First of all, Christmas is a potential nightmare for autistic folk. The lights, noise, Slade, too many people squeezed into a front room, drunk people - it's a recipe for utter misery for some autistic people, children and adults.
They will need, first and foremost, and escape route from any busy locations, especially places they've never been before. But it's not enough to have a way out ready - people have to not make a big thing about them disappearing for a while! Nothing is worse than the rest of the group making a song and dance of the fact you need some air. Ideally you should be able to slip out unnoticed or at least unrewarded, so you can then slip back again. It is also very helpful if people allow autistic friends and relatives to skip some segments of festivities. Offer it, especially to children who may be too scared to ask - 'if you need a break, you can pop upstairs and chill for a bit if you like'. Leave it up to them.
As far as possible keep routines normal on Christmas day, or if you have established Christmas routines, don't deviate from them as an autistic person will rely on them to help them handle everything else the day brings.
Buying presents *may* have been extremely challenging for an autistic person as it's hard for us to imagine whether our idea of a cool pressie is your idea of a cool pressie! Just be grateful! 7/?
Christmas can bring a halt to an autistic child's engagement with their interests as other things will be expected of them. Trouble is, their presents may well be part of their obsession, like a new video game. Likelihood is that them finally having the thing they have wanted for months, coupled with not being able to play with it, will lead to meltdown (and bloody rightly so). So be mindful of this and structure the day so they have an opportunity to indulge in their favourite hobbies. But yes, it is Christmas so you may not be happy with your son, daughter, spouse wandering off to play Counterstrike all day, so set clear time limits and expectations. Surprise gifts may be a bad idea. Surprises generally are not always welcome for autistic people, so bear this in mind. just coping and trying to show gratitude for a clearly unwanted present is really hard work.
Don't forget that autism continues into adulthood and never disappears. You may have a loved one who manages to camouflage their autism, but remember that this is *exhausting* for them, so give them a break from time to time and let them be themselves. A few small tips: have single coloured, non-flashing/winking Xmas lights; too many decorations could be overwhelming so tone it down a bit (this may help anyone, to be fair); DON'T ARGUE, even if it's traditional!
Listen to them. It may not interest you to hear about the minutiae of how the Imperial Guard field the best tanks, or how many species of elm there are, but this is important stuff to us and we just want to be able to share it.
Autistic people will often have small coping strategies that are physical in nature, like twirling a pen, drumming with their hands, rubbing their feet together. The older we are the more subtle it will be. Do NOT comment on it as it'll make us feel silly. These movements are called 'stims' and they can keep us nicely grounded and calm. It's not that weird really - most people have go to tics and habits when nervous after all. Children may have quite obvious or 'odd' stims but give them a break! Stims will be particularly useful over Christmas as it's so damnably stressful, so expect them and accept them. Same with comfort blankets and toys/trinkets. I usually have a lego minifigure in my pocket, for example.
It is possible that the extra people, lights, food, noises, expectations and lack of ability to use coping strategies will lead to burnout, or a meltdown. This is where our stalwart efforts to stay cool are overcome by stimuli, like Orcs at Helms Deep. Everyone experiences this differently but a meltdown can be, for the person living it: terrifying, panicking, totally exhausting, embarrassing, even dangerous (think hurting yourself). It's bloody horrible. For other people around a meltdown, it can be scary, upsetting and a real downer on the mood generally. But remember, it is WORSE for the person having the meltdown, so be kind and minimise their sense of embarrassment.
Harris, in his alleyway at 11.20am knew none of this. The delivery van was still blocking the
alley, and water was pouring from a ruptured pipe in the wall of the wounded
coffee shop; the alley was a mass of puddles and chunks of masonry. He tried his mum again: again no luck. Putting his phone onto a battery-saving mode,
he weighed up his options. As far as he
knew, a terrorist attack was ongoing and the city was a dangerous place. He had found temporary shelter, but realised
it was pretty restrictive if he was spotted by someone wishing to do him
harm. He would be better, he reasoned,
in a more open space, but one with plenty of hard cover. How would the parks be? Would they be as
hectic as the streets? With no way of
knowing, he set off down the other end of the alley, where the passage was
narrower, and emerged in Chinatown, staying on the narrow streets. Things were quieter here. Helicopters were still hovering overhead, and
the roar of crowds could be heard, but it all felt a little more distant, like
the back streets of a busy seaside town in August. Harris felt himself relax, and he considered
his next move. If he headed down past Piccadilly,
he could get to St James park. Or, with
a little more effort, he could head to Hyde Park, which was bigger and a little
further out, and therefore possibly safer.
He decided to head towards the West End, skirting Piccadilly as much as
possible. He fought against crowds in
several places, and Pall Mall turned out to be almost as busy as Charing Cross,
but he found himself in Green Park by midday, discovering it to be relatively
quiet. A few people he’d met on the way
had given him snippets of information.
It seemed that the terrorists were brutal, exacting physical, manual
violence on Londoners rather than shooting or bombing them. Apparently one person had seen a group of
individuals being eaten alive by their assailants. Harris’ head span. He still couldn’t get hold of his mother, and
was still no closer to discovering what was going on. He’d realised the Guardian had gone down at
about 11.50, when an error screen kept being returned. Twenty minutes later, his signal had gone
altogether, including his 4G. He was
without means of communication, huddled under an oak in the least revered royal
park in London. He quietly sobbed,
hiding himself as best he could under his coat as rain began to fall.
A sudden
flash and eruption of flame interrupted his misery. It came from somewhere around Park Lane, and
was joined with a second plume of smoke and fire. The sound reached him a moment later, a heavy
thudding roar. Pieces of flaming debris
were scattering around him, hurled into the air by the explosions. Harris could see tall flames emerging from
the source of the chaos, licking the walls of the high hotels and apartment
blocks, a smear of black smoke on the blue sky.
So it was terrorists, he thought.
They were going for the symbols of wealth and inequality, no doubt. He glanced across the trees to spot the
heights of the Shard, peeping over the oaks and rooftops; a moment of clarity
came in the realisation that he was sitting only a few hundred yards from
Buckingham Palace. He began to run.
He was
stopped by another immense crowd of people, many of whom were screaming and
crying. They were jostling and elbowing
past one another, like an aggressive glacier.
There was no hope of crossing the stream, and Harris had no desire to
join it. There was no choice but to
wait, so he ducked into a clothes shop that seemed to have been looted –
garments were strewn on the floor and windows were smashed; no one was around. The place smelled stale, with a tangy odour
Harris put down to the vandals. He
squatted in a corner, hidden by some racks of jeans, and took out his phone
again, only to discover there was still no signal of any kind. Turning it off to preserve battery, he looked
around at his situation. The steady
stream of people continued outside, and he could see the other side of the
road, where people were leaning from windows, frantically looking at the events
unfold. There was a brief flash of blue
lights and a moment of a siren which then died to nothing. The shop was wrecked. He hadn’t noticed how the ceiling was caving
in, wires and light fittings dangling; glimpses of upstairs apartments with
potted plants and book cases could be seen through the apertures. There seemed
to be no logical reason for such destruction.
Harris pondered this for a moment and then noticed a figure, watching
him from the far corner of the shop, a silhouette against the bright inlaid
lighting advertising Givenchy and Boss scents.
Harris held up his hand in greeting, but the person didn’t move. They appeared to be looking intently in his
direction, and seemed totally uninterested in the crowds outside; Harris
shifted his weight to offset the cramp that was developing in his thighs and
tried speaking. “Hiya, you ok?”
The
response was immediate and horrifying, as the figure leapt at Harris in a
single, fleeting movement. Harris turned
and dived under the customer desk, banging his head hard on the wood, hurriedly
drawing in his exposed legs as the other person reached for them. The light was now illuminating the other, and
Harris could see grey skin, shrivelled and worn features and empty eye sockets.
The smell was incredible, and almost made him pass out. Screaming in terror, he backed away, under
the desk as the creature crawled towards him, clutching for his feet blindly. The stench was unbelievable, and was choking
Harris, bringing tears to his eyes. The
monster was wearing a grey, matted and filthy dress, in blue and gold, and had
a necklace dangling around its neck; it swiped at Harris’ eyes with thin and
discoloured fingers, the tips worn to bone like dinosaur’s claws. Harris kicked at it with all his might,
landing a few solid blows on the jaw of the thing, which promptly broke off and
shot across the floor like a rat. It
rose, standing over Harris, its head shrunken and strangely imbalanced; with
electric speed it lunged at him, but he managed to roll out of the way and
struggle to his feet. Heart racing, he cast his eyes around for anything that
could be useful. A fire extinguisher was
a possibility. Footsteps behind him as
he closed his fingers around the nozzle of the extinguisher alerted him that
the creature was close, so he wildly swung the heavy metal cylinder in a wide
arc, using its momentum. Blind luck had
it connect with the thing’s head, and its skull shattered into powder and small
fragments. The rest of the body
continued to move for a few seconds, clawing ineffectually at him as he danced
out of the way, extinguisher discarded on the floor. After a longer time than felt reasonable, the
remains collapsed onto the chequered floor of the fashion shop and were
still. Harris let his back slide down
the wall; exhausted, he too slumped onto the floor, breathing heavily. He now realised tears were shiny and sticky
on his cheeks and his back ached terribly.
The crowd was thinning outside, but he could do nothing but rest. But there would be no way he would shut his
eyes.
We teachers all love ticking work. That green, unaccompanied tick on every page of an exercise book - a solemn nod to the Ofsted inspector that this work has been read by teacher, and that the student must, therefore, be making lovely rapid progress.
Ah, sarcasm. Can't beat it. But as a slightly foolish and over-excitable relative of irony, very relevant indeed. For this week, the ticks were not a teacher's best friend at all; no, they made life a complete misery.
Exmoor is a beautiful, wild zone separating the Bristol Channel from the A361, a realm of heather-smirched rounded hills and terrifying steep descents into sleepy seaside towns. It is famous for its scenery, its cider, its horrifying 1950s floods and its beautiful population of red deer, which have wandered the place since God-knows when. These deer are content to bellow maniacally and smash each others' heads in, seemingly oblivious to the grim creatures that stud their exterior. Deer, you see, are the Pearly Kings and Queens of Exmoor, studded with tiny, shiny humps of pearlescent white and marbled brown - often resembling the branch of Selfridges in Birmingham, so cloaked in blood-sucking ticks they are. For these arachnid vampires are a very real presence anywhere that large mammals such as red deer, roe deer, dogs and people interact with each other through the medium of long grass: a lesson I have learned well this week.
Exmoor's coast, near Lynton.
A picture of a tick would just gross you out.
Pitching a tent by a river on a flattened plain of trampled long grass seemed a splendid idea at 6pm in the evening, after a long drive along apparently endless hills of 25% gradient and above. Get the tent up, crack open a beer and sob by the camp fire - that was the plan. And it worked. The tent was up in no time, the beer was rivaling the stream at our feet in volume and swiftness of flow, and the exhausted sobbing of amateur campers could be heard in Tiverton. In fact, the whole time there went reasonably well. Maritime vistas were photographed and instantly spread by Facebook, steak was consumed in dusty old inns tucked under perilous cliffs and dogs were befriended and sat by the campfire like sentinals. It wasn't until we had packed our tent and made our way home that we discovered we had stowaways, presumably picked up from the long grass that had become our carpet.
No red deer had been seen at all in the week, so ticks had been of little concern to us; our hubris would have made Macbeth tut and shake his head in worry. For my part, I had never even seen a tick in the wild, and was of the opinion that ticks only ever happened to 'other people' - people who liked carrying maps in plastic envelopes around their necks and ate Kendal mint cake more than once a year. They never happened to folk who drank lattes and drove a Fiesta. Well, they did happen
. Four separate ticks, all nuzzled in that peculiarly intimate way of theirs into just one individual. Four tiny little beasts - spiders drawn by toddlers - all eagerly burrowing down to the artesian well of blood that lies beneath the skin.
Cue a brace of days frantically tumble-drying every single item of clothing taken on the trip, at a high heat, for twenty minutes. Cue panicked research online into the order of symptoms and likeliness of death from Lyme Disease. Cue endless - limitless and deathly boring - examinations of bare skin every time an itch was felt. Believe me, the experience was so icky that itches were a constant, dull reminder of the body's ability to freak itself out unnecessarily. Everything itched. I'm fairly certain that for a short time, even my pockets were itching.
It's all over now, but I'm painfully aware that should another darling little critter rear its abdomen at any point in the next week, we'll have to go through the whole de-ticking process once more, at which point I will probably just give in to their whims and allow them to turn me into a walking nosebag.
I look forward to September, where I will once again be dishing out the ticks, rather than being a dish for them.
Minecraft is a game without an instruction manual. You download it, and then you're plunged into a strange, vast new world, packed with pigs, sheep and spider-riding skeleton archers. You have nothing to defend yourself with...you have nowhere to hide. However, you don't know this yet. All you know is that you can see loads of lovely, blocky trees, and perhaps a few brightly coloured flowers. The cubes of earth beneath your feet undulate gently, forming hills and meadows. The bright blue sky presides over a vibrant world. You prance, quite content, through this place, taking in the strange vistas, noticing a desert in the distance perhaps. The weather holds, and you gamely climb the nearest mountain and marvel at the view - a broad Savannah to the west, a thick jungle to the south, a vast ocean with a craggy shoreline to the north. The sun continues to move overhead. You see a cave in the craggy mountainsides, and explore it for a while, finding nothing more than a few black specks in the rock that look a little like coal. Emerging from the cave, back into the sun, you realise that it is now evening. Said sun hangs heavy in the sky, orange and raw, and the blank above is beginning to darken. It will be night soon. You begin to feel anxious. All of your roaming around was lots of fun, but now it's nearly dark. You've heard that the darkness in Minecraft is not your friend, and that monsters appear in the black of night. The sun continues to sink, digging into the horizon. It hovers for a moment, and is then gone. Darkness envelopes the landscape, and suddenly the inviting land around you seems alien and strange. Odd noises emanate from the jungle. Shapes are moving on the grey sands of the desert; you stand on your hill-side perch, and you panic.
The 'first night' in Minecraft is an experience that you will only ever have once. Eventually, you become accustomed to the game, and any attempt to re-live that dreadfully scary time is undone by your experience. But it shapes the player, and most Minecrafters will recall their first night with relish. Mine was spent in a makeshift hovel made from wooden planks in the middle of swampland. Luckily, I had figured out how to punch trees to gain log blocks quite quickly, and had crafted planks from the logs - I had just enough to build a 2x2x2 hut that enclosed me totally. I had no torches, so no source of light. I didn't manage to get the wool together for a bed for about another in-game week. So I sat in my pathetic hut all night, listening to the moans of zombies as they swarmed around me, with only a thin wall of wood to protect me. Being totally unencumbered by weapons or armour, I was the epitome of vulnerability. If they'd somehow managed to gain entrance, I would've died a scary death. I stayed in the hut for around 3-4 nights as I explored the area and gathered resources, and each night was the same - tedious yet strangely thrilling, like I was experiencing first hand the thrills of being the main character in I Am Legend.
But before long, you will have a secure, well-defended homestead out in the wilds, with farmland, storage space, domesticated animals and interior design. That's the beauty of the game - you get better, and end up leading a comfortable and safe lifestyle. You no longer fear the monsters of night, as you have a diamond sword and enchanted armour, so you focus on aesthetics and making your home a beautiful sight, adding wholly unnecessary turrets and flourishes, all to please your eye for architectural glory. It is a microcosm of human experience, mirroring the birth of culture once the immediate dangers of starvation and being prey to toothy predators had been held at bay for good. Your home towers, cathedral-like in its splendour. The surrounding land is tamed and landscaped with great oaks and hedgerows. You add stables, barns, outbuildings. You expend once-valuable wool on trivial fripperies like picture frames and carpets, flags and portraits. Your home is awash with colour and design. Diamonds, once so vital, are now in strong supply as you expand your mining operations, so you create a throne built of blocks of the precious stones.
Soon, a huge stock of electronic redstone thrusts you into the industrial era. Now application and efficiency are key. You begin working on train networks, webs of railway lines threading between your quarries, mines and forests. You begin to create large scale smelters, using the myriad tools available. Now you can craft whole stacks of iron bars in moments, and those early days, spent desperately wandering caves searching for minute pockets of iron ore seem long, long ago. You now have so much material that you no longer know what to do with it, so you make pointless diversions, crafted from various rare blocks, just for something to do. You build a vast skyscraper out of iron blocks and populate it with furniture, just to get some kind of use out of the gigantic stockpiles of stuff you are now struggling to store. Your cathedral home is disfigured by necessary extensions for all this rubbish, yet still you crave more, until you have utterly exhausted the world around you. The trees, the flowers, even the mountain is now gone; they have been ground up, used to make other things. You stand in a desert of your own making, and despair.
I seem to get headaches a lot. I get them so often, that I'm starting to view them dispassionately, trying to figure out what caused them, where the sensation actually is, what positions/movements affect them and why/how they eventually go off. As such, I feel I can now publish my Headache Spotter's Guide and help out all fellow sufferers of the malady.
Headache #1
The Eye One
Centered around one of the eye sockets, epicentre usually seemingly in the very bone of the skull, in mockery of your vain attempts to massage the pain away. A constant, dull soreness, no throbbing with occasional flurries of excruciating pain when looking at bright light or laughing. Affected by light, thinking hard about difficult matters, blocked nose, poor eyesight. Cure: glasses, closing eyes, time.
Headache #2
The Neck One
Centered at the base of the skull and top of the neck, epicentre is apparently your very spinal column: the very think that makes you a vertebrate fighting back. Pain also spread around muscles in that area. Muscle pain, mostly, but with an insistence that is frankly rude, and prevents you from doing anything useful. Affected by sleeping position, weight of head, amount of nodding, dancing wildly to anything pre-1984. Cure: Neck brace, sleeping with only one pillow, neck massage, decapitation.
Headache #3
The Brain One
Floating freely around your cranium, epicentre is everywhere at once and makes you sad. The entire dome of your head becomes an upturned basket of pain, spilling agony out into the rest of your head and often, if you're lucky, your teeth too. Pain comes in many forms, but usually throbbing and inconsistent pain that will continually kid you into thinking its gone, before striking you down with a bolt of fire when you try getting out of your seat. Affected by everything, but especially aggravated by thirst, lack of sleep, lust and needing the loo. Cure: painkillers, silence and sleep.
Headache #4
Migraine
Different for everyone, and probably less common than you'd think. People who've had one are obvious - you can sense it in the clear fear they show when discussing the subject, and their avoidance of anything that could possibly lead to another episode. Pain is intense and debilitating, making you disinclined to socialising, reading or being alive a second longer. Can be accompanied, or preceded by aura, which is an impossible term to define but basically consists of the brain going haywire and fooling the key senses into thinking nonsense, such as talking bees spreading from growing cracks in your vision, to the all-pervading smell of garlic invading your entire head. Or just blurriness and discolouration in what you look at. Affected by continuing to exist and all its trappings. Cure: unknown.
I have a cold. It settled upon me on Thursday evening and has clawed deeper into my being since then. I assume I will either recover, painfully and weakly, over the coming months; or it will kill me and probably eat me to boot. It's a nasty cold.
I'm not going to waste my time, or yours, decrying the injustice of a summer cold. Viruses care little for seasonal preferences. Instead, I'm going to consider why we persist in calling it a cold. It really is a most unsatisfactory name for the illness. I would argue, in fact, that it removes even the connotation of disease, due to its very bland and vague nature. What use is a name for a viral disease that makes it sound as if you simply need to put a jumper on?
Because of this, people everywhere have to pretend to be fine when they've got a cold. They have to soldier on, and act as if nothing untoward is wrong at all. Society, combined with linguistics, has left us powerless and guilty on those occasions where we 'catch a cold'. I see this as wrong. Catching a cold is horrid. It's one of the more common viruses out there and it really lays into the victim, often for periods of a week or more. It is usually more debilitating than a bout of tummy trouble (which, at least, people give you sympathy for as you waddle to the loo looking fraught), and is far more of a regular occurrence than, say, typhus. It makes you feel like a slovenly furry animal has taken up residence in your sinuses and is steadily sandpapering the walls in order to redecorate. It makes you very sleepy, and a hazard to other motorists. It forces you to grimace apologetically to an audience of indifferent bastards as your nose transforms into a weir of snot and you desperately grasp for the loose end of the bog roll you're now forced to carry around with you. It's a bad illness.
So, its name needs changing as a matter of some urgency. People need to be allowed to look and feel horrific during the course of the illness, and they need to be able to garner sympathy from the multitude. 'Man flu' has had some vogue recently, mainly due to questionable pseudoscience seemingly performed by GQ magazine, but I fear that it lacks the punch required (and is still, clearly, a derogatory term). I think most of the worst diseases have a hint of Latin or Greek about them. Diphtheria - ends in a vowel, good move. Typhoid - ends in an '-oid', making it sound like a killer robot. Gonorrhea - hard to spell, a definite plus. Legionnaire's Disease - slightly seedy sounding, with extra connotations of the French, excellent.
I think we should begin to call the common cold 'Fisherman's Grehbuloidia'. That would work.
The haunting, insistent tapping music created on a load of old planks, carried by a young and inventive cast, proved a high point in this inconsistent yet memorable production at the Old Vic. The planks of wood are the central props in the show, playing a myriad of roles from Oberon's fairy hordes to the jaws of a hunting dog, all controlled by the wonderful choreography of the Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse) and the clever movements of the cast.
Having large hunks of wood in a central role is a brave move in any performance, with the possibility of cliched puns groaning from all quarters. However, it pays off admirably, and I would argue that the work done with the 2 by 4 is probably superior to that done with the more conventional puppets. Their use as instruments, elements of large scale dioramas, creeping tides and waves and forest pathways shows a real creative spark, and lent the whole show a sense of delight that it may otherwise have lacked. The traditional puppets, all creaking joints and mischievous faces, were often lacklustre and even redundent. The acting started reasonably and got an awful lot stronger, leaving the odd homunculi-like doppelganger puppets seeming unnecessary and forced, dragging the attention of the actors (and audience) away from the complex language and plot structure of Shakespeare. Oberon and Titania were stronger - the sparse puppetry used well to create ethereal and otherworldly characters that are very difficult to successfully portray in the usual manner. But it was the planks that stole the show.
The Mechanicals were wonderfully played, with the play-within-a-play of Pyramus and Thisbe a manic and super-detailed romp: the wall getting, perhaps, the biggest laughs, which is an impressive achievement. The vigour and timing of the Mechanicals was great, bestowing the script with the skill required to make it truly hilarious. The teenagers in the audience laughed even more than the adults. The love square of Helena et al was reasonably portrayed, but bogged down in the wholly gratuitous puppetry. Attempts were seemingly made at presenting the puppets as external souls, or perhaps the second part of a dual personality - at one point, Hermia and Lysander swap puppets - but it never quite seems to work. Puck was, for me, the true highlight. Portayed using ony a mallet, hammer, basket, saw, chisel and blowtorch, the inventiveness behind one of Shakespeare's most inventive beings is a joy to watch.
And so, before I stop - Bottom. It needs to be mentioned, but I will not give the game away. If nothing else, you have to see this production for the porytrayal of the Ass-form Bottom. The actor playing the role imbues him with an excellent cod-Grecian accent and attitude, but after his transformation, you'll never look at a bicycle the same way again...
I saw a ghost last weekend. Or at least, that's what a noisy, irrepressibly excitable part of my brain is shouting. It being my birthday, I was watching Skyfall on Blu-Ray (a tremendous experience). Glancing toward the open door leading to the hallway I saw a whiteness pass from the open, darkened bathroom door beyond, into the hall and away from my field of vision.
I do not believe in ghosts at all. As a youngster I think I hoped that they existed, but due to my scientific bent I have short shrift for anything supernatural. This does not mean I don't find it all fascinating: I have a very deep-seated interest in all things ghostly and mysterious, as I feel it tells us a great deal about the human condition. But I never thought I would see a ghost. And the majority of my brain still insists that I haven't. It was a trick of the light, or even an hallucination, asserts the side of my mind most closely aligned with Occam's Razor. Imagine the implication of actually seeing a spectre in my bathroom: it would firstly mean that my flat is haunted and, quite frankly, sod that. Far too stressful. It would also suggest that there is perhaps life after death (if floating meaninglessly in someone else's bathroom is 'life' in any true sense), and this goes against all of my intuition and education. Far easier to say that it was simply a sham - a trick, amplified by my silly brain.
But here's the thing: how easy it was for my brain to be fooled! I would say I am a fairly sensible chap, with a keen sense of scepticism. I always seek out the most realistic and reasoned arguments for or against anything. And yet, last weekend, just a fleeting peep of something strange has led me to wonder what my waking eyes have seen. I think this, in itself, suggests an answer to the big question: what are all these paranormal witnesses seeing. All those thousands of men and women who have seen ghosts, UFOs, the Loch Ness monster, Pikachu and all, all of them have been fooled by their brains. What they saw was something immeasurably dull - a stick, or a cloud of steam, or a little yellow rat - and their brains, their over-evolved, high-perfomance brains, have filled in the rest of the story. The stick becomes an anachronistic plesiosaur, the cloud of steam a baleful spirit and the yellow rat is suddenly a fictional pocket monster from Japan.
Our wonderful brains are flawed. All you need to do to witness this is see a face in the wood-chip wallpaper round your gran's house, or a smiling clown in the pattern of clouds above you. Your brain wants to see things that aren't there, as it is programmed to seek out movement, forms and most importantly faces. All it took was a mote in my eye, or a gust of wind, to fool my brain into seeing ghosts. And, the trouble is, once its in the mind, it's hard to shake the terror...
And this is the other thing at work, of course. Deep inside our psyche is a strange urge to be terrified. We all merrily seek out things that scare us (I watched Lightfields the other night, sequel to the excellent Marchlands, and spent the whole time peering through my fingers, waiting for a terrifying shock that sadly never came), to the point where we create or invent whole scenarios just to freak ourselves out. On a global scale this leads to theme parks and a thriving horror film industry. On an individual basis, this means telling exaggerated creepy stories and adding malign intention to everyday occurrences, like a fugue in a bathroom.
The myriad ghost stories and legends that litter the UK in particular are testament to these dual drives of wanting to be scared and the brain being able and willing to scare us. The endless reports of ghostly figures, hideous demons and frightening alien encounters are, perhaps, all a product of our own fevered imaginations.
Either that, or they're real.
Part II - my favourite 'real' ghost stories:
1. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, with her eyeless sockets and habit of floating down stairs. This photo was taken by a photographer for Country Life magazine who was taking a nice shot of the staircase when he noticed this shape descending the stairs:
2. The Monk of Newby Church, which is just a photo really, with no associated tale. But it's really tall and incredibly freaky. Estimates suggest it to be around 8' tall, and no evidence of fakery or deception was ever discovered.
3. The hauntings of Pluckley, Kent. This is the most haunted village in England, with at least 12 roaming spooks. My favourite is the screaming workman in the old quarry. He was crushed by a load of stone, and his scream is still heard on moonless nights...
4. The ghost bus of Ladbroke Grove: this was a terror in the 1920s, as it blared down the streets, lights blazing, with not a soul on board. Not even a driver. It apparently caused several car accidents.
5. The hairy hands of Dartmoor. These critters materialise in or on your vehicle as you drive down the B3212. They often appear over your own hands on the steering wheel, forcing you off the road. Or, they thump and pat on the walls of your caravan, looking for a way in...
Pupils at Hogwarts have access to a reasonably wide range of esoteric qualifications, suited to its key demographic. As an independent school, it does not have to follow the National Curriculum closely; however, it is disappointing to note that basic requirements such as English, Mathematics and Religious Education are all lacking or entirely missing from the school's syllabus. This has had adverse effects on all students, many of whom have never even been taught basic KS1 or 2 literacy. A few students have attended state or independent primary schools, and these students typically perform very well in contrast to their peers.
The majority of students appear to be under-performing, with most pupils struggling in all their lessons, most of which appear to be set at too challenging a level. One particular class, which seemed to be based on A-Level chemistry, proved too difficult for even the most proficient students. Only one pupil managed to complete the lesson objectives, mainly thanks to his use of an annotated text book. However, certain subjects appear to be either very short-term, or far too easy for the majority of students. An outdoors lesson was observed where students made very little progress over several lessons, simply performing the same repetitive tasks again and again, counting and feeding small maggot-like creatures. Clearly the curriculum requires an overhaul to bring literacy and numeracy levels up to the appropriate level for such a prestigious establishment.
Extra-curricular activities are well-established at the school, with chess clubs, animal care groups and 'duelling clubs' all vying for popularity. There is a definite sense of social responsibility among some students, with evidence of a student-led campaign to get the canteen workers more breaks and holiday time. The school library is underused, and often totally empty. The librarian has no idea why this is the case.
The sixth form is indistinguishable from the main school, as the students all remain on to study to the age of eighteen. The subjects offered remain the same, though with more rigorous examinations. End of KS4 results are generally average, whereas end of KS5 results this year were disrupted by unforeseen and external events. Students typically go into government posts, journalism or remain unemployed.
The Quality of Teaching is Unsatisfactory
Teaching at Hogwarts is generally very old-fashioned and lets the students down considerably. Lessons are formulaic and, other than the occasional impressive display of skills from teaching staff, are dull and lifeless. Lessons all too often revolve around tedious rote-work and use of text books. The study of History is particularly poor, with very little teacher interaction and no group work of any kind. Students were frequently found to be asleep during these lessons and, on one occasion, the teacher was also sleeping at their desk. Clearly this is not good enough, and suggests that Senior Leadership need to have far more rigorous CPD in place for struggling teachers, alive or dead.
Teachers have very high expectations of their pupils - often far too high for their age and ability. Again, during chemistry, the teacher was seen to display entirely unfounded expectations of a Year 7 class who could barely keep up with his description of various chemicals, poisons and antidotes. Students in this class were often punished for their lack of prior knowledge - a worrying trend that the senior leaders of the school need to counter as soon as possible.
Assessment for Learning is not well implemented at Hogwarts school. In fact, students seemed only rarely to be given assessments of any kinds, and homework tasks are often over-long and irrelevant (usually essay based). Starters and plenaries are very rare, and usually students enter classrooms with a genuine fear of what they may be expected to achieve. Tasks within lessons are often over-long and repetitive, lacking anything other than brief modelling from the teacher. Lessons all appear to be two hours long, but it is hard to say exactly what fills this time, with lessons often dedicated to a single activity with little teacher feedback beyond simple criticism. As such, the pace of learning is very slow in most subjects - most notably chemistry, biology, PE (which seems to disappear after Year 7) and charms.
The Behaviour and Safety of Pupils is Unsatisfactory
Frankly, the quality of safety provision for students at Hogwarts is totally unacceptable. Despite having a highly qualified, capable and over-worked school nurse, many severe and significant injuries have occurred in recent years. The main sport played by the school, entirely internally, is incredibly dangerous and should be reviewed by the HSE immediately. Several injuries from wildlife have occurred in recent months, with trees and large flying animals usually to blame - these hazards are not successfully monitored or kept safe by any member of staff other than the groundsman. This kind of Health and Safety brief is not usually in the remit of a groundskeeper, and it is our recommendation that more staff are drafted in to help with this task. There have been several deaths in recent years, all on site. The recent loss of the previous headteacher was a severe blow to the school's reputation, and many parents have removed their children from the premises. The headmaster's death went entirely unexplained, though rumours that a pupil murdered him are almost certainly hyperbole. The death of a Year 12 student during an international competition was also kept from the newspapers, and the effects are still being felt across the school. This summer, the school was disrupted by riots and pitched battles between rival sectors of the community. Whether the school was an incidental victim of this outburst of aggression, or an active part of it, is unknown to the inspectors. Significant damage was wreaked on the school buildings, with certain wings now closed for repairs. In short, at present Hogwarts is a very unsafe environment for all students and staff.
Behaviour of students is very poor indeed. Staff seem to maintain their grip on the school using threats of violence, and yet student disruption is at high levels. Most of the worst behaviour seems to be focused around one particular 'house' within the school's pastoral system, but despite this clear correlation, no positive action has been taken. Bullying is a very common occurrence and is not dealt with very well by the pastoral team, which consists of some of the strictest staff members in the school. Often the bullying between students can become physical aggression very quickly, with some students causing each other actual bodily harm. The bullying of students by staff is at unacceptable levels, with some students singled out from an early age for grudges that seem to date back decades. Most of these issues stem from the high levels of insular relationships that form in the school, between staff and pupils. Much of this stems from the unsatisfactory usage of a house system, which seems only to make the students more insular. Cross-house friendships are very rare and often mocked by other students, and even staff. One house in particular seems to be very isolated, with students from all other houses declaring them 'evil', 'sly' and other derogatory terms; with a common room located in a cold and damp basement, and a Head of House who spends a great deal of time out of school, it is perhaps no surprise that the students are struggling. Looking at the records, the House Championship has been corrupt for some time, with clear preferential treatment given to some houses over others.
The Leadership and Management of the school is Satisfactory
Until his death, the previous headteacher had a very strong reputation in the local community and had steered the school through some difficult times. However, accusations of favoritism dogged his career, and his lack of investment in quality teaching led to some very poor staff choices, including the appointment of unskilled staff for Divination (a spurious subject that has no academic rigour) and the constant poor selection of teachers for the difficult role of Defence Against the Dark Arts (a PSHE subject). After the headteacher's death, the school was run by the Chemistry teacher, rather than the established deputy. The reasons for this are unclear, but it is certain that it had a detrimental affect on the school and its students, many of whom were impossible to locate during our time at the school, suggesting serious problems with the school's safeguarding procedures. Since the death of the last headteacher, there has been no clear line of authority for child-protection matters, with the issue usually left to arcane and vague concepts such as 'love' and making sure students are 'sent to live with relatives until the age of 17' to keep them 'safe'. Middle management is a tier that seems not to exist, with the headteacher taking sole responsibility over every aspect of the school. This is not an efficient model, and it is recommended that the school create a new tier of management to help the current headteacher with her workload.
Hogwarts School is awarded a grade of 4 (unsatisfactory)
Hurrah for Sir David Attenborough. In a benighted world, he still calmly
presents the facts of life in his wonderfully honest and sincere voice (easily
the nicest voice in the world, after perhaps Ian McKellen’s Gandalf). This is good, as the rest of the telly-world
seems bent on providing mis-information, dogma and foolishness. ‘Science’ is the abstract noun that gets the
most punishment. For whatever reason,
the realm of science is treated as just that by the media – a fairytale
kingdom, unknowable to the masses, and only really comprehended by a lucky few
who possess the magical properties required, like jumping into an enchanted
lake or breaking the back off a wardrobe.
‘Science’ is a mystery, a bizarre concoction that seems to consist of
huge, blinking machines, intimidating men and women wearing goggles and looking
stern, huge explosions and Brian Cox.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in a recent episode of The Year of Making Love – a deeply
misguided TV ‘experiment’ that attempts to prove that ‘science’ can match
people up and make them fall in love.
Now, at first glance I thought this meant they would take people’s
initials, plonk them on the periodic table and set them up that way (‘So,
Annette Goon – you’re paired up with Alec Umbrella, and what a beautiful sight
they are together!’). But no. The ‘science’ that is so mystically invoked
by the utterly unlikeable Cherry Healy is, in fact, a few questionnaires,
compiled by a couple of boffins who calculate what people’s hobbies are, and
match them up that way. If this is
science, then so is putting forks in the correct section of your cutlery
drawer. There was nothing remotely
scientific about the approach taken in the programme. There was no concern at all about the
incredible number of variables at work in this experiment, or the terribly
subjective nature of the ‘scientists’, who shrieked happily whenever a couple
were first introduced: “Ooh look, they’re smiling! They’re going to get on just
fine; oh, these don’t look happy – look, he’s not impressed by her webbed
fingers at all – this won’t end well”.
Hardly an unbiased observation.
The impact of having a camera crew slavishly follow these poor
singletons on their dreadful dates
wasn’t considered at all. I
always thought science was about minimising the intrusion of the observer;
having a camera lens right in your face when trying to enjoy crème brulee in a
gastropub with someone you’ve just met doesn’t really suggest CERN levels of
scientific rigour when testing their likelihood of getting all sexy.
But I could put up with all of this foolishness if the
programme didn’t keep insisting it was all deeply ‘scientific’. It got so deluded that it put me in mind of a
crazed drunkard sobbing that he is really sober, whilst miserably urinating all
over his duvet and staring, teary- and bleary-eyed at a photo of his dead
dog. ‘Remember’, Healy says, ‘that
science has put these two together’.
Even the pudding-faced contestants kept insisting that their romantic
successes and failures were all down to ‘science’, as if this was simply the
name of the lead researcher. Perhaps it
is.
Hearing it so often ends up having a powerful effect. There will be people who believe that it has
now been proven, beyond reasonable doubt, that science can hook people up. To
most, this will suggest that potions, or weird blinking machines can act as
cupid. They will take this
misapprehension to the grave. Yes
indeed, it’s fine when it’s about something as ephemeral and pointless as this
TV programme, but when the same thing occurs with science that matters, such as
inoculation or nutrition (read anything
by Ben Goldacre to find out just what kind of egregious misinformation is out
there) then we surely have to blow the whistle and demand that science is taken
more seriously. Surely?
People could argue that Brian Cox is the perfect saviour of
this grim situation, but I would have to disagree. His new series, Wonders of Life, is an exploration of biology by a physicist - odd
and not altogether helpful, but then what do I know? Maybe cross-discipline stuff is all the rage
now. Maybe I should start designing
skyscrapers or performing brain surgery for a giggle. But my real problem with this show is the
man himself. He's being hailed as the
natural successor to both Attenborough and Patrick Moore. How dare these faceless folk suggest such a
thing? If Brian Cox ends up 'replacing'
Attenborough once he's gone (after what I hope would be the most wonderfully extravagant
and beautiful state funeral humanity has ever seen) then I will set fire to my
television and sit in a corner, grumpy, for the rest of my life. He's just too there. Here's a zebra, look
at it's pretty stripes and happy face.
But wait, Brian Cox is standing right in front of it, gurning and
bubbling like a moron about how awesome it all is. Too much effervescence, too little
information and far too much of Brian Cox's face. Attenborough only rarely pops up to speak to
us face-to-face, and that's the right way to be. Cox just can't get enough of his own teeth on
TV, and that's to our detriment.
We need proper, informative, classy science shows on the TV;
all else is just fluff.
Residents of a suburb of Gubley are astonished this week
with the revelation that their local supermarket is haunted. The Asda store on
Great Fleshy Road has been plagued with a myriad of reportings of ghosty
occurances over the last few weeks. It
would seem that ghosts have been seen, heard and even smelt in the warehouse
area, the canteen, and the area round the big bins.
Batch Loaf
The first ghostly sighting was in November of last
year. Asda employee Jessie Cake had been
hosing down the counters late on a Thursday night when he heard the
unmistakable sound of a large unseeded batch loaf falling to the floor. Cake (24) had rushed to the source of the sound
and seen something incredible: “It was just this huge thumb,” he cries. “It was slowly thumbing through the different
loaves of bread, as if it were somehow trying to choose between them.” Cake had run straight to the boss’s office
to report his sighting, but fell foul of his own hose, cracking his skull
on the sluice. He was found the next
day, and recounted his story to horrified onlookers.
Managers have stated that ghostly sightings, of thumbs or
otherwise, do not fit under normal Health and Safety laws, and that the case
with Mr. Cake is still under review. His
store manager assured us that he would be able to return to work as soon as his
instep was healed.
Mysterious Cloud
This should have been enough to close the store, but
short-sighted bosses demanded that the store remain open to the public. The second sighting came soon afterwards. Security guard Andy Hornbill had been
watching the rear entrance when he saw a mysterious cloud heading towards him:
“It were right weird. I was standing and
looking at the shutters when this cloud of mist came at me like a fox and made
me worried. It had no hands but it
seemed to have thumbs that were threatening me.
It came right near the bailer and then disappeared by the gas
taps.” Hornbill (40) had been bewildered by
the encounter, but was most shocked by the smell left behind by the entity: “it
were like dirty rubber plimsolls” he opined, grimacing at the memory, “but not
the right kind – the wrong kind.”
Without So
Clearly there was something nefarious at work here. The Asda store occupies the site of an old
tyre factory and broom warehouse. These
were demolished soon after being sold to the Asda parent company, Walmart, and
indeed some employees believe there was something fishy going on here. Aging coffee shop customer Agnes Pinecone (67) believes that there were plottings afoot: “It just seems strange that as soon
as they bought them buildings, they go knocking them down without so much as a
second thought. What were they hiding
from us? Then they go building an Asda right on the top of the, no repect or
owt for what was there before. I tell
you, it’s no wonder there’s summat going on in that place.” The mystery has been compounded by the discovery of a broom in a cubby-hole in the gent's changing room. No-one has as yet explained why it should be there, or why it has such a mucky handle.
Thumbs
The ghostly smell has been smelt several times since Mr.
Hornbill experienced it for the first time, and always somewhere around the
bailer. As for the ghostly thumbs, they
haven’t been seen since. Some say they
are waiting for the right moment to strike.
Others say they were just thumbs.
All we know, here at the Herald and Jerkin, is that there’s something
sinister over on Great Fleshy Road.
I am quite a tall person – roughly as tall as a garden wall,
or a little shorter than a ceiling. I
duck under doors and get cooed over by old ladies in chip shops. It is a good thing, a lot of the time.
Being tall is a permanent state of being, of course. This
means that I have always seen the world through the eyes of a tall person, as I
can’t really remember any times prior to being around 13 in any meaningful
detail. To me, an eye-line at roughly 6’4”
is the norm, and my perception of the world hangs upon it. After all, tall people get a unique view of
the world, much like worms or fleas do. We see the hidden places – the places
where people put things to forget about them, areas in towns where no graffiti
has been daubed, spaces over and above things where secrets lie. I can see the top of the lockers at school,
for example. Fascinating hoards of
miscellany can be discovered there – old pens, bits of paper, ragged lumps of
food, mouldering old doughnuts. They all
inhabit this dead zone where no normal people visit. They belong there. The tops of vans are equally intriguing. Rarely seen by human eyes, apart from those
souls that linger on motorway service station skyways, they offer a fascinating
glimpse of the unknown: there is nothing
particularly to see, you understand; it’s more that you are glimpsing virgin
territory when you look at the roof of a transit van.
The deep recesses in train’s over-head shelves can’t escape
my gaze, and nor can top shelves.
Top-most shelves are always the best of all. That’s where we put all of our least wanted
paraphernalia – things we can’t quite do away with, but things we don’t want to
consider in a meaningful sense. It is a
relegation zone far more potent than the bottom shelf (that’s where we put our
guilty pleasures), and yet I see them in every house I visit. As a fan of the forgotten and abandoned,
these bleak spots are an endless source of fascination – a top shelf filled
with books offers a glimpse into the psyche of an individual that years of
intimate friendship cannot beat. A shelf
lined with dusty ornaments and trinkets paints a picture of a long life of endless
unwanted Christmas presents, and their associated cocktail of emotions: guilt, disappointment and fury. A top shelf of records points to a careless
obsessive, a nostalgic clutz clutching his vinyl, but no longer interested in
ever playing it again. To tall people,
this is all on display. Beware ever
inviting a tall person into your home.
But height is not always a blessing. Often it causes pain, discomfort, a certain
sense of injustice. In the same way as a
world designed for people of average height affords us illicit joys, so too it
can ruin our day. Washing dishes is a
painful chore, marked with tremendous pain in the lower back and
shoulders. The pots and pans are far
away, you see. Manhandling them is
tiring, especially when bent-double over the sink. My head is so used to being whacked into
things that it no longer hurts when I do.
Rather than a searing jolt of pain when I crack the top of my head on
the hood of the oven, I get a mild tickling sensation, twinned with a quizzical
glance around the vicinity. I’m
confident that if someone shot me in the head I would simply give it a quick
rub and move on. Food is a constant
issue for the very tall, too. Calorie
intake is around 3500-4000, and this can be expensive. Vast piles of pasta, whole pizzas, massive
steaks and whole gallons of water can be a very pricey breakfast. The trouble is that for someone around 6’7”
to lift their arm to take a sip of coffee requires so much more energy! My left
arm weighs around the same as a chest of drawers, and my legs weigh as much as
three times this amount. It’s a
wonder I get around at all.
So, next time you see a freakishly tall person, consider
their lives. Think about all the strange
things they’ve seen, and pity their pained, endlessly hungry lives.
I play Minecraft. There, I've admitted it. I play it because it's fun, cheap, provides endless leisure, and allows me to utilise my imagination in a different way to writing. I've been playing it for around a year now, endlessly tinkering with my own personalised world, adding buildings, bridges, churches, castles, underground lairs - whatever I can think of. After a stressful day's teaching, an hour in this electronic sandpit can wash away all my troubles, allowing me to get on with life with a bounce in my step.
A market square in my map - all built by me out of cubes.
But though there are a huge number of adult players (it was designed by, and for, adults), it is the school age kids that have really run with it. As you may have noticed, corridors and classrooms are now rife with talk about creepers (baddies that explode, destroying your handiwork), redstone (the Minecraft equivalent of electronic wire) and diamonds (the ultimate find when mining, deep underground). and the thing is, these guys can play. A student in my tutor group was telling me how he'd designed a working calculator using the redstone - a hugely impressive feat, and one that shows that he has somehow taught himself the rudiments of electronics, using a video game where you can ride pigs. Another student was talking about traps he'd built, using this redstone - floors that disappear, hurling you into a lava pit, and doors that require a code to open. I understand that to many of you this may mean nothing, but believe me, it's the equivalent of a 12 year old confiding that they have constructed similar things in real life - it's that complicated. They can certainly do things on that game that I can't, and I'm quite capable on games.
So, students are learning about electronic circuits, logic gates, even electronic memory storing. They are also learning about architecture. I overheard some older students talking about their construction projects, and discussing the merits of different column shapes, or roof pitches. I mean, when the hell did that get cool? And here's the final thing: though the game is obviously the preserve of the geeky, all other sorts play it too. Girls and boys, geek and popular kid. In my boys Yr 11 class, all but one student plays the game. These are tough, naughty and tricky lads, but they all love to talk about mods, texture packs and blowing stuff up with in-game TNT. The single lad that doesn't play tries to mock the game, but can't manage it, due to the weight of popular opinion. I give him a week until he gets on-board.
I haven't yet mentioned the thriving modification (modding) community, mostly children, and those who draw and paint their own texture packs. This game is a genuine phenomenon, and I feel we need to make some use of it. But it will require imagination.
It's time for a new post! This is quite a quick one, but it was something that got me thinking about the mayhem of the modern world. Earlier today I was trying to write on a PowerPoint slide (I'm such a cool teacher) the concept of a 5x5 table. I was, as always, in a rush. Outside, the freezing fog pressed itself up to the windows of my comfy classroom, presenting a bleak grey outlook. I stared at the keyboard in growing annoyance. Where on earth was the symbol for multiplication? My eyes ranged over the arcane scratches on the right hand side keys of the keyboard, and even briefly alighted on the never-before-noted button that makes this happen: ¬ . In despair, I studied the numerical keys and their multicoloured offerings. It took me minutes - literally - to remember that it's just an x - one of many examples of a symbol collection we like to call the alphabet.
Obviously this implies that I am quite a stupid man, and to a point this would be a fair assessment. However, I believe it to be indicative of something bigger than this: the overwhelming nature of modern life. The reason I couldn't find the x key is that I expected it to be somewhere funky - somewhere where it could fulfill its role as simply a multiplication mark. I hadn't considered it to be a moonlighting letter. So totally immersed are we in instant, specific, wonderful gratification (I'm thinking chocolate hob nobs and Google Chrome here, as examples) that we (well, I) end up unable to see the woods for the trees.
There's too much going on, and too much that I can simply demand, like a deranged Pharoah of decadence, to be delivered to me right now. A website I over-use considerably is Just-Eat, which acts as a kind of friendly meta-takeaway, enabling you to peruse a billion of those fast food menus in digital form (saves opening the top drawer, I suppose) and then order a takeaway, using a credit card. Yes, gone are the days where an illicit kebab was only achievable if you were lucky enough to have some cash on your person. Now you can run well into your overdraft with Egg Fried Rice and Shish Lamb Special. And all from the sorry comfort of your living room. What hope does poor old 'x' have in this climate?
Perhaps I need to return to simplicity. Buy digestives, find an old typewriter and go back to Internet Explorer. Perhaps.
Today the internet has been heaving with the news that
mobile phones will soon be bendy, like a bit of old elastic you find behind the
wardrobe. This will mean that we could,
for example, wear them like a funky, time-wasting bracelet, or use them to prop
up wobbly restaurant tables, or run around bending them around, laughing and
crying at the fact that the technological might of our species – this awesome,
collective, gargantuan knowledge amassed and perfected over the centuries – has
finally allowed us to wrap a telephone around a stick.
I should, perhaps, apologise for my facetiousness, but I am
fed up with the endless touting of ‘tweaks’ on existing items. My joy to see that Dyson has made a bladeless
fan was tempered by the fact that flinging shit at it would now no longer have
the desired effect. The unveiling of the
iPhone 5 was marred slightly by the fact that they’d forgotten to make any
changes to the iPhone 4 (or 3…etc).
Everything’s being tweaked to death, and nothing new seems to be being
invented anymore. I’m sure something
must be being invented somewhere (they’ve got to get on with hoverboards and
Jaws 19 for 2015, after all…), but we never seem to hear about it. We only become aware of these endless ‘improvements’,
and it’s all about money, of course.
I’m no social philosopher, but sometimes I remember that
civilisation is an unprecedented experiment, led by no-one, and with no real
hypothesis. When in these moods, I
contemplate the fact that we have absolutely no idea – no idea at all – what
the outcome of all this technological tweakery is. We know why it’s happening: money. Profit drives the eternal tweaking of
existing models, as it’s hugely cheaper than the development of an entirely new
idea, and far safer too. But if that’s
all that is driving it, then what
will the eventual outcome be? If
‘progress’ is going to boil straight down to profit, is there any hope of a
highly developed, highly successful, ‘Type III Civilisation’ being
realised? Risk, inherent in any
development of totally new technology, is very expensive and not particularly enjoyed
by big business. As such, new things are
less desirable, to business, than tweaked things. In short, I fear that we could end up coming to a halt,
endlessly poking around with existing ideas, and never doing anything truly
new.
