a fight, into the bargain! A justified struggle against THEM! In fact, a sort of holy war! Yippee!

Extreme stuff, all this... and, with any luck, people will prefer the habit of civilistation over the excitement of insurrection and chaos, but Peak Oil really IS going to mean The End of The World 'as we know it'. There will definitely be ructions and storms of some sort before we work out how to live without our current obscene levels of waste and pollution.

It strikes me, for what it's worth, that Humanity, at least in 'the west', is in the middle of its teenage phase: it thinks it knows it all (to a large degree thanks to the arrogant and intolerant doctrines of Scientific Materialism) and doesn't have the imagination to think it may possibly be in error in any way. It also thinks that as life has no purpose, there can be no point to anything, so why bother? Let's all smoke skunk for breakfast, get blasted on industrial vodka every night and to hell with the consequences.
As always, there are a few people pointing out the error of this 'philosophy', but as ever, the majority don't want to think things through. For a start, they don't know HOW to think because nobody has ever taught them, and anyway, getting wasted is much more fun because famous slebs do it, and they can't be wrong, can they, coz they have their pix in Hello and everyfink doanay?

Thus, we move closer and closer to the precipice, stoned out of our responsibilites on cheap oil, stupidity, and selfishness.

Doomed? Shurely, Captain Mainwaring... we're all DOOMED???
No.. not at all!
I'm optimistic, actually, especially in the long run. But there may well be tough times ahead in the short run, I think, before Man really does realise that Humanity must hang together or we will all hang separately.

'What should we do about it?' you ask. I can think of no better response than the
Buddhist one of 'live your life mindfully', meaning that we should weigh up the value and cost of every single action we take (and encourage others by our own example). It only takes a moment to realise that 'mindful' equates powerfully with 'green' in these urgent times.
We each need to look beyond our own personal or selfish 'wants'; government needs to
start extending its sense of responsibility beyond the next election; and business must look much further beyond 'the bottom line' than it does at the moment.
In short... we all need to think ahead more, to think of others more, and to grow up... fast.

Have a great day, Ali! Your contribution to sanity via your Transition Town work is a shining example for us all.... mindfulness in action! Wonderful!

***

Did anyone else see 'Horizon' the other night? 'A Scientist' set out to tell us the truth about various things ranging from superfoods, through anti-bacterial cleaners, to probiotic yoghurts.
One of the things she found against was 'organic food'. She began by admitting that she didn't know what 'organic' meant. This from a middle-aged professor, who clearly had a respectful opinion of her own theories and opinions.... but after twenty years of increasing market share, and after many scientific papers published showing that organic food is more nutritious, and that kids stop being anti-social little rats when fed organic food.. she still didn't know what the word meant. How had she mananged to avoid it for so long,one wonders? And was she thus a suitable person to judge the merits or otherwise of organic food, even?

If I or you were called upon to make pronouncements on eg 'cloning', and did not
previously know what 'cloning' meant, despite the subject having been examined in
hundreds of newspaper articles and tv programmes over the past decade, we would make
quite sure we were well-prepared for the task, by mugging up before-hand, would we not?
But the professor apparently did not feel the need for such preparations. One can only wonder why.

It came as no surprise to find that she decided organic food was a waste of time and
money. Why? Because chemically-speaking, it was no different from chemically grown
food. Chemically-speaking, a dead acorn is identical to a live one: but one will grow into a huge tree and the other won't. There IS a difference. Chemistry is NOT the be-all and end-all. But chemistry was enough for the learned professor who was much too content to need to challenge her Materialist paradigm.

And by the end of the programme, despite interviewing various organic growers, she
seems not to have grasped that the essence of organic growing is 'sustainability': the capacity to continue growing quality food when the oil that enables the chemical
fertilisers and cheap haulage, processing and packaging, finally runs out.
She had learned nothing. Pity.
More to the point... what will viewers have 'learned' from her? And why did the BBC, and the once highly thought of 'Horizon' strand, allow such a tacky and one-sided 'analysis' to be screened?

Hi again, Duke..

2008-02-22T20:00:00.002Z

Hi Dook....

Good to hear from you.
Atheism? Wow! The easy ones first, eh!

My Grand Oeuvre will be about how Science and Religion might be quite easily reconciled; but guess what? I'm having a terrible time in getting it started. I've made six different attempts so far.
This is not because I don't know what I want to say, but because it matters terribly which order I say it in... and that's giving me endless headaches, because there are six different things that all need saying FIRST.
Well.. having said that, let's have a bash...

The first thing I would suggest, if you are seriously interested in the whole God/no God business, is to please re-read 'The Tale of the Kale'.. the last chapter of 'Scenes from a Smallholding'. I spent longer on writing that chapter than on the whole of the rest of the book (and that's the chapter the publisher most wanted to cut out, naturally!). The chapter has been called various things by various readers, all the way from 'brilliant and incisive', to 'pointless philosophical ramblings'.
'Incisive' or not, it is written as clearly as I am able. What it is NOT is 'philosophical ramblings'. In the first place, it is not philosophical (ie, 'extended opinion'), but logical (ie, based upon simple premises, leading to a rational conclusion). And it doesn't 'ramble'. It follows a clear consistent path.

Having said all that.. what is the essence of my argument in 'Kale'?

Deep breath........
First of all, forget any dispute about evolution. Nobody seriously doubts that some form of evolution may have or could have taken place. (If you do dispute evolution, please don't write and tell me. I'm not interested.)
The REAL issue is 'origin of life', and NOT 'evolution'.

Dawkins and co are Materialists, which means they believe that Matter/Energy came first in the universe and everything else came from out of Matter/Energy. This includes Life, which, they say, spontaneously arose from chemicals and lightning (Matter/Energy), and maybe cosmic rays (Matter/Energy) or similar. They have no proof of this, despite having tried to synthesise Life from inert chemicals etc for over fifty years. Millions of dollars spent have produced NO Life from base Matter/Energy.

So.. no proof, or even evidence.
What is more, there is no reasonable theoretical backing for their assumption that Life developed spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone (note the essential word 'alone' here.) Here's the problem:
If Life arose spontaneously from un-alive chemicals (Matter/Energy), where did the Life in the living form come from? It MUST have been present (as some form of potential) within those un-alive chemicals, must it not? Because, if there is ONLY chemicals (Matter/Energy), there can be nowhere else for it to have come from. Do you see the logic of this?
What's more, the Materialists claim that not just Life, but Mind and eventually Consciousness (and Self-Consciousness, the mark of Man) in turn arose spontaneously (and by random accident) from... well.. just from chemicals (Matter/Energy). Thus, if the universe is made up only of Matter/Energy/chemicals, these entities must all or severally contain the potential for Life, Mind and Consciousness within themselves (as there is nowhere else for them to have come from). See the logic?

What's more... if there is nowhere else except M/E/c for L,M,C to have come from, it stands to reason that every atom of Matter, and every pulse of Energy must contain ALL Life patterns (from an oak leaf to an elephant), because, again, there is nowhere else for these patterns to have come from, and as Materialists tell us that the universe is all one big accident, there can be no way of knowing in advance which little drop of Matter/Energy is going to become a giraffe and which will become a microbe. Thus, every quantum of Matter/Energy must contain ALL the plans and patterns of ALL living things, if more than one form is to arise by spontaneous accident, as they claim. Do you see the logic of this?

Thus the Materialist argument contains a huge paradox: that un-alive Matter, which supposedly gave rise spontaneously to Life, Mind, and Consciousness, must itself be alive, mindful and conscious (in some potential way) as there is absolutely nowhere else for LMC to have derived from.
In other words, Matter/Energy is both un-alive and alive at the same time, thus breaking the first rule of logic, that a thing can not be both A and not-A at the same time.

This is why I find Materialism to be literally a non-sense: it is irrational, and there is no supporting evidence for it either. Why people who call themselves 'scientists' still give it house room is a mystery to me. (Well, actually, it's no longer a mystery to me at all, but that's another tragic story altogether. Again, please re-read 'The Tale of the Kale' for starters).

So what is the alternative to Materialism? Philosophically speaking, it is 'Idealism'. 'Idealism' is the technical term for believing that Mind came first, and Matter came later, somehow created by Mind.
All religions are idealist philosophies of one kind or another. They all disagree in detail for various reasons. The two main reasons are firstly, that people have a tiresome gift for misunderstanding and messing up simple helpful ideas like basic 'Christianity' (be nice to each other), for example, or 'Communism' (why not share things?), or, I would say, even 'Science' itself (build your theories according to all available evidence) (see my argument re Materialism above).
'The Life of Brian' showed this gift for messing things up magnificently, both on the religious front ('Follow the shoe!' 'No... follow the gourd!') and politically (The People's Liberation Front of Judea vs The Liberation Front for the People of Judea etc etc etc....).

Secondly, if we propose, as Idealists do, that Big Mind somehow created what we think of as Life, Lesser Mind, Consciousness, and for an encore, the physical universe, then it's only reasonable to assume that this Big Mind is considerably more powerful than yours and mine, and that therefore its motives and methods must necessarily be beyond our comprehension. As a parallel, try explaining why you're doing a crossword to a dog. Better still, to a flea. There ARE layers of Mind. We all know this. Thus it's no big deal to assume that there might be layers above us to the degree that we are above a virus or a daffodil.

Is there any evidence for the Idealist view? It all depends on what you call evidence.
For a Materialist, such things as ghosts, psychokinesis, telepathy, visions, etc must all be unthinkable nonsense. Therefore, he says, as they are all nonsense by definition, there can be no such thing as evidence for them, so it is a waste of my valuable scientific time to even look at this so-called 'evidence'.
This is the standard 'scientific' position, believe it or not. 'Unless events fit into my pre-conceived notion of Reality, (ie, the Materialist doctrine), then they simply don't exist.' Lunacy.. and bad science, of course.

As I hope I've shown above, the Materialist doctrine is fatally flawed according to the two scientific pillars any theory needs to sustain it (theory and evidence), therefore this 'It CAN'T exist, therefore it DOESN'T exist' nonsense is.. well... non-sense.

The Idealist view (that Mind is superior to and preceded Matter) may be harder to understand, but it does not contain the same gross paradox that Materialism does, and thus DOES allow for such things as ghosts and telepathy etc to occur: it allows a framework for non-material essences to exist and operate in, in other words.
If you need some examples of the non-physical oddities that occur from time to time, (actually, far more often than people brain-washed by Materialism think) try reading Lyall Watson's 'Supernature' and 'The Romeo Error'; Colin Wilson's 'Mysteries'; Matthew Manning's 'The Link'; and JG Fuller's 'Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife'.

I will go into all this in more detail in my book (if I ever get it finished!), but I hope this might give you some food for thought, Duke.
Please note that to accept that Idealism is a more rational philosophy than Materialism does NOT mean that you then have to accept any dogma whatsoever along with this. All the world's religions are Idealist-based, but they are all confections to various degrees, and have accumulated all sorts of rubbish down the centuries. I look into this issue in a little greater depth in 'More Scenes from a Smallholding' .. why not re-read that passage too, Duke?
Meanwhile.. don't believe any of these religions! Read.. think... and always follow the path of logic. Don't follow the gourd! Look deeper. Logic will take you a very long way, and keep you from being brainwashed into the bargain.

Please note too that the issue of 'First Cause' remains a problem for both philosophies. For the Materialists, it's presented as 'What came before the Big Bang?', and 'What came before whatever it was that came before the Big Bang?' etc etc. ad infinitum.
For the Idealist it presents as 'What came before God, or whatever you want to call It?'
It's 'a constant', as scientists say: a common issue to both sides and can thus not be used as an argument for or against either of them.

But you might like to ponder on which philosophy (Materialism or Idealism) has the better answer to this one, however unsatisfactory!

Is this any use to you, Duke?
There's obviously a whole lot more to it. My book will look at how we've come to the sorry state of having Religion and Science stand on opposite sides of a great big fence, glaring and snorting at each other, and show how the two might logically be reconciled. It just requires a bit of clear thinking.

I make a couple of predictions, based upon my own thinking and analyses:
* In 20 years' time Richard Dawkins will be seen for the dinosaur he is, over-stating, as he does, his irrational and unproven theories as Scientific Truth. (OK.. 50 years... but it will come one day.)
* Life will never be synthesised from base Matter/Energy ALONE. (Current DNA/cloning technology depends upon the genes being transferred into an already living cell. Nobody will ever make a living cell from base Matter/Energy.) Wanna bet? Feeling lucky?!
* And while we're at it: Materialist science can never come up with their Holy Grail of 'a Theory of Everything', primarily because the Materialist paradigm chooses to ignore whole libraries full of evidence for events that are usually called 'paranormal' (ie, not explicable in Materialist terms). If you miss thousands of effects out of your calculations, you can't possibly come up with anything even faintly approaching a Theory of Everything, can you?

If anyone other than Duke should read this, and finds it interesting, I do urge you to read 'The Tale of the Kale', to be found in my book 'Scenes from a Smallholding'. There are plenty of used copies out there on the net, but if you're feeling generous you can buy your very own Fairtrade first edition direct from the author at www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk . Mention the word 'Kale' in your PayPal order and I'll be happy to give you a 10% (£1) discount. Oh.. and I'll be happy to sign or dedicate your copy too if that's of any interest.

Whew!
That's enough for today. My brain hurts. Time to go and saw a bit of wood I think.

All best wishes to all out there...

OK, Dook….

2008-02-06T19:01:00.000Z

I've just had another comment in, this time from the Duke of Rochdale, chastising me for not writing this blog more often. Ok, Your Dukeness… I apologise. It really is partly a question of busyness, partly a matter of expense, believe it or not, and partly because I still find it hard to believe that anybody actually reads blogs.

The good news, for anybody who does want to read more, is that we should be getting broadband next week. We can't really afford it, but we did our sums and realised that it would actually be cheaper (if we picked our supplier carefully) than sticking with dial-up. This is because of the grotesque amount of spam I'm getting recently. Yesterday, for example, I got 122 emails, of which only one was legit. I use MailWasher, which helps cut down processing time a bit, but it still takes a lot of online time to eliminate all the crap.
We've decided to go with the Post Office in the end. They're offering a line service, plus line rental, plus <8Mb broadband for £22 (and three free months if we join before April). There's a couple of other tempting freebies too, but what attracts us is that it's being heavily marketed as simple, sensible and honest. After years of abusive and shifty treatment by BT, this sounds too good to be true. Let's hope it isn't. I'll let you know how we get on, especially before April.

Does anybody understand the mentality of spammers? Do they really think I'm more likely to buy their rubbish if they try to cheat my filter by offering Vi*aggr/a, or Dik Turnip penis extension tablets? (..you sew them on, apparently). They must have brains the size of the pills they are trying to sell me.
These superbrains are mainly Americans it seems, with names like Yolanda McTavish and Jesus Schnittermeister, but some of them are Japanese. These particular geniuses are even cleverer. They know that by ensuring I can't tick their wretched little messages (in Japanese, mark you) as 'To Be Blacklisted' or 'Bounce This'.. well.. I'll be absolutely certain to buy whatever rubbish it is that they can't be bothered to explain to me that they are apparently selling (in Japanese).
The Human Race progresses very slowly, it seems to me (but see below).

Not much success on the publishing front yet. I'll give more details when the broadband arrives.

Meanwhile the Irish organic mag I write for ('Organic Matters') is about to publish its 100th issue. I've written my column ('Odds and Sods') around this. I'll attach it below. Maybe it might raise a smile or two.. and allow you, Your Dukosity, up in Rochdale, to doss off work for a few extra moments. I guess you must know the Marquess of Oldham, do you? We used to go duck shooting together as kids. The park keeper hated us.

Odds and Sods, Organic Matters Issue 200, July 2025
(A preview)

Well, well… 2025, and I seem to have made it into my eighties after all, despite what they said at the clinic back in 1972.

And what a change we've seen in the Green/Organic world since 2008! At last, the circulation of Organic Matters is beginning to drop, as almost everybody finally seems to have got the 'organic message' and doesn't need shouting at any more. At last, our food is most likely going to be edible.
What have the key events been over the last 17 years? Let's see… in my opinion…

November 2008 Mr X, a government Minister, wonders aloud over a cup of tea whether anyone else has been struck by the logical impossibility of infinite economic growth on a finite planet. His two companions are deeply impressed by this shaft of prophetic wisdom and vow to try to remember it tomorrow.

January 2010 One of Mr X's tea-drinking companions is suddenly struck with the notion that infinite economic growth is a childishly stupid concept. He is so shaken that he spills his tea on his lap, and (historic moment, this) wipes himself down with the paper napkin tucked into his collar instead of grabbing a fistful of fresh napkins from the dispenser. This triggers in him the notion for which he has since become world-famous: that we can re-use things instead of just grabbing more and more.

March 2012 Battery farming of chickens is utterly outlawed in Europe. Crate-rearing of any sort is also under huge pressure. Meat consumption declines, and the vegetarian movement 'grows apace', even in Texas, where according to ex-President Bush 'some down-home families ain't eating but five, six, steers per head per capita these godless pinko days'.

January 2013 Mr X's other tea-drinking companion is suddenly struck by the idea that catching the free minicab service to take him from his place in the Ministry parking lot to the doors of the Ministry gym, might be.. well… replaced with walking the two hundred yards involved. He formally submits a paper based upon this insight to the newly-formed 'British Isles Commission for Possibly Considering Possible Action on Green Issues and So On and So Forth'. It is enthusiastically greeted by the Isle of Man, and after intense lobbying is eventually supported by all other delegates except England (on the grounds that it might in some way offend 'our colleagues in the business community').

December 2014 Throughout the EU, all plastic bottles now carry a €50 deposit (except in the UK, where the idea is deemed to be an infringement of civil liberties). Glass bottles carry a €2 deposit. All shops selling bottles are required to accept and redeem empties (except in the UK where the Health and Safely Executive succeeds in getting all glass products banned, replacing them with plastic, steel or brick, as appropriate.)

July 2015 National Downshifting Week (www.downshiftingweek.com) finally gains government support in thirty-seven European Union countries, including Ireland, Norway and Tadjikistan. This leaves Britain even more isolated. Prime Minister Labooty al Hazaar-Smythe promises an official enquiry 'some time soon'.

January 2016 After the lights suddenly went out during the month-long OPEC conference in Las Vegas, it is agreed that oil should be strictly reserved and rationed out fairly amongst all the peoples of the world, and used only for projects where nothing else would do. Car and aviation fuels to be taxed at the same global proportion, linked of the GDP of each country. America accepts an increase from $0.75 per gallon to $15.60 without demurral, except for localised rioting and insurrection throughout the continent.

June 2017 Official figures show that road miles have declined from 50,000 per kilogramme of spuds delivered, to 'under 500' in Ireland (which is agreed to be a special case). In England the mileage has stabilised at 'approximately 32,000 miles per kilogramme: a huge step forward in only fifteen years' according to the 'Road Miles Rolling Commissariat' group speaking from their official Lear Jet somewhere over the Caribbean.

May 2019 It finally becomes a constitutional requirement for all prospective MPs to have done 'at least one proper week's work in his life, not counting lawyering or property developing'. After a decade of relentless pressure from the green/organic movement, many of them are dragged kicking and screaming onto a farm for three days where they are initially sedated and tied to a chair while it is explained to them in very very simple words why unpredictable genetic mutation of the plants we depend upon to live is just a tad foolish; and that allowing foreign monopolists to control the seed supplies of the world is way beyond criminal. Almost all prospective MPs are persuaded, and many 'wish that someone had told them all this before.'

July 2022 Japan agrees to reduce its cull of whales for scientific purposes to 150,000 a year and to remove the torpedo tubes from all its whalers after the unfortunate series of accidents involving the Greenpeace fleet in recent years. Prime Minister Bushido graciously accepts the Nobel Peace Prize for these initiatives, but only if it is formally acknowledged by the Intergalactic Union of Space Brothers that Japan took no part whatsoever in WW2.

April 2024 A consortium of Irish MPs, led by the famous 'Inspirational Three' spearhead a campaign to ensure that 'safe and sustainable food production' be given top priority in Irish and then European society. 'A triumph for common sense,' one of them says. 'I'm proud to have thought of it,' says another. 'I am actively considering selling my shares in Monsanto,' says the third.

Slowly, we move forward… but we do move forward.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Hey.. Wolfie! Are you still out there?

Hi Wolfie...

2008-01-08T19:44:00.000Z

Hi Wolfie..

I'm still battling to understand blogging myself. I don't think I can reply directly to your 'comment' (for which, many thanks), so this will have to go onto the blog site itself, I guess... Hope you find it!

Glad you've enjoyed Scenes I. The best (ie, 'Fair Trade') way to buy Scenes II is via my website, www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk . You'll find full instructions there. Thanks for your interest.

I should become a smallholding life-coach, eh? Now there's a thought! Actually, I am still half-thinking of writing a Scenes III but so far not enough people seem to be interested in it. Vol III would be pretty much of a 'life-coach' effort, actually, interspersed with more 'scenes'.
How on earth would one go about being a life-coach? 'Internet and phone' you say, but I'm none the wiser!

Good luck with your smallholding bid. Newcastle Emlyn is a beautiful area.
I hope to hear from you.

All best wishes Chas

PS We're hoping to get broadband sometime this month which may mean that I'm able to add to this blog a little more regularly. I keep meaning to, but strewth… so busy…

The Strange World of the Publisher's Mind

2007-10-14T11:33:00.000+01:00

To date, three publishers have rejected 'Guide Yourself to Greater Happiness'. Well, OK, fair enough… but what were their reasons?

*HarperCollins wouldn't touch it because I wasn't 'a name'.
*Virgin thought 'the advice in the book was good', but it didn't have a USP (a Unique Selling Point, the Holy Grail of marketing), and
*Simon & Shuster didn't want it a) because I don't have my own tv show or broadsheet column to launch the book from, and b) because it is written 'informally' and in this area of the book world 'authority' is vital, and that only comes from 'trained psychotherapists', like Paul McKenna, who are also able to … wait for it…. launch the book via a tv show or newspaper column.

What are we to make of this?
Are we to understand that The Victoria Beckham Book of Philosophy would be instantly snapped up? I suspect 'yes'.
Are we to suspect that publishers are very lazy and greedy, in that they just want quik'n'easy celeb-trash, and are not prepared to try something a little bit different, and will not anyway lift a finger to promote something a little bit different? I suspect 'yes' again.
And are we expected to agree with the idea implicit in the S&S rejection that humour is incompatible with seeking happiness? Sad to say, 'yes' again.

For any aspiring writers out there… be warned! The world you are hoping to enter may not be as you expect!

There's still a few more people to hear back from. A couple of them do sound like they just might see the point of 'Guide Yourself'. We'll see. And then, if nobody at all is interested, there's always the Internet!
But I wonder how you go about that? Another steep learning curve coming up, perhaps?

Life's not boring, is it? And I speak as someone who has just broken his keyboard by tapping it upside-down on the desk to shake cake crumbs out of it.

Meanwhile… a new project! I've just been reading about the seventh century Synod of Whitby, which was a brave attempt to reconcile the dogmas and practices of the Roman Catholic Church with the dogmas etc of the Celtic Church.
What a theme for a drama, I thought. I can see the cinema posters now:

'SYNOD: THE MUSICAL'

Vinnie Jones is Cuthbert...
also starring
The Chuckle Brothers as Egbert and Ogbert, the Altar Boys with a secret,
and Sherbert the terrier as himself.

Thrill to Captain Cook, the one-armed pirate
battling it out for the soul of Man with
Dracula, Prince of Rome
in the catacombs of the ruined abbey while
mighty Cuthbert weaves his web of lightning above them....

I wonder if Simon and Shuster would be interested in the spin-off book of the film?

Two weeks on...

2007-09-02T15:58:00.000+01:00

Nothing happening on the writing front. No news from Stan. I guess all those editors still aren't back from Goa or Jupiter yet. Or maybe… none of them likes my offering and Stan's too embarrassed to tell me. Could be.. Certainly could be. Oh well… maybe I should have written a filthy and depressing novel after all. Can't miss with them, it seems:
'Oh God… not that you exist… why was I born? Why does everything I do turn to dust and ashes? Why must cocaine cost so much these days, even when I bring it in myself in Louis Vuitton 'One-Trip' plastic sachets in my crappy little yacht?? Oh God.. not that you exist, as we've already established.. why is life so unfair?'
Hmm.. sounds pretty good to me, actually. Maybe I'll carry on with it.

The MS I did send Stan is a little 60k number which reflects my growing interest in What's Wrong with the Country. Or more accurately, what's going wrong with a lot of the people who make up 'The Country'.
Poverty? Don't think so. Witness all those billions of £s Britons booze and gamble away every year. It seems to me that people now have more money than ever before, and all they do with it is gamble it away, fritter it on over-priced 'labels', or stuff their faces and livers with more and more junk food and gallons of industrial vodka. Meanwhile they blister their skins with megamiles of junk travel on Melanoma Airways and give each other STI's like they're going out of fashion.

So what's going on? What's at the root of all this ridiculous behaviour?
Well.. at the bottom of it all, it's clear that people aren't happy. Happy, well-balanced people don't get smashed three times a week or feel unfulfilled just because they haven't got the very latest mobile phone, or whatever. They have other markers and standards in their lives.

So.. if money isn't the answer, what is?
I think the problem, the fundamental problem, is that people feel lacking in purpose. Their lives have no point. Thus they are easy victims of advertising and 'style' magazines, who tell them over and over that when they have this particular handbag, or that particular shade of lippy… well then they'll be fulfilled and happy. All they need is more and more money, to buy more and more things.
And, of course, it's all bollocks, isn't it? Because, if it worked, then you wouldn't be needing yet another handbag or lippy every other week, would you?

The fact is that money does not buy purpose in your life. And if you have no sense of purpose you are doomed to being unhappy. That's it. Simple. No matter how many Prada earrings you own, or Jimmy Choo Home-Lipo kits, or how many BMW Pelvic Thrusters you have in your Coco Chanel garage, none of them will make you one jot happier with yourself.

I'm just about the happiest person I know, and my average income is consistently below the official poverty line. But I have a sense of purpose in my life, and that's what makes all the difference. When we were full-time smallholders we were living a personal challenge. Every day was an adventure. We were our own bosses, too. And we knew we were acting out of a sense of purpose: to be as green and as self-sufficient as we reasonably could, ultimately for the benefit of all.
There's a key phrase: for the benefit of all. Although we constantly struggled to pay our bills (see 'Scenes from a Smallholding'), we knew we were leaving a tiny carbon footprint (before we'd even heard of such a phrase) and were thus doing our best for the planet, and thus for everyone living on it.
We had purpose in spades (and forks, naturally). And our purpose wasn't just self-based, but planet-based.

All the other smallholders we've ever met have been similarly happy folks, because they are acting on principle: the principle of working for something bigger than mere self.
None of them has any money worth mentioning, but they get by somehow and are endlessly creative too. It's no coincidence that you'll find a much higher percentage of artists and musicians among smallholders than you will among, say, stockbrokers or corporate lawyers.
I feel actively sorry for the pointlessly rich of the world.

The good news is that a growing number of these poor souls seem to be realising that mountains of money isn't (aren't?) the answer. It's for them and the millions of other dissatisfied people 'out there' that I've written the little book that Stan is currently trying to find a publisher for.

Now and again someone asks when I'm going to write a third 'Scenes' volume. I tell them that it's pretty unlikely, because my publisher and I did not see eye to eye on many things, and I don't think they would be interested in a Scenes III, especially as Scenes II has not exactly made them a fortune. In fact, it dropped virtually out of sight as soon as it was published.

But a recent mail from a certain 'Wanda Knowmore' (a pseudonym, methinks…) has set me thinking again…
I self-published the original Scenes book. Why shouldn't I self-publish Scenes III as well?
There's a couple of obvious reasons why not: It's expensive and risky, for one. Secondly, it takes your life over, trying to sell one copy here and two copies there: it's just not cost-effective, and I do need to earn my living. When I published Scenes I we were living on Benefit, so I could spend my non-ME/'awake' time on the sales work. Now I'm recovered enough to not be on Benefit and must be more efficient.
Thirdly, I'm no longer writing for the HDRA magazine, so I don't have that level of public 'exposure' to people who might want to buy the book.

On the other hand: I now have a website and indeed a blog, which can act as information channels to potential readers. Maybe I could just sell direct from the website?
But I'd need to print at least 2,000 copies to make the unit price acceptable. Could I really sell 2,000 copies via just a website?

May I ask a question of you, dear reader?
Would you be interested in buying a Scenes III? It would not be quite the same as the other two, as we are no longer running a commercial enterprise, so it would lack the 'storyline' element. But I would retain the 'scenes/articles', and intersperse them with what I hope is useful material and advice for anyone even vaguely wondering about going down a self-sufficient route. I'd try to talk Ken into doing some more cartoons, too. Obviously, a sense of fun would guide me, as usual.

If I can get assurances from enough people, then I reckon I might have a bash. What do you think? Please contact me if you're interested. And please get your friends and contacts to do so, too. If I hear from 500 people….

Time to go. Garlic to plait. Hmmm… garlic… Like a bit?

Moving on...

2007-08-04T08:56:00.000+01:00

I've had a bit more feedback on Your Dog as Philosopher. Stan duly sent me back the shredded tatters, with all the story elements trimmed out. It ran to about 29k words. The original was 80k. The new version reads very badly, as you might expect, and would need a lot of work doing to make it acceptable, never mind lively and engaging.

In fact, the prospect was a bit depressing, and not remotely as 'challenging' as I was hoping. So I did the obvious thing and asked Anne (She Who Understands Things) to do her own version of the edit, with a view to comparing hers and Stan's. Anne has always been an excellent critic. If she and Stan agreed, I thought, well that would give me more confidence.
But it didn't work like that. For a start, Anne's version came out at 40+k: nearly 50% longer than Stan's. Never mind. I did now have two texts to compare and work on. But then the unexpected happened… I found that it hurt.

I really wasn't expecting that. But I couldn't deny that every time I chopped out a chunk that referred to Fiona (Dave's wife) or Lucy (their child), or one of Dave's friends and colleagues, I felt I was damaging the text. It didn't feel at all as though I was condensing or clarifying or focussing. It just felt like damage.
This was something new for me, perhaps because I'm not very experienced in editing. Why's that? Because I hate it.

This is not because I regard my writing as so precious that not a single jot or syllable may be moved, but because I find it a hopelessly confusing exercise. And why's that? It's because literary editing isn't much like ordinary journalistic or essay editing. A good piece of journalism is constructed in such a way that whole paragraphs can be chopped off, from the bottom up, and the story will still read well. An essay is broadly similar. A good piece of literature, however, is not so straightforward. Characters crop up in dozens of chapters, relate to other characters, and influence the plot, in scores of places throughout the whole book. A good novel is a mesh of networks. So if you want to cut out mad old Uncle Beatrice from the story it's a matter of major surgery: you need to be very clear about what you need to cut out and why, then isolate the major areas for excision; then you have to tie off all the ligatures and veins and little stringy bits and nerves and so on. Miss one and the patient is in real trouble.
Cut a character, and you may find you need to re-write, sometimes at length, a couple of hundred paragraphs. It's a nightmare. You need a memory the size of a minor galaxy (which I don't have), endless stamina (ditto), and a sort of gleeful ruthlessness, of the sort made popular by Nero (also ditto).

It's because of this that I've gradually come to write in a way that reduces the need for editing to a minimum.
The way I work now is to spend ages gawping out of windows, plotting and pondering over the deepest principles of a project, then more endless hours working out how best to present it, then more and more on what you might call 'chapter headings' or 'broad detail'. I make reams of notes (most of which I can't actually read, never mind understand, a year later) and set up a dozen computer files on 'characters', 'plot', 'useful phrases', 'telling lines', 'relationships', 'situations', and so on. Then I make sure I have a good idea of the Opening and Closing scenes and what they must establish. Sometimes I make notes on the weather and season during which the action takes place, and where each person's dwelling is relative to the others'. This is because I'm irritated when I read elsewhere such stuff as 'Mandy hurled off her filmy 'Twin Peaks' underwear, sighed deeply, and pulled the fresh spring morning air deep into her lungs. "He loves me!" she shouted to the sun. "He loves me!" and ran off through the field of ripening corn towards the glowing orb in the west.'
Boy, when we were farming we'd have loved to have corn that ripened in the spring. (Incidentally, Mandy lived in Australia, so it's OK for her to run towards the sun rising in the west. Or should that be the north? See how confusing it can be to get these little things right?)

Anyway… when I've got the whole thing running in my head, in the form of what you might call a vaguely-detailed-web, then I start writing. If I'm lucky, things go more or less as expected. If I'm unlucky, I soon discover a major flaw in my original broad plan (Uncle Beatrice is vital to understanding Cousin Beyonce's relationship with Mr Darcy) and more gawping and illegible note-taking is called for. If I'm really lucky, the story and characters begin to flow with a sort of inevitability, and will themselves suggest little links and diversions en route. I've heard many writers comment on 'the characters taking over' and I know what they mean now.

So that's why trying to edit Your Dog as Philosopher is such a gross headache for me. After all those hours of planning and plotting I have all the characters and events in the story very clearly in my mind. To cut them out is like removing several vital organs with a rusty spoon. It leaves an awful, lifeless mess.
And what's more, it's like cutting old friends out of your life. That's why it hurts.

So what is to be done?
Well for a start, I can put the whole project on hold, and come back to it one day when I'm feeling braver. Or forget it altogether.
Or maybe something else will turn up? You never know; it's a mysterious universe. (And I've gradually come to believe that if you have something that is genuinely worth saying, then somehow, somewhen, the road ahead will clear itself…)

There is one glimmer of hope. I sent Stan something else I've been working on and he (so far) seems to like it. Apparently, though, he can't approach a publisher just at the moment, as they are all on holiday for the entire summer (has anybody ever met a poor publisher?), but one day soon, he'll see what he can do.
More details, when and as.

***

Meanwhile, we've just had our old bathroom replaced. This was not a consumerist whim, but an act of considered wisdom, as the lavatory cistern had gradually developed a number of hairline cracks, and we know enough about water to be sure that hairline cracks soon develop into fissures and hence into streaming torrents, usually in the middle of the night, discovered only hours later, when the granite sarcophagus we keep in the hall as a memento mori, can be seen floating around at the bottom of the stairs, gently bumping into the supporting wall in a nuzzly but forceful sort of way.
What's more, the flush mechanism was so old and knackered that it would only work at all if supported by a network of elastic bands which allowed the ballcock to rise and/or fall. After flushing, one had to force the arm down to start the refill. As we are on spring water, the pressure is very low, so refilling the tank took several minutes. Unfortunately, it didn't stop re-filling until you forced the arm back up, and then jammed it with a bit of old umbrella that seemed to just fit the gap between three of the rubber bands and then locked under a notch in the cistern rim. A switchover to mains water, for washing-machine duties for example, required complex adjustments to this rubbery cat's-cradle, and the assistance of a large twig.

We needed to stop it re-filling (ie, 'overflowing') because the spring water now comes though a complicated system of filters, one of which 'hardens' the water to stop it dissolving holes clean through the copper pipes. Don't laugh. It's previously done it in several places, alarmingly, wetly, and closely followed by expensively. The filters are a step forward.
The carbonate 'hardener' in the Big Filter is also expensive, and a pig to replace, but it does cut down on swearing at plumbers who quote astronomical prices at you to fix yet another hole in the pipes, then don't turn up.
But I digress…

To be sure of remembering to force the mechanism to 'Stop' we had taken to engaging the services of a large decorative metal fish, given to us by our daughter, which normally resides on top of the cistern. This big blue tin-fish would be taken from its normal place and be placed immediately in front of us, on the coffee table, as a reminder that within, say, five minutes, one of us should go out and jam the cistern into 'Stop' mode.
But usually, we forgot anyway, and our expensive carbonate would gently be eroded away a little more, to nobody's benefit, except the manufacturer of water hardening carbonates.

But now! Now we have a loo that flushes! Properly! And doesn't require the services of a big daft fish, or a large twig, or a piece of broken umbrella.
What's more, it seems to use only about a third of the water that the old cistern needed.
Which leads me to the question: why on earth did the old cistern need three times as much water to do the same job? Is modern water more fluid than 1970's water, or something? Is there somethng we should be told?

Back again..

2007-07-26T19:37:00.000+01:00

Hello again! Long time no write!

I've not added anything to this screed for months, partly because I've been too busy with writing and other things ('life', you know…), and partly because I realise that most people have better things to do than read about how I've been too busy to update my blog.

Is it possible to check whether anybody actually reads your blog, do you think? I have this picture of billions and billions of words drifting off into cyberspace, and eventually shoaling up in a fourth dimensional equivalent of the Dogger Bank, or the Van Allen belt, where they form a sort of digital smog… unread, unloved…just clogging up a useful channel, and diverting virtual asteroids into quite the wrong direction.
If anyone ever reads this, please tell me so!

Actually, I do know that one person has read the original blog. Last month I got a very nice note from a certain 'Daz', who had enjoyed Scenes I, and wanted to take up my plea for someone to read a bit of 'Your Dog'. I mailed him the first 10k words or so, and waited with bated breath. (I once dated a girl who had 'baited breath'. Very fond of fish. It didn't last).
Daz came back with some useful comments. On the downside, I use too many long words like 'episcopal' and 'Gotterdammerung in spades', and I also use too many '…' and '—' to indicate thought patterns, rather than using the semi-connected prose of speech. OK, fair points, but it's actually impossible for any writer to know what counts as a 'long word'. One man's 'mako' is another man's 'big pointy fish'. Any writer has to make judgements and hopes to hit a happy medium. I guess one's agent is the guy who guides one in this.
Overall, Daz 'really enjoyed' Your Dog, and compared it favourably with Ben Elton's work. Excellent. Thanks, Daz.
Daz and I then went on to exchange notes on the points I put forward in The Tale of the Kale (the last chapter of Scenes I). This chapter is to be extended and included in something I've been planning for years, which will aim to show how religion and science can be reconciled, despite everyone's apparent belief that this is impossible. Actually, it's easy (in principle).
On the other hand, it's incredibly difficult (in practice), as witnessed by the exchanges between Daz and myself. After a couple of back and forths, we found ourselves looking at each other in a sort of a bafflement.. how could the other guy simply not see the blatantly obvious points the other other guy was making? Daz is convinced that my ignorance of biochemistry is the problem; I'm convinced that Daz isn't distinguishing between 'mechanism' and 'principle'.
There's the difficult part: getting someone to re-consider a fixed position.
All good fun, whatever. Thanks, Daz, for the stimulation!

I had a similar exchange with my old friend John (of whom more below). He read Kale diligently and finally agreed that no, he could not find any fault with my logic. 'OK' I replied, 'then, as you can find no fault with the logic, you must accept the conclusion I come to, which is that Life must come from outside the material world of Energy/Matter.' But this was a step too far for a life-long atheist. John still couldn't fault my logic, but decided that he'd rather 'sit on the fence' a bit longer. In vain did I point out that in this case there simply was no fence to sit on. Never mind, he was going to sit on it all the same!
A new idea is in for a tough tough ride…!!

But that's OK. Everything remotely new has always been ignored and derided by the 'experts' of the day. If I remember rightly, the Astronomer Royal called the possibility of space flight 'bilge', approximately six months before the Russians launched the first satellite. (Please correct me on this if I've got it wrong. And, if you have any more well-attested examples of 'experts'' duff predictions, I'd be delighted to hear of them. 'Iron ships will never fly', sort of thing…)

Your Dog, meanwhile, has been pottering around, collecting an opinion or two en route. As I explained above, it's not a 'normal' book, and I knew it was going to collect mixed comments. The problem is that it tries to meld two styles that are simply unmeldable according to current prejudice. 'Farce' and 'Thinking' simply can not go together. Well, who says so? is my response.
M*A*S*H had a bash, and so have many other offerings. It can be done. Perhaps it's just that my own attempt simply isn't good enough. On the other hand Daz enjoyed it and compared it with Ben E. Another reader, admittedly a friend, thought it was 'brilliant'. A second friend, however (John, above), whose judgement I have relied upon in the past, thought it was awful. This may have been because he simply couldn't get on with the style of humour (as he admitted), but whatever….

In the end, a writer must rely on his agent. After all, what's the point of an 'awful yet brilliant Ben Elton style farcical-philosophical sort-of novel' that nobody will publish? That's the key. Who will publish it?
No writer is actually writing for the public. He's writing for his agent, who will trim the work until he thinks it is suitable for a publisher to consider, who will then require changes that he thinks will make it suitable to be offered to the public with a decent chance of making a profit. Judgements.. judgements… The literary world is full of stories about books being turned down by dozens of publishers, and then finally turning out to be a best-seller. JK Rowling had this experience. And Decca famously turned down The Beatles. Judgements.. judgements…

The state of play at the moment is that Stan the Agent is quite clear that he could not 'place' it in its current form. No publisher would want it, not least because they don't seem to be buying any sort of novels at the moment. So he's suggested that I drop the story altogether, and re-write it as a sort of philosophy book. Same title; same style: watching your dog for a week and seeing what you can learn from him. Keep the humour, of course, just drop the storyline. Oh, and change the 'hero' from 'Dave' to 'I'. Another first person job, like the Scenes books.
Obviously, I could not do this to match Stan's brief without a lot more detail. He knew what he meant, so it was his job to do the first draft. That's where we are at the moment. Once I have received back from him the bare bones or the tattered remnants or whatever, I can make a start on trying to stitch it altogether again, so that nobody, apart from you, dear reader, will ever know that it's a cut-and-shut job.
I must say, I'm looking forward to it. A fresh challenge!
And I must also say that I'm quite astonished that Stan thinks a philosophical offering has a better chance of engaging the attention of a publisher than a funny story has. One lives and learns. Possibly.

Meanwhile… the friend who thought Your Dog was 'brilliant' asked her friends at the Flintham Book Club to take a look at it. They very kindly did, and agreed with Daz that the punctuation is confusing. They did like the bits about the dog getting drunk and disgraceful, and Dave's vomit-streaked jacket gradually decomposing in the bath, but overall, they thought Your Dog might be best re-written as a short story.

I guess you can't please all of the people all of the time. At least Stan and the ladies of Flintham agree on one thing: Your Dog should be shorter. Something I can hang on to.

I'll try to write some more on this blog a bit sooner than last time. But it all depends on having something remotely worth saying doesn't it? I'm ever conscious of that virtual Dogger Bank.

2006-11-11T13:31:00.000Z

… telling listeners about his search for the key factors that made for a word-of-mouth bestseller. 'Interesting,' I thought, and took his name and number. He was called Scott Pack, and he worked for Waterstones, the biggest chain of booksellers in the country. So I emailed him, telling him that I had written a minor local w-o-m 'bestseller', and giving him my opinions on what the key features ought to be in his search.
To my surprise, he replied, and asked for a review copy. Several days later he came back, to say that he thought 'this book should have a wider audience', and that he'd 'taken the liberty of passing my name on to an agent'. This caused some whooping and hollering because every aspiring writer dreams of having an agent, as publishers make no secret of the fact that they almost always turn down anything that hasn't been submitted by an agent. (There's little point in contacting agents direct, because they only want to be bothered with you if you are already published or your name is Chantelle Rooney; same as publishers, eh?). What's more, I discovered that Scott P didn't just work for Waterstones, but he was their Buying Manager. He was a man with serious clout.

Stan, the agent, also thought Scenes was worth bothering with, and asked me to send a dozen review copies for him to post off to all the big-shot publishers: Penguin, Macmillan, Random House….
'Who'll be paying for all these books?' I asked. 'You will,' he replied, which seemed like a nice clear answer, so I did as he asked. A potential £120 down the drain, but maybe worth the risk, I thought.

Over the next week or so, publishers engaged in a bidding fracas (more than a 'minor disturbance', but less than a 'war') and then, just before it was all settled, something else extraordinary happened…
... I got an email opening with 'I love this book!' It was from the manager of Ebury Publishing, and she wanted to re-publish Scenes. Wow.

Now then.. here was a dilemma. This offer had turned up quite independently of my new agent, so I could quite legitimately tell him to stuff it and go with Ebury direct, and thus save the 10% an agent would charge me. However, I have grown to believe that things and people come into one's life for a purpose, and it became clear to me that now was precisely the point at which I would need an agent. Publishers have an unenviable reputation for shady dealing, and I'd never even heard of 'Ebury Publishing'. I had no idea at all of how the book world worked, and was as prime a patsy as you'd ever wish to meet. I could be fleeced, skinned, butchered, and served up with a delicate orange sauce, and would never even know it had happened.
So I passed Fiona on to Stan and let him worry about it. Smart move. Not that Ebury came across as shady at all, but Stan understands all that contract gobbledegook. Worth 10% for that alone.

Within a week I was signed up to Ebury (who I now understood to be a substantial part of the huge Random House empire). The contract was for 'Scenes plus a second book'.

How did Scenes reach Ebury? It seems the MD of Random House was becoming interested in the growing number of self-published books, and wanted RH to pick up on anything they might re-publish at a profit. Alun Owen, the RH rep in Wales called at Ottakars in Carmarthen one day and asked if there was anything of interest. The manager said 'Well, we’ve sold a significant number of this one' (78 copies) … so he took a copy back to London and passed it on.

There were a couple of nasty alarms with Ebury. I took them at their word when they said 'I love this book', but it turned out that Fiona wanted to edit Scenes to the point of completely re-writing it as a sort of Gervase Phinn down on the pharm. I argued my corner exhaustively, pointing out
a) that the book worked fine just as it was (2,500 copies sold), and
b) it was actually quite impossible to do what she wanted for several reasons of style and contents. Any re-write would have destroyed what Scenes was.
It must have been startling for Fiona to have her offer to personally turn my humble offering into a best-seller completely rejected. I felt for her. But I also felt a loyalty to the integrity of the book. That may sound odd, or even something of an ego-trip, but that's not how it felt to me. I knew that a re-write could only convert a bit of rough and ready rock and roll into a Readers' Digest cover version.
Eventually Fiona gave way in an email that said 'OK. You win. Author 4, Publisher 0'.
After a couple more fairly lurid disagreements, Scenes was eventually re-printed more or less 'as is' on Election Day in 2005, but with only half the cartoons. Don't ask.
The price I paid for my stubbornness was predictable. Scenes was removed from the A-list for publicity and promotion. Quite right too, from Ebury's point of view. No point in putting good money after bad.

I immediately started work on Scenes II. It was released roughly a year after the Ebury Scenes I. Everyone expected it to match Scenes I in sales, but instead it has dropped out of sight. Why, I don't know. It's had little publicity, and very few reviews, mainly, I think because it doesn't have the novelty value of the rags-to-'riches' story of how Scenes I went from self-publishing to major reprint. People who've read II tend to think it's up to scratch, however. Stan the Agent went so far as to say it's actually better than Scenes I.

So there we have it. A grand adventure. No, I did not make my fortune, which may come as a surprise to some people. However, it's a fact that most writers make very little from their books, and a huge number make virtually zero. We hear lots about how the odd one signs up for six-figure deals, but this is a vanishingly rare event.
Most books sell ~4,000 copies. Many sell far fewer. There are well over 100,000 new books published every year in the UK alone, of which only a handful make 'real money'.

As I write, in November 2006, Scenes I has sold ~14,000 copies. My nominal royalty is 'up to 47.5p per copy'. In fact, due to massive discounting, and Amazon, and what have you, the true figure is more like 30p a copy. Thirty pee x 14,000 = about £5,000. I've decided not to order a Ferrari.
Scenes II had sold 2,500 last time I checked; so that's another £800 in the kitty. Not a lot for a year's work, I can't help thinking.

But of course, it's not as bad as that. The whole point of an agent is to negotiate an 'advance' for an author (short for 'advance against future royalties'), which means that the publisher has to fork out an agreed amount, non-returnable, before the book is released. This helps to protect the author against sheer bad luck in the marketplace, and also encourages the publisher to get out there and do some promotional work to get their up-front money back. So we do have some advance money to live on. It's not a fortune, but we live more cheaply than anyone I know, and we'll get by.

Would I do it again? Certainly. It's been an education. Would I do it the same way? Mainly yes, especially if I could bank on the incredible strokes of luck I've had so far.

Now what?
Well, I have gone back to my original idea, and have all but completed 'Your Dog as Philosopher'. It's a story about how a man called Dave sets out to see what he can learn about the Meaning of Life from watching his dog bumbling about, while trying to look after his feisty toddler daughter on his own for a week.
A novel, then? Yes, but with a number of what you might call 'thoughtful passages' woven into it. So I prefer to think of it as a 'sort-of novel'.
My worry is that it might fall between two stools. People who just want a funny story might be offended by the idea of being offered an opportunity to think; and people who do want to think might be put off by having to wade through the silly story. We'll see. If Stan think it's hopeless to approach a publisher with it, well I guess I'll try something else instead, and 'Your Dog' may end up being part published in monthly instalments on this blog!
Actually, if you'd like to read the first couple of chapters, and let me know what you think of them, please email me at chas@thirdleafbooks.co.uk. Thanks a lot.

2006-10-11T20:16:00.000+01:00

Right.. more or less back on an even keel…

2,000 books to sell, and knowing absolutely nothing about the book world. What would you do?

Well, we did have two things going for us. Peter of Eco-Logic Books also runs a wholesaling business. He would have some off us for a start. But not 2,000! Maybe a dozen. Maybe two.

The other option was much grander. The editor of The Organic Way had been most encouraging, and was pretty sure that readers of my 'very popular' column, up to 30,000 people, would snap up all 2,000 copies virtually overnight. This meant I had to be prepared for the rush and spent a lot of time trying to find the best way of packing books for post. Jiffy bags looked too floppy. What else? 'Book-boxes' my local bookshop told me.
These are actually slabs of corrugated cardboard, cut and scored to fold up and over into a very neat sort-of-box. Drop book in, wrap round with vinyl tape, and Robert is your close relation.

I wish I'd been better informed. We ended up buying 2,000 of these things, at an outrageous 35p each. I pre-wrapped 600 copies of 'Scenes', stuffing all available space in the spare room and waited for the Christmas rush I had been warned about. Would I need to employ temporary staff? Or alert the Post Office to have a couple of trucks standing by?
Eighteen months later, we sold the last of the 600 pre-wrapped books. The good readers of TOW resisted buying 'Scenes' in their tens of thousands. After two full years of advertising the book at the foot of my 'very popular' column, only 300 readers had bought a copy. That's one in a hundred: I'd have been better off offering toilet fresheners. Clearly, my column wasn't nearly as popular with members as it was with the HDRA staff.

We didn't have a Plan B! What to do?
Well, the good news was that people who had read the book invariably said how much they had enjoyed it, so we were pretty sure we had a saleable book. All we had to do was reach the right people.
Advertising? No… far too expensive, and extremely unreliable.
Local bookshops? Well, yes, but they tend to be keen on Sale or Return, and to only want 2 or 3 copies at a time. And, living in the country, bookshops are few and far between. To reach the ten nearest would take a whole day and cost a fortune in petrol. No real use. But some use.

What we needed was some sort of exposure. Reviews in the national press? No.. they wouldn't be bothered. 'Smallholding?' Pah! 'in Wales??' Double pah, and tish to boot. Waste of good books.

In the end I found a useful solution. A couple of magazines, notably Organic Gardening, and Smallholder, did a deal with me. I wrote them a free article, and they put in a free ad for 'Scenes'. Slowly, we sold a few more copies.
In the summer, we took a series of risks and booked into the local agricultural shows. Some were awful (£120 to be sat all day behind a ghastly fairground amplifier playing ghastly rubbish music on ghastly clapped-out speakers turned up to 12? We didn't cover our costs).. and some were great (£30 for a delightful pitch overlooking Cardigan Bay. We sold 30 books and celebrated with a bag of chips on the way home).
I also worked hard at selling one copy here and two there wherever I could. I managed to persuade two estate agents to have a couple each, to give to smallholding purchasers; the local vet took four; a posh household furnishings place took three; two wholefood shops took a few; two cafes took three each. And so on.
Every time we went to visit the kids, down in Guildford or Brighton, we'd stop at every bookshop en route and sell a couple of copies to most of them. (The Welsh Book Council was meant to do this for us in Wales.. but oddly, every shop we went to had never been offered 'Scenes' by the WBC, and wished they had been. Still don't know what that was all about.)
Slowly word got round, and slowly we began to get re-orders. (Eventually Ottakars in Carmarthen sold over 70 copies. More on this later.)

We realised we ought to take advantage of this new-fangled wide world web thing, but knew nothing about it. By chance, Anne came across a local ISP called Flashgranny. The name appealed… I rang them. Yes, they would do me a nice cheap website, very basic, for what was it? £50? Something like that. Very expensive, we thought. Then we discovered that everybody else would probably charge at least twice as much. FG's Sheila (the 'Granny' of the outfit) bought a copy of the book and enjoyed it so much that she made us up a website on tick: 'until the book's a bestseller and you can afford to pay'. Thankyou so much, www.flashgranny.co.uk . We sell a book about every three weeks via PayPal. Every one counts.

So, one way and another, we sold the books. Gradually, we covered our costs. We were in profit! Then we sold all the books! The risk had paid off!
Now what?
Orders still trickled in, so it seemed to make sense to order a re-print. Again, 2,000 copies seemed to be the most economical number to order. We were a bit anxious, though. It had been hard work selling the first lot. What if we couldn't sell the new lot?
Well, if the worst came to the worst, we knew we'd paid for the reprint out of the profits, so if we didn't sell any at all, we'd not actually lost money, and it would all have been a grand adventure; something for the diary. And we'd have a lot of firelighters and doorstops for many years to come.

We did sell some. But after about 500, sales began to dwindle, and then virtually stopped. We had exhausted our market. We could have taken out full page colour ads in The Organic World and Organic Gardening and it would have made no difference. Them as wanted one had already got one, and them as didn't want one still wouldn't want one. And that was that. The adventure was over.

Then one day I happened to be walking through the kitchen and heard someone talking on the radio….

Part III of this gripping yarn soon.. provisional title… 'A Man Called Scott..' (FADE UP WESTERN RANGE-RIDING MUSIC….)