TWITTERSTORM

I do try not to say that I “hate” anything these days. There’s already enough hate in the world without me adding to it, but the TwitterStorm I read after a rumour surfaced about another well-loved celebrity entertainer had me truly despising Twitter and many of the people who use it for quite some considerable time afterwards, and had me seriously considering packing my bags and moving away from online life forever.

“Forever” is, of course, a relative term these days. Once upon a time it meant, well, forever, but having been devalued about twenty years ago by “Yours to own forever on video” (i.e. about five years) it has since come to mean “about five hours” which seems to be the longest any of us can go without checking our messages or catching up with whatever “vital” social networking requirements seem to be calling out to us.

Nevertheless the thing that bothers me is that it’s now so easy for someone to just make an accusation about somebody and it can be bouncing all around the world and believed to be the truth before anyone’s had the chance to know what’s actually being said about them, so that, by the time they’ve got the chance to publish an explanation, they already look like a guilty person trying to wheedle their way out from underneath whatever it was they were being accused of.

A “celebrity” name (or otherwise) might “slip out” due to a nasty bit of opportunism from a passing neighbour, or a visitor who happens to be in the right wrong place at the right wrong time, and a reputation and a career can be utterly destroyed if even the merest hint of a taint of wrongdoing can now be sniffed on the morning air.

Now do not misunderstand me. If wrongdoing has been done then it is absolutely right that the perpetrator should face the consequences of their actions, but the problem is that we’re brewing up a culture where guilt is assumed before anyone has had an opportunity to defend themselves, and if something that has been said turns out to have been untrue, then we ought to give it just the same amount of weight and support, even though people still prefer to believe and remember the juicy gossip over the cold, hard (and possibly quite dull) truth…

Lord Leveson stated quite emphatically that social media are too difficult to police but that should not give anyone the right to burble out such hatred about something unsubstantiated just because they can. “Freedom of Speech” is one thing, but the freedom to spread malicious gossip had always been something that society used to frown upon, even in medieval times, and yet we now like to think of ourselves as being more civilised than that…

Such things are no different from the actions of the mob, and we really ought to resist descending to the level of the mob if we still want to consider ourselves to be a civilised society.

When that first name slipped out I read such a barrage of hatred from the “always thought there was something dodgy” “iReckon” brigade, and from those who were genuinely upset to hear a much loved name being mentioned in such a context, but very few were actually questioning whether this was the right name at all, and whether he had actually done anything.

As he was released without charge a few hours later, the storm died down, only to resurface when an actual well known broadcaster was actually arrested for “historically committed” crimes a couple of days later.

The venom and the online hatred was out in force again at that time. Almost as if anyone who’d ever taken a dislike to the man – and let’s face it, none of us can be liked by everyone and this is magnified for those living in the “public eye” – suddenly felt the need to spout forth their spite and bile about someone who most of them had never even met but that they thought they knew because their face and voice had been in their living rooms so often over the years.

And ultimately, that’s the problem. We may very well need to defend the right to free speech, but should we simultaneously condone the raging ravings of the thoughtless, hostile and downright offensive? There are those who will always maintain that it is all “self-regulating” in a way, in so far as an opposing argument can be voiced, although it is often obliterated in the face of the oncoming juggernaut and the lone voice of reason can find themselves being turned upon.

The other problem is that this is what gets remembered long after all of the furore and the anger has died down. Even if the person is proven to be completely innocent and gets released without a stain upon their character, they’ll always be the person about whom people say things like “Oh, wasn’t he the one who…?” in a year’s time, because all that they will remember is that raging, damning headline, and another career is all but over simply because of the merest hint of a scandal meaning that no-one will touch them with a barge-pole.

The other, more sinister, worry is about the ignorant who might read all that hate and believe it and go off and do what they believe to be in the “public good” and commit an act so barbaric upon the person that they criminalise themselves and cause a much larger tragedy to unfold than the “innocent” and “faceless” voices on the internet could ever have thought possible when they first spewed out their message in 140 characters or less, and about which they would no doubt be pronouncing upon later.

We should all be careful about what we say, no matter how “outraged” we might feel at a particular moment, because all of us can very easily find ourselves on the other side of the coin and being chased by the baying mob, and all of us run the risk of having our own words coming back to haunt us and bite us when we least expect it.

SHINY, SHINY

I wasn’t feeling too well the other evening. I think that too many early mornings, too many sleepless nights and too many meals snatched on the fly had finally caught up with me, and I was feeling dizzy and exhausted and in need of a bit of a lie down. So, off I toddled to Bedfordshire at an hour when most small children might be grumbling at the unfairness of the earliness of the hour and I zonked straight out, only to wake a couple of hours later at about the time I would normally head to bed.

So I lay there, trying my best not to think about anything very much and therefore thinking some very strange thoughts. Like the ones about borders and whether we ought to abandon them as they are only artificial constructs created by previous generations and the borders themselves are there more out of habit than anything anyone alive now has done and I (thankfully) started to doze off again only to be struck by a terrible, terrible and yet utterly trivial thought, perhaps more of a “revelation” about the ridiculous number of shiny discs still gathering dust on the shelves, and about what a waste of time and money they’ve turned out to be.

You see, I’d been doing a bit of last minute Christmas shiopping a few days ago and had missed out on what could only be described as an out-and-out bargain, a “once in a lifetime, never to be repeated” offer of the kind that will probably turn up in the sales after Christmas.

I “ummed” and I “aahed” and I resisted, because Christmas shopping really ought to be for other people and not yourself,  and the offer went away after 24 hours and, despite my very best efforts to track it down since, has not reappeared.

So, I missed out on a “bargain”, kicked myself for doing so, and tried very hard to forget about it whilst making a mental note that I should keep half an eye out for something similar and bear that low price in mind before I commit myself.

All well and good and so far, so trivial.

The thing is (and this is where the “revelation” part came in) that the “bargain” was for a complete set of the original series of “Star Trek” that I’ve already owned for quite a number of years and haven’t actually sat down and watched since going through the sets when I first got them as gifts about five years ago. Granted, they’ve been cleaned up a bit, and the so-called “cheesy” old effects shots have been replaced by shiny new CGI versions, but the stories are essentially exactly the same and these shiny new versions aren’t even the original classics that I first enjoyed so much that I asked for them as gifts in the first place.

I’ve done this before.

I’ve bought complete series of shows from the 1960s that I used to know and love, like “The Avengers” and I’ve watched them, put them on the shelf and never watched them again, and then got myself all excited and into “must have” mode when exactly the same shows are re-released in a remastered version with some tatty little “extras” or “VAM” (“Value Added Material”) added that I then buy and don’t even watch.

So I’m going to try and make a promise to myself and resist with all my being the “Special Edition” or the “Fully Remastered” versions from now on. They are essentially exactly the same shows as the ones that I already own anyway. The scripts rarely change all that much, that’s for sure. Oh, people might try and insist that the picture quality has been improved a thousand-fold or that the “new” version makes the perfectly adequate “old” version somehow look drab and slow in comparison but I won’t be holding with any of that old nonsense and, when it comes to “picture quality” well it’s not as if I watch them day after day after day and would be familiar enough with them to make any kind of a real comparison, is it…?

But my fevered dreams also dredged up another knotty problem, that of all the other “complete series box sets” that I once craved for and yearned to watch so much that I had to go out and buy them at full price on the very day they were released into a gullible and eager world, watched once, and then placed upon the shelves never to be viewed again.

What am I doing with four series of “The Sweeney” or nine years of “Seinfeld” anyway? I have at least worked my way through the complete “M*A*S*H” twice, but I can’t ever see me finding the time or the inclination to do it for a third time. “The West Wing” was superb, but when, really when, am I ever going to sit down and work my way through all seven years of that again?

The, of course, there’s the tiny little issue of brand new formats to consider. My spies inform me that Jon Pertwee’s very first “Doctor Who” adventure is about to get the “Blu-Ray” treatment with added “VAM” that won’t be available elsewhere, and the completist in me is already twitching about that, even though I don’t even have a “Blu-Ray” player and I already have it on ancient videotape, another tape recorded off the television, and two DVD releases because it got the “Special Edition” remastered treatment a couple of years ago and sneakily then got itself tied in with another previously unreleased story and so I had to buy one in order to get the other.

Watched it once. Put it on the shelf…

You see, no matter how many times you buy “Alien” or “Star Wars” or a “James Bond” film, and really convince yourself that this time it’s going to be somehow so much “better” this time around than the last time you saw it, when you sit down and watch it, it’s still going to be essentially the same story, told in roughly the same amount of time with perhaps a few less scratches that you hadn’t noticed anyway o the previous version.

So, you see, they really can see me coming and, what with the amount of times I end up going to bed utterly exhausted before the “toddler’s truce” has even been sounded, and what with all the keyboard tapping that I tend to do in my “free” timer anyway, when would I get the chance to watch any of them…?

I should go to be early more often. The “wiser” version of me seems to only surface when I’m sleeping.

As my regular readers will no doubt attest…

SOME RANDOM MID-DECEMBER THOUGHTS

I woke up feeling pretty crappy again on a dark, chilly and gloomy old morning in mid-December whilst these pages were all being distracted by an “exciting adventure” which I didn’t want to interrupt with something so banal and dreary as my own little whinges about nothing in particular. My stomach was churning, I had a strangely “bloody” taste in my mouth, my nose was all gunked up and I felt as fatigued as hell…

In other words, I had a slight winter cold but, just in order to defy the common fallacious beliefs about gender stereotyping, I battled on right through it with the minimum of fuss, and only had the odd early night to let anyone in the world know that I was slightly “under the weather…”

You see how thoughtful I can be. I might have gone on and on and on about it right here, in that way we’re supposed to do as “modern men” but I refuse point blank to accept that such sexist beliefs ought to be tolerated in either direction, even if it is merely to redress the balance after centuries of injustice in the other direction.

Now that it is “unacceptable” for workplaces to hang calendars portraying naked women in an exploitative way, why should we find a profusion of men’s bottoms in our advertisements any more acceptable? Equally, why is it acceptable for mainstream supermarkets to imply that men have little input into the average family Christmas in a campaign that seems to have upset the feminists almost as much as the men who find themselves run ragged over the festive season…? The word is “equality” for a reason, ladies and gents, girls and boys, or indeed women and men...

Thankfully, to keep me from brooding upon such dark thoughts and my own sense of feeling pretty woeful, there was cricket on the radio to keep me amused and away from the distractions of composing witty TwitterBanter instead, because inspiration was otherwise failing to strike me as I sat at the keyboard in the small hours trying to come up with things to write about, and it was nice to have something to listen to in order to commit the one thing we ought not to attempt: killing time.

After all, we get little enough of it, and so deliberately squandering it seems like such a waste…

Then, rather ironically in this context, I had an evening to myself, which is never a good thing despite the fact that it ought to be. These days I’m just not all that good at spending time in my own company. I get twitchy. I get distracted. There’s so much that I could do that I find it hard to decide quite what to do, and so I end up doing very little.

I thought that I’d perhaps spend the evening writing, but then I found that I couldn’t seem to find any desire to write and, not only that, I really didn’t want to spend the time writing. It’s all very disturbing but does at least convince me that I really do need to take some time away from the keyboard, and fairly soon, too…

And it was cold.

Work is becoming busier as we approach the most frantic period of our production year which is traditionally (and rather wickedly) pitched exactly three weeks beyond Christmas in order to ruin it for everyone in the industry. It’s also far less easy to concentrate upon such things as it is the season for those slight winter colds, and for everyone involved, that nagging sense of feeling slightly ill descends properly alongside the niggling sense of guilt that you really need to keep calm and carry on…

I also forgot how utterly draining and exhausting writing a long project can be. Since it has finished, I’ve been scrabbling around and utterly failing to string anything like an ordinary blog posting together, and still am, if I’m being completely honest.

It’s tricky. Nothing seems “significant” enough after churning out a twenty-five part posting. Picking and choosing the “next” thing to put on the shelf next to it seems very difficult to compose, and yet I’m still here, trying and struggling to fill a page with coherent thoughts about anything very much at all, and still pondering upon the shortcomings of my own daily efforts at word-wrangling and wondering again about the point of it all.

Not only that, but as that particular story continued to unfold over in the heady, giddy world of “page-a-day” publishing, the numbers (because with me it’s always about the numbers), whilst they started off healthily enough, seemed to crash into a metaphorical brick wall and, if I had bothered to save the graph, looked as if they had plunged off a cliff.

Do I know how to drive people away by attempting to entertain them or what…?

A gift freely given does not, after all, have to be gratefully received if it’s something that you really, really do not want, and if it’s a cheap and nasty gift, a pale parody of a thing of the sort you might find on the market or in the petrol station, then it’s just as likely to end up in the bin just as soon as you think nobody’s looking.

In other words, what kind of an idiot writes a long story quite badly that no-one wants to read and stick with it regardless and over such a protracted period off time…?

What was I thinking…?

But it was intended as a “gift” to anyone who was interested. The problem is that the people at whom it was aimed chose not to read it, and very, very few people actually did… Either that or perhaps I’m just not the sort of person who people consider “like”-able... (and there I was, saying only a couple of days ago that I would not mention it again... Obsessive...? Moi...?)

It’s cold out there…

And the rains have returned, too…

I must still be “quite” likeable, though. I recently got a party invite and, for once, I was even considering (for the time being anyway) that I might quite like to go. It would, after all, at least be another opportunity to dig out the suit to wear. Unfortunately, this time the wiser head of the household is rather less keen to go, so I suppose we won’t end up going.

But it’s nice to be asked…

If nothing else it proves that I’m not quite the social outcast that I sometimes believe that I’ve become.

Yet…

SIR PATRICK

It’s not been the greatest of years for those of us with an interest in all matters space-related. Earlier on in the year we lost both Sir Bernard Lovell of “Jodrell Bank” fame and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Then, earlier on this month, we also lost the noted “amateur astronomer” and xylophone-playing eccentric Sir Patrick Moore, a man who had probably done more to encourage and inspire generations of astronomers, both amateur and professional alike, than anyone else in the field.

I didn’t feel the need to write about it at the time. After all, despite the obvious surprise and sense of loss of a man who was so familiar because he appeared on our televisions pretty much every month since 1957, it has to be said that during his more recent appearances he had not been looking well and, despite the very best efforts of “The Sky at Night” team to work around him at his house, “Farthings” (“far things” you see…?), every month, little of what he was saying was very understandable any more.

But Sir Patrick was great. There were more than a few eyebrows raised at the amount of love and affection being thrown in the direction of the old curmudgeon after his demise, mostly from people appalled by his views on politics and women, and whilst his personal opinions probably didn’t play all that well to our modern. More “politically correct” ears, as far as I can tell, he never used his position to try and influence his “Sky at Night” audience with his views.

With Sir Patrick it was all about the astronomy, and the astronomy was all that mattered.

When you find out about the huge tragedy in his personal life, and the loss of his much-loved fiancée during the war, it is a little easier to understand his suspicions of the European union, and why he buried himself in his work.

And what a legacy it was.

Not only did he help to map the moon and therefore help to make the lunar landings in the 1960s and 1970s actually possible, but he is widely believed to be the only man to have met three key pioneering figures in the world of flight and space exploration – the first man to fly, the first man in space, and the first man on the moon, Orville Wright, Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong.

In 1945, this “gifted amateur” was elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 1977 he was awarded the society’s Jackson-Gwilt Medal. In 1968, he was made an OBE which was promoted to a CBE in 1988. In 2001, he was knighted, and also appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society, the only amateur astronomer ever to achieve this distinction. In June 2002, he was appointed as the honorary vice president of the Society for the History of Astronomy, and was presented with a BAFTA award for services to television. The University of Leicester’s Department of Physics and Astronomy awarded him an honorary Doctor of Science degree in 1996, and a Distinguished Honorary Fellowship in 2008, which is the highest award UoL can give.

He wrote dozens of books (some estimate more than a thousand) designed to ignite the interest of other gifted (and not-so-gifted) amateurs, a fair few more in the world of fiction, which I remember enjoying as a young boy recovering from having my tonsils removed, and the “Yearbook of Astronomy” each year for nearly fifty years. Unhappily I had only picked up a copy of the latest “The Sky at Night” book whilst mooching around in a garden centre last week (and decided not to buy it, it having been during the infamous Christmas Gift no-buy “zone” at the time. I ordered myself a copy later.) and got home in time to hear the statement announcing of his death on the 9th of December 2012.

“After a short spell in hospital last week, it was determined that no further treatment would benefit him, and it was his wish to spend his last days in his own home, Farthings, where he today passed on, in the company of close friends and carers and his cat Ptolemy. Over the past few years, Patrick, an inspiration to generations of astronomers, fought his way back from many serious spells of illness and continued to work and write at a great rate, but this time his body was too weak to overcome the infection which set in a few weeks ago. He was able to perform on his world record-holding TV Programme The Sky at Night right up until the most recent episode. His executors and close friends plan to fulfil his wishes for a quiet ceremony of interment, but a farewell event is planned for what would have been his 90th birthday in March 2013.”

Anyway, in these days when several of our broadcasting giants have been found to have feet of clay, it was good to know that there was still one television icon who we could still regard with a certain amount of respect, even if the Twitterati did feel the need to drag up a few of his less-than-wise opinions as sticks to beat him with.

As the other big-haired celebrity astronomer (and part-time guitarist) Brian May said:

“Patrick was the last of a lost generation, a true gentleman, the most generous in nature that I ever knew, and an inspiration to thousands in his personal life, and to millions through his 50 years of unique broadcasting. It's no exaggeration to say that Patrick, in his tireless and ebullient communication of the magic of astronomy, inspired every British astronomer, amateur and professional, for half a century. There will never be another Patrick Moore. But we were lucky enough to get one.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself… (and didn’t…)

As to the future of “The Sky at Night” well, who can tell? It’s been fairly obvious that his fellow presenters have been bearing the bulk of the load for the past few years, but as to whether this quiet “broadcasting institution” can survive in the modern television era (despite quietly and efficiently having gone about its business for the past 55 years) remains to be seen, but I do hope that it manages to continue despite the loss of its greatest and most enthusiastic supporter, originator and presenter.

Somehow that seems as if it would be his most suitable memorial.

BACK TO “NORMAL”

Back to normal now (whatever that is) after the inglorious excesses of our annual foray into something approaching festive fun (he said, whilst doffing his hat to the spirit of Leonard Sachs), and what a month it’s been back in the big bad “real world” whilst I’ve been off trying very hard to compile some fun in the form of some highly derivative fiction to “entertain” you all with.

The strange game of “Celebrity Pass the Parcel” continued with more arrests occurring whenever the music stopped and somebody was left with the finger pointing at them. Hmmm… Perhaps I’ve got the analogy wrong. Maybe it was a game more like “Spin the Bottle…?” which might be a more appropriate mental connection to make, given that it was a fairly popular pastime back then.

At least it was when I was a teenager back in the 1970s.

I suppose it was the more innocent version of whatever those notorious “wife-swappers” and “swingers” were supposed to be all getting up to behind their closed curtains in the Shires back then, whilst the frustrated housewives weren’t seducing the window cleaners, that is.

This was all the kind of stuff that led to sentences like “I made my excuses and left” as the old “Investigative Journalists” used to say. Different times, different times… and all of which proves that I really ought not to base all my memories of an era upon the “pop culture” that has outlived the era in which it was made.

Whatever and however different the world might have been, the baying crowds nowadays who immediately commit “Trial by Twitter” whenever someone’s past indiscretions finally catch up with them did little to endear themselves to me during those times. “Someone” got arrested and a name got bandied about in cyberspace and this was immediately treated as “established fact” and the particular “much-loved” broadcaster suddenly transformed into the most hideous monster known to mankind about whom so many people suddenly felt the need to share that “they always thought” that there was something “funny” about him…

If any of these people did turn out to be innocent, of course, their lives would be ruined forever, and the wild hunting pack will get away with their crimes almost scot-free (although they do still have to look themselves in the mirror) because, as Lord Leveson said, it’s almost impossible to police the internet, and I do now suppose that people really are entitled to their opinion and are less and less likely to keep it to themselves nowadays, but I do wish that a lot of them would just shut up about what they “reckon” until they actually, genuinely KNOW something…

Not, perhaps that we shouldn’t try to police. Especially when we learn the tragic results of any kind of media bullying. After all, during that month, a nurse died because a woman of “importance” announced that she was pregnant and someone else decided to make sport of it, and merely just proved to me a couple of things that I’ve always believed: That something that is supposed to be a “bit of fun” often isn’t, and that we are not all built to spend our lives in the harsh spotlight of the media despite the sense, often created by the media itself, that all any of us really want is to be famous.

Sir Patrick Moore died at the end of a year which hasn’t gone well for the “space” fan or the astronomy world, what with Neil Armstrong and Sir Bernard Lovell also being called up to the heavens, although, perhaps rather poetically, there were some spectacular full moon scenes to be seen in the skies at the beginning of the month, and some dazzlingly clear skies as the world got colder.

Meanwhile there were some numerically very strange dates involving beautifully balanced numbers that cannot now reoccur in most of our lifetimes now that we’ve passed the part of the century where the calendar months are outnumbered by the tally of the years. I do sometimes wonder about my similarly obsessive counterparts looking at the calendar one hundred years ago and wondering about how they thought that the world might turn out in a hundred years time. That generation were all but blown away by a huge war breaking out less than two years later of course, whilst we have the prospect of North Korean Long-range rockets to trouble us. Still, at least the world failed to end as some people predicted which should only serve to remind us that all calendars are merely fairly arbitrary human constructs.

And Christmas time came and went as it usually does…

Still, the day after Boxing Day can mean a return to “reality” in a lot of ways and for a great many people. The Christmas Day hangovers are fading, after being held off by the supplementary ones attained during Boxing Day. The revels are all but over for another year. Many of the toys are already broken. Most of the gadgets are now programmed and are now just found to be dull little boxes that go “ping” and ruin your life. The exotic boxes of “pong” will have turned out to have been a bunch of chemicals in a bottle and not brought the lifestyle promised through all those pretentious pre-Christmas adverts. Everything still has to be paid for and, for those of you who still choose to celebrate it, the system now needs to gear itself up for the dubious pleasures of New Year’s Eve and whatever fallout that may bring.

So there, I’ve gone and got on my “high horse” again after so many weeks of rambling around rather ineptly in the world of creative prose. Have you missed it? I’m sure that you haven’t, but now that we have got “back to normal” here in Lesser Blogfordshire, I suppose we’d better make the most of it.

Go on, I dare you to say that you’ve missed this kind of thing…

A CHRISTMAS TALE IN ONE HANDY CHUNK

Ah, ’tis Boxing Day and, because of my recent distractions in the writing of the “Christmas Advent Calendar Story” thing, I’ve kind of got out of the habit of writing my usual daily postings and can’t really think of anything new to talk about, especially upon this day which is notorious (at least for some) for being one of those days that can be a little bit flat or disappointing after the excitements of yesterday.

Of course, some people still have their “Christmas Day” celebrations on Boxing Day, and many take the opportunity to visit friends and/or family, or just to play with their “new toys” which they received as Christmas gifts, so I ought not to make sweeping generalisations, but, for many, Boxing Day can bring along with it a bit of an emotional “lull” and be a bit of a “non-event” of a day.

With that said, and in the spirit of the season (and also because nobody ever really asked for it), and as something of a “gift” to anyone of you who might be interested in such a thing, there should now be attached to this posting a pdf file of the entire Christmas story that I have so recently been unfolding to you over these past three weeks or so, all packaged together in a handy, printable (and obviously far too late for Christmas) A5 format and running to a surprising (well, it surprised me anyway) 96 pages, and only one day too late to be of any interest for Christmas Day itself.

Writing it has been consuming so many of my thoughts, and so many of my early morning hours recently (because I do tend to put an almost inappropriate level of importance upon such things, no matter how irrelevant they might seem to the rest of the world) that there really is nothing else that I’ve been thinking about all that much, which is why I found myself dwelling upon it once again this morning, instead of finding myself something far more interesting to burble on about.

I’ve been so focussed, so single-minded, that the world might have stopped turning, or the news might have been full of sensation and shock, and I would have remained oblivious, simply choosing instead to churn out another instalment, and another, and another…

Anyway, because of all that, I’ve got little else which I can share with you, so I might as well take one last bite out of that particular cherry and drag it all out for one more day before we all go away and forget about it forever and never speak of such things again.

I can’t imagine, for example, that such a thing has resonated enough with anybody that they might want to dust it all off and run through such a load of old nonsense all again during some future Chrimbletide, but you never know, and so I tend to find that it’s best to keep your options open.

Also, if you should want to print it off and send me a beautifully leather-bound hand-stitched copy, do feel free to do so, although I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do something so obviously altruistic as that. After all, such things are fine in fiction, but it’s a big old dirty dog-eat-dog world out there, full of busy people doing their very best to keep their own heads above the rising waters which means that we all should really try to, as a wise man once told me, “Make friends with the fish!”

Here’s that pdf…

…or, at least it would be, if I could get the uploading and linking software to work.

Tell you what, if you do want the pdf (and, to be honest, why would you…?) let me know and I’ll do my level best to find a way of putting it in a place that you can download it from properly, although I’m now reliably informed that the following link might just work if you just…

CLICK HERE.

Enjoy…!

A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART TWENTY-FIVE

Well, it’s Christmas morning and we’ve reached the final part of our merry tale and, because this is a Christmas story, it really ought to have a “happy” ending, so, if you are going to find one, then this is probably the best place to look. Especially, I suppose, if it’s an ending to the story I’ve been recently telling that you’re looking for today.

And furthermore, whilst this morning is probably not the time or the place to discuss the relative merits of what the word “happy” might mean from several different points of view, or whether an “ending” only really works in a story-telling context and not in “real-life” where a story might get concluded but life itself carries on, we’re not going to dwell upon it. After all, our story needs an ending and, seeing as we have reached part twenty-five, it’s probably a good idea to allow it to have one.

Of course, as its “author” (if that’s not getting above my station), I cannot expect anyone to be actually taking the time to be reading this, especially on such a busy morning as today is for so many people, but I can at least try to provide anyone who might choose to with that option, and make just one more vague attempt at making my own humble effort to entertain you in the midst of so many other distractions.

As to that “happy” ending, well here it is.

To be perfectly honest with you, Mr Snatch didn’t change all that much after his experiences, because the Mr Snatches of this world seldom do, but he did change just enough to make enough of a difference, and perhaps that’s really the point. If each and every one of us can change just a little bit, then the world might be a better place.

After spending a few hours just chatting to the girl whose life he had saved from the brink of extinction, Mr Snatch found out that Olive was more than just a faceless nameless nobody but a real, genuine human being with hopes and needs and fears and worries just like everybody else, and that made him think about her and, perhaps surprisingly about everyone else who worked for him and, ultimately, about everyone else that he was sharing the good old world with.

He was always going to have that cynical streak, and the occasional moment of impatience and disappointment. He was always going to remain ambitious and perhaps just a little bit ruthless too, at least in matters of business. After all, he had responsibility for all of the hopes and needs and fears and worries of his entire staff to worry about along with his own, but he did at least approach it with a little more humility.

After all, when you’ve seen the whole world reduced to dust and how insignificant your legacy can be in the face of its obliteration in the crucible of time, you start to think less of such things and give more attention to the “here” and the “now” instead of what and whether people might think of you once you’ve gone, and, over the years, old Mr Snatch did really finally start to earn that “Humanitarian of the Year” Award.

And things did improve for Olive too. Her life had its problems and they were never going to vanish overnight. After all, nobody ends up living in a hostel with their kids without having had at least a few hiccups along the way, but things did start to get better from that day. As she headed off in the company limousine for her joyful reunion with her children on that Christmas morning, courtesy of a long-suffering chauffeur who was still waiting for the call to come anyway (but got a huge – and rather unexpected - bonus for his trouble), Mr Snatch had already made arrangements for them to have a far better Christmas than they ever expected to, and the general welfare of his entire staff became very much his business over the coming months, and became very much the model for many of his fellow business leaders who kept wanting to create new and interestingly-named Awards for him, all of which he rejected as the pointless self-aggrandising nonsense that he knew they were.

Mr Snatch found that he was just happy doing as much good as he could with the wealth he had, and finally learned the lesson that might be obvious to you, dear reader, but can take a long time to learn; that real wealth and riches really are perhaps those which are more spiritual in nature.

But if you are wealthy, then it’s a damned sight easier to do some good than it might be for someone who’s struggling along, and, whilst it can be very tempting to do your level best to get even more wealth for yourself instead of trying to do some actual genuine good from your position of privilege, then it’s never the worst thing to remind yourself, every once in a while, and certainly around Chrimbletide, that there are limits to the amount of “stuff” that you can accumulate and that you really cannot take it with you.

All of which probably means something or other, that may, or may not, be all rather profound, but which is probably not the sort of idealistic nonsense anyone wants to be told upon Christmas Day, even if that is possibly the one day of the year when that sort of idealistic nonsense is most likely to be understood and appreciated, so I think that it’s time that I shut up now, and let the rest of the story unfold as it should, which doesn’t take long and can be summed up in one, mercifully short, paragraph.

In the far future, Mr Snatch got home from a very full and happy Christmas Day and settled down in his favourite armchair with a glass of something tasty to watch another rerun of one of his favourite Christmas episodes from one of his favourite sitcoms. Before the programme started, he glanced for a moment out of the window to watch the full and active world, which did not die, passing outside his humble and snug abode, and smiled with contentment.

Happy Christmas everyone.

Martin A W Holmes, Christmas 2012

A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART TWENTY-FOUR

Mr Snatch fell…

…and was completely surprised when he found that his hands, which he was holding out in front of him as a last futile gesture towards self-preservation, made contact with the thick pile carpet of his own office.

His momentum caused him to still hit the floor with a bit of a thump which rather took his breath away, and he lay there for a moment, slightly winded, and let out a long, relieved deep breath.

So it had all been a dream after all.

He realised that somewhere a telephone was ringing, and he staggered over to the desk to retrieve it from where he had thrown it earlier on that night, or whatever night it had been. Time was playing tricks on him and everything seemed to be acting in a rather fluid manner, and he hadn’t quite worked out what day it was as he stumbled about believing that he was still half-asleep.

As he picked up the telephone, he winced as he cut his hand upon one of the shards of glass from the broken picture which he had never had the opportunity to clear up because of his unusual diversion. Sucking in his breath to stop himself from inadvertently exclaiming something more unpleasant, he punched the “receive” button and listened as the message which he had failed to pay any attention to earlier was finally relayed to him.

At the end of the message, he pressed the required number after the ghostly voice told him that he had several options from which he could choose; “To receive further information, press one. To dismiss this once-in-a-lifetime chance at redemption, press two. To tell…”

He pressed “one” and waited as a strangely familiar yet unfamiliar harpsichord ditty tinkled away and another ghostly voice apologised for the fact that they were busy and that, if he was patient, they would  answer his call just as soon as an operator became available.

Eventually, an actual voice interrupted the music and Mr Snatch was able to ask a very important question, in response to which there was a distant unseen shrug and an absent-mindedly muttered “Who can tell?” before an attempt was made at forwarding his call on to a colleague whom he assured Mr Snatch would be able to answer any and all of his questions about that particular matter before putting him on hold again.

After making a less than original observation to nobody in particular that they might want to update their music, something with which Old Marley actually concurred, Mr Snatch clicked the “end call” button on his telephone, but it refused to be switched off and the tinny little tune played on and on and on.

Mr Snatch sagged dejectedly and defeatedly onto the floor, and started weeping quietly to himself at the realisation that there seemed to be nothing he could do to change anything.

After a moment, he noticed that the tune had, in fact changed to something slightly more modern, and, even though it still seemed to be a tune dredged up from the bowels of hell, the mere fact of its alteration made him stop and think. Then he stood up and wiped his eyes, before heading across to the little ensuite cloakroom with a view to “freshening up”.

When he switched on the light and looked into the mirror, he was rather surprised to find that he looked to be in an absolute state, standing there wearing a ratty vest and a rather battered looking old overcoat. Then he looked down at the tattered remains of his once immaculate designer suit, and the battered non-matching pair of boots on his feet and realised with a growing sense of dread that it hadn’t been a dream after all.

And then he had another thought.

He grabbed a pair of jeans, some socks and a pair of trainers from the cupboard and threw them on. Hanging next to them was his overcoat, which he grabbed and roughly folded under his arm as he was dashing towards the door.

Then he dashed back to the cupboard and grabbed a thick sweater which he then had to put on because the version of the coat he was now carrying had made the tattier one he had been wearing just seconds earlier inexplicably vanish from his body as it would now never make it back into the trunk from which he had first retrieved it.

He was delighted. Things could change, and he could change them.

Which is how, acting in a manner which was against everything he had ever previously done in his life, he then dashed off into the night in search of Olive Scrimp and, to a lesser extent, Mitsy.

It took him quite some time to find them, as the streets of the city are many, but when he remembered that he’d met her in the park, he soon found her walking around and using the last of her energy in an effort to keep warm.

She was very suspicious of him at first. Her evening had already been full of strange figures offering to show her various alternative notions of their ideas of what a “good time” might be, but when she finally recognised that the enthusing and caring face which was trying to help her was a variation upon the same, sterner face which had flung her out into the cold just a few short, but potentially deadly, hours earlier, she accepted his invitation to put on the very welcome overcoat, and was soon warming through whilst gorging on abandoned party food in the upper banqueting suite of the SnatchCon Tower.

In the distance, the chimes of Big Ben struck the midnight hour and drifted softly across the river to where they were just sitting and chatting in a pleasant and casual manner which Mr Snatch had seldom experienced before.

Because she couldn’t help herself, she wished Mr Snatch an almost whispered “Happy Christmas” and, after a moment’s confusion, he actually returned the greeting, before sitting back in his chair and realising that he had an awful lot of thinking to do.

A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART TWENTY-THREE

Because death is still, as far as any of us can tell, forever, Old Marley still walks the Earth, and he also has a long, long memory, which means, in many ways, that he is in a stronger position than any of us to observe the results of his actions, and to consider the benefits of moving just one of the tiniest of pieces in the great chessboard of life.

Marley walked a hundred years ago, he walks now, and he will still be walking long after the last human has dropped off this mortal coil. The only advantage the Marley of the far future has over the versions we might have contact with in earlier times, is that he has already witnessed everything they did, and remembered it, and has been around long enough to witness the various outcomes and results of his actions.

So, like him, perhaps this is as good a moment as any for us to pause, reflect and philosophise upon the things which we have been perhaps unwilling witnesses to during the series of events which occurred in our little tale as it unfolded over these past three weeks or so. If there is ever likely to be any kind of a moral to this insignificant odyssey which we have journeyed through together, it’s most likely to be found here.

Could, for example, the changes which seem to be occurring to the person we might consider to be the “present day” Mr Snatch mean that future isn’t quite as bleakly painted for his descendant…? Would a sea-change in his own philosophy mean that he changes his ways enough to ensure that the barbarians are no longer at the gates and threatening to tear the whole of civilisation down...? If he fails to survive his sudden plunge from the remains of his own high tower, will the future be irrevocably reshaped by the fact that his offspring fail to be even born…?

We haven’t addressed the knotty little question about how the various Messrs Snatch have managed to produce this chain of miserable souls, despite them all seeming to be such unpromising prospects for any young woman seeking love, if that is what they are seeking, or find most attractive about this fabulously wealthy family line.

We do, of course, know that there have already been a number of previous women who have borne the name, however briefly, of “Mrs Snatch” to the current incumbent, but we have not really considered whether there are already any little Snatches running around and biting the ankles of those whom they are ultimately set to replace.

Perhaps this future is already shaped, or perhaps it remains as fluid as the thickening air through which Mr Snatch is currently plunging, where the gravity might still be unfortunately working, but perhaps without its usual efficiency.

There are some other, perhaps bigger questions to consider, too. Petty, fiddling little things upon which we might like to mull like “Will the world die?”

Well, of course, one day it will. These things, whilst perhaps not quite the sorts of things we like to dwell upon as we arrive at Chrimbletide and tick away another year in the long journey towards the inevitable, are unavoidable. We just prefer to choose not to think about them, and realise that in our short human spans, we are unlikely to live long enough to see them, but, if the actions of one man are significant enough, perhaps we ought to give at least some consideration to the fact that we might.

Because, if this story is to be about anything, perhaps it is not so much about redemption, nor is it about the bleakness of that future, or whether the world as we know it lives or dies, but merely about how those things might happen. There may very well be a bleak future, and it might very well be just around the corner or a million years away, but how it is shaped rather depends upon what we choose to do right now rather than leaving it to somebody else to sort out.

How we arrive at the future, and what shape we find it in, is largely down to us, and people like us, and we all have the opportunity to pause, to reflect, to take a moment to consider the consequences of our actions and see whether we can do anything now to make the outcome for everyone else as pleasant as it could be, instead of choosing the path which is easiest, or which brings along with it the most hurt for someone else.

Speaking of which, back in the trivial world of this humble storytelling offering, there is the other tiny matter of the fate of Olive and, to a lesser or greater extent dependent upon your own philosophy on such things, Mitsy. What is to become of them as they remain sitting outside in the deepest, darkest cold of just before the dawn?

And what, if anything, has any of this got to do with Christmas…?

Ah well, you see. I personally struggle to find the joy of the season myself, which means that any Christmas tale which I can think up to share with you is likely to be at least a slightly cynical piece, and so, whilst this dark little tale might, ultimately, have the best of intentions and, perhaps, contain a shining diamond in the midst of all the coal, it’s always likely to be the darkness surrounding these joyous events which is most likely to draw my attention. As ever, I don’t know whether I write well, but I do know that I write, and this is the kind of thing that I seem to write about.

Finally, we might ask ourselves whether it was, in fact, all a dream, which is, of course, is always the ultimate cop-out when the various strings in the cat’s cradle of a story start to get too knotted, and the imagination starts to run out, but it is something that you might wish to keep in mind as we return our thoughts to the fate of the still-plummeting Mr Snatch.

Tomorrow.

A CHRISTMAS TALE IN 25 PARTS: PART TWENTY-TWO

It wasn’t the best first meeting that ever happened in the long history of mankind, and it rather surprised at least one of the Messrs Snatch that it turned out to be that way. He had, after all, believed quite reasonably that someone living such a lonely life as his descendant appeared to be doing might actually be rather more grateful to find that he might have any kind of company at all, no matter how unusual the circumstances of how that meeting might have come about.

And, after all, family was family, wasn’t it…? Even if ancestors long-dead don’t usually make a habit of turning up in people’s lives and having a bit of a chat, and, quite literally going over old times, perhaps over a little drink of something or other.

What he had utterly failed to consider (because, after all, consideration of what other people might be feeling was not, as we have already witnessed, something that he was well practiced in) was that during his long endurance of extreme loneliness, Mr Snatch had had plenty of time to brood and ponder upon how his situation had come about.

Quite reasonably, at least from his point of view (which was, after all, the only one that really mattered any more), once he had finally managed to forgive himself for having clambered inside his shelter in the first place, he had turned his attentions to the sources of the conflict which had led to him making that most wretched of choices, with the certain knowledge of what the family archives had already told him when he had read them as a small boy.

Buried deep in the archive was his family’s hidden shame and guilt, the great secret which they had tried so very hard to keep to themselves, but which, when it did finally seep out and become more general knowledge, had meant a sea-change in people’s attitudes which had escalated and escalated until it could no longer be controlled. It had been a moment which might have seemed rather insignificant in the great scheme of things but which had had devastating consequences for the whole of humanity.

And here, delivered to him by the fickle finger of fate, and in a manner that was so very unlikely that he simply had no choice but to accept it and learn to deal with it, was the perpetrator of that very wrong, hoping to have a little chat with him over a nice cup of tea.

Standing right there, on his own stairwell! Right in front of him! As large as life and yet only half as ugly.

Well, to say that all of his pent up anger, rage and frustration boiled over at that moment from inside him where it had been bubbling, would be something of an understatement. The surviving photographs from the family files did not do justice to the sheer arrogance and audacity of this man, even if they didn’t really do his natural good looks all that much justice either. He was simply one of those people who do not photograph well.

Setting all that aside, however, it appeared that it was indeed most definitely HIM, and  the lonely little man who had spent so much time alone was willing to believe that any manipulators of events who were able to conspire to bring about the end of the world were just as capable of shifting the jigsaw pieces of time around enough to bring about this visitation, and he seized his moment and lunged at this despised figure at the first chance he got.

There is little point in discussing what was said between them as they fought their way up and down and all around the tower, but we can be fairly certain that there was little in the way of seasonal greetings being flung back and forth. There might have been some discussion as to whether one or the other of them was being unreasonable, or there may have been something in the way of a sharp (and perhaps slightly biased) history lesson, or there might just have been the pointless outpourings of blind rage that occasionally are then to be regretted in the cold light of day, but it is unlikely that we will ever really know.

And it wasn’t much of a fight, to be honest. Viewers of “Pay-per-view” would have been switching off in their droves at such a disappointing spectacle. Neither of the combatants had ever really been built for indulging in the less-than-gentle art of fisticuffs, nor were they really in the best of physical shape after their diverse recent experiences. So, in general, this meant that, whilst there was much huffing and puffing, and considerable quantities of ducking and diving, there was little for a connoisseur to appreciate, as they generally spent most of their time trying their very best to keep out of each other’s way, and not much else.

They covered an awful lot of territory, in all directions, but made very little actual physical contact. The “present day” Mr Snatch spent much of the time pleading with his descendant as to whether they might not be able to just talk about things, and trying his level best to summon up the negotiation skills which had served him so well in his business life, in order to remind his assailant, time and again, what a dreadful thing it was to be lonely, because he genuinely believed that reminding him of this might actually help him to bring him to his senses.

However, as time went on, this strategy was obviously failing to have any impact, and instead he found himself backing his way higher and higher up in the rickety tower until he found himself standing upon a ramshackle and rather hand-made looking platform, upon which there seemed to be standing little more than a brass telescope, and about which there seemed to be a great deal of what he could only describe as being a howling and rather icy wind.

Surprised as he was to have run out of places to run, and desperate as he was to keep away from the flailing fists of a person who might once (in another reality) have more lovingly referred to him as “Great-Grandpa” (or something), he was most shocked when the railing that he was clinging on to gave way, and he found himself unexpectedly plummeting to the ground from the top of the remains of the very tall tower he once built to carry his own name into the bright new future.