• Home
• Blog
• Contact
• Writing
• Design

So, as the web already knows, Wired has printed a loada six-word stories, and Slashdot has fostered loads more.

I give you:

Death became her. Resurrection angered her.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel stepped from the –

Birth. Death. Sold sandwiches in between.

Red-hooded girl defeats transvestite wolf.

I. Angry Achilles avenges Patroclus, killing Hector.
II. Odysseus has adventures getting home (uncuckolded).

a. Hamlet dithers after uncle murders Dad.

b. Never never trust your daughters (sometimes).

c. Magician trains monster. Avenges family. Retires.

d. Witches correctly predict Scottish royal bloodbath.

“Policeman” revelation spoils long-running play.

Plane crash. Mysterious island. Interminably unexplained.

POISONED KEYBOARD KILLS HEADLINE WRITER SHOCKE…

So, c’mon people, let’s have yours.

Based on his talk at the Sheldonian in Oxford on 20th October 2006, here is a summary of George Monbiot’s arguments for achieving the necessary turnaround in otherwise disastrous climate change within our lifetimes, put here to spread the message and encourage debate.

A. REDUCE ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND INCREASE EFFICIENCY
1. Carbon rationing. Don’t use taxation, use rationing to give everyone a quota and make it fairer across rich and poor; in fact, it would help redistribute energy wealth, as the rich can buy the extra carbon credits they need from people who don’t use as much energy as they do or want to. (One person in the audience argued for caps at the source of energy production instead, but GM sensibly said that this wouldn’t give people a motive in their daily lives (a) to campaign for more energy efficient products in the marketplace (b) to reduce their own energy use in creative ways – personally, I think both routes might be needed.)
2. Efficient homes. Come on, you know this stuff: loft and cavity wall insulation, low-energy light bulbs, etc.
3. Energy transport. Use DC rather than AC to transfer power as its more efficient over long distances.
4. Look to yourselves. Yes, yes, China has a huge, growing and increasingly demanding population – but we in Western Europe and the US are still far and away the cause of the problems at the moment.

B. USE SUSTAINABLE WAYS OF PRODUCING POWER
1. Offshore wind power on the continental shelf on a massive scale. Monbiot controversially (to environmentalists) dismisses micro-scale wind and solar power, on the basis that, well, it’s overall impact on the problem is going to be diddly squat, unless we have wind turbines on our homes that are dangerously massive. (Though he did concede to the greenies in the audience that of course there’s no harm in people doing it to some extent.)
2. Solar power in the Sahara – the east-to-west axis of the desert provides sun at some point all day long. (He was less clear on the issue about who gets this power – Africa? Or us? – except to suggest…)
3. A global electricity grid to distribute this stuff.
4. Use hydrogen for heat – domestic boilers can burn hydrogen rather than oil or gas. Much of the technology is there, and it is already transported across huge distances for some industries.

C. CHANGE TRANSPORT POLICY & EXPECTATIONS
1. Drive electric cars. The technology is there, and the battery problem is easily oversome: he cleverly proposes that the existing network of filling stations becomes a network of battery-charging stations instead, where your battery is swapped out for a charged one, and on you go. Charge the batteries at night. (Nice – though he doesn’t explain how you could bootstrap such a system without wholesale, dramatic change in government policy…) Oh, biofuels are a disaster: to use them on a large scale takes crucial food-producing land away.
2. Coach networks. We have motorways already, so let’s use them intelligently. Move coach stations from town centres to motorway junctions, and have express services running up and down the Mways all the time; then use local networks to connect to the coach stations. (A statistic: the M25, at full capacity with current average car occupancy, and traffic flowing at 60mph – clearly impossible on the M25! – can accommodate 19,000 people; a coach system would manage 250,000.)
3. Stop flying. The Monbiot headline: we need to stop flying by 90%. He began his talk in awareness of ‘love miles’ – the long-distance journeys we feel morally obliged to take to visit friends and family. His argument is basically that we have to wake up to a ‘new morality’: where our right to travel like this is seen as inferior to our right to survive and not be destroyed by climate change. If we want to fly, we need to save up our carbon credits over a long time.

He’s a convincing speaker, though it’s hard to see how these suggestions can all be begun to be implemented within the 10-year timescale that he says is urgently upon us, given the intransigence of governments, and large corporations’ enthusiasm for clinging to their current profit streams. He throws it at us to motivate political change.

But can we? How, realistically? What do you think?

I’m increasingly convinced it all fits together. Dr Macartney (sic) has an accident and slips into a coma. He ‘wakes’ and finds himself a police detective in 1970s Manchester by the name of Sam Tyler. It turns out he has a sister, Rose, who has been travelling with a mysterious man called the Doctor. Together they investigate the evil Cybus Corporation, which turns out to be a subsidiary of the Hanso Foundation, which of course is just a front for Opus Dei.

Now, a number of you listening to this broadcast regularly will have come across some odd phrases in popular parlance, and you would rightly suspect these to be Americanisms. With his broad experience of world cultures and pluck in the face of linguistic adversity, your correspondent has elected to proffer a brief guide for the perplexed. Simply find the egregious word on the left, and a translation will duly present itself alongside:

Doh – Bother! (vulg, Blast!)
Duh – I say, you must be two pinches short of a snuffbox
Feh – What an absolute shower
Fnord – I think you’d better ask the Ministry about that
Hurr – Tick tock! Ding dong! I say!
LOL – I say, that is a hoot (compare ROTFL – Really, Simkins, you are the limit!)
Meh – If you say so, old chap
OMG – Good Lord!
Squee – I say!
Woot – Rather!

Budding authors take note. The sensible way to assess your chances of writing a bestseller is of course to look at the qualities of previous bestsellers. It is with public-spiritedness in mind therefore that I have run a frequency analysis on the titles and authors of every bestseller (from the Publishers’ Weekly lists) in the US from the whole of the 20th century. I can now announce the results:

Your best bet for a first name is JOHN, JAMES or MARY; and your second name should be STEEL, KING or IRVING (though other first names might work, such as ROBERT or DOUGLAS).

As for a title, as well as connecting words, you’re really going to need MAN, HOUSE, TIME or WOMAN in there somewhere. My optimal suggestions would be THE HOUSE OF MAN, perhaps, or A WOMAN OF MY TIME.

I look forward to receiving a small royalty share when you’ve put this into action.

It’s still very much a work in progress, but I’ve been gathering links to those invisible cities people were exploring recently and collected them at Blind Atlas. If you know of more, please do let me know. There’ll be ongoing content at the site from a collaboration of writers.

Far, far away from Velocester, if you take the road east from Spindlemarch (with thanks to and ), you come to…

Polopolis

The invisible city of Polopolis is half way, by most compasses, between here and Cathay. It has always been a place for meeting – cultures delicately touch one another there as the moon kisses the water on its river, known by the same name as the city’s marketplace, ‘Il Milione’. Leaders meet there, too, to discuss their affairs of state, knowing that this is a place of the moment and the record books will not judge them here – and that Il Milione will carry their words away if they regret them. So long are these moments that much of the city is populated by these leaders’ descendants.

There are no record books in Polopolis, then: all is talk, and all history is oral. History is made most intensely at Il Milione, the marketplace, where thousands gather every day to trade, negotiate, accuse, reconcile or befriend. There, over there, are lost twins reunited after years at the opposite edges of the city (there are no gates, of course), smiling to discover their wives and children have completely different names; to their right, a carpet maker shows off his craftsmanship, so finely woven in so many colours one cannot tell where each thread begins or ends.

Polopolis has three quarters, known as Niccolo, Maffeo and Marco, though no two estate agents can agree on where exactly their boundaries lie: that fine apartment building you see, with roof tiles the colour of the sky, is championed by one as being in ‘Maffeo borders’, and another ‘where Niccolo and Marco meet’.

Il Milione itself is not one broad channel, but an endless series of bifurcations and rejoinings, sometimes ducking under the houses and at others flaunting itself in ornamental lakes; everywhere there are bridges, and each has its resident mathematician, frowning the long weary hours away as she contemplates the shortest route from one place to another. “We both step and do not step in the same rivers” is the old philosopher’s inscription on the perfect masonry of the arch above the city hall.

I have been to Polopolis myself, and sometimes it feels as if I never left.

Genealogy is always a double-edged sword. Within minutes of being entertained to find that one set of my great-great-great-grandparents ran a canalside pub in Middlesex… I discovered that it’s now a strip joint next to an industrial estate.

Last year I observed that I don’t often read the same author one book after another – the exception was Iain Sinclair (see here and here). He’s the exception again. Hot on the heels of Edge of the Orison I’ve felt compelled to read Rodinsky’s Room (co-written with Rachel Lichtenstein).

The first follows John Clare’s ‘journey out of Essex’ – ie his fugue from an asylum at High Beach in 1841, walking penniless, driven by lost (and unregainable) love, the 80 miles to his village north of Peterborough. I can’t remember feeling so inspired and gripped by a book in recent times, such that I’ve fixed anyone who’ll listen (or won’t) with an ancient mariner’s stare and proceeded to prate about it. Sinclair’s form, for me at least, gets ever better with each new non-fiction book he writes – while his fiction (though I probably will tackle Dining on Stones when I have the stomach) gets more unwieldy and unfathomable.

The Clare book is self-indulgent at times, especially with a fruitless quest revolving around his wife’s genealogy, but I loved it throughout nonetheless – the usual blend of coruscating sideswipes at modern blandness, fused with elegiac tones and swathed in his psychogeographic obsession with making connections: Sinclair is the real Dirk Gently.

I’m still in media res with the Rodinsky book – more on that some time soon.

I cycled to Charlbury and back today as practice for the London to Brighton (albeit only half the distance). The highlight, apart from much glorious countryside, and seeing a hare closer than ever before, was North Leigh Roman Villa. Very well preserved foundations, many still with hypocaust intact – and the most astonishing mosaic, preserved in a locked shed, but with window views. It’s enormous. The site is a beautiful, tranquil place, which I had all to myself in the grey drizzle, and I almost feel guilty for telling anyone about it.