My Own Fantastic Voyage

Discovered that the classic sci fi movie "Fantastic Voyage" is available entire on youtube at the moment, and settled down to watch it in Starbucks, the screams of young children in my ear disturbing me from my contemplation of internal butchery by a sub microscopic submarine.

I wonder what a voyage into my own body would be like; a desperate risk probably. Trips through a heart that even slowed down would occasionally thunder with anxiety, double systolic beats crushing the hull of all but a virtual internal dreadnaught. Fancy a trip to my brain, my carotid would always be tying itself in knots as my tics throw my body into convulsive, wrenching poses.

Tourettes, that would knock any submarine in my bloodstream about like you would not believe, the aquanauts would be concussed out of their minds as I sometimes feel I'm out of mine.

Get to the brain. Find the damage. Repair it. No chance. Electric impulses a-randomly firing frying the Raquel Welches trying to fix the damage. Which is a pity, maybe they could use their laser beams to activate the bit of my brain that might get me a better job.

No chance.

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

STORY - I The Vanguard

I wrote this after seeing a BBC story about Trident Missile renewal about 20 minutes ago. I love writing about sentient machines or other inorganic things

Copyright BLoody Mulberry 06/03/2012