Spaceboules!!!

I've been writing a lot, in a quiet, secret place, about family holidays recently. I think this is because of my folk's getting a little bit older, and my mother's health not great, I guess I want to try and ollate all the good things we had in one place.

It's a good exercise for the memory as well.

This tale is extrapolated from a holiday in Southern France, courtesy of Eurocamp. It was the second half of our trip, after a week in Biarritz, and we had fetched up in Hourtin, in claret country. Across the Garonne, you could see a nuclear power station looming above the vineyards, a squat concrete building on the North bank of the river.

Sea beaches, blasted by Atlantic winds, were places where the skin was stripped from your face and the waves rolled in with primal force. Safe swimming could only be done at a beach on an inland lake, with a quay I unsuccessfully fished from. Our campsite had an unusual feature; an air raid siren used to summon fireman to the station. First night I was there it went off at 3am, and I lay terrified, expecting armageddon while trapped in a foreign land.

I used to wath petanque in the shady locale of Hourtin town square. This was the version of kiddy beach boules played with heavy metal ball bearings a couple of kilogrammes in weight. The pastis sipping locals could pitch these things accurately to an inch from twenty yards away, and cause clanking mayhem on the rough ground favoured for play. The sound they made was amazing.

Of course I cajoled my parents for a set, and eventually prevailed, despite the fact they were about 6 quid for a pair. I had two pairs, and a little wooden jack type ball. My favourite set were exquisitely cut with triple interlocking rings into the shiny surface of the steel, like a 16^th century astrolabe or some other piece of astronomical equipment.

But where to play? I played on the grass next to our tent, but this was boring, the petanque landing with a dull thud like a shot putt, and rolling only a short and predictable distance. Yawn. There was no proper rink like some French campsite's had, the nearest thing I could find was a gravel area romatically sited near the campsite toilet complex.

I began to pitch, nice set versus slightly less nice set, typically adding commentary. The light was fading, the nuclear alarm silhoutted ominously against the twilight. I was dismayed to find that the gravel was scuffing my new boules, which I fondly imagined were similar to the balls of Plutonium found in the “Fat Man” Nagasaki nuke. But as the light got worse, I noticed something more amazing.

Everytime the petangue landed on the gravel, or hit each other, they were giving off sparks. The granite based gravel chips must have had incendiary qualities, there was a shower of auroral flame in minuture every time the ball hit the ground. In retrospect, I wish I could have just lain in the dark, and taking care not to crush my own head, thrown the petanque up and down right mext to my black-black-black-brown eyes to be drawn into the macro world of fireflashes and electro-flame, asteroid collisions on unknown worlds.

All while the Uranium in the gravel toasted my genetics, I would revel in these magnesium cream coloured events, and try and take photographs, and try and wish myself back there to be 15 again.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 28.02.14

The Sexuality of Sci-Fi

We are the only sentient species we know about at present, in a universe where the possibilities are nearly infinite.

It is thus disappointing, if unsurprising, that we can only see things through our own tediously heterosexual and missionary position eyes. Our imaginations, when they should be alive to every possibility, are thinking only of England.

We are so boring. This young child playing with his Star Wars figures, could see all manner of fun and games involving Squid Head and a Gammorean Guard, while EV9D9 the Smash Martian torture-bot of Jabba's Palace looked on approvingly. But no, long long ago in a galaxy far far away, there was only rubbish old male to female, humanoid snogging going on. The brilliantly realised array of species that frequented the Mos Eisley cantina or Jabba's Sail Barge were about as sexual as a packet of crisps, save for the constantly ejaculating phallus that was Jabba himself, his scenes with Leia a blatant earth bound bukkake signifier.

As the Holiday Special showed us, Wookies like pornography featuring humans, rather than other Wookies, and how disturbing is it that Han Solo gets the white girl, but Chewbacca's father has a black woman served up to him as his fantasy?

Contemporaneously, H2G2's Zaphod Beeblebrox may have been sporting an extra head and three arms, but there was nothing to show that his dealings with Trillian were anything past Page 32 of the Joy of Sex.

We all know that Kirk may have been canoodling with all manner of green skinned – or more shockingly for 1968, black skinned – women in the traditional manner, but leap forward into the Next Generation, and the excitement of the final frontier was sharing screen time with Nescafe advert style sexual tension with Doctor Crusher and Captain Picard, and with Riker and Councillor Troi – another example of a mixed species relationship being portrayed in typically heterosexual penis to vagina coupling.

The First Contact movie presented us with the spectacle (cringing!) of Data getting it on with the Borg Queen, but for all his announcement that he was “Fully functional, programmed in multiple techniques” it was clear that this android to cyborg corpse coupling was going to be of a very standard format. Indeed, any alt-sex activities of the Star Trek Universe were always of the cloning, or assimilating variety.

It wasn't until Star Trek Voyager, that anything different to these standards were offered up to the viewer – Harry Kim had some form of bizarre intercourse with the ever stunning Musetta “Mansquito” Vander - “I'm not sure that was even legal” - and Kes and Neelix's long term interspecies relationship revealed some interesting little tit-bits about Ocampa sexual physiology that were very different from ours.

Still all het though. Even the radically inhuman creations of Species and Splice engaged in fairly conventional heterosexual intercourse.

The world of sci-fi literature, however, had been a bit more open to alternatives. Arthur C. Clarke's universe was hard-sci and asexual a lot of the time, aside to joky references to shipboard relationships with genetically engineered apes called Simps in “Rendezvous with Rama”. However, by the 80s, there were open references to homosexuality in the relationship between an American and Russian astronaut aboard the Leonov in 2010, the “Feys” of 2061, and butch surfing spacedudes recalibrating their sexuality in “The Songs of Distant Earth.”

Going back to the 1930s, Olav Stapledon, in “Last and First Men” actually envisaged fully realised, highly complex and rather incomprehensible successor species of man, with sub-sexes and full intercourse involving a large group of individuals, but these were a later species of man, albeit barely recognisable to us, rather than aliens.

I think it is David Bowie, who else, who actually through the vision of Nicholas Roeg, gives us an idea of what a realistic form of alien sex could be...messy, genital-less, and with no-need for penetration at all.

And indeed, for all the stress and violence it causes, higher forms of life in the universe will probably have abandoned sex. And who can blame them?

Copyright Bloody Mulberry

What to do when a Poet Uses the Word “Desolate” Too Many Times

Poets have suddenly sprung out of the earth everywhere, like one of those American towns where annoying chripy crickets emerge every 17 years in order to eat all the leaves, and leave dessicated insectoid corpses rotting all over the ground for months afterwards.

Poets are hard to avoid. A truly dedicated poet can insist on trying to make you read their latest work in any social situation, and if you claim you are awaiting a phone call from a girlfriend in Guatemala that can only be made in that time window, they will roll up their sonnet and try and stuff it down your eye socket directly into your brain.

Avoid that, and they will follow you home and hide under your bed, and read it out as you sleep, subliminally imprinting your brain with pretentious imagery as you dream.

A favoured word of peripapatetic pub poets is “Desolate”. Every couplet mentions it, and every stanza that doesn't mention it has an air of desolation about it anyway. Relationships are desolate. Loneliness is desolate. Friendships involve a profound sense of desolation, and mental health is as desolate as the surface of the moon after a nuclear war.

Frankly, everything is far too fucking desolate.

But I have a suggestion. The next time a poet offers me a tract that features too much of this “D-Word” I will have them transported to the most barren desert in the universe, under a sun that blazes with so little mercy it would happily incinerate a starving child who had just watched their mother murdered. There they will write “Desolate” in the sand with a stick a thousand times in words one mile long.

And if they fail to complete that task within a year, a goat headed demon god from hell will appear, and give them an enema of burning sand.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 22.02.14

Sister Ray and the Transgression in my Head

I've out the song on now, the classic Velvet Underground festival of sound, the scratch of guitatrs, the stilleto organ stabs and the metronomic pound of Mo Tucker's drumming.

The song tells a tall tale of a drag party, where sailors and queens suck each other off while observers struggle with mainlining heroin in the dark, collapsed veins under hep stained skin, struggling livers, the nod out to avant garde Ornette Coleman sax riffs. All is presided over by Sister Ray, King Drag Queen of the Lower East side, seducer of seamen, conductor of sex parties and orgiastic ejaculations on the dirty carpet, a carpet littered with needles, bent spoons and dead lemons.

Cotton buds stained brown. Oxidised blood stains on the arms of the sofa covered in burn holes, exhusted hipsters and smacked out poets. There is a panic as the police bust the door down, cocks are hastily put away and the stashes are thrown out of the window, dirty dock water laps against the warehouse pilings, the hep cats climb down the iconic New York fire escapes.

That's the song. And it never happens here and I want it to, I want to play this very damn fucking song and watch it all happen in front of me, violent fucking, screaming maniacs dancing with whips, bad poets having their tongues cut out and aliens landing in a black spaceship in the courtyard.

The aliens take the drag queens and EMOs away for pentrative medical tests; and I play guitar and kick the face in of the chav trying to spoil the party...make him kneel as if for a faceful and then knock his teeth down his throat, harvest his skin and throw him out the door for the urban foxes. Leave us alone, this is the world of the elites not the peasants, the coolest people doing the most sordid and unspeakable things and leaving marks and stickiness all over the place, as I watch emotionlessly, drinking black rum from the bottle and occasionally spitting it in people's faces like toxic phlegm. The epileptic lady and the boxing helmet bops, grand mal attack in the car park when she leaves. People engaging in Public Displays of Affection told to either fuck or get out of the room.

For I am Sister Ray, in a waistcoat and bowler hat, and what I say goes.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 20.02.14

The Lair

I've always wanted to have a lair, a secret bolt hole a few miles away, on the outskirts of town.

What is it's purpose? Well, in my wandering mind, there are two stories that tell of “The Lair” - one is the dissident escaping the fascist torturing secret police, the Okrana of the future oppressors. For some reason, this internal story always involves jumping into a river, and finding my secret entrance under the surface, in the river bank. They chase me, dogs close behind, but after I've jumped in the weed and lily clad water by night, they lose my trail.

I enter the airlock behind a door disguised as shale and mud, and within I have a supply of food to last three years in a storeroom beneath a livving accomodation about the size of a tent, well equipped with sensors, and means of communication with my fellow dissidents.

The dogs and torturers clump about the surfae lit by a quarter moon. But they cannot find me, and when things quieten down the modern day junta defying Scarlet Pimpernel can escape from his hideout, and resume tweaking the tail of the neo-nazis and leading the popular rebellion.

A real life fantasy tale from the riverbank.

The other daydream is darker. I am a killer, a mass spree killer, who has carried out a brutally bloody crime for reaons beyond his understanding. I am cornered, like Peter Lorre in M, a cornered rat, fear in my eyes. I escape by bicycle, unlit, in dark country lanes, and race for a bridge out towards some local woodland. I am like an American black helicopter, a mutilator of cattle and people, of uncertain but perhaps celestial background. In the wall of the bridge on the cycle path, is a false brick that acts as the key to my lair and laboratory...the wall opens up, and the bicycle disappears.

I take the sack of organs from my shoulder, and place it in the medical fridge, as I turn of the Inrfa Red monitors and laugh at the police helicopter. They can't see me, this place gives off no heat trace as I burn the remains and transmit messages back to my handlers off world.

Every day, the modern day devil rides out, and patrols plebeian streets for victims.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.02.14

The Duvet Spaceship

I guess this is continuing a theme of childhood memories – I've been writing a lot of such material lately, trying to get a grip on parts of my past, to try and find in the child the Tourettic perhaps Aspergic fellow I am today. Although I seem to have spent a lot of time scrawling about the killer hornets of the Greek islands, or the pretentious kids I was forced to share holidays with, rather than find any significant psychological insights.

I sometimes wonder if every child has had a spaceship, or a submarine, or a car, or a nest, or an anything, constructed out of their duvet. Nowadays I think of my duvet as a tent, a tiny one man shelter I'm staying in on a bad weather day in the Lake District. But as a child, it doubled as a spaceship, and a home in a cave.

Getting the duvet into the right configuration was always tricky; I remember always being very OCD on getting the duvet in the correct folding pattern to enable it to feel like a tiny space capsule, rather than the inside of an obese silkworm. But once it was set up, you could retreat within, and leave a tiny opening to act as a porthole. I used to imagine I was being put in suspended animation and being sent on a space journey designed to last a thousand years.

Although it usually only lasted until Saturday Superstore came on, and you wouldn't want to miss that, in case someone called Matt Bianco a wanker again. Eventually I was rewarded (years later) when someone asked “Five Star, why are you SO FUCKING CRAP?” If you were in space for a thousand years, adrift like Major Tom, you might miss something like that.

Eventually I grew out of space, and pretended to be a sort of Stig of the Dump figure, living in a cave up a cliff surrounded by puffins.

Playing make believe has never left me, and I'm glad it hasn't, no matter how strange it might seem to others. 

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 13.02.14

Me, the Teenage Designer of Worlds

I was no artist, but the asperger side of me was always designing things, constructing navies, spacecraft, maps of resettled other worlds...these all date back to about 1987, a lot of scrawling during class and at home.

I have learned (in "An Anthropologist on Mars") that this sort of thing is a typical Aspergic trait...whether it is a Tourette's type behaviour as well I have no idea.

I still do this sort of thing, but it's more or less an entirely internalised process. Indeed my navy is being overhauled as I write.

Cruiser classes in the internal navy

An interstellar "Starsip" (Doh!)

These designs owed an awful lot to Project Daedalus

A UFO sighting designed by me. Alien looks like a bad attempt to draw Bowie

Map of terraformed Mars

CIA World factbook for a planet that doesn't exist

Colonised Venus

The Nessie Submarine

I am remembering a story I wrote at Primary School, many many years ago, in my dark blue jotter, on the scratchy cheap paper found within. It had terrible illustrations to go with it, radar traces, underwater worlds, the techno tech imagined by the mind of a ten year old boy in 1983.

It was all about an attempt to prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster.

There was a submarine, and it dived to a depth of 58,000 feet in the Loch because there were secret trenches down there and I didn't have any idea of the real depth (700 feet or so) of the Loch.

The monster was 65 feet long – the exaggeration of childhood – and a long sea serpent kind of thing, drawn in dark green coloured pencil. The submarine was rocket like, and may or may not have been bright yellow – my head was permanently full of “Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World” at this time, endlessly read by me every time I went to stay at my father's house.

It was cramped inside, furnished in purple luxurious...er...stuff. There was barely room to move. I used to pretend to be inside it in real life, in my duvet, before my younger sister would crash in, in her annoying bundle of toddler life fashion.

As well as the Nessie Submarine, there was the Mattress Spaceship from a couple of years earlier. Me and a friend used to lie on the bed on our backs, with our legs up the wall in a kind of proper astronaut position. He always got to be Neil Armstrong, I was always David Scott for some reason, but then he was older, and half American to boot. We used to get signals from Houston, and activate various systems by pulling on the cord that switched my light on and off, disturbing the gerbils that lived in a cage on a high shelf, in constant fear of Tiggy the cat.

So, there my lifelong sceptical interest in crypitids and space began, in bedrooms and jotters, in the house of the artist and captain in Scotland, and in the imagination of an only child, in what for a while was a single parent family at what Doctor (not Mr!) Spock would have said was a crucial time.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 04.02.14

Too Close for Comfort, Mr Bond...

Back pain, serious back pain, and a touch of toothache as well. These things have sapped my inspiration the last few days, and I was at a complete loss as how not to waste the afternoon.

Luckily, I was watching “Goldfinger”, and as the luridly waiscoated Gert Frobe detailed the true nature of his “Operation Grand Slam” to 007, it reminded me of a mental wondering I've often had in the past.

What would happen, if one were sat next to a detonating nuclear bomb?

It is of course, a fate many people have experienced in movies; Stanley Tucci as Conrad Zimsky in the finale of ludicrous geo-disaster movie “The Core” springs most immediately to mind. But no-one really shows what happens, no-one wonders about what you would see, feel, or experience. Most of the time, our incineratable hero normally makes a laconic joke with a sideways grin, before the shot cuts away to a safely distant exterior shot of the flash, fireball then mushroom cloud.

But what can it be like, to be a metre away from a hydrogen bomb, a yard away from a “Fat Man” blast? Would you have time to register anything at all before your body was reduced to its component atoms, or would you just step into everlasting blackness the same moment the detonation was making a CERN experiment out of your very organs?

Well, I think you would notice something, simply because it would be a travesty to be so close to such a major event and be catapulted into death without knowing it. So, I'd like to think - without any evidence or theory to back me up at all - that the detonation on a megaton sized device would create a huge well in the curve of space time, and thus time would slow down.

So, rather in the fashion in the activation of the solar bomb in “Sunshine”, time and space would be “smeared out” and you'd be able to see the expanding mass of energy heading out towards you – unless you had your eyes shut, this may be tricky not to do – so you could almost run your fingers through it like million degree treacle.

And then of course, you would be immolated beyond all measurable trace. But I'd so hate to be so close to an event like that, and not be able to study it a little.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 02.02.14