A month ago I opened a new Facebook account in anticipation of the eventual publication of The Raven and the Hart. It has been a slightly strange experience without being quite as fraught as using my old account which was deleted. The main difference this time around is that I simply ignore a lot of what appears on my timeline. In this I have been well trained by Twitter, particularly during the early stages of the pandemic, when I actively, and brutally, edited some posters and posts out of my timeline – something I continue to do. I’ve been applying similar principles to Facebook.
It helps that I have a reason for being there: engagement directed towards, in the long run, marketing. That doesn’t mean I don’t try and make the best of it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that my activity is cynical and instrumentalist: there is genuine pleasure at reconnecting. It remains the case, though, that were it not for Facebook’s reach for marketing purposes, I would not ever have considered returning to it. Having an overriding purpose helps me to grit my teeth and get on with it, especially since I’ve taken care actively to exclude some things from my timeline so I only see them if I go looking. Even so, I’ve still had a couple of weird interactions with ‘people’ who are either bots or whose accounts have been hacked.
I said somewhere recently that the main Facebook page is OK because I can control it with the ad-block features of my primary browser (Brave) and third-party apps like Facebook Purity. The mobile app, however, sucks like a sucky thing in an ocean of sucks. Not only can I not control the newsfeed, which is algorithm drive, I can’t eliminate the ads either. Despite Facebook’s claim to target the ads with unerring accuracy, in fact they are mostly irrelevant to me – possibly because I lock down ads and tracking elsewhere as much as I can. In any event, I make it a strict rule never to click on an ad on Facebook. Of course accidents will happen, but I remember them because I curse myself for my fat fingers. Interestingly, deep in the crypt of Facebook’s settings is the ability to see ads that I’ve ‘interacted’ with, and there are entries there that I can be certain that I’ve never interacted with, unless you count scrolling past them.
***
As for the forthcoming book itself, I have applied the outcome of the sensitivity review and also have a cover design. This week I’ll be sorting out prints of the current text for a final review and also sending out e-copies to readers for their final comments. I’ll let that drive decisions on the actual publishing schedule.
***
We’ve taken the plunge and booked flights to visit Amy in Michigan later in the year. Fingers are now crossed that ‘world events’ don’t intervene to sabotage the trip.
I took a long walk through town today, wandering more or less aimlessly, checking into charity shops to see what was on the shelves. I didn’t buy anything, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. It was warm and sunny for March, too.
One of the shops I dropped into was a specialist running shop. I wanted to ask about aspects of getting back into running, particularly choice of shoes. the guy there could not have been more helpful, even though I made it clear that I wasn’t looking to buy anything today. He was happy to put me onto a treadmill, analyse my gait, make a recommendation then test that recommendation. The risk is that I take that recommendation then look for it at a cheaper price online, but the reality is that I’d prefer not to take risks with running shoes and would rather build a relationship with the shop. The upshot is that I will likely get a stability shoe at some point soon.
I still have a pair of my old Asics running shoes that I first ran a 5K in many years ago. Unfortunately, I no longer have the Saucony Triumph 5s I bought in New York – they gave up the ghost long ago. However it was immediately apparent that today’s shoes are markedly different to those I wore back in the day. They are much lighter and more cushioned. The next step, once I have them, is to get further into the couch to 5K thing without aggravating my knees or rekindling old injuries: new shoes and the guy’s tips on running technique should help.
I also spent some time in Greyfriar’s Kirkyard wandering around the old graves. A lot of people were there sitting on the grass, some of them enjoying lunch. It seemed a little anachronistic at first, but I think, on reflection, that it fitted with the original spirit of the place and the old habit of carving momento mori onto gravestones and memorials. There was something more honest about recognising death and living amongst it than the Victorian habit of writing memorials saying the deceased had ‘fallen asleep.’
***
I mentioned a few entries ago that I had requested a sensitivity read for my two forthcoming novels. I got part one of the report back this week. There is a lot of noise on social media from the armchair brigadiers of the culture wars about sensitivity reads, very often by sclerotic writers asserting their right to write whatever they want. And they’re correct – they can write whatever they want, but at their own risk. All I can say is that my experience has been overwhelmingly positive, leading me to a much deeper consideration to aspects of characterisation that I would otherwise have missed.
It seems to me that a good sensitivity reader is as valuable as a good editor and a necessity rather than a threat. I’ll have more to say about this when the process is finished, but I would unhesitatingly recommend it to any writer who has one or more characters whose lives are markedly variant to the writer’s own. It liberates characters rather than restricting them.
***
Moon Knight 24 – (c) Bill Sienkievicz/Marvel
Season 2 of Picard is quite enjoyable, more so than season 1. The highlight of the cast is Alison Pill, who was excellent in DEVS some time ago. I also watched Spider Man: No Way Home, which I enjoyed a great deal more than I expected. Marvel is soon to debut Moon Knight as well, starring Oscar Isaac. The early issues of Moon Knight – up to around issue 30 as I recall, were ones that I bought assiduously back in the day, at least as much for the brilliant art of Bill Sienkiewicz as for the stories. The cover of issue 24 from October 1982 is one of my favourite pieces of comic art ever. I’ve long-since sold the comics, but I’ll give the TV show a shot.
***
I’ve been reading my way back into the writing-in-progress that fell by the wayside somewhat last year. I have a much clearer idea now of what it is actually about and where the story is going, which is to say the bigger point of the story rather than the narrative per se. I’m also clearer about its structure and its relationship to a couple of linked stories I’ve yet to write. Essentially the three stories together form a sequel to Coyote in the Corner and, perhaps, bring that sequence to an end.
If all goes according to plan – and it may not 🙂 – then I have a schedule for the next couple of years of the two novels that are nearing readiness for publication, the writing-in-progress (tentatively titled Up The White Road) and a possible collection of short stories in late 2023 or early 2024.
I finished watching The Ipcress File last night after resisting the temptation to binge watch it. I enjoyed it a lot. It took several liberties with the book, but I’m OK with that. And it was perfectly cast. Here’s hoping they keep the same team and follow Len Deighton’s novel sequence. The next in the series – Funeral In Berlin – is probably my favourite Deighton novel.
***
Earlier this week, I watched a short documentary on YouTube about the catacombs of Paris. You can find it here. The catacombs were developed when the soil of Cimetière des Saints-Innocents became so oxygen-poor that
proper decomposition of the dead was impossible, meaning that, instead of rotting away, those buried in the cemetery slowly turned into gelatinous mounds of fatty horribleness, known as corpse wax.
Inevitably, I was reminded of the current UK government, of which more later.
I’ve been thinking more about some of the subjects I touched on in my gloomier-than-usual post a couple of nights ago. Specifically, I’ve been musing on society and interconnectedness. This isn’t entirely doom and gloom – it is also relevant to my long-delayed writing in progress and the thematic background to it, so I would have been thinking about it anyway.
All my assumptions about society revolve around interconnectedness. Of course, there is always some degree of connectivity, but how it manifests varies by context. In the extreme case of a society in collapse, the sudden decoherence of the links between the nodes that connect it may be triggered by a relatively small event, akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back. It is generally held that highly connected networks are more prone to (eventual) catastrophic failure then weakly-connected networks. The latter grow increasingly damaged, but are better able to adapt. Our society is highly connected – as we discover when, for example, we attempt to disentangle ourselves, as with Brexit. Be that as it may, my thoughts have been around personal and local ability to respond to catastrophic collapse (this is the core of the inciting event in the writing in progress).
In our daily lives, we assume power, food, water, sewerage, shelter, healthcare and a recognised medium of exchange – though this is not true in many places. Those things are all simultaneously robust and fragile for the same reason – interconnectedness and infrastructure. They work well enough until, one day, they don’t. Throw in sustained acts of violence and your world shifts from calamity to horror. This sits at the heart of my thinking about preparedness: what is reasonable and realistic to prepare for? Survivalists and preppers represent one end of that range of possibilities; ‘keep calm and carry on’ is at the other end.
Why am I thinking in these terms (aside from narrative and plot development)? Because to prepare for collapse, we have to admit the possibility of it into our thinking. This isn’t about catastrophism but about scenario planning. What is the minimum we require? Shelter, fire, food and water.
Kirstin and I went to the supermarket yesterday and bought some of the same basics that we bought at the beginning of lockdown: dried and tinned goods, for example, as well as batteries, etc. These are all things that we’ll use anyway. We got them because supply chains have been abraded and degraded by four things:
Brexit
Covid
War
Our gelatinous government
Supply chain robustness is only one aspect of interconnectedness, and buying in some basics isn’t enough, but it’s a start. However, even were we to continue to accumulate ‘stuff’, there are limits, and it’s the limits that interest me in terms of writing and concern me in terms of the state of the world. I was born 14 years after the end of WW2 and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s mindset of the post-war settlement. That mindset has been deliberately and comprehensibly wrecked by successive Tory administrations. Much as I’d like to follow my instincts and assume that there’ll be a safety net to catch us, I can’t do that anymore, even though my sense is that it still lurks in the attitudes of a substantial proportion of the British population.
Anyway, there are no answers here, just questions I never thought I’d have to ask or answer. You might think that I’m over-thinking and over-reacting; I hope you’re right.
***
I haven’t had any music here for a while, so here’s Jean Michel Jarre supplying what Cimetière des Saints-Innocents lacked.
We are in the time between times, the time when we know something horrible is about to happen but we don’t know what it will be. But it will happen soon and Ukrainians are dying while we wait.
I’m 62, and never thought I’d be thinking this way. Back in the old mutually assured destruction days, there wasn’t a lot of point to pondering preparedness because the assumption was that there wouldn’t be anything to prepare for. This thing in Ukraine has the feel of something very different – something that will echo on through the rest of my years. Call me too pessimistic, but it seems to me that, whatever Putin chooses to do now, the trajectory is towards escalation, and that trajectory is unlikely to be interrupted without Putin’s death.
At a selfish level, the impact can already be seen on my pension fund and our savings. The impact may be transient, but over what timescale? Our local Tesco supermarket is getting embarrassing at the best of times – they barely even bother to disguise the emptying shelves, and prices are going up. Our energy bill is fixed for two years, supposedly, but I don’t know if that can hold without government intervention to steady prices. Even if the conflict remains ‘regional’ rather than European, it’s impact on raw materials, supply chains and economies will be major.
And that brings me back to preparedness.
That all reads dramatically, I know. There may well come a day soon when I look back on what I’ve written here and wince at my foolishness – and I hope it does. But I’d rather be foolish than unprepared, so I’m thinking about stocking up on candles, torch batteries, tinned and dried food and no doubt some other odds and ends, just in case. If nothing else, they’ll get used in time anyway.
And I find myself having to reassess a lot of positions I’ve grown into over the years, positions based on the assumptions of continuing peace. I don’t think of myself as naive, but I certainly think I need to examine my presumptions. And I hate that: mine is the peace we knew between the wars.
Like everyone else – certainly everyone in Europe – Ukraine is on my mind. It seems redundant for a random blogger in Edinburgh to bloviate about it, but, rather like my Covid diary, that is kinda the point of having a blog like this which functions as a hybrid diary and journal (and an ad hoc vehicle for bloviating.) I don’t pretend any special insight, and everything I write here is necessarily personal and provisional, but here’s my current tuppence worth.
*
There’s a story, quite probably apocryphal, that at the outset of WW2 Winston Churchill mused on outcomes and what the end of the war would mean for Germany and, by implication, Europe. That isn’t a million miles away from the old programme management notion of Outcomes > Strategy > Tactics. I am in no way qualified to muse on outcomes for Ukraine and Russia, but I have been thinking about outcomes for the UK and Europe.
My starting point is one articulated by most commentators – that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has, within days, reaffirmed the importance of both NATO and the European Union. (This is worth a read: Putin Loses No Matter How This Plays Out – But We Might Too.) That is despite Putin’s best efforts to destablise both of those institutions through Trump and Brexit and their associated fellow travellers. In consequence, the stupidities of Brexit are once more laid bare. This country has isolated itself from decision making in what is one of the major geopolitical blocs, a bloc that, despite all that Brexiteers said about it, turns out to be able to move very quickly when it wants to.
That we are left isolated when the government is stuffed with the most corrupt and inept Cabinet in memory is the cherry on the cake. With every day that passes, the incompetence and pettifoggery of Priti Vacant and Liz Truss is allowed to make things worse. The Tory party as a whole is too drenched in Russian money and influence to have any ability to do what needs to be done to isolate and sanction Putin and his croneys.
The current issues with visas for refugees and their families (and we are the only country requiring visas) are not merely symptomatic of the Tories’ incompetence and meanspiritedness, it’s worse than that. This is how the system has been designed to work by sociopaths and ideologues egged on by a compliant right-wing press that pretends to be unable to see a distinction between the economic migrant and the refugee. These are the people who questioned whether the RNLI should bother to save the lives of asylum seekers, the Home Secretary who thought out loud about using the Royal Navy to stop boats at sea and push them back to France until the MoD told her where to go.
The government is caught on the horns of its own infernal dilemma: if it recognises the plight of Ukrainian refugees, they’ll have to recognise the rest too, which grates on every fibre of their being. All they have left is to flounder, gaslight and lie. From the top down, they continue to say that we are ‘world-leading.’ This is, and always has been, bollocks.
In the meantime, the government is forced also, through gritted teeth, to acknowledge that the BBC, which stepped up to the crease with educational programming for children during Covid lockdown, which the appalling Nadine Dorries is fond of threatening, turns out to be a potent and respected source of trusted information via the World Service – the same World Service that the Foreign Office has persistently sought to defund and shrink through successive administrations.
Also in the meantime, a wing of the Tory party, to which the loathsome Nigel Farrage remains tenuously linked via slug trails of odiousness, has taken to pondering the notion of Net Zero and how beastly it is for their oil-producing chums (including Mr Putin and his oligarchs.) Putin’s war has forced a serious and timely crunch time in decision making, not only for oil and gas, but also for energy provision in general. It looks likely to reinforce a push for renewables and alternatives in a way that increasingly apocalyptic IPCC reports haven’t. As it happens, I agree that we should question the idea of Net Zero – because I think we need to set actual zero as the target outcome and find strategies for achieving that.
One of the possible outcomes of Putin’s War and the sanctions now in place may well be that Russia becomes, to all intents and purposes, a vassal state of China. That’s why I think that China – taking their customary long view – won’t be too unhappy if Putin’s murderous adventurism is stopped. That would be a geopolitical shift of such a magnitude that a general realignment of Europe, the USA, the rest of the world and NATO would be inevitable. What then for Tory and Brexiteer visions of a post-Imperial Britain and its dreams of a Victorian paradise where we all ignore experts, identify fronted adverbials, learn Latin and know that Johnny-foreigner understands their place?
I think it puts us on course for some kind of associate status in Europe, however that comes to be tarted up to save blushes. How long it will take the Tories or the electorate to begin the process of rowing back from Brexit is an open question (as is the degree to which the EU would welcome us back), but that will now be the direction of travel, I think.
Standing all of the above, in the humanitarian instincts of the British people and the general outrage at Partygate, I see signs for optimism, though. Signs that the tide is on the turn, and that petty nationalism of all stripes can be seen for what it is: terminal.
Recent Comments