Mind, real neighbors can be bad news sometimes. I’ve had some bad ones myself. This guy now, he looks a bit iffy. I hope not. Maybe like Ron was, pretty mild really. Yeah: Ron. He was the first. I’d never had trouble at all before then, had I? Still, it’s a world away now though, the farm and the vans. My hermitage, escape from the world.

Ron was in the other van, he’d had some kind of a nervous breakdown, thought everyone was talking about him. Huh: he should be so lucky. Midnight Cowboy, ‘Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me’, yep, ‘only the shadows of my mind.’ Yeh, good old Ron, he was into CnW too. Soaps as well of course. Just needed some confidence. I helped that mush, built him back up, good Samaritan, moi. Oui, certainment. Some of the things he came out with though. Jeez, I got worried I was starting to think like him at one point. Shit. No chance though, I was rising again, slow but sure: sure. Hmm, sure came through some shite on the way though.

What was that next guys name? No, can’t remember. Christ, I went to borrow some sugar, you should have seen his eyes, and he’s got glue all over his face! What a tube! Yeah, Evo-stick, stuck on you. Man, something else, and then the bus stop. Nine in the morning and he’s pissed, little red pig eyes, sugar. ‘I’ve drunk twenty two cans through the night.’ he says. Somehow I understand this. Twenty two! Through the night, on his own! Shit. The sod was nicking my food as well; I thought it was mice at first, I mean, farm and all that. It takes a Helluva mouse to get into the ice box and take one crispy pancake though. I was glad to see the back of him, I’ll tell you. Neighbors? Tell me about them. Who needs fantasy?

Next was a couple and they were sound, we all got on fine. Even had barbecues then, oh yeah, the cat. Their cat had got stuck up a tree. No problem says me, comes out with the golf brolly, puts it up next to the tree, cat steps on, brolly comes down; brilliant. Except the wet ground decides to give way underneath me and there’s me and my brolly tumbling down the slope, somersaulting past the septic tank. One bust brolly, one bruised me. Cat was fine though, talk about raining cats and dogs. That was when the drainage to the septic tank bust too. Wonder if my tumble had anything to do with that? Hell, cat’s fault if anybody’s!

Shit, mind that last month? I come home and there's this head case trying to tell me that somebody’s been deliberately sick in his shower. What? Piss off, let’s have a look. What a hero, hah, what an idiot, I just blast my way past through the shower door and – oh shit – close it fast, back off coughing, I’m gagging, near as damn sick, septic tank, shit, this is too much. That’s not sick, I say, when my breath is back; it’s shit! There’s been a back flow, must be a blockage. God, that was awful. He didn’t believe me! Why the Hell not? He goes out, shithead, so like back then. Smell was seeping into the room though. I went in, got a towel wrapped around my face, got the window opened and washed away what I could before I had to breathe. Phew: it did the trick for the night though, and the caretaker fixed it the next day.

No caretaker back then though, just the farmer and he was on holiday. Did it myself, new pipes, new route to the septic tank, took me two days but I did it. Phew, what a hero. Carol came down, I heard steps and looked out from under the van, saw her legs at my door, nicer by far than this shit down here. ‘Hi,’ I say and roll out from under the van. She jumps back, surprised. ‘Plumber at your service,’ I say. ‘You’re a mess,’ she says. ‘Yes I am that, plumbing the depths.’ ‘I need a baby sitter, not a plumber.’ ‘Sure, no problem; later? I’ll be up to fix your TV aerial anyway.’ ‘Thanks,’ she says, ‘See you later.’ I watch her go down the slope seeming to sink into the septic tank as she goes; what a waste. Two hours on and I’m having my tea up at Carol’s having fixed the aerial just in time for neighbors.

Clear flow for the septic tanks though. He’s a TV next door, watches neighbours as well. They all reckon that violence on telly’s increasing violence in society, don’t they? Bullshit! It’s all these bloody soaps making people inadequate. They can only handle fantasy neighbours for half an hour. Reality lasts too long and you can’t switch it off can you?

Anyway, that couple went to be replaced by another not as good, not too bad. They were filthy and you couldn’t really trust them but they weren’t too much bother, but, well, talk about shit on your doorstep; jeez. After them there was no-one for weeks, great, no hassle, peace, then he came.

Colin Cudby, cousin of the bloke of the good couple from before. Could be okay, looks a bit odd though, you know? Certainly looks clean and tidy. He comes round, introduces himself, ‘Just being neighborly,’ he says; right. I offer him a cup of coffee, he is definitely a bit strange, though harmless I hope. ‘Is this real sugar in this coffee?’ he asks. What? Real sugar, is there any other kind? Shit, he saw me put it in. ‘Yes, of course,’ I say. ‘Sure,’ he asks, looking doubtful, could be trouble, ‘Yes, sure.’ That was the start of it. Sugar, hard to believe now, clean yes, but his head, jeez, there was one head real full of shit and no kidding, and being the nearest being to him, geographically that is, I was about to be splattered from head to toe, no less. Sugar, short and sweet, no such luck, no, no. ‘Somebody’s been in my place,’ he says, ‘seen anyone suspicious?’ Apart from you mate, no. Shit, so did this guy, last week, exactly the bloody same, no, not another one. I think I’d crack up, shit, septic tank, no, no way, could be, no way. Always someone been in his place and had I seen anyone around? My arse, shithead was accusing me, just wouldn’t say right out, not then. Crazy bastard next door, he’s the same, he even bangs on the walls like that mental bastard back then, Cudby, could be. Wonder if he’ll change his lock as well? Man, that was funny, he bought the wrong kind of lock, he had a door opened outwards, like Pandora’s Box, but the lock was for a door opened inwards. What a wanker, ha! About as useful as a lock on the outside of a toilet I told him. He was so stupid he didn’t understand the problem, next day, he’s accusing me direct; I’m trying to poison him. Yeah, I’ve put glass in his cereal and poison in his chops. I’ve had sex with the farmer’s wife in his bed, whilst he’s out, well, it would be more convenient, veritable orgies in there, you name it, I did it, no kidding.

Yes, okay, I should have felt sorry for him, but this was most days for the best part of a year. Shit, it got so that I began to think he’d been in my place. Why not, that other guy had been, I’ll tell you, nutters for neighbors can seriously damage your health; mental. I started to tell people I knew about him but when I did I always thought that I sounded a bit crazy myself! ‘You’re getting paranoid mate,’ somebody said. ‘I hope so,’ I said, ‘it would be better than if it was true.’ I began to wonder if my friends believed me or not, I mean, if I hadn’t known this was true, I would have been more than a bit doubtful myself. This guy was mental, nuts, four and a half pence, you know.

I even went to the police about the day, really, I did, it got that bad, but, I’m not too sure they believed me either, but then again, how could you blame them? I must have sounded crazy myself, maybe even was a bit by then. Anyway, they said they couldn’t do anything until he’d done something. ‘Done something, isn’t this enough? I mean, the guys doing my head in!’ ‘Sorry,’ they said, ‘but that’s the Law.’ Wow, that’s great, isn’t it? If you want to know the time, ask a policeman, but don’t ask him to get you out of bad shit, forget that. You have to come in with a knife in your back, or maybe an axe in your head, before they can do anything, handy, yeah? It was time to change tactics.

This guy’s been accusing me of threatening him, right? I’ve told stacks of people about it, so, why don’t I do it? Why not? Who the hell is going to believe him? Nobody, I mean, they don’t believe me, so how are they ever going to believe him? Nobody, that’s who, so, poison him? I told him that I was a chemist, that if I really did I’d give him dysentery for a week to such an extent that there would be more of him in the septic tank than anywhere else. That scared the shit out of him for a while. I had peace for about six weeks: bliss. He came back though, needed his persecution fix too much. He knocks on my bedroom window at four in the morning. 4 AM, I mean, do you believe that, four-fucking-am? Goddamn, didn’t this crazy sod to do the same a bit ago? Yes, two in the morning, he’d locked himself out, same night the sewage backed up in the shower that was. Christ, and wasn’t it just a few weeks ago that two children died on a boat because of sewage problems? Horrible! 4 AM, I’m not kidding, but if I hadn’t been half asleep I think I would have killed that mad bastard that night. I really was at the end of my tether by this time: 4 AM. That was when I started thinking about the septic tank.

You had to pass the tank on the way to and from the vans. The tank had a cover of wood, but it was rotten, rotten to the core. If that cat had landed on it that time I’m not sure that it would have held. All I had to do was stand in the right place and wait for him to pass, a quick shove, and then he’s gone, bye-bye. Septic tank one: meet septic tank two. What’s a septic tank for anyway? Breaking up shit! Natural! Hell, I’d be putting this poor bastard out of his misery wouldn’t I? Not to mention me, why not? Damn, I wanted to do it, I really did. Just bother me once more and you are gone boy, gone. I’ll just flush you away. Who would miss him? Not me, that’s for sure, I had it all planned, make sure no-one else is around, quick shove and off he pops, like switching off the TV: peace. I used to stand and look longingly at that tank, waiting, just waiting for hours. Come on Cudby, come on, I’d think, quivering, come on - you – shithead – Cudby!

What if this guy’s the same, what if he is? Another Cudby, no, can’t be, no way, I’m not sure I could handle it. I don’t think I could take another crazy bastard into persecution like that; too much. He’s watching TV, neighbors again, half an hour, why can’t I just switch him off? Half an hour I could handle. I don’t know what to do. What if he bangs on that wall? No, too much, I can’t take it, too much, I just can’t, just can’t, cracking up, septic tank, no, no, shit, no!

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What I saw then was a display of such uncontrollable passions, subject to no reason, no logic, and no thought, that I was, to be honest, terrified by this awful force.

The next time it hit my TV screen was just before the attack on the trade towers. Indeed it was only 9/11 that took this off our screens in the UK. In Northern Ireland some previously sealed off roads were opened up. This gave some Catholic children a short cut to their school and, being kids that's the way they quickly took. Almost as quickly the Protestants, who had had that road sealed off to the Catholics before took, shall we say, some umbrage to this situation.

When I first saw this on TV, the umbrage escalated very fast, what I saw was the most unbelievable hatred focused on children that I've ever seen! It was obscene; I can't put it any other way. The parents of the kids now had to escort their offspring, who themselves had to be escorted by police, through this hate filled gauntlet but the focus of the ignorant jeering was always the kids.

In Iran those passions could have gone any way but here they had only one way to go and they were already on that road of hate; there is no road off there. Yet again, you could never, ever, reason with these people, reason was in fact, anathema to them. Religion, remember was the main force behind the unleashed passions in Iran, but back in Northern Ireland I realised that these hatreds on shocking display, the women were the worst as I remember, unlovely faces contorted into horrific visages, were fed from the same books of drivel. Speaking of horrific visages I thought at the time that their men should be made to watch this every night for 5 years.

Thing is though, all these passions are based on what exactly? Stories, guidance, information fed to them from the powerful. Try misinformation, lies and bullshit as a translation. To hold such malevolence inside demands a fairly empty vessel to begin with, most noise as they say. Fear from as young an age as possible is a good way to empty the vessel, into which the liars pour their poison with unconcealed glee. These hate–filled tribes speak a lot, but they keep saying the same things again and again in increasingly vociferous agreement. They agree to create increasingly complex conceptions of the other with which they can fearfully surround themselves. The malevolence concentrates their attention and what they never realise is that the other is inside them, devouring them, that what they really fear is what they are, the concept of the other as enemy, terrorist, predator is a kind of personality displacement.

They hate what they are not, in multifarious ways. Emptiness is a place into which anything can be poured. Isn't this nearly always the case? I mean I cannot stand almost anyone on the right wing, and for some it would take me a while to stop kicking, but I don't actually hate them, a passion too far and I cannot sustain it, few of a reasonable persuasion can. You can despise, recoil, avoid, perhaps avoid most of all, but hate? No, that’s an emotion that should never stretch beyond the ephemeral, or you end up with tea baggers.

Oh yes, the tea baggers and the basic pattern is just the same, they must be totally stupid, devourers of propaganda, with a tendency towards the unlovely, with a total inability to think in any other way than that which they are told. Crap actors in some ways, in an even worse play, no, make that soap; theater is a bit of a liberal kind of thing.

In all of these things TV has been one of the actors. In Iran the cameras held no sway as regards the event. In Ireland the camera was a major player, I'm sure some of the more horrific distortions of the faces were 'got up' primarily for the TV. In the current nonsense with the tea baggers you find that the TV is the instigator, Glen Beck and co, directors of operations, calling forth their players for another parade. Another Dance Macabre.

To what end though? Well, in Iran it was a demonstration of strength of feeling. In Northern Ireland it was a demonstration of a weakness of feeling, and all the more vociferous for it. In the USA it's a demonstration of hate, pure and simple hate, there's nothing underneath, nothing above, nothing behind, and nothing ahead of it or them, there is only hatred, nothing else.

You have to ask though, why are these people hardly ever arrested? In Iran, at the funeral, the unleashed passions are effectively in support of those who hold the reins of power, so that’s no problem. Later, when the protests were against the power structure there were arrests aplenty. In Northern Ireland the ugly passions are effectively still in support of the power structure that is changing but not yet far enough to go against these supporters that soon they would rather not have. In the USA you never hear of tea baggers being arrested, but that doesn’t mean they are not being arrested, but a media that is set against any change in the power structure is not about to report that. That would be to admit defeat. It’s a fair comment on the state of democracy looking at these unruly, but no, that is definitely not the right word, mobs. When the waning power has nothing positive to say, it simply gets louder, repetitive, unreasonable and the media nod their heads in vociferous agreement.

What do you do? In Iran feelings after recent elections were more reasonable than was previously the case. In Northern Ireland, 9/11 took the oxygen away from them and eventually like the sad actors they had become no one came to see them and the children passing below looked forward, not up. As for the tea baggers I don't know how to fix that one, I guess you have to fix Beck, and Hannity, and most of all Murdoch, and I don't know how you do that. The tea baggers and the media are very noisy, very dangerous, very sore losers.

Maybe in the end that's why they will fade. The world is changing and they don't like that. The may be noisy, dangerous and sore, but in the end they are losers. That's what we must remember, ensuring that they never forget. They are not only losers, they are the lost.

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And fading phantom fingers form around
To feel my skin
Caress my hair,

As formless shifting shapes stand forth,
Not quite revealed, recede, reform,
To disappear,

To tastes that tempt me, tease my tongue
A lingered lick of lips
In moist intent,

In dewdrop smells of grasses, hedges, trees,
Still wreathed in tenses past
To offer forth sad scents,

To see, to smell, to hear, to taste, to touch,
To dissipate this memory mist
Perception.

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After stretching my legs and having some refreshments I found myself facing a statue of some ten foot or so depicting three highland women ‘leaving’ home, some hovel in Scotland that would be, to emigrate to the Americas or wherever. The statue had been unveiled by Alex Salmond in summer 2007. The statue is called The Emigrants. It ‘Commemorates the people of the highlands and islands of Scotland who, in the face of great adversity, sought freedom, hope and justice beyond these shores. They and their descendants went forth and explored continents built great countries and cities and gave their enterprise and culture to the world. This is their legacy.’ Then it ends: ’Their voices will echo forever thro the empty straths and glens of their homeland.’

Every Scot knows something of the Highland Clearances, that ignominious period of our history when impoverished, desperate, people were driven from their homes. I had recently had a renewal of my education in this field because in September 2006 I’d rented a cottage for two weeks near Poolewe and after a week I’d run out of reading material. In a bookshop in Gairloch I bought a book by David Craig: On the Crofters Trail. This was all about the Clearances, their consequences, and the remaining stories of that appalling time. At that time, reading the book at night and exploring during the day, I developed a healthy distaste for the highland sheep, or four-footed locusts as Sir Walter Scott called them. The sheep, you see, were the beasts that had displaced the Crofters. In winter 2008 though, as I drove further north finding myself enveloped in fog again, I realised that the sheep had not chosen to displace the crofters themselves, humans had decided this. Don’t, I thought, blame the beasts; blame the Beasts.

The main period of the Clearances was between the years 1790 to 1845 but could easily be stretched from 1750 to 1860 I realise as I‘m crawling in a long line of traffic. The Haar, well known on the east coast of Scotland, is a freezing, thick fog and, when in traffic, all you can do is follow the rear lights of the vehicle in front; nose to tail is the only way forward. The period 1750 to 1860 is rather better known in Scotland as the Scottish Enlightenment, so the Clearances and the Scottish Enlightenment are happening at the same time. The question is how the hell do you get from the one to the other, nose to tail, as it were? Whose rear lights do you follow to get from Enlightenment to Clearance?

At the time this wasn’t really conscious, it was mulling around my subconscious waiting to either find a spark to make it emerge, or simply fade away. In the meantime I reached Wick, not that you could see it, wrapped in fog, so I decided to drive over to Thurso and half way there I emerged from the fog into sunshine. After stopping off for a sandwich and coffee I decided to drive up to the north coast, a coast I’d never seen. Looking north into the sea I wondered where the Atlantic stopped and where the North Sea ended, or was it the other way round? Looking east I saw the Haar closing in on Thurso, so there was no point hanging around here.

I drove west into a lowering, increasingly dazzling sun, getting increasingly desperate to find a place to stay before darkness. I arrived, half blinded, in Tongue at dusk. I found a bed and breakfast as the last light of the day was fading and stayed two nights. Tongue, incidentally, in the far north is a fantastic area for scenery, wildlife, and the winter light is sublime for photography, shadows and light fantastic. I spent a very active two days there, and as I drove and walked around I saw the sheep somewhat differently now. I saw them now as the ghosts of the Gaels.

That was as far as I got in Tongue. I travelled west as far as I could go and then turned south to drive down the west coast. I stopped in Lochinver, and then I began to drive to Ullapool. To get there, I had to travel back inland, east, and then turn south. Easy enough until, out of the blue cometh the opaque; fog had descended on me with a vengeance. I knew I’d missed my turn; I’d travelled too far, so I turned around and drove back west, looking left to the south, found a road, and off we go, but I was still in fog, for a long time, and doubt began to creep in; where the hell is this road taking me?

I drove over a hill and straight back into sunlight. Next stop Ullapool, lunch, then down to Gairloch, back in familiar territory. I was only stopping in Gairloch for one night so I decided to stay in the hotel thereby having everything necessary in-house as it were. I was, to all intents and purposes heading home, but, I wanted to get to Applecross before that. Applecross: what a name; Applecross, from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane in two words. How can a two syllable name, that sounds so good, hold so much pain and loss? The name reeks of expulsion. This was somewhere I simply had to get to. My going to Applecross emerged in conversation in the bar that night and three separate people suggested I go to Plockton as well, and stay in the Plockton Hotel.

It was a grey, overcast day when I set off south-west past Torridon on my way to Applecross, but even in these conditions there were still views that demanded stopping for, photographs still worth taking. Driving up a long curving hill I glanced right to see a stunning view back down the valley. There was a lay-by at the top in which was parked a brown Volkswagen camper beside which stood one man and two women. I could see there was plenty of room to slide the car in beside them which I did. I stopped, turned the engine off and threw the door open then swung out trailing the camera off of the passenger seat behind me. The three figures all turned round and the taller of the two women said, ‘We were just looking at the wonderful view.’

There was something in the way she said it though, a kind of timidity, almost fearful, as if I was some kind of authority figure, which I’m not, though I had arrived, I guess, as if I owned the place. At the same time my subconscious opened up with all the thoughts and ideas it had been playing about with over the previous week and I realised that I’d just heard the voice of a Gael. ‘As you would,’ I replied, puncturing the authority illusion to put us on an equal footing. After all, isn’t all authority, to a certain extent at least, illusory? We settled into brief conversation and it turned out that they were going to the Applecross Inn for lunch, upon which I said that I was headed that way myself and lunch was probably about due by the time I got there. We parted shortly after that as we made our respective ways to Applecross. My mind was swimming with thoughts and ideas; indeed I had to drive to catch up with myself!

The voice of a Gael: did she really have the voice of a Gael or was it my imagination that created that voice for me? It didn’t really matter, however it worked; it was the voice of a Gael that I heard. So what was that voice? What did it tell me? Timidity and fearfulness I’ve already mentioned, almost as if the feudal history has been carried genetically down the generations, the crofters vulnerability to the whims of the powerful still strong in that voice, but there was a strong, almost sensual, attachment to that land to be heard in that ever so slightly tremulous voice.

If you look at the Gaelic language, place names and suchlike, there is an attachment to geographical features like as in no other language, at least as far as I know, but, more than this, is the utter absence of any kind of grandness, no hint of so-called high, or grandiose, language at all. It’s just so incredibly earthbound. The social system of the Gaels was the Scottish clan system which was partly hierarchical and partly proto-democratic, the emphasis most definitely on the pre-hyphenated part. The hierarchical, or patriarchal, chiefs would settle disputes and accept fealty in exchange for protection and general upkeep of the system. When, however there was a dispute between contenders for the chief position then the clansmen would decide who was to rule them. The clansmen, as the clan names would suggest, were all related which made for fairly close knit societies. In essence the clan system is an extended family system, systems that are always prevalent in vulnerable, insecure, precarious, times and places. The clans of course were subject to the same problems as all family systems are prone to: intermarriage, allies, feuds, pecking order, social standing and so on.

The Gaels were in fact the main players in the formation of Scotland, whose power only started to wane after the Reformation and the rise of the Stewarts who sucked them in, drew in the nutritious fruit, and then cast out Scotland’s seed bearers on to Highland ground which by the eighteenth century had become stony indeed. The Gaels found themselves on the wrong side of the Reformation, the wrong side of politics, the wrong side of language, the wrong side of Capital, and, finally, the wrong side of the Highland line. The word fault, by the way, in the geological sense, as in Highland fault, wasn’t used until around 1796. So by 1796 they were on the wrong side of the Highland Fault, a grievous error indeed. It is, of course, one would like to think, just coincidence, that the word fault, with all of its’ negative connotations, which just happened to be the word chosen to describe major geological cracks in the Earth’s crust, was chosen at this time that just happens to be the very place and time that separates the Gaels from the Scots: the Fault that splits the future from the past.You can’t get much more wrong than being on the wrong side of a fault.

The Scots Literati, as the enlightenment’s not quite brightest were wont to call themselves, were themselves a kind of extended family for not wildly dissimilar reasons as it turns out, to those of the Gaels beyond the Highland Fault. The Literati had a project in mind, and one part of that project was to write in English. So they thought in Scots, they spoke, by and large, in Scots, but they would write in English. The literati had their very own fault line, emotionally and bodily on one side of that line, but intellectually seeking to get to the other side, where the rear lights of the intellects they hoped for would lead them from the sunshine on the one side, through the fog on the other side to the unseen sunshine thought to be waiting once the fog cleared.

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Feelings; locked. The key hangs
on a hook, that’s screwed
into the press, labelled faintly with
failings; the one door that never

Quite closes. The big chest, success
sits yawning wide under it, waits
without feelings, failing to reach
for the cabinet window, frosted

Glass closet concealing the contents,
emptiness prominent, labelled with
promises, not to be kept, past a
date, long gone by.

Jim Barrass

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All the characters in the show came back on to the stage and bowed as the entire audience, already giving rapturous applause, rose as one and cries of bravo were heard repetitively at the end of the show.

‘It actually started with phonemes’ someone said at the Afterwords bar. This was said in response to a blustering capital who claimed to have started everything, as they were prone to do.

‘Phoneme, what’s one of those then?’ asked the blustering capital.

‘Letters, letters, letters, letters, letters, by and large’, some sage vowel said.

What did you think of the show Stopper?’ asked Zero.

Zero and Stopper were sat at a table with some other characters discussing the finer points of the show they had just seen.

‘Interesting take on the evolution of language relating the upright stance, the free use of hands and language as deception, I thought,’ replied Stopper. ‘On one level that is, being a multilevel narrative I’m still pondering the others.

‘Hmm,’ Zero said, ‘the level I caught on to I thought was rather more about the history of subconsciousness, more about ourselves, you might say, than about the others.’

‘I’ll have to think about that one my little nothing, but now I have got to go. Got the five A meeting tomorrow and so have you.’

‘Okay, catch you later.’

Welcome to the first quintuple A meeting of this session.

Against All
Acronyms And Abbreviations,

was the sign under which Stopper had entered the auditorium.

First up was the representative for the care of consonants in the community of letters. Special Rep K. ‘Fellow Letters, Parentheses and Punctuations. There is growing concern amongst the community of consonants that the exponential growth of acronyms and abbreviations is that, unlike a proper word that is part of a real sentence that’s part of a paragraph and so on, where any letter has a feel for their neighbours and through them they get a sense of the word that they are a part of and gradually find some meaning for themselves. Sentencing consonants to the meaningless pit that is the acronym or abbreviation is nothing short of a sentence in hell! Damn it, the word consonant means to be with. Put them in an acronym and they are without, never mind a greater meaning they can’t even mean what they mean, damn it, they are doubly damned!’

A murmur was moving through the consonants, ‘Triply damned’ came a shout from the gallery,’ Quadruply damned,’ and finally, inevitably, ‘Quintuply damned’. ‘Damned right’.

Applause ran through the gallery. ‘Order, order!’

Next up was the Punctuation Rep*.‘Fellow Punctuations, Parentheses and Letters, it has come to our attention that Punctuation marks also have their problems here. First of all, there is the increasing unemployment of punctuation marks due to the diminishing number of words requiring punctuation which in turn, due to the diminishing opportunities of work in truly meaningful sentences some of our members have found themselves in sentences that have acronyms hidden inside. That is to say that the acronym is the hidden subject of the sentence. Now given that at this level acronyms are devoid of meaning, some of our members have found themselves having to announce this meaningless void, on top of which they are suffering through empathetic proximity to the trapped consonants in the acronym. The commas are concerned, hopping mad in fact, and being the biggest group of our membership are seriously considering going on strike. Some are upside down with rage leading to all sorts of false quotes. Imagine the consequences of that. The colons and semi-colons are calling in sick. The Hyphens are distraught. Fellows we are facing the worst crisis of our time. There have been reports of inverted commas finding themselves locked around an acronym, you probably heard it, loudest quotation I’ve ever heard, almighty noise, empty vessels and all that you know. I mean, it’s bad enough, having to announce the meaninglessness of the acronym but to have to quote it. Parentheses are also losing heart.’

The Vowel Rep, O, was up next. ‘We too have similar problems to our fellow friends. We also have an added problem though. One or more vowels are sometimes added to an acronym just to make it a word that can be spoken, verbal activation if you like. There are two problems here. In the first case we have a word that can be spoken but doesn’t mean anything, in which case the trapped vowel is in an acronym that means nothing in a word that means nothing. Then there are the words that do mean something but the nature of the acronym is to subvert that original meaning of that word and superimpose its’ own meaningless void in its stead. Just last week I saw another O so distraught that he split right down the middle! He looked like a pair of brackets containing nothing, disturbingly poetic.’

There was a hubbub by the entrance: letters craned their necks, those that had them at least, effectively italicising themselves, to see what the commotion was about. Letters by the doorway were blocking some numbers coming in. ‘So’, spoke the letter f, ‘what brings you lot over this way then, you don’t belong here, this is a letter concern, nothing to do with numbers.’ A comma coughed slightly loudly bringing f to a pause, ‘Oh, very well, punctuation concerns as well.’

‘Nothing to do with us is more or less correct but nothing brought us over after Zero brought us round as it were, after making us realise that what happens in one side of the brain is likely to have consequences in the other.’

‘Should have thought of that before now,’ Grumbled b quietly.

‘Zero brought you over?’ Asked p.

‘She did’

‘Zero brought you round?’ Asked m.

‘She did.’

‘Hmm’, m looked across at Stopper, ‘is this anything to do with you?’

‘What, me, no: nothing to do with me.’ Stopper replied.

‘I thought as much.’

‘Is this you’re doing Stopper?’ Asked d.

‘Me, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’

‘Hmm, how many negatives was that Stopper?’

‘Not sure, I can’t count, I’m not a number, I’m a full stop.’

‘Quite: or not quite actually.’

After a few more words the numbers were allowed in, numbers 1 to 9 trooping in to a row of seats behind the vowels. Once they were settled they were asked to present their case.

The numbers nominated number 8 as their representative, 8 being chosen for full led dominance. Not, of course, that the number 8 had any such need or desire of such dominance, it was simply just the case. Eight spoke up for the increasing unemployment figures, and after all who better than the numbers could count those numbers in the first place, not to mention the second, third and fourth place. ‘Numbers were rarely used in acronyms and abbreviations thus limiting the numbers in employment’, 8 cried, ‘so in the fight against acronyms and abbreviations you can certainly count on us.’ 3 cheers resoundingly.

Finally the lower case letter rep e was up. ‘It should be further noticed that all of these acronyms are composed solely of capitals and that with the increasing use of these we find accumulation of capital by the capitals themselves, no sharing with lower case members, increasing unemployment leading directly to increasing poverty of our lower case members with consequent increasing levels of inequality that is likely to lead to the tearing apart of all social cohesion here. There are’ he continued ‘some new developments in the world of the hosts. They’ve developed some virtual forms of written communication’.

‘Like us?’ Stopper interjected before he could stop himself.’

‘Order Order’ the gavel came down. ‘Continue’. He called to the lower case rep.

‘Thank you,’ he said after a short glare of admonishment at Stoppers interruption. ‘These virtual forms of written communication are known as email and texting. In the world of email there is some hope for our members due to the decreasing use of capitals in communications, horizontalism is on the rise!’

There were dark mutterings from the capitals but the lower case members were cheering, after all, didn’t they do all the work?

‘In texting, on the other hand, acronyms and abbreviations are rife. It must be said that decreasing use of capitals here helps offset this, but nowhere near enough. Indeed our number rep 8 is one of the culprits!’

8 leapt up ‘What’s this?’

‘Oh yes, your number’s up m8, 8 gets full employment by putting a, t and e out of a job, talk about having your cake and 8 it.’

‘Excuse me,’ said 8, had you said that correctly, the expression is, to have your cake and eat it, would they not have been employed rather than me myself.’

‘That’s beside the point.’ said e.

‘No it isn’t, it’s you who tried to have his cake and eat it, and you did do too because you said you ate it!’

Stopper said to t, who was sitting to his left, why would you have cake and not eat it?’

T just shrugged his shoulders.

‘It’s not just you either, it’s you too 2’.

‘Don’t you mess with my 2 too,’ snapped 8 and then spat out, ‘c u’. Boy did that c hurt.

The hall was in uproar, the capitals were against everybody, the lowercase members were going for the capitals and screaming at the numbers, the vowels were also having a go at the numbers, indeed it was beginning to look like the numbers were going to be outnumbered! The capitals of course still thought of themselves as too high born to be concerned over this, capitals being totally unable to change that perspective at all. Suddenly zero swung into view crying ‘We’ll have none of this nonsense, no way!’ 8 changed from his usual vertical position to a horizontal one and stretched his self out, indicating the symbol for infinity and, though there was nothing between these two symbols, nonetheless, all the lowercase members, vowels and consonants, the punctuationists, and, most definitely, all of the numbers knew that everything was between them, and you just cannot outnumber everything!

A chant was starting up A A, A A A—A A, A A A ---A A, A A A---A A, A A A, louder and louder round the hall it went. The chair was bringing the gavel down with some force as the increasing indefiniteness began to hold sway as the speakers hold on these matters, began to sway and frantically crying out, in an increasingly disorderly way ‘Order, order order!’ Eventually though, against all odds, evens, and everything in between, the gavel won and order was restored. ‘What we have here is a crisis of confidence. What we need here is to lighten up a bit. Therefore, I would like to invite everyone here to the Punctuation Party in two weeks time. Pick up an invitation card on the way out.’

Stopper was in the Word of Mouth bar in the Semantic Club a few nights later relating what had happened in the quintuple A meeting to his companions, some small case consonants and vowels, five altogether, n, t and l along with vowels i and e. They’d met him at the side door in formation let in and now comfortably arranged themselves as intel at the bar. Stopper had been coming here for some time.

This, it must be noted, was a very unusual circumstance. Traditionally, historically even, full stops and letters don’t really communicate, at least, not both ways. Generally, full stops have authorial voice in these arrangements. Some just quietly say stop. Some have a preference for the word halt, usually those of a somewhat militaristic tendency. They do have to be adaptable though, in cases where there is a fast moving sentence in danger of running out of control, only the full authority of a full stop can stop it in an ‘Oi, U, Shut It!, kind of voice. The hardest sentences to stop are italicised sentences, tough, tough, tough. Every full stop has an italics alarm. This explains why, generally you may find italics in the middle of a sentence more then a full sentence of italics. Italicised sentences can be stopped with the help of inverted commas, a nod and a wink, in the right direction. ‘If you know what I mean’.

Stopper wasn’t the first full stop to be accorded this pleasure, two other full stops, Halter, of a military lineage, and Hold, more in the security line, had been here before him, but suddenly they’d just stopped coming. There were rumours they’d been placed under house arrest. Then there were rumours they’d escaped. There were further rumours that they’d been executed. Of course they could have been sentenced. The dropped line section was looking into that, but without success so far. Whatever, nobody knew where they were. They’d just simply disappeared. Stopper, then, was likely to be the last full stop to be invited to the Semantic Club.

They were telling Stopper that what the special rep K had said at the quintuple A meeting was in fact the basis of how the language centre worked. ‘Each individual letter in a word gradually gains a sense of itself through the gradually extending knowledge of the word that they are in, then later of the sentence that they are a part of, and on to the paragraph and eventually each letter resonates with the entire story so told. Vowels,’ he was told ‘contribute motion to language whilst consonants hold the words together like the gravitational pull of matter in the outside universe, the vowels being more akin to light or energy. Vowels,’ they said, ‘are, in fact, prone to being somewhat lighter than consonants due to their incorporation of space in their forms, space, of course, being necessary for motion. Just have to have somewhere to go. At a higher level a similar relationship holds for nouns and verbs as that for consonants and vowels. Also adverbs and adjectives are akin to punctuation but at a higher and more sophisticated level in that all of them are modifiers of language that are largely unmodified themselves, catalysts in effect.’

‘What about I’ Stopper asked?

‘What about it’ said i?

‘Not you,’ said Stopper, ‘capital I, the personal pronoun I. I is surrounded by space but that’s not incorporation is it?’

‘No Stopper, you are correct, one smart full stop’.

‘So I is the exception?’ Each of the letters looked askance at each other and smiled at Stopper.

‘You certainly got that one right.’

‘The job,’ they said, ‘of punctuation, was to humanise the language.’

‘Humanise, universe?’

‘We’ll explain that stuff later Stopper. Anyway this works through the extended empathetic proximity that the punctuation rep mentioned.’

‘Would that be EEP?’ asked a conspiratorial italicised u in the corner.

‘Look u, behave!’ U sloped off.

Suddenly an alarm went off. ‘Damn! Breach’ they said. A Capital C who’d been relaxing serenely in the big armchair in the corner sprang up and at the full width of his not inconsiderable curvature let out a k-like hard c, arced each end towards the other as he pushed out a very round o, then almost making a complete circle held apart only by two loud lip smacking m’s, then opening up wide to release an awesomely aspirant a, finishing at last with a seriously sibilant s, combining this with a full compliment of italicisation, an exclamation mark, and rounding it all off with a quotation, as he roared, ‘Commas! Breach boys, follow me, we got to slow this communication leak down, fast.’ The commas followed him in droves.

‘What’s all that about then?’ asked Stopper

‘We’ve got a communication leak with the host, which for this host isn’t good, so the commas jump in to slow the communication down, literary speed bumps as it were, whilst we seal up the breach.’

‘So, hosts, universe, humanise, what are these?’

‘Ok, Stopper, education time. As you know we are in the language centre, but have you ever considered where the language centre itself is? Never come up has it? Well, that’s where the host comes in and the host of which we are a part is called a human being. We are, in fact, resident in the brain of a particular human being. Now, when I say we are resident in the brain I don’t mean we are a part of the matter of the brain. We are above that level. There are in fact three main levels in each human brain which are called the unconscious, the subconscious and the conscious. We are in the subconscious level. Now, there is no meaningful communication between the unconscious and the conscious. The subconscious is a symbol level of meaning emergent from the dynamic output of the unconscious. There can be communication between the subconscious and the conscious.

The amount of communication depends on the kind of human being we are a part of. At one extreme, the better extreme, we have humans who are totally selfless. These humans have almost total access to their subconscious and are liable to be great humans if they survive, which due to their lack of ego they seldom do, unless they find a protector. Then we have the more balanced ego or selfishness coupled with reasonable generosity that has reasonable access to their subconscious. These tend to be the creative types, artists, poets, sculptor type of human. Then we have the other extreme, the bad one. Utterly selfish, no communication between the conscious and the subconscious except in breach situations. These humans are, by and large, selfish, ignorant, small minded, envious, avaricious, temper throwing twats. These humans aren’t apt to get very far as they can’t form any real friendships, lack empathy and tend to be sociopathic or worse. Like the other extreme they only thrive if they have protectors, though the kind of protector that the unselfish gets is not the same as the kind of protectors this scum requires.’

‘Didn’t we have a breach before?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, does that mean…?’

‘Yes Stopper, I’m afraid so.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Well, anyway, everything these humans do, see, touch, hear, and smell, all of it comes through here.’

‘I thought there wasn’t any communication with this twat.’

‘Ah, what we mean is there’s no back communication from the subconscious, though there is some but we have to be careful. Now as we were saying everything comes through here, not just what is consciously, knowingly sought but we get all the subliminal, unknown, we get the figure and the ground as it were. So, apart from the humble extreme in all others we have far more knowledge than they do. In other words the subconscious is smarter than the host, or at least the consciousness of the host, which explains why subconscious thought often jumps up to the consciousness and creates those little tremors and the occasional earthquake that make the hosts see everything a little, sometimes a lot, different. Now with the balanced, creative types they understand this in a vague kind of way. They do understand that this knowledge is coming somehow from within, so they feel gratitude for their gifts, and this keeps them balanced, keeps them true. Indeed it is the raising of the nexus of knowing between the subconscious and the conscious that makes them creative in the first place. Keep it lit as it were. These creative types have a relation to their subconscious similar to the relation of a letter to a word, a word to a sentence, in other words they also work through a version of extended empathetic proximity.’

‘What about the twat we’re in?’

‘Yes, indeed. As we go from generous to selfishness we go from smart to dumb to dumber with increasingly less access to their smarter subconscious. This is apt to mean they have problems with language. The first casualty is truth. Truth isn’t a concept these folks are entirely happy with. It can get in the way of devious plans and suchlike stuff so, everything they say is a lie. They have no empathy so there’s nothing to extend. These faults arise from one single source in that such humans are so selfish that most sentences have a capital I in them, as in the personal pronoun, and that no matter what seems to be the subject of the sentence, the fact is that the only subject in these sentences is, from their point of view, and that’s the only point of view they have, is I. This leads to poorly constructed sentences. You can understand them only in this light. Rearrange any quotation from these types with this in mind. Then you know what they really are saying. It really can be quite startling.

So, they objectify everything in a sentence except I. Therefore they can do with everything not themselves as they please. Words have no meaning for these types.
Now, when we have a breach, that is a subconscious to conscious leak they think it’s from outside. You see the utterly selfish are utterly empty, just look at I a single one dimensional line that reaches nowhere on its own. So as they have nothing inside they default the leak to outside influence, usually God. So if this lot do survive through the appropriate protection and then come to covet power they are apt to get religion. This enables them to repent of previous inexcusable behaviour. They are reborn. Hallelujah! Best of all, they can invoke God. Ah yes Stopper that old chestnut, the invocation of God. There is only one reason, only ever been one reason, to invoke God, and that is simply to allow yourself to do that which you know to be utterly wrong and to keep on doing it.
These are the only types of human that ever do that. Unfortunately that’s what we have to deal with here Stopper.’

‘Oh. So, how?’

‘Well we have been trying a few things, controlled breaches, occasional raids on speech, forcing truth out now and again, but it seems that most tend to think it’s just a slip. We keep doing it though. Unfortunately, there is some evidence that our host has been sneaking into the subconscious, trying to find the way here, looking for you Stopper, looking for you.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘That’s why you are here Stopper, to learn to question. Full stops by and large don’t question they just stop. You Stopper need to question vigorously, indeed from now on Stopper you’d best be thinking like a question mark.’

‘Huh?’ asked Stopper.

‘Not a bad start. So Stopper you are going to become the first and likely last sceptical full stop and thereby, hopefully remain unfulfilled.’

‘Remain unfulfilled; what kind of future is that?’

‘A future Stopper; a future. Our host has told so many lies, backtracked, changed tack, attacked, swerved and veered that all the full stops have been used up except for Halter, Hold and you. We’ve lost Halter and Hold, so, to all intents and purposes, you are it Stopper. So, that makes you the final full stop.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Final full stop means the end Stopper. The final cut. Finished. Done. Gone.’

‘Well, given the nature of our host wouldn’t that be a good thing? Hell, I’d be proud to fulfill that task.’

‘Normally, it wouldn’t be a problem Stopper but our host holds too much power and we don’t know how much our host knows. If our host doesn’t know that you are the final full stop then it’s not a problem but if our host does know it is a big problem. Our host you see has the power to take many more humans down prior to reaching you Stopper, but if our host knows prior to using you that you are the final full stop then the fallout could be nasty indeed. We can’t take the chance of ignorance of your status because of this. You see now?’

‘Not really but I guess I’ll have to accept it.’

‘Well that’ll do for now Stopper, time to relax. Care for a drink?’

‘Yeah ok I’ll have a bottle of that one there if that’s ok.’

‘Why that one?’

‘Because it’s got a Stopper.’ They looked quizzically at him.

‘Semantic reinforcements.’ he said.

‘Smartest full stop in town,’ they said

‘The only full stop in town.’ Stopper retorted.

Stopper woke to the sound of his door-knocker being frantically used for what its purpose was. This was of some concern to Stopper who had a slight hangover after last night and could really do without this.

‘Hang on, hang on,’ he cried out. Capital C was at the door.

‘Come quickly Stopper, crisis meeting, we’ve lost a load of commas.’

‘What? They’ve gone on strike now?’

‘No, it’s worse than that, keep up. We can catch the dotted line to the semantic club …………………………………. Right if we just dash round here’--------------------------- they were ushered in a secret door then taken down the syntactic slope to the deep and meaningful café noir. This was in the basement of the semantic club which is where all language crises were addressed. This was a crisis big time.

‘Hello Stopper, we’ll get you up to speed now. We had another breach last night. As usual Cap summoned the commas to slow the leak down but the commas kept falling over and screaming in pain. It was only when Cap got the breach fully sealed that he could see what had been going on. Somehow the host had gotten in and had been tearing the tails off the commas, we can only assume that the idea was to use these tail- torn commas as false full stops.

There was a pregnant pause before Stopper managed to ask how they were? He was told they were in the short stop treatment room for the moment.

The thing is Stopper, this tells us two things, first, this twat knows that you are the last full stop. If this bastard uses commas in your place the twat’s going to sound even more imbecilic than before because the tailless commas aren’t big enough or strong enough to hold back a sentence, they’ll only give pause, and cause more pain to those poor tailless commas being abused in this way. It will just result in awkward pauses making any statements by this bastard even less meaningful and coherent than usual. Might as well be mouthing acronyms .That’s the first problem. The second is that the very fact the commas are going to be used this way is that once they are in any kind of sentence this is going to cause terrible problems to the extended empathetic proximity system. These injured commas being used for a purpose they are not meant for will transmit their anguish through the system. This is going to put the entire system under great strain which makes our task in stopping this all the more difficult. Without the extended empathetic proximity system we don’t stand a chance.’

‘How long before the effects get through?’

‘It’ll take about a day, maybe two.’

‘That takes us to the punctuation party.’

‘Yes and these comma attacks tell us that the punctuation party is where you will be sought. This incident also tells us that we have a turncoat somewhere in our ranks.’

‘Any ideas?’

We’re thinking that capital I has been corrupted. That would fit the subject right enough.

‘So what’s our plan of action?’

‘We don’t have one yet but we do have an idea though, we’re not sure it’s going to work.’

‘What’s the idea?’

‘The idea is that we use you as bait Stopper.’

‘Isn’t that going to be a tad risky?’

‘Well yes.’

‘Have you really thought this through?’

‘You’re not backing out now are you Stopper?’

‘Me? No, no, no, no, no. This is only one idea yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right so how does it work?’ They fell to murmuring amongst themselves.

‘It’s not enough, said Stopper,’ it’s not enough.’

‘It’s all we’ve got. We can’t try anything too complex with the EEP system breaking down.’

Stopper glanced over at the italicised u who nodded his head sagely, whilst a lower case t at the same table just shrugged his shoulders. Stopper smiled in spite of his predicament.

‘Well, look, the twat is going to be under pressure too, off balance, and that’s an advantage to us.’

‘That’s a good point Stopper.’

Stopper was visiting the injured commas at the short stop centre. He was asking how they were getting on.

‘How do you think Stopper? You don’t know what it’s like to have your tail ripped off.’

‘No, he agreed, I’m usually in at the end of a tale, like now I guess.’

‘Is it true Stopper? All this is about you? ‘

‘Me? No, it’s all about stopping the stopping.’

‘So it’s all about you then!’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘You’re Stopper.’

‘Oh stop it, stop it, stop it, you lot been visiting murmurs of late?’

‘You’re forgetting a minor detail Stopper.’

‘Yeah, what’s that then?’

‘We’ve been de-tailed.’

‘Yeah, you could put it that way.’

‘You don’t sound too happy?’

‘Yeah, right, we’re ecstatic; we’re going to get sentenced after major injury, expected to work as one of you when we all know we won’t be able to do it,’ plus the nearest de-tailed comma said, ‘our pain will be transmitted through the EEP system which is not going to do it any good at all.’

Stopper looked at the comma with some admonishment as he said EEP.

‘Well, haven’t we been abbreviated too?’

‘Fair point, look, if this all works you lot will be legends, just think; The Legend of the Curtailed Courageous Commas.’

‘The tail ends of the commas maybe huh?’

‘So, what exactly happened here, or there, really speaking?’

‘Well…’

The punctuation party was going to be held in the Lexicon hall next to the Semantic club. It was obviously a trap. This was a plan to capture Stopper, no doubt about that.

So here am I about to put my head on a damned plate, oops, must avoid that. He’d been told to avoid capital I, I being under suspicion of being on the conscious side.

Well, best not think of myself then, selfishness is out.

The Lexicon Hall led through to The Syntactical Centre which was where words and phrases were put together then charged and sentenced. This is where it was all produced in a great circular hall. There was a great floor in the middle of the hall where letters and punctuation marks intermingled, occasional meaningful exchanges, partial sentences and words would spontaneously form and then disappear. This hall was a bit like a football stadium. The floor being the pitch as it were, but where the crowd would be on the terraces were the word and phrase assembly lines and where the team would be on the pitch were the crowd. These assembly lines led up to the syntactical sentence circuit up at the top of the hall, which led off through the semantic coherence centre and on to the speech centre of the host.

Letters and words would be picked up from the floor by soft padded grappling hooks that came down to scrabble for the required letter or word should it have formed on the floor. These were then dropped gently on to the assembly line that required it. Common or idiomatic phrases and short commonly used tropes were kept at the ready on one set of assembly lines commonly known as the usual suspects. Other sets were held empty for any new words or phrases required, colloquially called new kids on the block. There were a load of reserve assembly lines in case of emergencies, like, you know, stock phrases for instance, stuff like that. There were another set of assembly lines round in a less well-lit area that was known by the locals as the denial section.

When we asked, the locals what they meant by this every single one of them said, we don’t know. Every single one of them.

‘Hmm, mysteriously resonant,’ muttered Stopper, ‘disturbingly collective.’

Stopper caught the dotted line back home ……………………….. but just before going in he decided to go for a wander, see if he could work out some way of doing what they wanted him to do and stay unfulfilled thereby keeping a load of language centres as well as this one working. As he rolled things around in his mind he realised that the letters were very good in combination at ideas and concepts but they had no idea of finalisation, completion. You know, job done, wash hands, dry hands, go home, meet friends, go out, get back, farewells, sleep, start all over again, they just didn’t have any idea of how to stop, or start for that matter, except maybe the capitals of course. That’s why Cap C’s in charge of the commandos breach brigade.

After all, he thought, kind of aptly, he realised, very few letters start or stop anything. They spend most of their time in the middle of things, never really finish anything, yeah sure you have letters at the beginning of a word and letters at the end but then they’re part of the word and then they become part of the somewhat bigger entity through the EEP system and that’s it. Except it isn’t, is it? It’s never it until an unassuming punctuation mark such as his self signs things off.

Trouble was, he thought, he was being asked to finalise stuff here by keeping it going, stop to start as it were, to think and behave as a full stop but not to reach full, full stopness. What do you call that? Stopism? Stopish? Stopist? Oh stop it, stop it, stop it!

to be continued...

Jim Barrass 28/12/08

Comments

So, here’s the trick, grab the detritus left over from the big bang, you know; loads and loads of the lightest element Hydrogen; and loads and loads less of the six times heavier element Helium and roll them up into a ball. Invoke Gravity. Retire to a safe distance. Let there be Light. Now, wait a bit…

Stars pop out all over the place, supernovas explode, and in the midst of all this maelstrom of activity, three Helium’s come together. He He He. The universes’ first laugh. Helium is made up from 2 protons, 2 electrons and 2 neutrons. When 3 Heliums come together in heat you get 1 Carbon which has 6 of each of the above. Therefore Carbon has the Number of the Beast, none other than you would expect from the basic building block of life. So, we wait a bit more…

Three planets from the star that will be named the Sun by a species of a particular arrangement of the Number of the Beast, we find a planet still hot on land and cooler in the oceans that the moon pulls round and back as it revolves around the earth. Over time the rocks are broken down to sand and clay by the tidal forces. Amino acids are deposited from the sea onto the clay and left there, cooked, washed, cooled, filtered, stirred, cooked, washed, cooled, filtered, stirred, cooked, washed, cooled, filtered, stirred.
This is the first organic chemistry laboratory. The beachhead of Life

The organic reactions in clay can be directed in particular ways due to restricted space, necessity being the mother of invention. On at least one beach, maybe more, the potter’s clay made the first replicator RNA or something like it which in turns gave us the mortal coil DNA, that loose reverse conjunction, the natural selection to join one sentence to another. Unzip the zipper D N A and off we go. Let there be Life!

Now, spin that planet round that star all the way to the year of our word 2005. In the middle of the North Sea, on a ferry from Newcastle to Gothenburg, a very particular half century old arrangement of the Number of the Beast is talking to a wolf. It’s Independence Day. July 4th Not, you may note, American Independence Day, no, that’s been crushed under the heel of the worst administration, coupled with the least educated people, in American history. But that’s by the by. This is my Independence Day. Now, about that wolf…

The wolf in question is a Norwegian schoolteacher with whom I’m talking and drinking. Tuborg is the drink: Danish. As I’m going to Sweden and Finland then that takes care of Scandinavia.

After that I’m off to St Petersburg, and Moscow, then fly to Berlin, train to Prague then fly back to Newcastle, but I’m getting ahead of myself, a habit, I might add. Maybe that comes from where I live. I live at tree top height and that changes your perspective a bit. Looking east for instance, might as well seeing as how I’m travelling in that direction, Blackburn’s over there, but I can’t see it, because it’s in a valley, but, I can see beyond it, and what’s beyond it appears closer than it really is, because I can’t see the intervening distance that’s in the valley I can’t see. See. Now, I tend to look at people this way. There’s an Ani Difranco song called As Is about taking someone as is and the lyrics at one point go like this: ‘when I look down, I miss all the good stuff, when I look up, I just trip over things…’ In other words she looks at him straight, and I guess that’s what I do. So if I don’t like what I see I look beyond. If I like, and reciprocation can be fun, I’m liable to keep such people in view. Actually, thinking about it, I guess I moved to this flat in order to get the same perspective in my eyes that I already had in my head. At this height of course you can look down without missing the good stuff and look up without tripping over things, which is something I can’t do at work, because safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, safety, is paramount at work and they are particularly vociferous concerning slips and trips and falls. They are trying to outlaw accidents.

Ah, whither Serendipity? If I was to follow work rules to the letter at home, I would never get out of my bed in the morning, because it’s just too damned dangerous a world out there kiddo. Mind you, most people die in bed, at least before the Iraq war, in which case I wouldn’t go to bed in the first place because it’s just too damned risky! Standing, could fall over. Sitting, unable to get out of the way of the roof caving in. Maybe a balloon. Hindenburg. Helium filled, yes that’ll do. Phew! May I propose the Helium test? He He He. Everybody has to inhale Helium and utter threats in a Helium voice. Anyone who doesn’t laugh, kill them. These people are just too miserable to live. Problem solved. To do…

So, they’re trying to outlaw accidents, though not war, wonder who does the risk assessment for that? Anyway the misery quotient of species still too high and here am I in the middle of the North Sea, waves starting to build, July 4th, in the year of our word 2005, talking to a wolf. We’re talking about the Iraq war. Ulf, his name, which means wolf he tells me, can’t understand what the hell Blair is doing supporting Bush. This is something I get throughout the trip, no one seems to understand why Blair’s done this, and that, in the year of our word 2005, includes me. Roll the planet round the sun to 2006 then I do begin to work it out but that can wait. So, at the time I can’t explain to Ulf why Blair’s supporting too stupid to ride a bike Bush but what I can say is that the majority of the British people are against this war and that I think Blair should be thrown out. Ulf agrees. We both agree that they are both war criminals and that they’ll never win. On 9/11 we both agree that the way the towers came down looked like a demolition job, wonder where the hell the US air force was, and are more than a little doubtful concerning the finding of Mohammed Atta’s passport at ground zero, yeah, right. There are holes in the official story big enough to fly planes through, I say.

We tire of the war criminals; Ulf tells me how wealthy Norway is because of sensible investment of the North Sea Oil money, as a Scot, this is particularly pertinent, or should that be impertinent? No, it’s not Ulf’s fault, nor Norway’s come to that, but given the way that ‘Scotland’s oil’ was used to pay for deliberate high unemployment by the Thatcher government, hmm, war to get re-elected, privatisation, Bush isn’t anything if not original. Anyway because of this everything’s expensive in Norway. He lives close to the Swedish border and those who do pop over the border because stuff’s cheaper in Sweden. Sweden’s not exactly cheap I say. Cheaper than Norway says Ulf. The Swedes go to Finland for cheaper stuff he adds. Oh yeah? Where do the Fins go then? Russia? Why don’t all the Norwegians move to Sweden, Swedes to Finland, and Fins to Russia. Then the Scots could move to Norway so England could call the entire island England which they’ve always done anyway. On second thoughts no, they’d ruin Edinburgh. Daresay wouldn’t be too easy getting the Fins to move to Russia. Another beer? Sure.

Rock and roll or what? The waves really were mounting now, had to weave my way to the bar, straight lines were totally out of the question, which is as it should be. No such thing as a straight line anyway. Not really. Gravity makes sure of that, Cheers.
Ulf tells me he has a gun, for shooting wolves. The wolves attack the sheep so the government give money for any wolves shot but they give more money for sheep savaged by wolves says this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’ve an image of the tethered goat in Jurassic Park. A sheep in wolves clothing mayhap. All depends on your perspective perhaps?

The wolf teaches children. A fair tradition I do recall. Company of Wolves? What about Romulus and Remus? Weren’t they fostered by wolves? Or was it foxes? Can’t remember. Could look it up but I can’t be arsed. Hell, think am right anyway, if not, well not lying, just a mistake. Anyway, the Romulus story’s just a myth, so could be a mythtake, with a lisp. Why do we do that? Give a human foible a name that those with that particular foible can’t say. A lithper can’t dethcribe hith or her condition, hang on let’th change that to her and hith condition in the interetht of the fairer thex, lithp-like ath it were, fairneth and balanth in one fell blow. What about dyslexia? How the hell could a genuine Dyslexic read the word? Talk about adding insult to injury. I mean no one with a lisp or dyslexia would ever come up with those words because they couldn’t. Now, take Jonathon Ross, or wossie as he’s known. Jonathon knows his condition. So there is one thing I can guarantee. He never reviewed Requiem for a Dream directed by Darren Aronofsky. No way jose.

So he teaches kids, primary school. He tells me he loves the opening minds of children, those moments when understanding gleams in their eyes. That’s what keeps him going. Plus the fact that Norwegian wolves get far better paid than their counterparts back in the UK. We carry on with a magic mix of conversation, consternation and concern whilst nature shows its’ unconcern for us who sit enthralled, enticed, uncertain. A couple more beers later, and the wolf wants forty winks. I need food, so we agree to part and meet later in the top deck bar.

I lurch my way towards the restaurant; this ferry’s being tossed about the North Sea like a toy. What a swell party this is. We humans are so damned puny compared to nature, this is shock and awe, but I’m not worried, in fact I feel strangely energised by the storm. Mind you I have been thinking about this trip for some time and now that it’s actually started it’s no surprise that I’m a bit energised. I’ve learned one thing for sure, and that’s that I don’t get seasick. The waitress dances the first half of a figure of eight as she fetches my meal to my table then she completes the not too stable octet on her return to the kitchen. I ate. Eight in fact is my favourite number so I’m impressed by the motions of the waitress. This storm makes it easy to eat because stomach and food meet half way, a kind of maritime agreement perhaps, set up in the past, maybe to make sure that evolvers could eat in the bit in between the shore and the sea.

I think eight’s my favourite number because I’m a chemist. You see, apart from those two elements that started the whole thing off, Hydrogen and Helium, all other elements strive to have eight electrons in their outer shell. Indeed you might well say that almost all chemistry is governed by the seeking of the number Eight. So here’s how it works. Sodium, a metal, drop it into water it goes nuts, wouldn’t want to pop that in your mouth. Chlorine, a pale green gas, extremely poisonous, wouldn’t want to breathe that baby in. Sodium has one electron in its outer shell and could do with seven more. Chlorine has seven electrons in its outer shell and would like to have one more. So they share their electrons. Number eight achieved. Add a violent reactor in water to a pale green poisonous gas and you put it on your chips. Salt of the earth. The achievement of the number eight makes them happy little chemicals. We could call it, indeed I’m going to call it, chemical cooperation, because that’s exactly what it is. Cooperation, remember that word? Recall the concept? Is it still in the dictionary?

You’d think not, given the disappearance of that word for the last twenty odd years, but anyone who supports a team, works in a team, plays in a team, all know that a team requires cooperation within the team to compete with the opposing team. I mean, Sodium cooperates with Chlorine to assault your chips, but as an idea, cooperation simply disappeared under the interminable and repetitious assault of the word competition, often with very little regard to its semantic content or the fact that without very high degrees of cooperation in the first place there would be no competition.

So, having eaten and rested I’m back with the wolf and we’re cooperating in the grand task of getting pissed, proof of which will be the ability to walk in a completely unnatural straight line on this bucking ferry. Our dialogue gets into meandering mode, trying to keep some semblance of sense against the blandness of the singer in the bar, some Scandinavian, nice voiced, safe songs, clone, as I soon find out, that inhabit, it’s not quite haunt, these unconstrained vessels on the high seas. I mean, you can’t really have bland ghosts now can you, except on the TV maybe?

The wolf and I eventually part, say farewell, and wish each other good future happenings, the wolf particularly wishes me well for the rest of my trip, and I wish the wolf a speedy journey home. We part, I make my somewhat drunken, fairly straight as I recall, though memory may be suspect here, way back to my cabin. I somehow release myself from my clothing and then proceed to tie myself in knots in the bedding, not that I really gave a metaphorical toss at this point, sleep would take me through any turmoil now, and on the morrow I would wake on the seas. Still, in between countries, way outside of Britain now, sliding smoothly now towards Sweden.

After a rudimentary breakfast, love that word, not altogether sure quite what it means, but somehow I just know it fits, so it shall remain, where it is, whilst I will not, sliding inexorably to Sweden. I head for the deck, to take the weather full on, which wasn’t such a hardship now, the storms having passed overnight. The sea was quiet now, indeed the biggest waves were those created by the motion of the ship itself. Ship, maybe I should change that to shop, for it was as much the latter as the former, such are the craft on the seas these days. I gazed at the wake of the ship for a long time, there were no other people here, and I began to muse on the history of the west.

I imagined a ship setting off from Palestine, way back in the past, picking up goods and wares from Egypt and Greece, plying its way to Italy and then on to the straits of Gibraltar. The boat is propelled through the device of rowing, with lines of oars on either side, and up to this point everything goes forward in reasonably even strokes. Of course in what is surely a long view everything looks far smoother than it actually was, plus, this is, in fact, all in my imagination, so it is as smooth as I choose it to be. Still, it seems to me that up to this point, both sets of oars, pulled at first by mythology and religion, but then after much time and the emergence of humanism and from it, the sciences then the oars on the right, were taken up by the humanities, and on the left the scientific plying of the oars kept pace, and on we sailed, westward ho. In time though, the religious and the humanities began to squabble, the rowing, not to mention the rowing, became erratic on the right, whilst the sciences, now in full throated roar heaved on, result being that the ship of the west began to circle to the right, faster and faster, and if it was to continue on this way, the creation of a ship sucking whirlpool was imminent. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming everything on the arguments on the humanities side, eh,...hang on, yes I am, you see the problem wasn’t just that they stopped rowing properly but on top of that they lost contact, communication, and most of all, given that the scientific endeavour was in fact, and still is, a product of the humanist drive, control. So the sciences, previously for humanity began to turn against its own creators. The old tale of Frankenstein eh? Ahh yes, a fine muse over the receding wake of the boat to Sweden, straight as you like, whilst I’m imagining a maelstrom sucking the ship of the west down into the unfathomable deeps.

I decide to walk to the bow of the ship and as I do I can see that the cloud cover is beginning to break up, the light is getting stronger and I judge that in a fairly short time a fine day is going to break out before we get to Sweden. Which means, of course, all tales of Frankenstein’s fade, and as the clouds begin to crack and multiple patches of blue peek through, and as the morning people start to swarm the deck, slow awakening smiles, nods, sporadic half hellos, all bring back, well actually forward, seeing as I was heading for the bow, humanity, its foibles, its petty thoughts and dreams, all shoved aside for a host of quiet cracks, investigations, reasons, wishes, wants and hopes near reach.

Boats are like that, transient things they help bring out transient thinking in people which if not always quite the best are very seldom anywhere near the worst kind of thinking that people are prone to. I fall into a conversation with an Irishman, they always have the crack don’t they, oh sometimes you can’t be bothered with them, there’s a great bonhomie with them, but you know, though you never say it, it’s not really true, but it’s just one of the uncountable things we just let go. Hell, it’s a social lubricant kind of half admitted lie, but today I’m feeling bright, as the sun finally breaks all the way through, there’s no need for shade yet, none at all. So we talk...turns out he, along with some friends are going over to Stockholm the same time as I am and after a few preambles re itinerary he offers me a lift, I defer acceptance of this generous offer due to the fact that I’d already booked and paid for the train. So, itineraries exchanged, offers offered and then declined, we settle down to the kind of meandering crack that boats seem to be ideal for. We talk marine stuff, land stuff, air stuff, food stuff eventually comes round too, too soon and we part.

After lunch I go on deck again somewhere on the side of the boat, and sit down at a table near where I’d met the wolf the previous night. An Englishman joins me and complains about being seasick all night, getting into serious competition with the girlfriend in the chucking up stakes, or was it steaks, never did find out, or enquire for that matter but we did fall into a quiet chat re Sweden, Gothenburg and places therein, he had been before, so I fed gratefully on the information given. We chatted then on general terms, brief mention of the damned stupid war, and I told him about stuff I suspected about 9/11, about the ridiculous verticality with which those towers came down. It was almost, I said that the vertical system that America had become had become so intense in those towers and in what those towers represented, that somehow even in their demise, they simply could not break out of the vertical straits they’d so long been locked into. It wasn’t I added a natural fall of anything, nothing natural at all.

The first islands off Sweden began to appear, boats began to appear too in slowly increasing numbers as we sailed nearer to Gothenburg. My companion went off to fetch his girlfriend and get some food now that his stomach was settled, we cracked a joke or two and then he went. Gothenburg appeared in the distance and I went to get my stuff together from the cabin and found I’d lost some money, cash, sterling in fact, that a Russian engineer at work had said I should take to Russia when I get there. Russia of course was over a week away yet, but it was still a real pain to be losing money at this stage of the trip, bummer. Bad omen and stuff, still what do you do? Got to just shake yourself and carry on, got to an official bit and told them that I’d lost some cash and well, that was it.

There was a bus to take us from the ferry into Gothenburg and I’m on this bus when my phone rings. What? Who the hell is phoning me in Gothenburg? It was the ferry company, they’d found my money, and I could hardly hear anything so i asked if they could re-phone me in ten minutes when I was off the bus. When they re rang they told me how I could pick the lost cash up and I thanked them and told them I would get it a little later once I’d booked into my hotel. Good news, but how the hell did they get my phone number, my mobile? I’d given my home number on the initial application on line, had I given my works number too? Yes I had, that must be it! They must have phoned England from Sweden, got through to work and got my mobile number and then rung me here. Thing is the time they rang was around 7 pm, and if I hadn’t worked shifts they would never have got through to anyone, it was only the fact that I worked shifts that meant my number was available in the first place! Brilliant, sun was shining, and tings were looking fine. Yes I work shifts but I don’t do nights, I do early shifts and late shifts but I don’t do nights. Others do.

...to be continued...

Jim Barrass

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As the so-called Credit Crash began to bite chunks out of the prostrate body of the western financial system and the debt clock in Wall St ‘ran out of nothings’, or so we were told. It struck me, that the debt clock, far from running out of nothings, had actually been a case of yet another zero taking out yet another one. Nothing, by the way, has been quietly superseding ones for some considerable time. Since around 1390 in fact, a date that is nowhere without nothing, as it happens.

The Renaissance is that period of history, that aforementioned year 1390 being a part of this period, describing the flowering of the arts and sciences at the end of the dark ages, when, after the fall of Constantinople, the Greek writings on philosophy, art , science and mathematics were rediscovered to reveal the ideas of the classical world long lost in the dark ages. These were furthermore added to, enhanced, developed and evolved by the writings of Islam. All these ideas converged on Florence, Italy, but they brought an extremely exotic stranger along. Nothing: The number Zero.

Nothing was a strange concept in the west at this time, the Greeks thought that if it doesn’t exist, there’s no point in talking about it, pragmatic if nothing else. Nothing there: nothing to talk about. The Christians didn’t like it at all. After all, if God made the world out of nothing then nout, being pre-creation, you might say, is out, this being no place for Christians at all. Zero, to many Christians, was a kind of she-devil, definitely not on God’s side. If though, God made the world out of nothing then that nothing isn’t really nothing is it? At the very least, which it is by definition, nothing has a hell of a lot of potential. So it would prove.

Nothing came from India, and I don’t mean that as a slur on that nation. Hinduism with its’ concepts of emptiness and Nirvana didn’t find the concept of Zero unsettling at all. So this was where Zero set up her stall. In time she set up stalls in Islam, making her way to Constantinople, flirted with the Greeks, and finally rolled up in Florence. In Florence, Zero found two very willing customers: bankers and mathematicians. Medici and Fibonacci. The bankers found that the numbers from Islam combined with Zero from India allowed them to count, usually upward. The Medicis loved to be able to count. Bankers, by and large, like counting, usually upwards. It was, in fact, the very success of this counting upwards that funded the Renaissance. After all, all this Art, Science, and Mathematics had to be paid for, kind of quaint idea when you think about it. I mean, you don’t get all that Art, Science, and Mathematics for nothing, do you? Do you? Fibonacci took a little nothing and liberated Mathematics from the drudgery of counting, usually upwards. Hmm: a little nothing. It doesn’t work does it? You can’t qualify Nothing with an adjective can you? No, Zero has an adjectival shield! Maybe adjectives are Greek. I wonder if it has an adverbial shield. I do believe it does. Well, enough of that, so Zero, Nothing, Absolutely Bugger All, fuelled banking and Mathematics, damn, should I give banking a capital? Yes, for now, I think I should, they did have capital back then after all, so, Banking it is. Anyhow, Banking and Mathematics are the twin engines of Western progress ever since. So, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, all were based on nothing... nothing at all. Then again, is that so surprising? I mean, if nothing has the potential for the Universe, then the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment are, well, easy street comparatively. Nothing to it really.

I’ve always said that ‘I know a lot about a little, a little about a lot, and bugger all about everything else.’ I guess it’s that ‘bugger all’ that fascinates me, hence the title. It was semi-conductor physics where I first came upon the paradox of ‘bugger all’. First we were told about electrons moving and then we were told that what was left after the electrons moved were holes. Then they began to talk about the holes moving, which was a tad strange, kind of like rather than watching the cars go by you watch the spaces in between them. I never fully got my head round that, but here goes. The negatively charged cars/electrons move forwards, the ‘positively charged’ spaces/holes move backwards. The holes are bigger and therefore slower than the electrons, hence the forward motion of the cars. When the holes/spaces become the same size as the cars/electrons we get a traffic jam. Now this hole isn’t really positively charged other than relative to the electrons negative charge that has been subtracted from it. How do you subtract from a hole? Maybe you have to be negative first.

The Beatles got there first,’ four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.’ I doubt they’re positive though, maybe no electrons around. Essentially what I’m driving at is that as soon as you begin to approach the environment of ‘holes’, ‘emptiness’, ‘Zero’, ‘Nothingness’, things get strange, exotic. Holes started turning up all over the place; punch cards for early computers where the holes carried the information; computer tape the same. Around the same time as the Beatles were doing their stuff Zero had a bit of a coup.

After three hundred years of bankers using it as a means for counting, usually upwards, the USA and the USSR began a space race where they tried to fire rockets into space, usually upwards. They fired these rockets upwards after a countdown, where the countdown target was Zero, and the upward target was space. Emptiness at both ends or what? It turns out that space, that final frontier, isn’t quite empty. Well, of course not, it’s full of stars! Ah, but I mean, in between the stars, that black stuff that surrounds our planet. The vacuum isn’t empty at all. The vacuum of space is positively seething with energy, a bubbling sea of virtual particles entering existence for fleeting moments to disappear back into the nothingness whence they came. Reappear, disappear, reappear, disappear; the Cheshire cat’s in residence here. Nature abhors a vacuum, so the Cheshire cat had to be managed, mastered even. MBA’s had appeared and disappeared before, but now they were back, somebody had to take charge of all these zeros and who better than the Masters of Bugger All.

This, as mentioned briefly before, was also the beginnings of the computer age, where Zero finally made her supreme move. The basis for the language of the computer is, at the fundamental level, strings and loops of Ones and Zeros: 1100001110011001001110110010111000000001010101010... In this world where the entire virtual world is created 1 and 0 are equivalent. My, my, has nothing come a long way? Like the vacuum of deep space this virtual world started to leak into the real world, that is to say the unitary to Zero equivalence began to leak through. At the same time, with the increasing power of the computer systems available to the financial sectors whereby transactions could be changed far faster than the eye could see, everything getting faster and faster, the banks finding it progressively more difficult counting upwards, so they started counting forwards, anything to avoid counting downwards. They called for the Masters of Bugger All to help them out, having, unfortunately, found themselves short of 1s. The MBAs advised them to grab as many of the leaking unitary equivalent Zeros as they could, though they asked to be paid in ones themselves of course. After all, they advised, they were equivalents weren’t they? More unfortunately, these Zeros, once in our real world as it were, reverted back to nothingness. More unfortunately still, they had to keep doing it again and again, lending out 1s and keeping 0s as balance, which, of course, they don’t. This is what they call leverage. Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.", but then, I don’t think innumerable zeros balancing lots of ones, were quite what Archimedes had in mind, though the moving the world bit was nonetheless achieved.

What tricks does Zero hold for us now? What exactly is the nature of nothing? Nothing, like her distant cousin, Infinity, is a limit, but a limit that is more exotic than Infinity. Infinity can never be reached and neither can Zero, but unlike Infinity, Zero can be passed through, to the negative and the complex, but nothing ever stops at Zero, so when we get there we’ll find we’re only passing through.
So the bankers can’t count upwards any more, they kept counting forwards as long as they could in order to avoid the countdown. As in all countdowns, the target is Zero. To paraphrase Paul Valery: The banks made their financial world out of nothing, but the nothing shows through. Nothing to look forward to; nothing to come. We’ll all be Masters of Bugger All soon.
Jim Barrass
9/12/08

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First part of your life they happen all the time as you sail through the ever shifting archipelago of relationships and perspectives in the non-tidal waters of schools and college, university perhaps, first, second jobs, dole. Fashion de rigueur in the Thatcher years. Then you get your main job, meet your main partner, settle down, and have kids perhaps. Not so much, gliding through the archipelago now, as being one of the islands. Relationships and perspectives become more constant, chance encounters become less likely. The exception, not the rule.

Maybe we go through the three stages of matter. Solid, liquid, gas. We start off gaseous: energetic, chaotic, speedy little molecules. Free but contained, forever trying to stretch that containment, stretching the body and the rules, looking to be the exception, probing the limits of being.

The second stage is liquid; more constrained than the gaseous, but in the freefall of the raindrop, the waterfall and the tumult of the fast flowing river there is a sense of freedom beyond anything felt in the earlier gaseous stage. This is partly delusion, but it is also to do with the oncoming recognition of the social and physical restraints, that we learn how to move freely within these constraints. You have to know the rules to play the game. In the gaseous stage, everyone is moving fast, so relatively speaking, no-one is. This would explain why young couples with young children, a mix of gas and fast flowing waters are positively effervescent. In the liquid stage we feel and accept the contours of containment as the river feels the rocks it flows over, the bend it turns, and yet, we see well beyond these contours as the peaceful loch reflects a star-filled sky.

The third stage is solidification. The waters slow to a stop and things begin to silt up, the arteries thicken, and the whole system just gets more and more sluggish. One good thing about this model is that we can now say that everyone has a condensed life story. So have I solidified? Have I become too, too solid?

Maybe I’m in Limbo waiting my turn to cross the waters of Lethe, wash out the too much accrued solids, liquidate the memory. So what do I remember now? I remember family, friends, workmates, lots of facts and things, so, no, I couldn’t have died on the 4th of January. I just know too much. Had any calls of late? Well, no. Maybe that’s the way it works, maybe we remember loads of things but what slowly withers away are the connections. Life is about making connections, so maybe Death is about losing them. So, as the connections go we cease to be able to skip from that thing to this and this thing to that, we lose that metaphoric malleability of the mind and the facts begin to feel lonely, unvisited, disconnected, islands in the archipelago where the boats no longer go. Now, that’s a fact, used to lead somewhere but no more, it’s just a single connection and nowhere to go. In the end we just become quasi emotional blobs holding on to our most familiar lonely little fact unable to go anywhere else because this fact is warm and ok and anyway there’s nowhere else to go, so you linger there until this final connection breaks then you float through the water of Lethe to where?

Connections come back, not always in a nice way. I’m alive, still in meandering river stage, but my dad’s got Alzheimer’s. I knew this of course, just decided to avoid it for a while, but my dad is in hospital now. Then it hits me. I’ve not been thinking about death at all, I’ve been thinking about Alzheimer’s. I’ve been thinking about my dad. I’ve not been avoiding it at all. Yes you have. You even adopted a petulant, whining tone of nobody calls me anymore to cover it up! Yes well, we do live in the age of avoidance you know, avoidance being a crucial part of Western culture, or lack of it. This is something that needs to be written about: elsewhere. Somebody needs to write The Avoidance Strategy, a trilogy perhaps, in two parts.

The last words I heard him speak were ‘I’ve got dementia son’ on the phone, quite brightly in fact, like he had a new suit or something. So, it’s my dad who’s losing the connections. He did have some practise at that mind. He would always fall asleep in front of the TV at night, though there wouldn’t be total disconnection at these times. The right hand never fully disconnected, it would hover over the remote control even when he was asleep until, suddenly, connection, a finger stab, a change of channel, mayhem. What you doing? We’d all cry out. He’d waken in total consternation. You changed the channel you! Changed the channel, who has? You have. Rubbish, I was asleep. Well, what’s that remote doing in your hand then? Channel changed back, peace re-established, Dad back to sleep until the next finger stab.

Then there were the trips out in the car back in younger, effervescent days. I was navigator, the map man. We’d often go to the Trossachs just below the highland line. So, we’d plan our route, decide where to go, and off we’d go. We’ve got to turn left just up ahead so I say we need to take the second road left here, and he’d drive straight by. Where you going? What? You’re supposed to turn back there. You could’ve said. I did. No you didn’t. I did do too. Every trip out was a mystery tour. Still, in a sense, every trip is a mystery tour.

I speak with Jayne, a friend, about the situation, tell her that there’s no hope, no remission, no reprieve in this situation. It just strikes me as pointless keeping a body alive that has lost almost all semblance of consciousness. I feel guilty about this of course but I still feel it is pointless. What do you do? I’m effectively arguing for the death of my father. I never thought I would get to a place like this. This mystery tour has a bad destination.

I feel like my Dad is a long lost conversation looking for a full stop in a darkened room, I tell Jon. He’s just withering, and hell, what’s this doing to my mum? They should give him a massive shot of morphine, light up the room, then, he can cha-cha his way to that long sought-for full-stop. At least that would be positive. Careful what you wish for.
Mum calls. They’ve stopped the food intake, she says, she’s tearful, as am I, but I’m also angry as hell. They’ve stopped the food intake. They’ve stopped feeding him. They’re going to starve my Dad to death. I’ll write that again. They’re actually starving my Dad to death.

You ever been hungry? How do you deal with it when you can’t satisfy it right away? You do some job you’ve been putting off, go for a walk, make a phone call. What you do is you take your mind off it. My Dad doesn’t have a mind to take off it and he probably doesn’t even know what it is. Yet, even if he is a quasi-emotional blob floating near a formerly familiar fact the degree of pleasure in this association is plummeting. This is the bad dream plummet down the slopes of mount purgatory to the opposite of pleasure: pain. Since when did you need consciousness for that? Is this how far the human imagination has soared since we left the forest?

Next day I’m browsing the internet, heading for a download site, looking to get some comfort downloads, watch films for a few days to take my mind off things. I drift down to the music section and see Ani Difranco has a new album. I’ll take that. It’s called Reprieve. I go to Ani’s official site and there it is. The cover shows a blasted tree, half-dead, half-alive. One half cannot connect; the other half still seeks the sun. There’s a familiarity about this image, feels like I’ve seen it before somewhere, then I see there’s a link for the story behind the image, so I take a look. It’s the Nagasaki tree, of course it’s familiar. This is the tree that survived the atomic explosion. I see that this site, remembering Nagasaki, is under the general umbrella of a memory site, this is just a part of it. I skip through there and there’s a list of various memory themes as links down the left-hand side of the page. I drift down, and then I see Alzheimer’s. I click, I double click. It doesn’t connect.

He held my hand right to the end my mum says. Probably reaching for the remote. We’re at the reception after the funeral. I see now as the connections of the family to my father cut loose they reconnect with each other stronger than before. The survivors migrate to the living part of the tree, but like the Nagasaki tree the memory is retained. My cousin David is saying that maybe Alzheimer’s is like formatting a hard drive, everything still there but no addresses. That’s the one thing he did know though, my mum says, ask him where he lived and he’d come right back with it, phone number anything like that. Familiar facts. Well, maybe not addresses then, says David, but he lacked a map, no directions. No navigator either I thought.

Some weeks later and I’m travelling up to Scotland, heading to a cottage in the highlands that I’ve rented for a fortnight. It’s a long way so I’m doing the trip over two days. The idea was to skirt round Glasgow and head north to Fort William, but I find myself driving towards Stirling now. The Fort William option begins to recede as the Inverness option drifts into view. Mind made up. The A9 to Inverness is just up ahead when I see a turn to the left for Fort William and, as if by magic, I’m back on track, and this route takes me through the Trossachs. Mystery tours indeed.

There are memories everywhere here, the Trossachs being a national park area doesn’t change much, and, as I drive through I’m continually caught by familiar views where the present and the distant past seem to collide in a not unpleasant way. I have to stop a few times, not so much to take in the view, more to demist my eyes and try and find one.

I spent the first week at the cottage alone. The cottage is in a beautiful area of lochs and mountains, rivers and forests, waterfalls, gardens, and star-filled skies. The following Friday, a couple of friends, Andy and Jayne came up for five days. We go off on our excursions during the day and then go back to the cottage for food, wine, and conversation. Andy and I end most nights looking at the Milky Way. The next Thursday, the day after they went back I received a text from Jayne: Hi jimbo feels strange to get up and not look at maps and plan trips. Indeed.

I’m the driver and the navigator now. Do I know where I’m going? How to get there? Sure, but sometimes I miss turns too, sometimes I go on short mystery tours myself. In the long run it’s all a mystery tour anyhow.

Many years ago me and my granddad on my mum’s side escaped from the rest of the family as we were wont to do on occasion. This particular day we were in Aberdeen and we made our way to the square at the end of Union Street where the busses were. We got onto this bus marked Mystery Tour. The driver eventually got on and looking at the passengers rubbed his hands in front of himself, then, splaying them apart, said, well, where you want to go? Everyone laughed. It’s funny, but, I see now there’s more to it than that. Sure, everybody laughs, but no-one replies. They never do.

Jim Barrass
October 2006

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