Tedious End of Year Music Post 2012

End of year music retrospectives always freak me out. Every year I think “oh hey I seem pretty good at this knowing-about-people-what-do-music business” and then I am bombarded by everyone’s top 10 songs, top 10 bands, top 10 thing people have said about music and bands, etc., of the year and I realise I have no idea what people are talking about. Earlier today all round awesome dude and good music knower JoeSparrow posted his end of year post and I realised I had no idea who Alt J is/are. I mean I have heard about Alt J and have heard the words muttered breathlessly on Radio 6 but I couldn’t actually tell you if I had listened to any music by them.

This is really what stops me talking about music on this blog. If you remember when I started this thing I was going to post some new music every week and then I was like “FUCK I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT MUSIC AND THEY WILL FINALLY FOUND OUT” so I just brushed it away and pretended it had never happened. I also started doing a podcast which has allowed me to make fun of bad music and be all “listen to this thing I like” which has somewhat filled the hole. But I’m not doing a podcast episode for a week or so and I’ve lost my outlet.

Anyway enough of this rambling introduction the point is I’m going to post some of my music highlights for the year. JOIN ME.

Why We Broke Up

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about relationships and I mentioned my feeling that the reasons I had for breaking up with people were often pretty ridiculous. She wanted some examples but I struggled to come up with them at the time and, as ever with these things, only started to remember some of the better ones on the way home. As is the way of the modern world I felt a compulsive desire to share them with strangers on the internet. But the obvious problem was that a lot of them made me look like a jerk, or made other people look like jerks and I like to think that I'm not that sort of guy. How could I deal with this? Well the solution was obvious: lying. So here are the reasons why we broke up; some of them are mine, some came from friends, some I made up:

Discover your Ancestors

Margaret Smith has become unstuck in time. Finding out about her ancestors seemed fun at first, a hobby to while away the time now that the kids had moved out and started families of her own. A chance to unearth some long lost family scandal, perhaps to discover an illustrious ancestor, and to finally work out how exactly she was related to all the half remembered aunts of her childhood.

An advert on ITV 7 had pointed her in the direction of Ancestor-Discoverer dot com, a site which promised to make easy all the hard work of searching through archives and records and take her directly to the business of nosing around the private business of her forebears. She made a cup of tea and got her laptop ready, entering all the information the site needed: her name, her date of birth, the details of any known relatives. She then pressed enter and set the machine whirring away.

Thoughts on the Death of Oscar Niemeyer

Today’s blog will be written as an account of a fictional conversation between my flatmate Steve and I. The story you are about to read is fake, only the names are real to incriminate the innocent.

Even though the heating has been on for hours our living room remains freezing cold. My porridge is cooling much too rapidly and that is sapping what slim enjoyment I can derive from it. This morning I had to make it with water instead of milk because we are out of milk. Apparently Scottish people make porridge with water instead of milk but this sounds crazy to me.

“Oscar Niemeyer died”

Gaza: Who Gains?

In the light of Barack Obama’s trip to Burma I had planned to write an article on the American government’s attempts to fend of China’s growing influence by shifting its foreign policy focus towards the Far-East and in doing so extract itself from the Middle-East. I may still write that, but in the context of the resumed hostilities in Gaza talk of American dis-engagement from the region would appear ridiculous. So I've decided to bite the bullet and write something about Israel-Palestine.

The Fiscal Cliff is Coming and it Doesn’t Exist

You may have heard recent talk about the “Fiscal Cliff”, and if you haven’t then trust me you will over the next few weeks. For those of you confused about what the fiscal cliff is don’t worry; everyone is confused by it and I'm about to tell you some things that might make it a bit less scary.  Essentially, over the next few months a lot of temporary laws in the United States are going to expire. These are laws which were brought in saying that taxes would be reduced for certain people for a number of years, or that certain government programmes would be guaranteed funding for a certain number of years. As the time limit on these all finish at roughly the same time that means that quite suddenly government spending will go down and taxes will rise. This has made people worry that the recession will start up again as suddenly a lot of money will be taken out of the economy. Trying to fix this is an even bigger problem as Republicans who control the House of Representatives want to cut spending and keep the tax cuts, whereas Democrats who control the Senate and the Presidency want to increase spending and get rid of the tax cuts. Either way this means increasing the deficit, which is the government’s debt.

What's Your Prediction Now?

I've had a few people make references to my earlier post in the last few days, asking me who is going to the President of the United States in 2016. Now first off I have to point out that my system of “gut feelings” obviously doesn't work as Mitt Romney isn't the President (see also my previous post about facts and whatnot). Having said that I am more than happy to give you some incredibly vague references to people you should be paying more attention to over the next 4 years if you want to impress your friends by possibly guessing who might be president next. I’ll probably hold off making any firm prophesies until the Mid-term elections in 2014 but in the meantime here are three democrats and three republicans to look out for.

American “Conservativism” and the Strange Issue of Faith

So the American election happened and I stayed up to watch it. I stayed up till 8am and my sleep patterns have been horribly messed up for the last few days because of it so that I am now living in UK time but sleeping on American time. Much like that little girl we all saw crying because she was so tired of hearing about the election a lot of people were thinking “thank god it’s over! Now we can go back to living out lives!” but politics is never over and it is continuing to mess everything up. After Fox News’ on air meltdown the debate has now switched to Facts vs Faith, or Nate Silver vs Conservatives which is funny and depressing for a whole range of reasons, and as such it is now time for me to stick my oar in.

The Lost Lighthouses of Siberia

This afternoon I visited the always fantastic Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, a slightly oddly put together gallery attached to Manchester University and making up one corner of the much maligned Whitworth Park. At the moment there is a fantastic exhibition by Jane and Louise Wilson titled The Toxic Camera detailing some of the after effects of Chernobyl. Chernobyl has always fascinated me: in particular because of the abandoned buildings, slowly decaying relics of a lost time and place. I have always loved abandoned buildings and wondering what stories they contained, what events happened there which are now perhaps lost forever.

The Tunnel

There is a scratching on the floor, in the floor in front of my desk. A frantic scratching a scrabbling, scuffling, scrofulous, scratching which only I can hear. I noticed it when they moved me to the new desk I had never heard it before and neither had anyone else. I asked Diane who sits next to me if she can hear the scratching but she says she can’t hear a thing. I asked Dan in IT if it was something to do with my computer but he can’t hear it either. It has been nearly a month and still no one can hear it but me.

A Confession

I often put myself forward as a Sci-Fi fan. There is a lot to of evidence to back up this assertion: I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Star Trek, one of my favourite films is Blade Runner, I have a collection of Isaac Asimov books on my shelf. Hell I have a selection of flipping Larry Niven books on my shelf. This would seem to be all the evidence to prove that I am both a massive Sci-Fi dork and a boring person to talk to at a party. While the later is certainly true the former is not for one simple reason: I have never seen Alien.

The Trouble With Being a Prophet

Much like half the people on the planet Earth (apparently) I have always been interested in American politics. I'm not entirely sure why that is; perhaps it is the dominance of American culture and media, perhaps it is because their top guy has the ability to blow up the world like some crazy super-villain, perhaps it is because American politics has just always seemed a lot more dynamic and variable when compared to our own moribund democracy. Regardless of the reason I have a lot of fun following American politics and have always enjoyed trying to predict the outcome.

An Update

So I'm dealing with some pretty serious writer’s block at the moment. I've written a couple of stories which I'm happy with but I don’t really feel that they are right for this blog, and I'm actually thinking about possibly submitting them to a competition which means not publishing them on here. Apart from that I'm short on inspiration on the story front. I've though about making some politics posts but they are either a bit derivative or just make me depressed. So what’s the post below? It’s about struggling with inspiration which is a bit self-absorbed and wanky I admit but it’s all I've got and hopefully it’s kind of interesting.

Train Tales

A double feature this week with a couple of observational bits written on a trip to Leeds and back, starring one of my favourite trains: the Trans-Pennine Express. Why is it a favourite? Well I get it a lot and I've got to assume whoever named the line is Kraftwerk fan. Plus the service is generally decent.

Trans-Pennine Express 02/09/12

The iPod cut out. What had once been the soothing sounds of Belle & Sebastian were transformed first to silence and then, more gradually, to the lilting vague conversation of the carriage which moves along in time with the rocking of the train and clank of the points.

He fumbled with the aging music box, desperately trying to return his distraction. But the electronics inside were as unresponsive to his wishes as the machine’s case suggested. What had once been gleaming pure blackness with a bright silver-white apple on its back had faded with the years and was now dull, chipped and scratched.

Against his wishes the sounds of the carriage filled his ears and then his mind. Two pockmarked teenage boys argued loudly over the benefits of orcs, whilst the Chinese girl sat next to them avoided the conversation through the intense study of an empty Burger King bag.

Behind her the fat belly of a man clad in neckbeard and taut My Little Pony T-shirt collided sporadically with the clear Perspex wall separating the seats from the doors. This slapping provided strange irregular percussion to the group of rugby fans who loudly and drunkenly carried the chants they had collected in the stands of Warrington and Saint Helens back with them across the hills.

One of the teenage boys desperately covered his mention of Thomas the Tank Engine by reference to an apocryphal nephew, the fat brony glared.

The iPod sputters back into life.

Trans-Pennine Express 03/09/12

Despite the people the train seems empty of life as it races through the dark and seemingly endless hills where in the gloom the distinction between track and tunnel becomes philosophical to all but the driver. What life there is in here moves so slow as to be almost indiscernible.

A couple are on their way to Huddersfield and then from to their homes in the hills above. Both she and he are worn down by years of weather and drink. She pulls out her phone and finds someone to give her a lift from the station; he feels an aching pain stir in a long broken heart.

Two men from the east of Europe munch on burgers and between bites of waking with the crack of dawn and the dreams they share of an imagined America, the hope that it proves better than the reality found in Britain. There words are whispered delicately as if in fear that should any other hear yet another fragile illusion will be smashed.

Only two others sit in this carriage. One taps and pecks absentmindedly at the screen a glossy red pad, I scribble and scrawl in a beaten black notebook.

The guard walks in then she yawns loudly and stretches against the door, paying no regard to tickets. In the blackness the Trans-Pennine Express rolls on.

What have I been up to lately?

As you may have noticed all I’ve been doing on this blog recently is posting stories, and I imagine most of you are very frustrated at not being able to read about my thrilling life or my opinions on politics, music, and so forth so I have decided to write something which should hoefully lay your mind to rest. Probably one of the main reasons I haven’t been posting all the other gubbins that I originally meant to when I started this thing is that I’ve been saving it for my podcast which if you don’t know is called Errand of Mercy, details on our facebook page. Once you’ve clicked on that link you should almost certainly “like” the page and probably subscribe to the show, and then force all your friends or loved one to “like” it too BY WHATEVER MEANS NECCESARY! I still do have opinions though so I’m hoping that now that I have a bit more time on my hands you’ll start seeing a few more of those from time to time.

“Why do you have more time Geraint?” you ask (I assume), well dear reader that is because one month ago I quit my job. There are a lot of reasons I left the job, and I’m not going into all of them here but essentially:

1)      I didn’t enjoy it.

2)      I felt exhausted all the time and didn’t have time to do anything with the money I was making.

3)      I realised I should probably do what I actually “want” to do rather than what I feel I “ought” to do.

Having free time has been great and has meant I’ve been able to do a lot of things I hadn’t been able to do in the months when I was working, not least of which is managing to get rather a lot of writing done and finally edit some of the things I’d finished quite a while before hand. Of course I’ve also managed to spend a lot of time watching TV, playing video games, and reading comics which while nice is probably a bit less productive and fulfilling us of all this time I have. I suppose the point I really want to reach is demostrated in the picture below where a group of men have done what they "ought" to (chopping down a tree) and have also managed to do what they "want" to (pose for a totally sweet photo), whether I manage to achieve it is a different matter but these lumberjacks fill me with hope.

Where do I go from here? I’m not sure to is the short answer, the slightly longer perhaps more medium length answer is that I’m hoping to do some travelling using the last few pennies I have stashed away and am currently making plans to go and bum round Europe for a. In the longer term provided I don’t win the lottery or get offered some amazing dream job I’m looking at going back to university and actually doing that PhD I probably should have been doing anyway. In the meantime you can continue to enjoy some of my stories and musings and what not which I imagine you’ll be getting on a much more regular basis from now on.

Ray Winstone

Having asked the intern for a cup of tea, milk one sugar, the actor Ray Winstone attempted to sink into the chair at the edge of the studio. However he was soon forced to sit bolt upright, the flimsy fold out chair did not make slouching comfortable and he was worried it would be unable to support his increasingly ample weight. They had just finished recording another advert for the betting firm BET365, in which Ray Winstone was pretending to be in another, different advert. He had convinced himself that this meant he was working three different jobs, including his current starring role in a gritty big screen re-make of the Sweeney, and that this entirely justified his constant exhaustion. By this point in his life Ray Winstone had wanted to retire and move to a cottage in the Cotswolds, perhaps doing occasional theatre work and taking time to write his memoirs. Downsizing had seemed like a good idea, especially now that his daughters, the actresses Lois and Jaime Winstone, had left home but his wife, the actress Elaine McCausland, didn’t want to move out of London because of her social life and had actually made him to move to a new bigger home. He was having trouble paying off the mortgage.

A booming laugh shook the set and Ray Winstone looked up to see the director joking with the Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone. Ray Winstone attempted to avoid looking at his own Giant Disembodied Head but it spun round and stared at him before beginning to float in his direction, the director in tow. Ray Winstone had originally enjoyed the company of the Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone, even considered him a friend of sorts, but he had grown to despise his own Giant Disembodied Head. In it he could see every imperfection in his own aging face blown up to several times their original size; every time the head spoke he heard the same idiosyncrasies that he hated in his voice as though they were being broadcast through a megaphone.

Ray Winstone had met his own head shortly after the release of the critical and commercial failure Beowulf, directed and produced by Robert Zemeckis. Zemeckis had told him that the film would be a huge success and that his innovative motion capture process would allow him to continue his film career long into the future despite his rapidly deteriorating physique. In fact it was these assurances that had allowed Ray Winstone to be brought around by his wife’s pleas for a new home. The fallout of Beowulf combined with his disastrous appearance in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull had left him embittered to the idea of computer graphics in cinema.

Soon after the failure of Beowulf Zemeckis had sent Ray Winstone a Fortnum and Mason’s hamper by way of an apology. Ray Winstone had thrown the hamper under a Northern Line tube train as it came up to the platform, an action which he found incredibly cathartic but which his wife, the actress Elaine McCausland, had called “petty” and “childish”.

It was because of his distrust of computer graphics that he had initially turned down the BET365 job, but a few days later he had found his own Giant Disembodied Head sleeping rough, hovering about 2 foot above an alley next to his local pub. Ray Winstone’s Giant Disembodied Head had explained to Ray Winstone how it had tried to make a living as a Ray Winstone impersonator and how its career had faltered due to the fact that in London there were a lot of people who sounded like Ray Winstone already and because it was a Giant Disembodied Head, which had unsettled the punters and made it difficult to find suitable performance spaces. Ray Winstone could empathise, having once been a struggling up and coming actor himself, and also felt some responsibility due to the fact that it was his own head. He had called BET365 back the next morning and arranged to get his head an audition.

Now the shoe was on the other foot (metaphorically of course, unlike Ray Winstone The Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone didn’t need shoes as it mostly travelled by hovering or just spontaneously appearing in rooms when it was needed). Ray Winstone had been the one in need of help. Ray Winstone’s Giant Disembodied Head knew that Ray Winstone was having money troubles so had set him up with a job supporting him in a few of the TV adverts. Ray Winstone hated having to rely on anyone, especially his own head.

“Me and the lads are going to the pub mate, fancy coming along for a pint” boomed The Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone.

“No thanks mate” said Ray Winstone “I need to get some sleep, me and my wife, the actress Elaine McCausland, are going to the Lake District tomorrow and I’ve got an early start.”

Unlike Ray Winstone the Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone did not need to sleep and rarely had to eat. Ray Winstone had sometimes wondered if The Giant Disembodied head had been absorbing energy from him but he soon became resigned to the fact that he was just getting older.

The Giant Disembodied Head of Ray Winstone appeared to disapprove of Ray Winstone’s answer and began to scowl. It then started to rotate violently around its axis, so fast that Ray Winstone was unable to make out any of his features and he appeared to be nothing more than a blur. The gust of air put off by this display blew scripts across the studio and knocked over some of the flimsier pieces of the set. The Head then bobbed and came to a rest with a beaming smile.

“You’re fucking whipped mate! Come on just one pint!”

Ray Winstone sighed and slumped into his chair. It gave way with a sudden crunch leaving Ray Winstone in a heap on the floor. Ray Winstone’s Giant Disembodied Head continued to levitate a few feet above him. It had no need for chairs.

I realise some of you might not have seen the advert in question, so here it is

Goodyear

The blimp first appeared for one of the Manchester derbies, hovering over Old Trafford. Do blimps float or do they hover? Either way it was up there in the sky, moving in a slow circle above the stadium, silently extolling the virtues of vulcanised rubber.

People joked that it said “Ice Cube is a pimp” on the side. It didn’t, it said “Goodyear”. People expected it to move on once the derby was over. It didn’t.

The blimp stayed there all season. You could say it loomed ominously, but it didn’t because in fact there are few modes of transport less ominous than a bright yellow and blue blimp. Really as far as transportation goes that is as festive and non-ominous as you can get.

The citizenry of Manchester wondered if it was part of a sponsorship deal: Sir Alex Ferguson would not be drawn on the subject. Goodyear remained silent.

Towards the end of the season it was suggested that the league cup was inside and that if City won the league it would buzz (or drift?) over to the Emirates. They won and the blimp remained obstinately above Old Trafford.

In fact it stayed there the next season, and the season after that, moving in those long graceful circuits over the Trafford skyline.

Goodyear went bust in the end, because of the hovercars, but the blimp stayed there regardless. No one really knew whose responsibility it was to deal with the blimp, it wasn’t causing any harm so there was no real clamour to remove it. If anything it had become a landmark, a symbol of the city, something that had entered people’s consciousness. “Let your troubles float away (like the Trafford blimp)” people would say, “Your troubles will circle back around in the end (like the Trafford blimp)” the cynics would retort.

As ever with these thing the cynics were eventually proved right, to the frustration of decent friendly people everywhere, and the blimp started to become a problem. You see the blimp’s endless cycle had begun to deteriorate and it was at risk of becoming snagged in the cables of one of the cities mighty and world famous cloud towers. And so it was that, years after it had first appeared, the city was forced to hire some adventurous soul to strap on a jet pack and try to take control of the ancient piece of machinery.

Inside was a perfectly preserved time capsule of a bygone age and resting at the controls a skeleton wearing a t-shirt stating “World’s #1 Blimp Pilot.” Who he was we may never know, all records from that era at the club having been consumed in the construction of Fergie’s vast funeral pyre.

Craig Chapter 6: And Finally

“Okay I get it, stop the video. Why didn’t I see this before?”

“I sent it to you repeatedly Officer Henderson, but you never check your messages.”

“Right well I don’t care about any of it, I’m not going to sign off on this, killing sentient creatures to make a rich man richer, it’s barbaric!”

“If you don’t sign off on it someone else will Officer Henderson”

“Then why are you pressuring me to do it? Why are you making this shitty job even shittier? Why do you want me to go down in history as the universes most unreasonable mass murderer?”

“Because I’m feeling kind”

“Well you’ve got a damn odd way of showing it!”

At that moment a thought went through his mind, he could stop it all happening, he could save all the… goop… well it didn’t matter what it looked like he could save it. Destroy the data, stop the ship getting back to earth. There had to be some sort of self destruct, a button he could press, something! I mean no one might realise it was him but if he saved a whole species from being turned into animal food then his life might mean something right? It would have been worth it all right?

“They’ll let you stay on Earth Craig. I know you hate space travel, if you agree they’ll promote you, let you stay on Earth, and study your frogs. That’s how I’m being kind.”

Well it had been a shit job, but if someone had to do it...

Craig Chapter 5: The Advert

A white haired man in a short sleeve shirt walks toward the viewer across a golf course in what could be the Caribbean. He bends down to pick up a golf ball then looks up at the camera and smiles; his teeth are incredibly white, his accent mid-Atlantic.

Hi there! I’m Charles Benson, founder and majority owner of the Benson Group, but as an employee of one of the many companies in our great big family I’m sure you knew that already! You also know that we in Benson Group strive for excellence in all we do, from computing to mining, healthcare to construction, sanitation to space exploration! [Brightly lit images of handsome people performing these activities flash across the screen] But did you know than we are also the world’s largest producer of pork based products? That’s right! Pork is where this business started, why every time you eat a slice of bacon, or a mouth watering pork chop, or even a gelatine based sweet you are probably eating part of a Benson pig!

Why is he wearing a short sleeve shirt? The skin on his arms is like muslin and covered in tiny white hairs.

But there is always competition and we here at Benson are constantly trying to stay ahead of the game. That’s why I’m offering major rewards to any employees who come up with workable ways for us to corner the pork market once and for all, rewards including:

A new voice takes over, deeper, more American.

Bonuses, Pay Increases, Promotion, Extra Holiday! Eeexecutive Company Cars,

Craig Chapter 4: Preckselfflurt

The technology existed to make a computer’s speech entirely indistinguishable from that of humans but when tried this had generally had the effect of massively creeping people out, because it gave the impression that computers were just as intelligent as humans when in fact they were far, far more intelligent. All computers were now designed to speak in a slightly self satisfied way with a tinny robotic voice.

“Signs of sentience detected, do you wish to attempt interspecies communication?”

“Wait you mean the goo can think?”

“Affirmative, do you wish to attempt interspecies communication?”

Craig had decided to stick some sensor equipment into the goop to see what it actually was, but intelligence had been the furthest thing from his mind what with how basic a creature it looked. The ability to speak to other life forms had been invented several decades earlier, but after it was discovered that cats did actually want to kill and eat all humans and the slightly unsettling discovery that certain trees could think (and held an extremely superior attitude) the practice fell out of fashion outside of scientific circles.

“Well yes, affirmative, let’s hear what this thing thinks!”

“That thing looks horrible”

“x150?” (That was the computer’s name by the way)

“Yes Officer Henderson it’s so solid looking”

“You’re not making any sense x150”

“That was not I Officer Henderson that was the sample did it put me in this container?”

“Can you give it a different voice? I can’t tell the difference between you and it”

“This ship computer contains a free copy of my voice programme, on registering this product further voices can be acquired for the low price of Five Ninety Nine a month and…”

“Okay never mind just don’t talk while I’m communicating with the sample”

“Affirmative hello”

“Um hello, I’m… I’m… from earth?… do you have a name?”

Craig realised he should have probably read the manual on making first contact with new species.

“Greetings ‘from earth’ we are an aspect of that which is described as Preckselfflurt”

“No, no, I’m called Craig Henderson; the planet I come from is called earth”

“Ah we see Craig Henderson…”

“Call me Craig”

“We see Craig, why have you separated us and put us in a container?”

“Well I wanted to study you I didn’t realise you were intelligent”

“Preckselfflurt is incredibly intelligent and we contain an aspect of that”

“Wait, wait are you prekle… prekself… is that your name or something else’s?”

“Preckselfflurt is all and we are simply a part of it, we can feel we have been disconnected”

“Oh wow! Are you telepathic?”

“Of course not telepathy is tabloid nonsense. I don’t think you really get what we are saying here”

Craig had to admit that he didn’t and that talking to an alien species was a hell of a lot more difficult than he had anticipated. Not helped by the fact it was being done via the voice of a self satisfied computer. This was his big break though right? Validation of a life’s work? The thing that he would be

“Pig Slop”

The words hung for a few moments.

“Excuse me?”

“This is x150 Officer Henderson I have cut off the sample life form’s voice”

“That… pig slop?”

“An analysis of the materials comprising the sample showed that they would make an excellent dietary supplement for pigs I have already fed a sample to one of the ships pigs and –“

“YOU FED AN INTELLIGENT NEW LIFEFORM TO… we have a ships pig?”

“Several pigs, as well as cows, sheep, horses, newts…”

As x150 droned on providing a list of apparently every animal on earth Craig grew increasingly perturbed, not only because he was the ships biologist and no one had told him, not only because it seemed a computer was entirely capable of doing his job without him, not only because he despised his job, but because he had been serving on this ship for years and had never explored it enough to find the incredible menagerie that it apparently held.

“… and the pig rapidly showed increased production of the chemicals necessary for excellent bacon”

“I don’t care anymore x150! I am not going to let us harvest an intelligent, living, breathing” (actually he didn’t know if it breathed) “creature so we can make more delicious bacon!”

“There is a near 100% chance of promotion”

“What?”

Craig Chapter 3: Goop

Planet 2024XV871d was a disappointment for almost everyone on board because it was covered in water and that meant that getting at any of the minerals would be really fucking hard. Craig was in his element however. For the first time in his decade long career the call went out for “Exobiology Officer Henderson to come to the bridge” when they reached their destination. It was with some pleasure as he watched Captain Benson disgustedly tell him that preliminary scans had shown that 2024XV871d was absolutely swimming with organic material. Whilst all the geologists sat gloomily on the ship Craig was flying down to the planet practically every day. Even if most of it was cooped up a tiny submarine collecting samples the amount of time spent off the ship was liberating.

The only problem was that the underwater life was almost entirely gross. It might have been bias because he was one himself but Craig liked vertebrates. He especially liked frogs. Nothing on this planet had anything remotely similar to a backbone; instead the main form of life seemed to be sacks of goop. In fact saying they were sacks was quite frankly a misnomer because they were just formless lumps of goop and once he though that he had worked out which balls of goop were different animals they would just sort of flop into an entirely different type of goop. And then those balls would split off into different balls of goop.

At one point he found a thing that looked a bit like a tree but when he tried to take a sample it collapsed into a runny translucent slurry, full of flecks and veins like a cracked egg that hadn’t quite managed to become a bird, which slopped all over the submarine and into all the equipment. What had once been excitement about finding new life rapidly turned into a nightmare of constantly cleaning organic goo out of sensors, robotic joints, window seals, clothes, hair… everything. In the end he just started wiping what he could off the sub and into a bucket which he then poured into the sample chamber.

Craig Chapter 2: Space Travel is Time Travel

Most people who haven’t been on an interstellar journey assume that it is extremely exciting. I mean all the elements are there, you are going faster than the speed of light, and you get to go somewhere no-one has ever been before, and so on. This of course is a lie and space travel is in fact one of the most boring things that humankind has ever managed to come up with. I don’t understand physics and quite frankly the guys in engineering are so boring that I would never let them explain it to me, but the reason we can now go faster than light is something called “time dilation”. I don’t know what this means, I can explain what it does though.

When you get on the ship everything is normal, then the engine kicks in and all the stuff outside the window starts moving slower and slower until after about a day everything stops moving entirely. Also it all goes a bit blue for some reason. I can’t remember if time outside stops or time inside moves faster, but the second one is less terrifying to think about. The further you are going the longer you spend with time stopped (for this trip it was two months). After your time stuck like that there is a big red flash and you suddenly appear where you want to end up two months (or whatever) after you had first fired up the engine.

This means you spend two months with almost nothing to do, seeing only the same people who are on the ship with you and having to endure the same unmoving view out of the window. I would say that the window thing would make you go insane but apparently when they first started the ships didn’t have windows because they thought it would just be dull to look at (it is) and one year long trip ended up with everyone killing each other. I couldn’t do a year; the longest trip I ever took was five months. That was the time I found the slime mould. I’ll be honest it probably was just mud, in fact I know it was because I spent the entire five month journey back trying to make it do something to show it was alive. And it didn’t. I guess I just wanted to feel that I had managed to do something instead of wasting an entire year.

Some of the people on the ship spend most of the “journey” actually doing work, but most of us are scientists and we don’t really have anything to do when we are outbound. As the only biologist on a ship full of geologists and engineers I don’t have much in common with the rest of the crew and I spend most of my time reading or watching old movies. This next thing probably only confirms that Roxy was right and I am a loser, but the reason I went into space was that I used to love Star Trek, but after seeing about thirty dead rocks the “new life and new civilizations” bit pissed me off so much I ejected the lot of it into space.

Craig Chapter 1: Myxogastria

Craig hated parties because they always had a way of reminding him of the pointlessness of his existence. Okay perhaps existence was laying it on a bit thick, but at the very least they reminded him of how terribly unimportant his job was. The title “senior exobiological survey officer” made his position seem a bit interesting, or at the very least confusing enough to kick start a conversation, the problem was that they always went the same way:

“Wow… what does that mean?”

“Well I go to other planets to find aliens”

“Oh that’s impressive! Have you ever found any?”

“Err not really…”

“Not really?”

From there he would go onto explain how he’d once found something that was a bit like a slime mould but not really and it was generally at this point that the conversation trailed off and he started to doubt the relevance of his life’s work.

Tonight was the Blast Off party for the latest expedition. Blast Off parties were a bit of an anachronism, I mean people went into space every day right? But it was one of those traditions which didn’t die and which make life terrible for everyone. Craig had to admit he was feeling particularly maudlin about tonight’s party because Rosanna Clark was stood at the other end of the room. Craig and Rosanna had dated briefly for two years while they were at university, but had broken up when he decided that he wanted to go and look for mould on rocks in space and she had decided to go to the Amazon and actually find some interesting new animals. Which she had done repeatedly to the point that she was now actually quite famous and was apparently about to be the star of some new nature programme.

The other reason for their breakup was that he had accidently slept with her best friend.

The room was actually quite small, just some crappy conference room at the company headquarters with a bar at one end and a buffet table at the other, but through intense scowling Craig had managed to creating a patch of calm for him to get annoyed by the fact that no one was talking to him and instead were all crowding round her. Because of the tiny size of this cheap little room he could hear her telling stories about where she was flying off to film next, the cool and useful things she’d discovered, how hard it was to work with a holographic version of David Attenborough, talking frogs. It was making him too sick to drink so he just leant against the wall staring into and idly swirling the rum and coke with a straw. Just as he was deciding he could easily sneak out she suddenly materialised in front of him.

He was annoyed that he still found her attractive. Beautiful in fact. He thought about looking for imperfections, an out of place strand of her long curling black hair, but he knew it was a futile effort.

“Craig I didn’t see you there” (lies) “are you on this mission?”

“You know I am Roxy. Why are you even here?”

“Don’t call me Roxy darling. Ray Benson invited me if you must know”

Ray Benson was the son of Charles Benson head of Benson Interstellar. He was the ship’s captain as well. Craig’s boss. Well he assumed that was who she meant.

“Do you mean Ray Benson as in son of Charles Benson the head of Benson Interstellar, and the captain e.g. my boss?”

“You mean i.e. Craig” (did he?) “and yes of course that Ray Benson. We’re dating. Didn’t you know?”

Craig’s heart sank into his guts. I mean the fact that Rosanna was vastly more successful than him was already shitty enough but. Wait a second.

“Wait a second I thought we broke up because I was going to space and now you’re dating a man who works in space?”

“We broke up because you slept with my best friend Craig”

“I thought that happened after the space thing?”

“It didn’t.”

The pause that followed was so awkward that it was almost certainly pregnant.

Whatever that meant.

“Ray told me about the mud you found.” (Definitely the most venomous sentence one could say with the word mud in it)

“It wasn’t mud Rosanna; it was more like a slime mould.”

“It wasn’t alive. Mould is alive, mud isn’t.”

“It’s alien. It’s hard to tell if it’s alive or not, aliens work differently than us. I assume. It probably just lives very slowly, so it’s hard to notice if it’s alive.”

“You’re a loser Craig.”

The Chippendales of Regret

It had started out as a joke “make a terrible decision… get a stripper!” An in-joke between friends, nothing more. I can’t remember why we even started that joke, it was just one of those thing that got said at a party or something that ends up getting repeated verbatim until it took on a life of its own… But like an idiot I made it something more, I thought I saw an opportunity, a chance at greatness. What I got was a nightmare.

I realised other people found it funny and though I’d start up some kind of post-ironic stripper-gram. Your friends made a stupid decision? Send them a stripper and a card. It was surprisingly easy to get off the ground, lots of people were unemployed and the work wasn’t hard; just turn up at someone’s house and take your clothes off. Easy.

Within six months we’d gone nationwide, we went “viral”, we were the in thing and we were rolling in it. Competitors tried to muscle in but we sued them into the ground. Within 2 years we were international, I was in the Forbes list, time man of the year. The world was going crazy for terrible decision strippers and what some people had written off as a fad showed no sign of slowing down. Every bad decision meant another stripper, the problem seems obvious now but back then I was so blinded by our success I couldn’t see it.

Think about it there are what, 7 billion people on earth? And every time one of them made a decision someone thought was bad that meant another stripper. Millions… Billions of bad decisions every single day, we couldn’t keep up. Our operators were exhausted, our strippers were bushwhacked, and tired people don’t make good decision so that just meant even more strippers.

We needed a solution fast and only the greatest minds on earth could provide it. And I mean the greatest minds, we had Nobel prize winners working round the clock to solve the stripper crisis, people were practically rioting in the streets because we had such a massive stripper backlog. But we were the biggest company in the world, we had more money than most countries and we were throwing cash at the problem until it went away.

Finally they came up with the solution that would change the world: a totally automated stripper factory. The whole thing would be controlled by a huge computer, the most powerful ever created, which would calculate every bad decision and every time one was made it would clone a new stripper to go and deal with it. At first it went perfectly, people were happy again and the system ran perfectly. Whenever and wherever a bad decision was made a stripper would appear, after a while the computer was so good the stripper would turn up before you even had a chance to do something wrong!

But of course it was too good, just a temporary fix. The computer was too smart you see? It was what you would call a paradox I guess because the computer knew that every time it was cloning a new stripper it was making a bad decision. It was exponential, a constant stream of bad decision and strippers.

It’s the end now. I am writing this trapped in a bunker with the last few survivors, our food is running out and water is low. We can’t escape because the door is blocked shut with a pile of strippers. They have started clogging up the air ducts so we may suffocate before we even manage to starve. This is a cautionary tale but god knows who will ever get to read it? At least it might explain to the aliens why the earth is covered in bow ties and bunny ears.

Automatic Doors

A person stands in front of a door, entirely still. Just staring through the glass at the street outside refusing to believe.

Another jumps away from the door in shock, she rushes to a different type of door and pushes the handles hoping that no one saw.

Some just turn around, pretend they had never meant to go towards the door in the first place, it was just a misunderstanding you see?

All the automatic doors in the world have stopped working and no one wants to admit it. No one wants to think about what it means
This is a situation I have been dealing with all my life so I know how to react. They have never worked for me you see, I used to joke that it was because I had no soul. Like that episode of the Simpsons. The one where Bart sells his soul. And the door won’t open because he doesn’t have a soul. I joked that I also didn’t have a soul.
The thing I always found strange when I told that joke was that no one ever agreed. Some would laugh politely but none of them would ever admit that the doors wouldn’t open for them. I briefly wondered if it was a social faux pas, whether automatic doors were a far larger part of our culture than I realised. But soon it became apparent that there was just no shared experience for the joke to work, I was the only person who ever had to deal with automatic doors not opening.
At the time I viewed it as a burden, I used to have to wait till a normal person went in and dive through behind them, or traipse around and use the non-automatic doors. It was at worst a minor inconvenience I admit, but it still rankled. Now my suffering is suddenly a boon. I am the only person who isn’t panicking, who isn’t nervous, embarrassed. This has been my life for as long as I can remember and I am the only person on Earth who knows how to act, it’s liberating. It almost makes it all worth it.
I have not been blessed with any knowledge or insight as to why the doors have stopped working, a few see me as some sort of messianic figure who holds a special bond with them but this is clearly ridiculous. They are doors. I don’t know why they all stopped working at once, I guess they just realised they didn’t have to open any more. Why they gave me advance warning is a bigger mystery, I don’t think we will ever really know.
It’s not a major issue, all buildings must have non-mechanical doors for fire safety reasons.

Animated Discussion

I like cartoons. I am a 23 year old man and I really like cartoons and am entirely unapologetic about this. I'm not an animator and I can't draw to save my life (well when I was a teenager I did do a comic strip called "El-Vez: Latin America's Worst Elvis Impersonator", but this is sadly lost to the ages) but I do have a lot to say about cartoons so I hope Dear Reader that you will indulge me in this.

One my favourite TV shows bit on my Facebook page about half of them are cartoons, on of my favourite shows ever is Futurama and I am currently obsessed with Adventure Time. I also build up my hipster cred by advising practically everyone I meet to look into the work of SoyuzMultFilm, the Soviet Union's animation studio, especially "Vinni Pukh" which is their version of Winnie the Pooh and is far superior to the Disney version.

So with my credentials on the subject established lets move on to the meat of the thing. Recently Channel 4 have started re-airing episodes from the first few series of The Simpsons, after a period of mostly showing only 'new' episodes. One of the first things that hit both me and my flatmate after this shift is the radical difference in animation style. Newer episodes are much more polished and crisper, whilst the older episodes are sketchier and even blurrier. Now there are several reasons for this, including improvements in filming and broadcasting over the last 20 years, but the main reason is a shift from hand drawn animation cells to "digital ink", ie. computer animation. New clips are hard to find online because of Fox's litigious lawyers but here is a clip from the 1994 episode Lisa's Rival (not coincidentally one of my favourites):



If you compare this to modern episodes you start to notice that the older episodes are more elastic and rubbery whereas the newer ones are more rigid and in a way realistic. This is apparent not just in The Simpsons but in lots of other cartoons, notably in the work of Seth MacFarlene. Characters may do things which are unrealistic and only possible in a cartoon, but they still do them in a rigid way. If you don't know what I mean I'll give you an example: I was watching American Dad the other day, which is a clearly unrealistic cartoon about a CIA agent who's best friend is an alien. In that episode Stan the main character was given the legs of a toddler below the knee but he didn't move like he a cartoon, he moved like he had a skeleton!

To make the point clearly please watch another of my favourite cartoons, a classic Max Fleischer Betty Boop short:



Toward's the end of this short Betty's constant companion Koko the Clown is transformed by the wicked queen into a strange distorted ghost who sings Cab Calloway's "St. James Infirmary". The dancing effect is achieved by rotoscoping, that is animating from a film cell of the actual Calloway dancing, but Fleischer maintains the rubberiness and moldability of the cartoon form to make the ghost move in a clearly unnatural way. Now it's slightly unfair to compare people to Fleischer because he was probably the best animator who ever lived but the point is that cartoons shouldn't really have skeletons, but the rigid elements of computer animation almost forces them to.

One of the few cartoons that is around at the moment that seems to recognise this is Adventure Time which I am a big fan of. The main character and the only human in the cartoon is a boy called Finn who has noodely legs an arms, and his best friend Jake is a magic dog who can actually stretch and change his size and shape at will. The effect of this can be seen right from the opening sequence of the show:



Of course with all this you'd think that the main problem I have with The Simpsons at the moment is animation style, but this is only the half of it. Style is important but obviously the story is equally if not more important. The episode I watched yesterday for example was 1990's Season 1 episode "Moaning Lisa", perhaps most famous for introducing the character Bleeding Gums Murphy. Now the art direction here is sublime, particularly in a section where Lisa wanders at night through the sleezy streets of Springfield trying to find the source of Murphy's music. During this segment the dark building stretch out into the night sky, really evoking the feeling of being a small child.

But the episode also deals with some serious issues in a funny and entertaining way. Lisa is essentially suffering from depression and doesn't know how to deal with the situation, until Marge finally realises that her own mother had given her bad advice as a child and that it is fine for Lisa to be sad if she wants to, because Marge will always be there to support her, a revelation which finally lifts Lisa's sadness. The B plot while less weighty and more funny deals with an equally important issue as Homer deals with a crisis of growing old, in the form of Bart beating him to a video game, a story which climaxes in a fantastic dream sequence.

Essentially these cartoons treat people as they should be treated, intelligently, and its evidenced throughout the early run of The Simpsons which is often thoughtful and enlightening while not being preachy and remaining funny. Too few cartoons manage or even attempt this these days. An article by Mark Kermode before Christmas in the Observer noted a similar problem in cinema while citing Inception as a hopeful example of change. Having recently seen both the Artist and The Descendants in the cinema it seems to me that perhaps Hollywood has finally realized they can treat people like grown ups, certainly watching Pixar films it would seem that feature length animations have, I really hope that in time TV cartoons can start to do the same.

Someone Should do Something

January 29th 4pm
One of the drivers at the intersection is panicking, I guess he’d confused or something because he isn’t going even though the lights are green. Still it means I can cross the road!

January 29th later
Coming back from Tesco and he’s still there, he’s sort of just staring straight ahead. Maybe he’s foreign or something and doesn’t understand how British roads work?

January 30th
He was still there today, looks even more panicked and was sweating a lot. The car is a green Peugeot estate that looks quite old.

January 31st
The guy was asleep today. He looks to be about 40 and has short black hair and a light blue shirt on. He looks quite dishevelled but I suppose he hasn’t left his car for a few days. The drivers behind him seem really annoyed now and are beeping their horns a lot.

February 1st
He hasn’t moved since yesterday, I think he might dead. Someone should do something.

February 4th
Lots less beeping of the horns now, I think some of the other drivers might have died.

February 5th
It all smells quite bad now because of all the dead people. Even the ones that are alive are festering in their own excrement. Grim. I should probably call the council, I don’t know why someone hasn’t done something already.

February 8th
Haven’t had time to call the council but I’ve found a new way to walk so I don’t have to go past it. People are saying it’s all been causing lots of traffic problems.

February 11th
There are traffic jams all over the city now, I’m glad I don’t drive but it’s getting pretty ridiculous!

February 29th
Got a letter in the post saying they are going to knock down my house to build a new road to alleviate all the gridlock. I’m just glad someone’s finally doing something!

Why Dreams aren't Boring

Crikey it's been a while since I last wrote to you dear reader, my apologies. This one is just short but I hope it will tide you over.

Today I'm going to talk about dreams. Now if you're of a certain type, or even in a certain mood you've probably just stiffened up and though "Oh god not a dream story". I know this because whenever you are with a group of people and someone says" I had a weird dream last night" about half the group are going to say (or at if you are British think and then not say) "not another boring dream story".

This really annoys me, and what annoys me more is that I have done it myself. Dream stories are often by equal parts, insightful, exciting, and hilarious. For example I have recently been rejoicing in the fact that a lot of my dreams start with film noire style title cards, resulting in the truly incredible "Hercule Poirot and the Rat King of Brooklyn" (I don't care to explain but the title was pretty accurate). Beyond the absurd I also find that dreams conjur up some of the most incredible imagery impossible, flying over endless oceans, pillars of fire, dark twisted visions of places you know. Finally they really are a window on the soul, giving us a glimpse into the subconcious mind, our fears and worries. A simple example of this is a dream I have whenever I face a deadline where I am constantly missing the school bus home and end up stuck there forever!

Because of this dreams are a huge inspiration to me whenever I try and write. I think its time we stopped getting bored at dreams and slapped down anyone who says they do, rejoice in dreams, write them down, try and work out what they mean, and share them with your friends. It can be a laugh and it can be very interesting.

I leave you with a dream I had last night, I think the meaning is pretty clear but I'd be interested to hear what you think.

Dream Fragment - They Are Selling the House I Grew Up In

It is late January now but the Christmas tree is still there,
Dead, Brown, Decaying,
The decorations smashed on the floor the lights flickering off,
They are selling the house I grew up in.

“I know I left but this is still my home” I say to the man,
Translucent, Ghostly, Faceless,
“We all move on” he hisses through invisible lips,
They are selling the house I grew up in.

“Give me my clothes!” I yell grabbing at a sheet to hide my
Nakedness, Loneliness, Fear,
“Your clothes are not here anymore” they all yell back,
They are selling the house I grew up in.

Cooking With G: Chilli Cookoff

I've been threatening for a while to do a cooking segment, and the time has finally come. This afternoon I bought my ingredients, cleaned my kitchen, and got to cooking. Today, as this is the first time, we are going to do something pretty easy, but still one of my favourites: Chilli! Before we get down to that though I think I should adress the first two rules of cooking.

1: tomatoes and any vegetable make an acceptable pasta sauce
2: Add the right spice/herb to that sauce and it is now any cuisine you care to mention!

Here are some herbs & spices I use the most.



From left too right we have: Mixed Herbs (make things italian), Chilli and Paprika (make things mexican), Garam Masala and Cumin (make things curry). Learn these and they will serve you well, and most importantly just experiment with them and all the other spices. Go crazy. If it doesn't taste great you know for next time.

Anyway here are the ingredients for today:



in no particular order 1 Onion, 2 Chillies, some garlic, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms, 500g of beef, kidney beans, other beans, paprika, chilli powder. I will also tell you here the dark secret of chilli: the only ingredients you really need are chilli, beans and paprika. Everything else is extra so just pick and choose as you want, the recipe today though is G's Chilli so all of the above are needed. I usually go for Kidney beans and Pinto beans, they didn't have any pinto beans though so I got mixed beans. It really doesn't matter too much.

We'll start up by chopping these:



It's worthing having a bowl for putting the chopped vegetables in, like I've done with the onion here



With the onion done we can move onto the chillies. For educational purposes I've split one open



You see the seed body? That's where all the hotness is. Get rid of some or all of the seed body to make your chilli a bit cooler. I usually get rid of a lot of it because I'm a spice pansy.

WARNING: DON'T TOUCH YOUR EYES YOUR NOSE OR ANYTHING RIGHT AFTER HANDLING CHILLIES.

Anyway once you've sorted your seeds out, chop that shit up and put it with the onion. Also at this point put some oil in a saucepan and start heating it up. You'll want the oven on a medium heat for most of this.

Next thing to deal with is the garlic. There is a great bit in goodfellas where the Don is cutting up garlic with a razor to get it as fine as possible. This is a bit OTT but the principle is sound: the more flavour you want the finer you should cut things, because it increases the surface area in the pot and on your tongue. I chop most stuff pretty fine but again this is up to you really.



Split your garlic into two piles, the first goes with the chilli and the onions. The second goes in your now hot oil.



Once the garlic starts to show signs of browning mix your meat in and IMMEDIATELY add paprika, chilli powder, pepper etc.



Once the meat starts to show signs of browning add in the chillies, onions and the rest of the garlic.



Stir it occaisionally to make sure it doesn't burn and chop the rest of the vegetables. I'm not showing you photos of this. You should know how to chop fucking vegetables. Once the meat has gone brown put your beans in



and thoroughly mix them in, and then add the peppers and mushrooms.



Erm I probably need a bigger pot...



Salvation!

Let all this cook for a bit until the peppers and mushrooms have softened up a bit and then its time for the tomatoes. These don't need to be finely chopped because their entire point is to boil down to nothing.



Once the tomatoes are in put a lid on and leave to simmer for a while on a low heat (I guess about 15 minutes should do it? I wasn't timing it, I never time things. It's why I can't bake)



Every now and then you'll want to stir and taste it. Add more paprika and chilli powder if it needs it. It probably needs more paprika because that shit is delicious.



It reduced down enough that it could all go in one pot. Looks good! (No seriously it does trust me). If it's not looking this gloopy just add more tomatoes and let it simmer a bit longer.

Now it's ready to eat! Have it in burritos! eat it with rice! Stick it in a taco! It's all good. I just slopped some on a tortilla and ate that.



It was amazing.

I bagged up and froze most the rest and probably have enough for about 5 meals which is awesome when you are poor like me. Also if you are a vegetarian just put in more beans to replace the meat, don't use fake meat because that stuff is gross and tastes weird. I will be going vegetarian in a couple of months (I will explain that closer to the time) and I will probably make some them.

Thanks for reading!

Trains and the People Who Use Them

As I stepped off the station platform and onto the train the weather broke, for the first time in days, a week at least. The rain stopped, the wind dropped, the sun began to beat down, and I finally saw the blue sky above us. If there was ever a more definite sign that the good lord has looked down on the railways and is pleased it was at that moment.

Divine approval of train travel is of course not surprising. After all I love trains and my opinion is invariably (in my opinion) the correct one. There are of course some perfectly boring reasons to approve of trains, they are environmentally friendly, they are efficient, they are fast. I like to think that my reasons are more interesting and perhaps a bit more "poetic".

To start off though I feel I need to define my train love. It is not lust dear reader, no I am not like that lady who loves the eiffel tower or that other one where the men wanted to do cars. Nor am I a train-spotting type, sitting on platforms and noting down the technical minutiae of engines. I admit my love is somewhat practical as I don't drive and don't even have a license, but I don't hate cars and indeed look forward to the day when I can finally get that Aston Martin I've always wanted.

I think the word love is well placed though as there is definitely something romantic about train travel. This is clear to me from how ingrained the romance of the train is in our culture: from the train pulling out of the station in Murder on the Orient Express, the image of Frank Sinatra gunned down as he chases the train in Von Ryan's Express, the whole of Once Upon a Time in the West. With this is mind it is no surprise that one of the greatest film directors of the 20th century, David Lean, was always using trains in his films to great effect, A Brief Encounter, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, in all the train plays a central role.

One of my favourite films, a film directed by Lean, is Dr. Zhivago. Last year when the winter was so different than it is now and the country was blanketed by snow I took the train, as I often do, to Swansea where I grew up to see my family for Christmas. This journey is beautiful at any time of year but seeing it covered in snow, with the wind occasionally whipping up the snow into an impenetrable cloud around us, felt to me just like that moment in the movie when Zhivago and his family flee to Siberia through the harsh Russian winter. Rushing through a familiar landscape so utterly changed was exhilirating and, I don't intend this as a pun, moving.

That ability to provoke passion and drama is something I have never felt travelling going up a motorway, even though I am just a passenger and am not devoting my attention to the road. Whoever built the British road network seems to have gone out of their way to hide as much of the outside world as possible from view, which is only compounded by the fact that you are enclosed in a little steel and glass bubble. From railways you can see some of the greatest views the country has to offer and even though you are always on one track just the simple fact that you can stand up and walk about gives an extra sense of freedom and disperses the claustrophobia of the car.

In the title I also mentioned the people of trains and that is perhaps the greatest part of their charm. You meet strangers, you for a brief moment have part of their lives revealed to you. You glide through stations in the middle of cities and villages, it is the human river moving from one social vista to another. This is an experience we are all too often robbed of elsewhere as endless barriers separate us from the life of society as a whole. Indeed in our day to day lives we often find ourselves trapped simply going up and down the same roads day in and day out, to the same places, and the same people; afraid to explore beyond what we already know and trust. From the train one sees hundreds of roads.

Because of this trains are endless source of inspiration for me, I find flipping through my notebooks that nearly half of what I write I do on the train. Trains have an incredible way of opening up the mind and the soul and revealing ideas and possibilities that were previously hidden.

You're a good man Ron Paul. Or are you?

Normally I am pretty light hearted on this blog because for the most part I am a fairly light hearted sort of person but I also have a serious side and, I guess kind of unsurprisingly for a person with an economics degree and a politics degree, have found the current Republican primaries far more interesting than any normal person should reasonably find them. So I am going to talk to you about that. Kind of.

If you know anything about the current Republican presidential primaries you will know that they are completely ridiculous. Republicans are usually an odd lot, and were it not for their annoying habit of becoming some of the most important people in the world they would be a constant source of hilarity rather than the source of a mix of anger and fear. This years candidates have been a whole other level of bizarre though, I mean to the extent that you go "man that Richard Nixon was a pretty sane and reasonable guy".

In the running this year you have the guy who is trying so hard to be normal is actually kind of creepy, the sexual predator who sells pizzas, the man who divorced his wife right after her cancer surgery and preaches moral virtue, the woman who's so extreme that even Margret Thatcher is creeped out by her, This Guy, and a man who wants to abolish the US government.

That last candidate is one I want to focus on, because he's one of the strangest and most interesting politicians around: Ron Paul. Here is a picture of him.

Now I assume you are a person well aware of current events dear reader, but lets recap. That old man sitting alone in a bare room might win a contest tomorrow which is the first step on the road to becoming president of the United States. In fact at one point last week the horribly intelligent human calculator Nate Silver of the New York Times predicted that a Paul win in Iowa was more likely than not (though his odds have slipped slightly since then). Obviously the perennial popularity of a 76 year old obstetrician in the race for the world's most important job has elicited a lot of news articles and opinion pieces as journalists struggle to explain what the hell a libertarian is and why millions of Americans consider themselves to be one, but one thing that comes up again and again is that, much like Brutus, Ron Paul is an "honourable man".

The annoying thing is that even if you dislike Ron Paul and his policies (it's worth noting at this point that I would describe myself as a socialist so am unsurprisingly not a massive fan), his "honour" is something which is actually hard to disagree with. Unlike most of his fellow presidential hopefuls he is at least ideologically consistent, that is to say that he will support unpopular things if they are in keeping with his philosophy. So as someone who in essence wants to abolish the federal government (it is slightly more nuanced than that I'll admit, but basically that's what he wants) he was opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and wants to slash the defence budget whilst wanting to lead a party with an out of control military fetish. He wants to legalise drugs in a party that is probably a bit unsure about whether ending prohibition was such a good idea. Even if you don't agree with the man that sort of integrity and dedication to your principles in the face of constant opposition has to be considered admirable, and yes "honourable".

It is here that I am reminded of probably the greatest history book ever written 1066 and All That, also probably one of the funniest books ever written and something you should definitely read if you haven't already. Throughout there is an obsession with deciding if the various people and events of British history were good or bad. This leads to such lines as "Although a Good Man, James II was a Bad King". Perhaps much the same could be said of Ron Paul. This is because although honesty and integrity are obviously essential parts of being a Good Man, if the ideals which you hold are utterly insane and without merit then you cannot fail to be a Bad Thing.

So yes he opposes the war on drugs which is a Good Thing and is against military interventionism which is also mostly a Good Thing. But his "honourable" position also means he opposes the Civil Rights Act, which is clearly a Bad Thing and generally supports a lot of policies which would see most people starving and living in horrific poverty. If you are not familiar with the libertarian ideology then keep in mind that their perfect future is basically the movie Robocop, and if you think that sounds good you clearly didn't get the main point of the movie Robocop.

Of course this is on of the central jokes of 1066 and All That, defining things as good or bad is really an exercise in futility. Good and bad are totally subjective descriptions and honour is an especially grey term. I alluded earlier to Mark Antony's famous speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar where he tells the crowd of Caesar's assassination and says of the conspirators "They that have done this deed are honourable: What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, That made them do it: they are wise and honourable, And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you."

If Ron Paul ever had his way he would oversee the deprivation and most likely the deaths of millions and he would do so because he is an honourable man.