 
# The Beast of EAYOR

According to the Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=EAYOR )

An acronym for "Enter At Your Own Risk." (via txt or something)

Person A: "Dude this site is the lulz. Do you have web now?"

Person B: "Yeah, but I'm at work. Is it business approp?"

Person A: "IDK. There might be boobs in the ads, so EAYOR."

Person B: "Cool. I'll wait 'till I get home."

(Definition entered by Sl8er8 February 20, 2011)

# Enter At Your Own Risk – The Compilation

Being the selected collected pieces that originally appeared in the Electronic Amateur Press Association (eAPA) mailings, which were also later reprinted in the zine

Enter At Your Own Risk.

This is a further gathering of some of those pieces – produced for free as part of an eAPA membership drive.

This publication definitely contains nuts – one of which is named below:-

Text Copyright © John A. 'Chuck' Connor

Cover Art Copyright © Robert Keane

https://unsplash.com/@keano16?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText

eBook ISBN:

This edition is being distributed via Smashwords

The right of John A. 'Chuck' Connor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher and/or the person holding the role of eAPA Central Mailer.

Extracts may, however, be reproduced for review/advertising purposes, so long as it credits eAPA and the email listed below.

This publication is in eBook form only, and is distributed – FOR FREE – in order to promote and encourage new membership to the Electronic Amateur Press Association (eAPA)

All initial eAPA membership enquiries should first be sent to the email address at the end of this eBook.

Contents

What Is An Amateur Press Association?

Welcome, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends!

From Out Of The Dark And Starry Night....

Back On The Chain Gang

Strange New World

The Story So Far

Legs Connor Rides Again!

Meanwhile, Back At The Minky Hause....

Home Is The Hunter....

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch....

Ghostwalks

Little Tommy Tittlemouse

Congratulations!

A Bad Day For Deja Vue

Congratulations!

Catch A Falling Star

The Bicyclic Gene

Of Shoes, and Ships, and Sealing Wax....

Me? I'm Just A Lawnmower

Life At The Cutting Edge....

If You have Enjoyed This

# What Is An Amateur Press Association?

An amateur press association (APA) is a group of people who produce individual pages or magazines that are sent to a Central Mailer for collation and distribution to all members of the group. This can be by email or via snailmail (sometimes referred to as The Papernet rather than The Internet.)

Organization

APAs were a way for widely distributed groups of people to discuss a common interest together in a single forum before the advent of electronic bulletin boards (the original BBS) or the Internet. Many were founded in the 1930s and later by fans of Science Fiction, Horror, Comics, Music, Cinema and other topics as a way to develop writing, design and illustration skills. Many professional journalists, creative writers and artists practised in APA groups and email mailing lists.

A Central Mailer (CM) (sometimes called a Distribution Manager or Official Editor) is the coordinator of an APA. The heart of the role is the distribution of the association's publication to its members. The CM manages the subscription lists and the deadlines to which the association works. The CM is usually responsible for chasing members to ensure maximum participation although some APAs simply accumulate contributions between deadlines and mail out whatever is available at the mailing deadline.

Where the APA requires the submission of multiple hard copies/print offs by contributors, the CM merely collates the contributions. Some APAs involve the submission of camera ready copy; in such cases the CM arranges the reproduction of the material. Most APAs require the members to submit a minimum amount of material in a specified format to a specified number of mailings. This minimum activity (abbreviated to "minac") is usually specified as something in the form of (for example): "at least two A4 pages to at least two out of every three mailings" or "At least 1 contribution per x-many mailings/emails (in the case of electronic apas.). Most paper-based snailmail APAs also require each member to maintain a credit balance in a central funds account to cover common reproduction costs and postage.

In most APAs the CM provides an administrative report listing the contents of each mailing and any business information associated with the association. This can include financial accounts, membership information and some news items. Although most APAs have predetermined deadlines at regular intervals it is normal practice for the CM to specify the next mailing deadlines explicitly in each mailing.

Although some APAs are autocratic, most run on a democratic basis.

Paper-based APAs that require members to submit multiple copies of their contribution (commonly called "apazines") usually set a limit to the number of members and run a waiting list if this becomes necessary. In many cases people on the waiting list are permitted to contribute to mailings and may receive excess apazines provided by the members.

History

The first APAs were formed by groups of amateur printers. The earliest to become more than a small informal group of friends was the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) founded February 19, 1876 by Evan Reed Riale and nine other members in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is still running today.

The first British APA was the British Amateur Press Association founded in 1890. This is a different organisation from that launched by comics fans in 1978 (see below).

The second United States APA was the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) founded in 1895 by a group of teenagers including William H. Greenfield (aged 14) and Charles W. Heins (aged 17). This became a confederation of small amateur publishers which split into two organisations known interchangeably as UAP and UAAPA. The American Amateur Press Association (AAPA) was formed in 1936 by a secession from what was then called UAPAA.

The first Science Fiction APA was the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA) formed in 1937. It continues to be active, as is SAPS (Spectator Amateur Press Association) started in 1947.

The first comics APA was started by Jerry Bails in 1964 in the United States. Called CAPA-alpha (aka K-a), it has become the archetype for most subsequent comics APAs.

The difference in a co-op and an APA is that an APA is helmed by a central mailer, to whom the members send copies of their publications.

In a co-op, however, there is no central mailer; the members distribute their own works, and are linked by a group newsletter, a group symbol that appears on each member work, and a group checklist in every "member zine."

The APA model was picked up by artists in the 1980s. Groups of artists contributed elements of combined duplicated artworks that omitted the conversational elements of the fandom-based APAs (these pieces are sometimes called "assembly art"). During this same period, a group of British science fiction and comics fans also set up a short-lived "tape APA", contributing music and spoken word to a central anthology.

The latest innovation is a digital distribution, e-APA. Copies of past "mailings" are archived at the online resource eFanzines (see end of this publication).

(Back to Contents Page)

# Enter At Your Own Risk – The Compilation

# Welcome, My Friends, To The Show That Never Ends!

Step right this way, lay-dees and gentle-men, step right this way! And you will behold a sight never before witnessed in either hemisphere of this, our most civilized of worlds! Or even on those beyond!

Yes, my friends, for the show that never ends presents to you – the exulted audience – none other than the unmummified but still decaying remains of the being once known as Chuck Connor!

Watch, amazed and mortified, as he proceeds to produce his Paper and eFanzine, suspended in front of your very eyes – with his intelligence and intellect no larger than a silver dime!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he produces these things to a crazed and insane potpourri of sounds and music which, by its very nature alone, stabs a bent and rusty skewer through the very heart of the meaning of the word obscure!

Lit by countless myriads of twinkling and sparkling rays from tens of thousands of tiny lightbulbs, every nerve, every muscle, every fibre of his metal stability quivers like jelly in a bowl!

Bring your friends, family and children to stare at this spectacle with unashamed macabre curiosity – or they will reproach you in later life for this uncalled for lack in their education on the dangers of self abuse!

But first, here are these massages from our sponsors...

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Skate Press Producktions are available for Trade/Usual, eLoCs/LoCs (Letters of Comment), CoCs (Cards of Comment), Cattymunguses, Cuddymungusses, and Collimungusses -plus anything of a curious and interesting nature..

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And now, back to the regular deprogramming...

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#  From Out Of The Dark And Starry Night...

(Rewritten from Boopledoggin' #1 – eAPA #24 - April2006)

I suspect that, at this point, some kind of personal introduction might just be called for. So, holding lightly but firmly onto the cork handle, and allowing enough loose line so that the fly lands gently on the surface of the water, cast yourselves back into my past...

I first found Science Fiction when I was a young teenager. As best I can remember, the first 'true' SF novel was Cat's Eye by Andre Norton. That started me off seriously searching out similar material, closely followed by a copy of Towards Infinity – the Pan paperback edition with the crashed spacecraft on the minimalistic front cover. It was (and still is, going by the amount of reprinted material on the shelves these days) an anthology of short stories from various authors, edited by Damon Knight.

That anthology had not been bought from what passed as Halesworth's local book shop, but at a secondhand 'book and magazine emporium' down one of the seafront back streets in Lowestoft, which myself and two other friends used to visit on a regular basis while still at school. We would arrive at Suffolk's première fishing town either on push bikes (cycling up and down the A12 was not a problem back then) or via the single track train service, a struggling straggly survivor of the cuts back in the 1960s.

It was one of those corner shops, in the middle of a fork in the road – one side veering back towards the sea front and the piers – the other disappearing into more backstreets, populated with terraces and back doubles.

You also couldn't miss the shop and its double front, mainly as the lower half of the windows had been painted white to help prevent the casual passer-by from getting too much of a look at the selected items on display.

And, once through the half jammed wooden door, Mr Carr – the owner – or the person we always assumed was Mr Carr – would show us into the back stock room, before returning to the front counter to keep an eye on the assorted adult gentlemen, thus preventing them from thumbing through various 'Scandinavian Magazines' imported via the 'friendly' Scandinavian trawlermen.

Apart from being left alone with a seemingly unending mountain of cardboard boxes full of paperback SF and Fantasy, a visit to Carr's Bookshop also had another advantage. It you bought a book from him, then returned it in good condition, then he would give you 50% of your money back. Okay, so it was in the form of a credit note, which you had to spend in the shop, on the day you were there. But, hey, after a short period of time we were not only swapping the books amongst ourselves, but also trying any authors we could get our hands on – and with no knowledge or 'experts' to tell us what we should, or shouldn't read.

A year or three later the advent of Science Fiction Monthly (a large format arts-centred magazine, published by New English Library), along with an exposure to local/Suffolk independent/semi-pro and small press ventures, helped to germinate the seeds that were to blossom into a hybrid of the Sensa-Wunda bush which grows in most proto-fans at some time in their lives.

That was the same year I sold my first piece to a professional magazine. Then, three months later at the start of 1975, I joined the Royal Navy.

4 years after that, in October 1979, I produced my first fanzine.

To be honest, I've lost count of the various SF fanzine based things I've either produced or been involved with since 1979. 21 issues of IDOMO, 5 or 6 issues of SABSS, 15 issues of Thingumybob (one M, just as the Reverend spelt it) – there were around 40 issues of Lollygagging, forgotten how many issues of Big Eyed Beans From Venus, 36+issues of Heart Attach & Vine, plus several one-shots (Secondhand Goods, and something called Spanish Armadillos #2 – there never was an issue 1) and half a dozen Skate Tapes (cassette tapes) – issue 21 of Lollygagging was on a cassette as well....

Recently, while digitising some of the old tape collection, I found a couple of tapes sent to me back in 1983. Willie Smith (an American writer and poet) had sent a copy of Suburban Relapse to a local radio station. They had taken to it, and Willie had recorded the resulting shows, then sent me the tapes.

Back in SF fandom, for my sins I also helped form up the ill-fated and short lived Simon Bostock apa, APA-SF&F. Then some years later The Organisation (a spinoff/mutation from the Birmingham/West Midlands comics-based APA-B).

Later still, when Frank's APA, The Soft Toys APA and The Surrey Limpwrists APA started to fold up and die, they came together under one skull & crossbone'd flag as the glorious Pieces of Eight.

Then, back in 1994, I started my own apa DNA (Die Nameless Apa) The only 7-legged bi-valve friendly apa in this, or any other, Solar system (barring Alpha Centauri, which as any fule kno, is where the 7LBVs come from).

That ran for 6 years until I finally snapped a ligament in my knee from road running, and handed the reins over to someone else before I FAFIAted in many respects.

Fast forward to today [2006]. The old Chateau on the Plateau in Suffolk has been sold, the book collection ripped off by a dealer (I was never paid, not even the shipping costs, on around 700 excellent to mint paperbacks) and the whole of the fanzine world went into a skip (4 Gestetner duplicators, 2 electro-stencillers, and about 4,000 fanzines from various fandoms.)

What is left of the once-infamous vinyl and tape collections resides in various rooms, or has been donated to charity shops over the years – slowly being replaced with either CD versions or mp3 files fished off the Internet. A lot of the indie material has also been lovingly recorded into the network to be cleaned and saved for posterity.

And yet...

Randomly chasing around the Internet led me to click on the eFanzines website. Curiosity got the better of me, and after some rummaging around I was more than a little surprised to see the Harry Warner Jr collection I put together back in the 1990s is now being published on the web. My only sorrow in that respect is that Harry wasn't around to see it happen.

Whatever, I saw the advert and back catalogue for e-APA, thought about all the times I had spent typing stencils, manually sticking in electro-scanned artwork, the hours collating issues of fanzines after days of typing and rolling the thing off...

But it's nothing like that anymore. It's all electronic now (albeit on various Frankenputers and open source software) without the worries of whether or not the thing will actually print, whether or not the ink will last one more stencil, whether or not the paper will run freely through the duplicator, whether or not we have enough envelopes and postage...

I can mourn the loss of such things as Colossus (my very early, hand built 286), or Rhadamanthus II (another Frankenputer), the original Typo Twins (manual portable typewriters), Dumbo – even Madam Syn – The 24-pin (back when software such as Bradford gave you 24-pin quality via a 9 pin printer.)

However, despite all the ease of access to equipment, the lack of any really manual processes, and the fact that I can now throw colour and illustrations into the mix – all of which feels a little 'alien' – coming back into the fringes of 'Fanzine' fandom will feel like putting my hand into warm, half-set jelly.

A little strange at first, but oh-so comfortingly familiar as well...

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-oOo- -oOo-

#  Back On The Chain Gang

(Rewritten from Boopledoggin' #3 – eAPA #26 -June2006)

All in all, I suppose I should be a happy little poppet in that I now seem to have picked up another job (at the time of typing this – 4th May 2006 – EDS have yet to officially accept my acceptance.) But, at the risk of tempting fate and jumping assorted guns, at the moment it looks like the advantages of working for EDS are in my favour. They have not only offered various training packages, but they have also put me on several courses to renew certain technical certifications, and in view of the requirements of the new project, they have even sent me on a new training package to teach me Sybase administration. Still, I have to admit I've found the last couple of months of unemployment to be a double edged sword.

Firstly, there has been the worries and stress of keeping the home fires burning – bills to be paid, mortgage to be covered, travel and car costs to be met – which is something I'd learned to buffer for in the past. Experience of start-up companies does that for you, believe me.

VNL, one Friday in the middle of 2001, I get moved from my desk at the Staples Corner offices by the bailiffs who came to repossess various things. Sunday afternoon get a call from Colin Bateman to say that Simon Hockhousen had secured fresh funding. Monday morning take delivery of new desk at the Staples Corner offices.

The other thing I certainly didn't relish going through all over again was the inane hassles which are the foundation stones of the UK's Jobseeker rubbish. I do it purely to get my 'stamp' paid – mainly to keep my State pension contributions up to date. Well, having paid into the damn thing for so long, it seems stupid not to keep the thing topped up in times of need.

But, on the up side of things, what buffers were in place are now being used for an odd treat now and again – such as a new bit for one of the beasties (the Franken-puters), the much needed new door for the garage, and bringing the mortgage overpayments back on track again.

In all honesty, this is not something I want to go through again, if I can help it, and the fact that EDS are a global company should, in theory, offer protection. In reality, though, it has to be said they're more likely to shed personnel once the project comes to a close than they are to re-employ.

Still, by that time, I should be more financially stable and ready to consider yet another career change (Farm Labourer, Turkey Processor, Armed Forces, Civil Service, Multi-Media Real Time Delivery, GSK, automotive plastics, and now Defence once more.)

However, every experience is a learning experience, and the things I can now take away with me from this period of unemployment are:-

1. Recruiters and their agencies are still malignant and depraved blood-sucking butt-crack parasites (this is the 4th re-write, hence it's complimentary tone).

2. Jobseekers Allowance and the whole DHSS experience is still mind-numbingly soul destroying and run by a complete and utter bunch of jobsworths

"Have you tried our jobs board?"

"No. Are you ever likely to have vacancies for senior IT Systems Infrastructure Architects and managers?"

"No. But if you try our jobs board..."

Give Me Strength!

3. That the whole of the UK is no longer going to be successful in any of the manufacturing industries, and will probably become subservient to either China, India – or probably both – in the next 20 to 30 years.

4. Amazon UK out near Milton Keynes really do not have a clue about the recruiting process. I should have gone through one of the agencies I usually deal with – as opposed to going it alone – and I should have walked away after 5th totally pointless interview.

They may well be customer focussed, but employee focussed they certainly are not...

Still, EDS have now made good their offer, even sent me on a 5 day Sybase database administrators' course – some investment in the workforce started on 8th May – and although the money isn't as strong as I was used to at Raytheon (may they forever rot in the Hell of their own making – nothing personal, you understand...) it does mean that we're once again safe.

Until the next time, that is.

[18 months later, EDS was Borg'd by Hewlett Packard – a company with little or no real presence within the Defence industries, but which has been willing to jump into various joint venture beds in their attempts to penetrate a very tight market. Sadly, after 9 years, I'm in too deep to get out – at least not without adding yet another group pension policy to the other 7 in the pension portfolio.]

[Even later – HP-ES as it became, was eventually 'merged' with a company called DXC and I was made redundant once more. Who says History isn't cyclic?]

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-oOo- -oOo-

#  Strange New World

(Rewritten from Boopledoggin' #7 – eAPA #30 -October 2006 – in response to the question:

What do you give a gay couple for a Civil Partnership present?)

There's something about an August that often makes me wonder what Life is all about. For us, a multitude of quick-fire 'events' happen in the extended holiday that August seems to have become.

The car needs its annual MoT Certificate (the equivalent to roadworthiness inspections required in some US states for our American readership) and needs to be taxed, Den's birthday, our original anniversary, and both our mothers' birthdays as well.

If you want to get freaky with fate and numbers, then I'll start by pointing out that both our mothers have the same birthday – 2nd August – but are 9 years apart (mine is 86, Den's mother is 77.)

There was 9 years between my mother and my father, and there are also 9 years between Den and myself. He is "Print that and you die!" years old, while I am 9 years younger at "Fat chance, squared."

Oddly enough, Revolution 9 is the one track I cannot stand on the Beatles double White album (their 9th studio release.) But then that's just down to plain good taste, rather than any numerology or any external Cosmic Forces.

Of course, now that we have an official, legal Partnership date (21st May – cards only, no presents, thank-you!) the original, un-legal anniversary date (27th August – good Champaign and coffee flavoured ice cream by candlelight) sort of felt weird this year.

Yes, we did what we usually do – and have done since we decided to make a proper go of it just after the Minnellium (obligatory Victoria Wood joke there) – but this time it actually felt less of an occasion. I don't know why, but both of us felt that way. The same feelings happened on Den's birthday, and then mine, which is 12 days later. But this year we'd planned on going to a wonderful Chinese restaurant & noodle bar with two friends in order to celebrate, so that may have been why things felt a little skewed.

But the question I still wonder about, inside, is whether or not actually committing ourselves to a proper and legally binding contract has somehow taken some of the 'danger' out of what we were doing?

In order to help qualify that piece above, I should point out now that both Den and I are both pre-1967, rather than post. 1967 is a landmark in that the UK finally decriminalised homosexuality. The myth usually injected at this point is the one in regard to lesbians being unacknowledged by the law courts owing to the archaic laws – supposedly Queen Victoria refused to believe that such women existed, and so all 'anti-gay' law was purely male based. In fact the whole criminalisation stems from various 'Christian' power bases, along with amendments to Amendments to the Criminal Bill Amendment Act back in 1885. The original purpose of the Act was to prevent child prostitution – along with restricting prostitution in general. However, a Liberal MP, Henry Labouchere, introduced an amendment to the Amendment making it a crime for two men to indulge in 'gross indecency'. British law has decided, in its wisdom (probably Labouchere's intention) that 'gross indecency' would be any homosexual act, not including sodomy. However, as the punishment for sodomy in 1885 was life imprisonment, many homosexuals were prosecuted under the Labourchere amendment because juries were far more likely to convict.

So, prior to 1967 it was a crime, punishable by terms of imprisonment, and with gay men treated as if they had some kind of mental illness – aversion therapy via electro-shock treatment (the good old Edison Medicine) was frequently applied in order to 'cure' the 'poor unfortunate perverts' (an interesting comment from areas of the Church, whose conveniently nomadic officials throughout time immoral have had more than a passing taste for choirboys...)

In fact, one of the administrators of the pre-Internet (aka direct dial-up) Bulletin Board Systems (Slice of Lime), co-ran a therapy group for those who, like himself, had been through various Realignment Programmes.

Even after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, things were not an immediate bed of roses. It took the Royal Navy a further 30 years to comply – finally revoking the SNLR and history sheet corner clipping in 1997.

But gradually over the years social acceptance has improved, to the point where both Den and I were pleasantly surprised at other peoples' excitement and interest when we announced our intention and that they were invited to either the partnership ceremony or the reception afterwards.

Considering the recent legislation didn't come into force until December 2005 [10 months before this was originally written] it surprised us that people accepted it and were treating it as a special occasion – we had both expected a potentially slightly negative response owing to the more senior ages of our friends and social groups. It was a Pavlovian reflex reaction on our part, generated from years of conditioning – expecting the negative – and later, as we discussed things privately, we decided it was time for us to start breaking down our own biased feelings and try to disarm our own defensiveness.

Yet we're not alone in our initial apprehension, as this attitude and reaction was also noted in one of the national daily newspapers. A columnist had been invited to a ceremony in his local village, and was bemused that rather than being up in arms and offended by it all as he'd initially expected, they had gone out of their way to make things work, and turn the event into an occasion.

That aside, there were a couple of things that niggled me a little in regard to our own event – apart from some of the women trying to out-do each other with clothes for the affair:-

Firstly, both Den and I do not like the term "Wedding" (or "Gay Wedding") – it is a Partnership. People gave us presents (even after we specifically said we didn't want anything) and had a good time. Those who attended the ceremony itself thought it very tasteful, and even more up-market than several straight weddings they had been to. But after a while both Den and I gave up trying to correct people – letting the expression "Wedding" stand uncorrected.

Secondly, and this is a general observation, all the official documentation, discussions, consultations (etc) in regard to the Registry Office had to be done during weekday working hours. In today's society where both partners could well be working, we both felt that this was a little bit out of sync with the real world.

But, what capped it for us was the fact that the cost of a Registry Office ceremony (regardless of orientation) went from £100 (Monday to Saturday morning) up to £500 (Saturday afternoon & Sunday.) Who the hell has time during the week to set up a wedding and all that it entails? Also, who can take time off mid-week to attend ceremony as a guest?

We chose a Sunday simply because it suited us, and the general logistics in getting as many people to us as we could comfortably manage [Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... what had originally started out being just 6 of us, with an informal reception lunch at a local Italian restaurant, turned out to be over 50 people and a full running champagne buffet.]

Thankfully, even though they've been doing the ceremonies for almost 6 months by the time we applied, the Registrar's Little Helper managed to make a bit of a pig's ear of the initial offer and gave us a receipt for a Sunday slot at £100. So you can imagine our surprise when, on returning three weeks later after the registry entry (aka the three week reading of the banns) to finalise the details and end up being presented with an invoice for an additional £400. A sift through our copies of the paperwork – the Registry Office copies having been apparently misfiled – followed by a little bit of discussion in regard to contracts, and the breaking of, and the Registry Office decided to honour the deal. But, it is a phenomenal amount of money for what is, basically, a 30 minute factory-line-style slot – £1,000 per hour, if you will.

What also bemuses me is that, one Christmas Eve back in 1997, as I was pootling around the Internet, I became a fully endorsed and registered member of the Universal Church of Mondesto California (I have the certificate somewhere to prove this) and as such I was (and still am) licensed in various US states to conduct Affirmation Ceremonies (as they were called then) in regard to same-sex couples, along with legal weddings. For some time I used to joke about setting up shop in the UK (before the Civil Partnership came into being) and doing the whole Commitment Ceremony production for a nominal fee. Sadly, now that things have become legal, it looks like that particular element of my retirement portfolio has been scuppered for good.

But, in closing this off here, and to answer Jan's comment about what to send a same-sex couple for their Partnership: send what you feel is appropriate. Because, in all honesty, deep down it really doesn't matter. It's the thought and the feelings that count – and the peace of mind that comes from being accepted by friends, family and the people around you.

Twins – separated by 9 years and two different pairs of biological parents

[Later] There was an interesting piece in the local newspaper just recently, which stated that, since December 2005 when the Partnership Ceremony was first introduced, Hertfordshire has had the most Civil Partnership ceremonies, with Hatfield Registry holding over 160 – about 20 a month as of August 2006 – bringing in around £70 t0 £80k.

What also surprised me was the comment:

"... with 6 couples being local to Hatfield itself."

I made a verbal observation in regard to the fact that it read like some sighting in the RSPB magazine:

"And in Hatfield, there has been several confirmed sightings of at least six pairs of Great Crested Queens, and one Flamboyant Nancy in a shade of orange that no one in their right mind would be seen dead in..."

Den thinks I'm just being a cynical, bitter and twisted old git.

Who knows, maybe he's right for once...

[Later still] December 10th 2014 has seen the sideways move in that although a Civil Partnership gives the couple the same legal standing and rights as a regular marriage, there is now the chance for CP couples to swap their certificate for a marriage certificate. A lot of this has to do with what seems like political correctness, and while I can appreciate the argument that a Civil Partnership should be open and available to all, such has always been available to straight couples via a Registry Office – ie, a non-religious ceremony which recognises the union between two people.

The only advantage I can see is actually one of protective imitation. Whereas before, when asked, I have always clearly stated that I'm Civil Partnered. This actually singles me out by definition – which could easily become problematic in regard to future employment. I mean, hey, for the sake of simplicity, let's all pretend that Ageism doesn't enter into the equation here.

A case in hand would be going back to a Venture Holdings USA style company and asking for employment. Peguform UK was a VH company. When Peguform UK was in the final throws of collapse, I ended up spending an evening with several of the US owners. They not only proved that the Southern Fundamentalist Stereotype actually does exist, they did so in spades.

Having a Marriage Certificate, rather than a Civil Partnership certificate, blurs the preconceived imagery – were it to exist in the first place.

There are also supposedly advantages in regard to pensions, 'survivor' rights, 'death in harness' pay-outs, and group policy pension protection. I've yet to see any proper analysis of these claims, though Den and I are already talking about whether or not we should convert over. For us it would be free of charge. For those entering into a Civil Partnership now, and wishing to convert over, there is a charge of £45.00

But if there's nothing to be gained and it ain't broke, then why fix it? Personally, I don't know if this is yet more appeasement for the LGBT minority as some kind of lead into an election year – in the same way that the campaign for heterosexual couples to be allowed to Civil Partnership seems to be gaining momentum – or if, like the Labour Party reneging on promises in regard to repealing Section 28 back in 1997 (it took 6 years and still exists in other, more insidious forms) it's all just smoke and mirrors for the masses.

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-oOo- -oOo-

# The Story So Far

Rupert has finally given in to desire and left Juliet for the Bahamas – a fun-loving retro swingers couple who balance the lows of Hipster cred New York with the cocaine and gansta highs of Bridlington-on-Sea – a notorious Yorkshire den of depravity.

Juliet, in turn, has been left with the children and is having to come to terms with the quandary which most parents have to eventually face. Does she sell them now for medical research, or wait a while and invest in the White Slave Trade futures market?

Mickey, who is really only Sherman's father by the foreskin of his teeth has, unsurprisingly, discovered Trixie in a compromising position in the potting shed. Not quite the sort of behaviour one would or should expect from a prize-winning pedigree goat.

Meanwhile, despite having twelve points on his artistic licence, Chuck Connor continues to add yet more column inches to his EAYOR, in the misguided hope that it will somehow bring him international fame, success and unimaginable riches.

But first, here are these massages from our sponsors...

# Advert Break

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# Legs Connor Rides Again!

I suppose one of the things people have to confront as they grow older is the inevitable loss of immortality. That thing which demarcates Yooofs from Crumblies (a transition seemingly conducted at FTL speeds, and which goes unacknowledged until the post-transitional phase has been achieved.)

The reason for this contemplation and thought is simple. For one of the very few times in my life I am being confronted with something I know is probably a sign of age.

To help you understand where I'm coming from on this, you have to remember that we (as children) were brought up in an environment which didn't really acknowledge 'age' as a debilitating factor in life. My parents has us kids late in life (my mother was 38 when she had me, and near 40 when she had my younger sister) and when my father died back in 1981 (of cancer) he was 70.

Because of all that, and I suspect also being isolated in Suffolk as a child, age was not something we religiously ticked off, seemingly as some kind of countdown to senility and the final screwing down of the lid.

So, to have what originally appeared to be a several small blisters appear on my shins, around about the week before Christmas 2007, meant I thought nothing much of it. Having reacted to various insect bites and plant sap in the past, these seemed to be inconsequential and nothing more than just a passing annoyance.

The trouble was, during the Christmas and New Year period they didn't seem to want to go away, despite the usual over-the-counter remedies which have worked with various ills and ailments over the years.

Come December 27th, and I pootle off down the local GP surgery. The person I see (one of six in the practice, but if you want proper continuity then you have to keep asking for the same quack, and take the month-long delays) seemed to feel it was a basic or standard form of cellulitis, gave me a script for some FloxiMoxiWoxiDoxiPoxicillin, and a tube of Bactroban.

Within 48 hours I'm putting myself into A&E at 4am as the left leg has swollen beyond the point of "it's just fighting the infection" to "it's a phenomenally painful adverse reaction of some kind, neutralise the bloody thing." The right leg isn't so bad, but puffy all the same. Five hours in A&E waiting for a set of basic blood test to be done (Nurse: "I don't know why your GP didn't conduct these tests first...") I end up being told I'm "probably" reacting to the Bactraban and the FloxiWoxi. Come off them and see the GP as soon as you can.

Which I do. Only (surprise surprise) it's a different one, and I get put on some horse pills (Erythromicin – the fallback alternative to the FloxiWoxi.)

Thirty-six hours later and we're back into another phase of fresh blistering again. It reminds me too much of chemical burns – but that's just associating what I 'recognise' over what is actually happening. As it is, they take another round of twelve bloods, checking for assorted this and thats, and then they decide they can't seem to pin it down. Time to see the Assistant Dermatologist.

Okay, now I'm all for a joke or two, but is sitting in front of the patient (ie me) and reading a book called The ABC of Dermatology really such a good idea?

I get taken off the last batch of 'cillin and put onto some stuff called Diclofenac, a prescription anti-inflammatory, and told to keep on taking the ibuprofen and paracetamol. The next 48 hours pass, then all of the sites (9 on the left leg, 5 on the right) decide to slough their protective scabs overnight and become ulcerations.

Thankfully, on the right leg, this seemingly drastic body move leads to more stable scabbing and, to be honest, at the time of typing this [March 2008], the right leg is certainly getting much better.

I suspect, because of the greater number of sites (also now increased due to further reactions, see below), the left leg will take a lot longer to repair itself. But, read on. As Jimmy Cricket used to say "There's more..."

When the Diclofenac sloughing took place I called the local surgery and invited them to get me an appointment with either one or the other of the two GPs I've been dealing with, mainly because this kind of action only lasts 24 to 36 hours and I didn't want them to miss anything which might have been helpful in sticking a name to the problem.

That was the first time anyone took a swab of the sites and sent it off for investigation and analysis. At least with the American system of insurance the specialists are falling over themselves to hook up to a potential gravy train. Here in the UK, with the GPs on a regular 6-figure salary, there's more of a tendency to rubber stamp.

For my sins they stopped all the previous medications and put me on some tubes of Fucibet cream. How long would the swab results take? Oh, less than a week.

Whatever, come the end of that week, and I get a phonecall from the surgery at 17:45, Friday evening.

"Hello? Is that Mister Connor? This is the Surgery. Doctor says you've got thrush, and you have to get some Canesten Cream from the chemists."

"Say What? Thrush? Are you sure?"

"Doctor says you've got thrush, Mister Connor. Canesten Cream."

"Okay. Is that as opposed to the Fucibet cream, in alternation with the Fucibet, or as a compound of the two?"

"[dumb silence]"

Not to be outdone, I follow that up with another body blow. "Also, is that the Canesten with Hydracortisone, or without? Mainly as the skin definitely appears broken in places, to a depth of around 2 or 3 millimetres in fact."

"Doctor's now away until Monday. Errrrr..."

"Well, what do I need to do then?"

"I'd use the Canesten Mister Connor, and I'll book you an appointment for Monday."

That weekend I went out and got a tube of Canesten without Hydracortizone cream. 36 hours later I not only had the sites grumbling a little, but both of my forearms and the backs of my hands became almost totally covered in what I now know to be called purpura. A massive claret-coloured rash of burst bloodcells. So I stopped the extra cream and went back to just using the Fucibet and gritting my teeth.

The rash, by the way, was that impressive, when the good Doctor Lavell saw it the following Monday he immediately went into a Meningitis test or two before calming down.

Then, on the 4th of February, I finally got to see Dr M, a professional dermatologist.

He asked a lot of questions, and actually listened to my answers, even when I reverted to a Rolf Harris impression when asking "Do ya know what it is yet?"

Thankfully he thinks it might be something called HSP (Henoch-Schonlein Purpura), or possibly something called Pemphigoid. Smart money seems to be on the Pemph, but I think M is looking for something to write up in a dermatology journal somewhere.

Whatever the damn thing is, it's some kind of unpredictable auto-immune reaction (white cells start chomping red cells, or similar) with no known cause, or cure, apart from sitting it out and just letting it run its course. What hasn't helped it has been the almost continuous assaults due to becoming hypersensitive due to the weeks of other junk medication thrown at and in me.

On the more positive side, if it does prove positive to be HSP, then it would appear that I apparently have the body of a 5 to 15 year old. My other half, on hearing this, immediately took issue, including derisive comments and some very derogatory suggestions. Thank you, you old tart, but if that's what the medical profession believe then who am I to dispute it?

Actually, it appears to be rare in adults, but does apparently target white males rather than females, so there are some vague grounds for Dr M's diagnosis.

He recommended continuing with the Fucibet, and tubigrip in order to support and combat the associated vasculitis (where the white cells are attacking the walls of the veins, etc.)

As to the use of anti-inflammatory tablets? No, no, a thousand times no! They can often be the cause of something like this, or even exacerbate the problem further! (his rather flamboyant emphasis – partially due, I suspect to his French origins and his outrrrrageous accent...)

Sadly, also on the 4th we discovered a fresh blister on my left leg which has since developed into an either/or type of ulceration, and appears to have caused a re-reaction with the rest of the sites. It seems to be a whole body experience, though with the output thankfully confined to below the knees.

As a precaution I'm also being checked for possible kidney damage (again, not something standard, but as this adult form of whatever-it-is is supposed to be rare then they check everything in case of variations – not forgetting those articles in relevant peer review journals will need observations and supporting data.)

That was almost a week ago as I type this, and so it's a bit early for a result. So, for the time being I still have to keep the ulcerations moist on the left leg (using a home-made version of Jelonet – ie, pieces of wide weave cotton bandage slathered up with Vaseline) until the latest one calms down.

After it settles I'm hoping there is an end in sight somewheres.

There has to be mainly because I am missing the gym badly, the weight is coming back on (it's now coming up to three months since I stopped going) and I feel that it might be advantageous to get some exercise done at home once the legs have calmed down (best will in the world, with the state of my legs at the moment the gym would be well within their rights to ban me temporarily, as it's not the nicest of things to look at when exposed – especially as the showers and sauna are communal.)

So, there you have it. Hopefully things will improve over the coming month and I'll be off the tubigrip – I'm a great believer in giving a wound air so it can scab up and protect itself naturally, but at the moment whenever the air gets to the left leg it becomes painful (raw nerve endings reacting to air, temperature, contact, etc. It's not as bad as when some of the little darlings start to grow back – or re-routing around potential scar tissue – it's just that it can become constantly irritating.)

At the moment I've not gone for prescription painkillers. Not because I'm even vaguely into masochism (a religion I doubt I could ever follow, regardless of how Catholic my tastes) but because they are mostly soporific in their nature, and the last thing I need is to be falling asleep all the time.

So, yes, there are times when I've felt akin to the puffer fish at the start of this piece, and there are times when I could still happily eviscerate the two GPs who kept feeding me stuff I reacted badly to (admittedly unbeknownst to all of us) but the things that make me smile have been the support and comments people have passed my way – including one from an old fannish friend who said:

"It's rare, obscure, exotic, and incurable? God, darling, how terribly fannish of you!"

And you all thought that John's Body was just a series of articles that Readers Digest ran in the mid 1970s?

Next time round – Cystoscopies And Me – "Doc, are you sure that 75-300 mil f4-5.6 lens is going to fit up there?"

[Post Crypt – As it was, having lived for almost 10 years with the thing being pretty dormant, when it became 'active and intrusive' again I visited the Lister Hospital in Stevenage, where a very nice Dr Ogden immediately went through the notes, stated it was "crap" and that it was in fact, LDS – aka Lipodermatosclerosis...]

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# Meanwhile, Back At The Minky Hause....

(Extract from the Mailcomms section of Boopledoggin' 56 – in reply to Garth Spencer about his father)

Oh thou of little faith! I give you a feed, and all you come back with the UN-embroidered truth!

Unless, of course, it was all a ruse to throw me off the scent and hide the terrible truth, thus concealing one of the Spencer family's dark secrets?

That he really was the owner-cum-manager of an illegal and unlicensed Canadian travelling burlesque & bordello circus train – regularly off the rails and also the beaten track – giving refuge to the likes of such previously shunned acts as The Jezebel Liberty Chipmunks – whose very deeds and existence had made them social outcasts even before they'd been born – and McCreedie's Wrestling Dwarves – every one of them a mere hop, skip and a boys size medium leotard away from the long arm of the Law.

And the less said about that terrible winter of '65 the better. Though no one in their right minds could blame them for what happened when that mountain pass became impassable, despite all the photographs and column inches the papers had later printed up and sold to a fact-starved, scandal-hungry public.

But then the family fortune would not have been lost and won back if it hadn't of been for the resultant court cases, would it? Unless, of course, the rumours of the old Spencer goldmine are really true, and that even today, in dark tunnels lit by mutant luminous chipmunks, the descendants of McCreedie's long-lost dwarves still dig-dig-dig-dig-dig-dig-dig-dig dig the whole day through...

The money from the undeclared gold – secretly laundered by a gang of loyal Chinese pirates aboard an unregistered Junk shop located on a sandbank somewhere in the South China sea – being steamed and pressed into funding your own Doc Savage-like exploits involving super-advanced pseudo-scientific inventions, and maintaining a cracked team of notorious uber-nerds, who right wrongs and regularly save the Earth, while all the time maintaining little or no true concept of linear time or Quantum Physics. Not forgetting the obligatory comedy foil of a pet pig, or the more than sinister Institute 'up state' where villains are sent to undergo corrective surgery and thus be 'rehabilitated'.

At least that's what Colby assures me is true.

Isn't that right, Colby?

Tell him it's all true, Colby. Tell him it's all true....

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As joy would have it, after some twenty years, the very last of my old amalgam fillings, in one of the large back molars, has decided to start failing, which has meant a trip to the dentist.

Apparently, according to Chris (someone who has worked on my teeth since I left the Navy back in 1997, and whose real name is Christakis Mindikkis) I haven't been to see him for over 5 ½ years. The bugger made up for it by also finding a spot of decay in the adjacent back molar (the upper right 7th, for those of you with a dental disposition.)

So at the moment I'm typing this final piece with a temporary filling, alongside a new composite one, with an appointment next week for the temp to be removed and a more permanent one (a proper chunk of metal) to be rammed home in its place.

Needless to say, my own comments about ripping the whole lot out and going for a full set of dentures was greeted with a look of sheer horror on Chris' face. It seems that, despite the fact it is now totally impossible to find an NHS dentist in the UK – and if you do then their books are over subscribed – the ethic remains to save the tooth, the whole tooth, or as much of it as can be drilled and filled more times than a West Texas oil field.

Oh, yes, and surprise-surprise, Hewlett Packard UK's dental plan doesn't cover this kind of work – which only goes to show just how much a big company like that really values its permanent workforce.

Just think, in 2023 he'll be celebrating 25 years of being known as Heywood.

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This has been another enthralling episode of Hey Hey We're The Minkeys! \- a brand new ecco-friendly sitcom about a socially dysfunctional pod of whales as they travel through life's highways, byways and oceanic continental currents, trying to avoid the various international whaling fleets – also known as EAYOR.

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# Home Is The Hunter....

It's been an odd month for maintaining any sort of mental direction. Every time I figure I have a goal and the drive, I end up being distracted to the Nth degree.

Example: I have a novel completed (back in 2010/2011) which is, in some respects, part copy edited. It did the rounds of various agency reps – and Crème de la Crime were originally interested in it. Only Crème got sold to Severn, who only publish to libraries, and were only really interested in reprint work from established authors.

So the novel – Turncoat – stayed in the drawer. Well, the metaphorical drawer as it was held on a hard drive, and backed up on several USB drives.

But I fished it out, did the 11th or 12th rewrite – updating various things as I went – then passed a copy over to Bill Butcher, who did a great job of initial copy & proof editing for me. It's not a job I can do myself, because I need an outsider to eviscerate the typescript – rather than me sitting there muttering: 'Aw, isn't that such a cute sentence? And so stylish, too.'

Now, after what must be the 14th brush through (though I think I still need one more minor scene, which becomes more pivotal later on) I'm dithering between getting Murderous-Ink to publish it, or pushing it back around the agencies again.

To be honest, it was the Darley Anderson Agency comment re the previous novel ("Well written, but we don't think it would be an easy sell in the UK,") which pushed me into self publishing in the first place. California Twist has been ticking over (not bad considering I've done little or nothing to push the thing over the past 12+ hectic months), but I'd like to get the next one out before Christmas 2015 at the latest. The reason being that I intend to run the '24 hours Free' offer, and see what tight-fisted little misers come a-downloading.

That's saying I'm unsuccessful when I put the Turncoat MS in for the next Harper Collins Wednesday Post (www.wednesdaypost.com.au)

Then there's been the whole Christmas thing itself – looming on the horizon like some kind of distant Tsunami, or a real-life version of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

Apart from the one bad Christmas vice we have left – getting a real Christmas tree – most of our Christmases are very much recycled affairs now. Den brought with him his Christmas tradition of alternating gold and silver decorations. This year (2014) is going to be silver, though we also cheat a little and have a few hand blown glass baubles that are our favourites – usually with various memories attached to them.

We don't bother with Christmas presents to each other – though we tend to buy things during the year, usually saying: "Oh, you shouldn't have!" which is usually met with "Call it a Christmas present." It's the same for birthdays and anniversaries, which is, or so I'm told, one of the signs of a comfortable relationship.

However, this year – the first time in a very long while – we'll be having guests for dinner on Christmas Day, and others over for Boxing Day. This, of course, means that I try and take to the background while Den changes his mind every other day/hour/minute in regard to:-

Decorations – we were halfway through The Howard Centre (shopping mall for our Colonial Cousins) before he decided he could use something with a different set of lights that he'd had packed away for just such occasions

Table Runner – we have at least half a dozen of the things, but none of them are right for what he wants to do

Food – I've lost track of the number of different ideas that've been discarded in regard to the Starter. One day it's soup, the next it's pate and toast.

Then, just to completely left field me, he's now decided we will be doing warm flaked salmon and shrimp, with wilted baby spinach and a warm oil & somethingorother dressing.

"At least it'll shift some of the salmon in the freezer," I say, smug in the knowledge that I was the one who caught it and returned home with it, triumphant.

Well, returned home with it from the supermarket at any rate.

And yes it was a whole salmon, and yes I was proud of myself when I threw it into the boot of the car and drove back home... only to be greeted with "What on Earth are we going to do with all of that?" Which was very closely followed by "Well, you can sort that thing out yourself, you know fresh fish makes me heave."

No "Wow, we could get half a dozen meals easy out of that!" – or – "That's going to taste really great with some lemon juice and a little dill sauce," by way of any Thank You.

No, I get the 'Makes me heave' comment, which is the perfect gateway for him to start recounting the horrors of his childhood when his Jewish grandmother used to make rollmops, and the smell of the fresh fish made him feel ill.

And, of course, not only can he kvetch to Olympic Gold Medal standards, he can quite literally throw up at will. I've seen him do it. There isn't even any 'wait a minute while I psych myself up' moment either.

The weirdest example was when I was setting something up in the kitchen. A pot of vegetable stock I was cooking down had a celery 'string' in it which, in the wrong light, I will admit, might have looked like a strand of hair. Ten seconds later and he's spitting up stuff into the kitchen sink. No mention of the fact he was casually poking around the kitchen, trying not to see what I was up to – despite our mutually agreed 'Non-Interference Pact' regarding the kitchen, and specifically when the other is doing something in it.

Thankfully we of the Connor clan come from good, old fashioned, less sensitive, London Irish stock. If it runs slower than you, and you can eat it, then we'll know at least three ways of killing it, and twice that many for cooking it as well.

Part of that ability I blame on my late Yorkshire mother. The other part I blame on the family moving from London to Suffolk back in 1964 – thus allowing me to get in touch with my feral side. And when you live only 15 miles away from Lowestoft, a coastal town whose primary industry was fish, then compared to a full sized Cod, or a fresh Skate, an Atlantic salmon is mere child's play.

Who cares if the salmon was captured in the Reduced Price section of TESCO? That just made it all the more desirable – a prize worth fighting for – and fight we sometimes do. It's all done very politely of course, but it wouldn't be the first time I've had someone try and block me when reaching for a choice reduction.

Things like smoked and dyed Cod or Haddock loins, pork loins, overweight Gressingham or Aylesbury ducks, smoked Vietnamese River Cobbler, or the run of Ox Cheeks a while back after some 'celebrity' chef mentioned the cut in passing. They all shine off the shelves with the promise of exotic preparation and experimental tastes. And the temptations are sometimes too much for the freezer space as well.

Several weeks ago, when four good sized Rainbow Trout fillets were scooped up, we had them on a bed of creamed potato & caper mash. The beautiful fillets had been part poached in the oven, then dusted with Panko (Japanese breadcrumbs), Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, then flash finished under the grill.

Would I have done something like that if the fillets hadn't turned up on the Reduced shelves? Hardly. It's just that, at the cut price, if things go wrong, or turn out to be a disaster, then we've not lost a large amount.

Unlike, say, the whole of the River Cottage Veg Every Day fiasco.

Despite the fact I seriously dislike the greasy little oik, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, several vegetarian friends 'recommended' the cookbook and, in a fit of adventure, we decided to buy a copy and give it a chance. It wasn't the first time we've gone Veggie for a while, mainly for the dietary change and the fact that after having his gallbladder removed, Den's not so good with large amounts of red meat these days.

Still, what we should have done was wait a further 6 more months, then gone down to the local charity shops and bought one of their many post-Christmas Present donation copies. That way we wouldn't have been so utterly disappointed.

It's not that Den and I cannot cook, because we can – and it's not that Den is unadventurous as such, provided that he sometimes has no idea exactly what he's eating (why do you think I call the Vietnamese River Cobbler "smoked yellow fish"?) However, both of us draw the line at having to get a mass of spices and ingredients that usually only require a pinch or a whiff at best, before the rest of the barely used jar/bottle/packet/tin is put back into the spice cupboard, only to be thrown out once it's at least 4 years past its Best Before date.

Yet we tried. We tried after the second rather tasteless dish. And after the third, and the forth. Then with the fifth we finally threw the results into a large pan, added some boned chicken thighs, and whacked up the heat for half an hour until we had a chicken & veg stew.

As the chicken thighs came from Costco, and were therefore not organic corn fed free range stress-free rare breed specimens (as preferred by inhabitants of the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Bohemian Lifestyle world) then I suppose we were doubly damned for our sins.

Still, we shall be having a warm salmon starter, roast leg of lamb rather than the more traditional bird, and finish with possibly a traditional Christmas pudding, with brandy butter.

Or vanilla custard.

Or a dark rum sauce.

Or maybe a homemade tiramisu instead....

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# Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch, Tonto, Disguised As A Door, Has His Knob Shot Off.

Later, as part of our Midweek Movie series, we have a film about a young boy who, after finally being identified as a certifiable Jonah (and thus causing the sinking of the ship he and his family are travelling on) eventually finds himself alone in a lifeboat with only a wild tiger for company.

Over the passage of time, the touching and often moving film depicts how the boy's philosophy of life and his understanding of the very nature of the Universe itself is changed forever – after he discovers that tiger tastes equally as good when packed under a cold water shortcrust, as it does under a full fat, hand-rubbed, butter puff pastry topping.

That's the network première of A Life of Pies, tonight at nine, here on Fux.

Coming up. Bare Grills investigates a Southern Chinese restaurant*, only to discover that its enticing promise of stir-fried Bengali tiger turns out to be donkey meat, marinated in tiger urine. That's Endangered Species of the Epicurean Kind, right after these massages from our sponsors...

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While some parts of EAYORs are now Original Material – other parts are the picked-over and rewritten pearls often to be found scattered in issues of Boopledoggin' – a contribution produced for eAPA, the Monthly Electro-APA (details available at www.efanzines.com) – eAPA is considered by some to be the 240 volt surge in the 120 volt world of those who cannot help electro-fannying around (it says here...))

EAYOR is also available on a 5.25" Apple 'Twiggy' diskette – combining the almost obligatory 1960's Swinging London nostalgia with today's mindless Apple fashion following.

Skate Press Producktions are available for Trade/Usual, eLoCs/LoCs (Letters of Comment), CoCs (Cards of Comment), Winkins, Blinkins, and Nods to Those in the Know – plus anything of a curious and interesting nature.

EAYOR – The Journal of the Counterfeit Goat Appreciation Society

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*http://uk.askmen.com/fine_living/wine_dine_archive/1c_wine_dine.html

And now, back to the regular deprogramming...

"Look love – if you ask someone to guess your age, you shouldn't be so bloody upset if they get it right!"

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What follows was first printed in Big Eyed Beans From Venus #8 for the November 1985 mailing of The Organisation. It originally appeared under the title I Am Alpha. I Am Omega.... as three un-paragraphed columns on an A3 sized broadsheet.

This is the Secondhand Goods version of Ghostwalks – mainly because between November 1985 and May/June 1987, even I thought the one continuous paragraph running on for around 2,400 words, was a bit too much.

# Ghostwalks

South Georgia, Antarctic Circle.

The first part sounds all sunny and warm until you tack on the geographical location. Although this is my second post-conflict patrol down here, this is the first time I've ever visited the most southerly point of human habitation – and the British Antarctic Survey Teams have my admiration in some respects, and my envy in others.

Whatever, we took a couple of days slow-time sailing down to South Georgia, and evidence of just how cold it was came when floating ice, and even massive icebergs, were clearly visible during the daylight hours. Night lookouts had to be posted in case the navigational radar failed to pick up something it should've done.

Yet, having said all this about the state of the sea, I was surprised at just how warm the air was – when out of the wind, thus not getting caught with a chill factor that told a more truer story than eye and skin. We were visiting the area during its Spring time, and even the sun felt warm. All this wouldn't have looked out of place in Norway, or Finland, or Sweden, set against a curiously blue-green – almost duck egg blue – cloudless sky.

And, on the second day, the whales.

You must have seen them close up on the TV programmes such as Horizon, The World About Us, or Survival, but sitting there in your living room, watching the 26-inch colour while the video recorder tapes Godknowswhat on another channel, you get no real idea of the actual size or majestic look of these massive creatures. You don't need close-ups of eyes, or fins, or tails waving. What you want are the long shots, the wide-angle, full-image shots – but in doing that, in setting off the grace and style of the whale, you lose all idea of the detail of the creature. Believe me, they are one of the seven natural Wonders of the World and no mistake. These sightings, always at a distance so as not to disturb them, were also to induce even more emotions later on.

But we arrived at South Georgia unmolested by ice, though there were still the ever-present Seagulls and Albertrossi to keep us company during the short bout of coastal navigation needed to find Grytviken and Husvik, our first stops. I took the opportunity of going ashore in Grytviken, and in between trekking through the snow to an abandoned church half way up the side of a mountain, I also managed to click off over 6 reels of film.

The cameras I use are hardly in the Time Life magazine league, but the Zenit TTL is the main one (35mm, with shop-supplied Helios-44M lens), with a Keystone motor driven 110 which provides me with back-up shots of stuff. Loath as I am to admit it, the motor drive really does come in handy now and again – especially when running off live action wildlife shots such as birds in flight, etc. Provided you remember to track the bird with the camera, that is.

So, apart from the mountains and snow, what else was there to steal the silver nitrate?

Elephant and Fur seals.

We had arrived just after the calving, and apart from the usually irate bull seals there was also the sight of black fur seal pups to take the film, and the heart as well. That is, until they open their mouths. Ever heard someone being violently sick down a tube, or in a bath? Especially when they don't know, or just can't decide, which way to turn their heads as well? Yeah, it's just like that, and all the illusions of pretty little things with big, soppy black eyes and endearing looks goes out the window when they start honking and snorting. Closely followed by mother and, if you're not too careful, four to six tons of daddy bull seal as well – and I do mean follow, as in chase. Don't be deceived by their size or seemingly ungainly style of movement across dry land, the bastards can move exceedingly fast if and when they want to, and to see one rear up on his tail lets you know that all that weight is not just blubbery fat from a lack of exercise.

But the little dears, when they keep their mouths shut that is, are the show stealers here. Tiny, with big eyes and that famous fur that almost led to their downfall only a handful of decades ago.

If Grytviken had the seals, then Leith – the only other place I went ashore to visit – had the penguins. But, after the initial joy of running around after a penguin to be photographed with, they rapidly lose their appeal when you find out that the ones on television are normally groomed for the parts, and in real life they are tatty, stinking, squawking balls of feathers, feet and beak. That's if you could get hold of one. Some – the species escapes me (sorry!) – had the habit of going into holes in the ground. Gentoo? I've no idea really, the only thing I know is that the Magellan Penguin got its name because the explorer not only discovered it, but also ate the bloody things as well. Hardly a fitting epithet, is it? Named after a famous explorer because you tasted good with a bit of side salad?

But Leith held more than just that.

The snow and mountain ranges helped to support the atmosphere of Norwegian and Scandinavian landscapes, rather than the automatically expected snow & ice & Oates-has-just-popped-down-to-the-corner-shop-for-a-couple-of-packets-of-Rizzla-greens. But that made the other emotive feelings all the more stronger. True, if it had been all snowstorms and howling winds then I would've been happy just to have been and gone without so much as a bat of an eyelid. But, because it was so calm, quiet, and clean, it had all the more impact.

Both Grytviken and Leith are old abandoned whaling stations – South Georgia was one of the mainstays of the whaling industry, and the last to leave the island were the Japanese in the early 1960s. And although I didn't get to feel it as much at Grytviken, mainly due to the damaged state of the buildings etc, at Leith I was struck with what I can only describe as The Marie Celeste emotion.

You see, as stated above, the places were, literally, abandoned. Just as if the inhabitants had been spirited away from the site by one mad, all-cleansing gust of wind.

For the moment let me try and give a kind of initial overview as best I can remember it from my own jumbled memories. The whole of Leigh is set in a U-shaped natural harbour that was mirror calm when we anchored: the obligatory snow capped mountains throwing back the sound of the outboard motor of the landing craft as a throaty double and triple echo. That only reinforced the windless, bird-less, soundless silence of the place. The 'we' here were 15 of us who were going ashore to look around and generally stretch cramped legs – a short break from re\- stocking BAS survival camps, and from shipboard life, being as good as a weekend holiday.

It was also true that we were all, without exception, effected by the atmosphere as soon as the small boat was free of the ship and headed into the landing site itself.

The jetty was taken with great care, mainly as you get a feel and an eye for things, and the sight of old, weather-silvered wood tends to make people a little leery on their feet. A sign of disuse and a lack of repair, made even more dubious by the known adverse weather conditions themselves.

As we came off the landing stage we – now broken down into a smaller party of three – Mac MacLeod, Glen Campbell and myself – turned right and attempted to take a quarter of the camp initially, with plans to double back round in a circle to take in the remainder if we had time on our side. Again, to help sent the mental picture I'm trying to build, you have to remember that these were settlements on the very edges of Nowhere itself, and apart from the radio contact and the scheduled ships calling to load or unload, the places had to be as self-sufficient as possible. And this is where the feeling of oddness – a sense of the alien; of the weird – pushed itself forwards and made itself felt.

There is no pavement or road, and the buildings are huddled, rusting metal and old red sand brick, standing off from a time-worn trackway that forms the 'main drag'. Add to that you have the patches of greenish plantlife, not grass as such but a mossy kind of thing, and a mottling of white-white snow, untouched by any kind of footprint, be it man, animal or bird. Then, as you travel down the trackway, you look through the remains of storm damaged windows, and around the shattered glass you can see......

......inside a machine shop, where the benches are still scattered with engine and heavy generator parts still waiting to be cleaned and reassembled, the protective grease on the machinery still a 'Pear's Soap' yellow and... still soft......

......inside a general messing kitchen where plain china plates are still stacked on shelves, ready for use, the old steamers and boilers still having that freshly cleaned look about them – so well preserved in the dry Antarctic air – the large tins of provisions still in the storerooms, and a large kitchen knife balanced on the corner of wooden chopping board......

......inside the Radio & Records shack where years of careful filing and logging are now scattered all over the floor, telegram duplicates and accountancy copies fluttering side by side with bright pink contract duplicates whose signatures and countersignatures look still wet from the company fountain pens, even though the contracts are for the 1950/1951 Season... and just exactly what did a Fleener do?......

......inside one of the barn-sized store buildings which is racked from floor to ceiling with various thicknesses and lengths of sheet and rod steel, so long untouched that they are very slowly rusting together......

......inside the research laboratory, where bottles and chemicals are scattered across the work tops, retorts and burners are lying on their sides, or holding broken glassware, and the ever-loose papers are fluttering by the salt-glazed white sink under the window, adding a hint of soundtrack to a kind of Technicolour version of an RKO Mad Scientists' Paradise After The Party...except that the whole thing is in colour, and broken glass crunches underfoot as you walk out again, into the watery morning sunlight......

......inside the library, and seeing a mixture of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and English books, the latter coming from the Edinburgh Library and proclaiming that they will charge ONE PENNY (1d) for the late return of this book, while on the desk rests the LEITH LIBRARY date stamp beside its black ink pad, as if the library assistant has just stepped out for a minute and will be back with the book you wanted just as soon as he finds it......

......and as you turn the corner of a building your feet get entangled with a mass of old black and white cinema film with

MOVIETONE NEWS

THE END

for frame after frame after frame after frame......

......and then you realise that the three of you haven't spoken a word for the last three quarters of an hour or more, even though all of you have been glancing over your shoulders to check and see if anyone – any one? – is behind you.

Yet even all that didn't really prepare us for the numbing horror of the factory side of the station – the reason for its existence – not even when we came to it head on, by walking into one of the receiving areas where the whales were dragged and initially cut up: the wooden deck now washed to that seeming innocent silvered wood. The clearing chutes leading to the top of the processing plants, the winches, cables and hooks are all now covered with layers of deep red rust, but inside the plants the machinery still gleams, the pipework still weaves and bobs and ducts from unit to unit, and the valves still turn open and shut, open and shut, open and......

......out the other side, to the thankfully childish superficiality of seals and penguins and rocky beaches and wiry tufts of grass and spongy waterlogged ground and finally, in the distance, slightly mist-covered cliff tops that look out over the whole bay and the station: and to cry in a release of emotion that is a mixture of pain at the destruction of such beautiful creatures, and a thankfulness that the place has been abandoned and left to rot away – a mutual feeling of all three of us.

The pick-up boat returns at midday and we depart. I take with me some photographs, some of the pink contract duplicates and a collection of thoughts that I know I won't ever be able to put down on paper adequately enough to express myself the way I really want to. The feeling of desolation and of loneliness; the destruction of life for greed; the timelessness of the place itself; and the knowledge that Nature is reclaiming its own back again, no matter how slowly, because there is all the time in the world and on such a scale we don't even rate a flicker of the needle.

That evening another storm blew up and we had to sail. Maybe we had been asked to remember the dead and, having done so, were then being told to leave. Somehow I cannot see me ever forgetting this experience, and I doubt if I'll ever want to.

(Back to Contents Page)

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# Little Tommy Tittlemouse Lives In A Little House

Actually no he doesn't. The furry little bastard's been dossing down in our shed – and by the looks of things, he's been doing it for a while now, if the state of the chewed up canvas 'gazebo' cover is anything to go by.

It was inevitable, I can't deny that. Well, the shed is at the bottom of the garden, and that backs onto Peartree park – an area of green the size of four football pitches, plus a general playground area in the farthest corner away from us.

And apart from the dog walkers, there's very little by way of food chain competition to keep the little sods on their toes. Or paws in this case.

Also, apparently, threatening to nail the little fecker to the side of the shed – purely as a warning to the others – such as those bloody thieving squirrels, for instance – isn't considered very sociable. Very sociopathic, but not very sociable.

Usually I'm not that aggressive towards the various bits of fauna that choose to visit us. For a start we offer a choice of two different kinds of bird feeder – which isn't a reference to the local cat population. One is hanging from the corkscrew willow, and the other from a branch of what I think is some kind of birch. Again, that's a reference to bird feeders, and not to any wandering felines.

The willow has the feeder which is full of seeds and things for the little birds – various coloured finches and a few LBJs as the twitchers are wont call them. We also seem to have a couple of returning blue tits and a group of three robins we've seen flying around the garden together. We're thinking of also providing some social housing for them by way of a nest box, and although we think three is a bit of an odd number, who are we to be the ones to question their lifestyle choices?

The other bird feeder on the Silver-cum-Coppery birch thing, is stuffed full of those round, flaky, fat and worm balls. With it fully loaded it becomes a high cholesterol fast food drive through for the local gangs of starlings, usually a dozen or so at a time – the Essex Chavs of our back garden. They're nothing more than a bunch of fly-by opportunists, as often witnessed in the local TESCO car park. They're also the reason I'll sometimes take half a crust of bread with me on the weekly Sunday morning shopping venture.

TESCO open their doors at 09:30, and open the checkouts at 10:00. I get to the car park around 09:20, park up, break some of the break off and throw pieces of it out the window. Then I sit back and watch as the glossy feathered little chancers come out from under the surrounding parked cars. A couple of big pieces down first, to keep the usual 'Alpha male' busy, then smaller pieces for those on the boundaries of the gathering. In an ideal Darwinian world, those on the peripheral edges of the group are supposed to be those destined not to survive, so I always deliberately ensure they get more than their fair share of food. I consider it as being my way of helping to screw up Evolution.

A couple of minutes later, after I've gathered together a flock of twenty or so – all of whom squawk and look at me accusingly when I have the audacity to actually stop feeding them – they disperse back under the other parked cars again. Fickle little buggers, but they make me smile.

Then I'll walk round the car, open the boot and, armed with a canvas bag full of the supposedly virtually indestructible-but-never-are Bags For Life bags, plus the trusty shopping list, I am prepared to do battle with the shelf mis-stackers. At least by the time Security have worked out which key on the bunch is the one which opens the main doors, that is.

While the little birds are amusing, the pigeons on the other hand, can gladly slow roast in Hell for all I care – and I don't mind who knows it. It's their overly smug attitude you see. Apart from the fact the fat feathery bastards are forever drinking out of the water features (don't ask), at the very least they should be expected to fly away whenever I stand at the kitchen door and clap my hands loudly. Not look up, give me a couple of beady-eyed winks, then go back to stealing the water from the lilies, bulrushes, and that other thing at the far end that I can never remember the name of.

And opportunistic isn't anywhere big enough a word to cover their sins.

Example?

Several days ago – Sunday morning – I step outside to put some recycling into one of the various coloured bins by the side of the kitchen. On the way back I see that both the water features (look, I said, don't ask) have frozen over. I stop and think about the three or four big frogs we've had in them for several years, and whether or not they could still breathe under the ice. So then I go over and bend down to crack the ice with my knuckle.

Several Maltese expletives and no cracks later, I head back inside, open a kitchen drawer, and pull out the still-unused-in-anger-why-the-hell-did-we- buy-this-in-the-first-place meat mallet (seriously, do not go there).

After several tentative failed blows I finally take a half dozen good swings at it – breaking through the ¾-inch ice, successfully shattering the pieces into smaller chunks and soaking my rapidly numbing hands up to the elbows in the process.

Back in the kitchen I start warming my hands up with a bowl of hot water when lo, one of the grey feathered rats descends from on high, stands on the wooden surround of the fricking water feature (look, I won't tell you again), dips its head and proceeds to haul out one of the water soldiers (Stratiotes Aloides to you) – which were supposed to die off at the first touch of winter and not sink to the bottom and breed like rabbits at the first whiff of spring! – only to toss it casually onto the garden proper before settling down for a guzzle.

Needless to say, at this point I have a 'senior moment', during which I re-open the kitchen door, step out, and launch the aforementioned never-before-used meat mallet – boomerang style-eee – at the two-legged abomination with all the force I can manage.

And that is why, oh best beloveds, that the meat mallet now lives under the camellia bush near the rainwater tank. At least until I can be arsed to go pick it up. Well, the various camellias we have are just about to start flowering, so I figure I'm still good for another month yet.

As for the squirrels? They owe me and my corkscrew hazel, big time. Me and that hazel go back a long way – to just after we first moved into Chelwood Avenue in Hatfield. It had lived in a pot for years. Admittedly, it was a bloody big pot, but even so, back then, it had never been a target of interest for those scuzzy little furballs.

Mind you, back then almost everything had been in pots – including the little bitty Eucalyptus thing which, over the years, became a 16ft tree which we ended up moving to 85 The Paddocks on a flatbed truck, driven by Peter. That's Peter from Friendship House, where Den used to do volunteer work, and not Joyce's Peter from next door. Look, do try and keep up.

It's the same Eucalyptus that's out the front now, cut down to a 4ft central trunk when we'd both thought it had finally died, but hadn't. We cut it down on the advice of Laurence Honey's fireman friend when they helped to put the shed up. Now of course the thing's re-sprouted new branches all over and looks a lot like Medusa on a bad hair day.

We finally put the hazel in the ground when we moved to 85 – unlike the quince, which then smelled earth under its pot – rather than flagstones – and immediately punched a couple of fibrous tap roots straight through the drain holes, anchoring itself solidly – so that thing's not coming with us when we move again.

But the hazel didn't object to being pot-less, even though it did seem to rest for about 12 months. Then the following year there'd been an abundance of the delicate soft green catkins, which appear long before the leaves have emerged from their buds. After such a vigorous and impressive display, it should've meant we'd actually get an equally impressive amount of edible hazel/cob nuts off it.

Notice the use of the 'fantasy' tense there? As in: "In your wildest dreams, sucker!"

Believe me, the greedy little grey furred bastards couldn't even wait until the nuts were ripe enough for human consumption before they were queuing up to go climbing in amongst the leaves and branches. Apparently squirrels can eat the nuts while they're still green, which was news to me, I can tell you. No wonder they're classified as vermin.

No, seriously. Here in the UK the American grey squirrel is classified as invasive vermin. If you catch one, then you're bound by law to kill it. And don't try taking it to the vets, because once the receptionist finds out what's in the bag they'll tell you to sling your hook – rather than tell you that vets are also bound by law to kill them instead of you. Free of charge as well, I might add.

The alternative is to follow what the Daily Express advised its readers to do – ie, stick it in a bag and whack it with a brick. I mean, have you seen the price of bricks these days? Actually, I'm not joking about the Daily Express and the 'Brick a Squirrel' campaign. Not only is that rag totally against any human immigrants, but also down on animal immigrants as well – no matter how 'cute and cuddly' they might look.

I also keep saying I'm going to get a trap for the things – and one for little Tommy as well. I don't really want to go down the poison route. For one thing, you're never too sure where the bodies end up, especially if you can't trace the smell in time for summer.

Den's suggested we get one of those humane traps, so that we can then take them into the nearby Fairlands Valley park and release them back into the wild again. I've tried to tell him that it isn't far enough away – but my alternative, that of driving up the local motorway before letting them loose, was scuppered when he said we would have to slow down and actually stop the car before tossing them out.

So, for the time being, things in the back garden are on a reprieve. The squirrels come and go, little Tommy will probably use our shed for a love shack again this year, and the pigeons will still keep on giving me their feathered version of the bird. At least for the time being, that is.

You see, I've been led to believe that there's this American Cuisine from somewhere usually just referred to as simply 'The South' – probably Texas, or maybe Mississippi – not that it matters too much. It's called Chicken Fried Meat That Isn't Really Chicken. And I've got this hankering to see if chicken really does taste like squirrel....

 Rosemary Parmesan SquirrelTry this Italian approach to squirrel.

 Skillet SquirrelSquirrels simmered in mushroom and red wine gravy, delicious!

 Squirrel and DumplingsSquirrel replaces chicken in this hearty, traditional main dish.

 Squirrel Country SausageStart your day with this wild version of breakfast sausage.

 Squirrel Pot PieServe this homey main dish on a cold fall evening.

[http://mdc.mo.gov/discover-nature/cooking/squirrel-recipes/]

Missouri Conservation Dept. – Serving Nature To You On A Plate

And you thought I made all that up? Shame on you!

(Back to Contents Page)

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# Congratulations!

You have been singing along with the original film soundtrack recording of the newly restored and digitally remastered Irving Berlin 1953 cult classic musical, Call Me Ishmael!

"Three hundred and one

Pounds of fun,

That's why he's

Our Chucky-bun!"

Yes, that's Call Me Ishmael!

Starring

Halibut Lom as Cap'n Ahab

"Which one of you scurvy dogs wants to polish my harpoon?"

Ethel Mermaid as Sickbay Nurse Nancy

"That's the worst case of Moby Dick I've ever seen! Take two Aspirin and come back if it drops off. Next!"

and Buster Crabbe

Simply because that's just too good a name for me to pass up!

Shot in Technicolor (using both barrels), Call Me Ishmael! is more commonly known as EAYOR.

-oOo- -oOo-

(Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum)

Mr. Fanac,

[Yes?]

Bring me a Zine

[Why, sure!]

Make it the cutest

That there's ever been

[Uh-huh!]

Full of BNFs

And a four colour cover

(bum-bum-bum-bum)

And lots of hooks

To really LoC that mother!

Mr. Fanac,

[What now?]

I'm desperate, it's true

I'll read anything

That's sent from you

But Mr. Fanac

Don't be a bloody bore!

Just bring me something

That isn't EAYOR 4!

[Oh, crap. Er... Well, we'll be right after these massages from our sponsors...]

(Back to Contents Page)

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# A Bad Day For Deja Vue

Monday September 8th, 06:20.

I'm just about ready to walk out of the house and head off to work, when Den has another one of his attacks. This time it's really screwed up, even for him – mainly as he's had a nasty chest and throat infection for several weeks, and the fob-off of Amoxypoxydoxycillin plus steroids has done little to shift it.

Neither of us have any patience whenever we become patients ourselves, so the previous Sunday (31st August) we'd finally agreed we'd had enough, so off we go to a 'near-by' (15 miles away) walk-in surgery in order for him to be seen by a member of the medical profession. That is, without having to wait another week to eight days for the 'regular' appointment to come round – or clogging up the local, overloaded, A&E department at the local Lister Hospital, a situation which has become quite profitable to the Hertfordshire NHS since the introduction of 'token'-based multi-storey car parking – stack 'em high, then make 'em pay.

At the Springfield Walk-In Centre, post form filling, we get to see a doctor after only 40 minutes. However, mid consultation, said doctor had to take a mobile phonecall from her husband, and then, five minutes or so later, one from her daughter. Apparently these were of such a nature that we were asked to go back to the waiting room until each had been completed.

Now, eight days later, and he's on the edge of the bed, complaining that his throat is badly swollen, the soreness has returned, and the more he coughs the more it feels like it is closing up – despite two sucks on the purple flying saucer. The purple one is usually two doses first thing in the morning, then another two last thing at night. It's large and round – like a flying saucer – and obviously coloured purple, like the dinosaur. To be honest, I know for a fact that the payloads are mostly milk powder, used as a delivery agent to stick/coat the active ingredient to the back of the inhaler's throat. I don't know what the absorption time is, but I'm pretty sure I've convinced Den to leave 30 minutes between the last morning hit of Fluticasone (aka Flovent) and the first breakfast hit of coffee.

While taking his temperature and mentally counting the number of breaths per minute, I put the purple UFO back on the nightstand. If I thought back and turned the thing over in my hands a couple of times, I could probably remember how to correctly disassemble it without damaging the delivery mechanism.

Flashback to October/November/December 2002 – Videonetworks Limited had finally collapsed, leaving me redundant after 27 years of continuous employment. Before I was able to pick up the UK IT Manager role for Peguform UK, I'd ended up getting sort of involved with GlaxoSmithKline – at their major factory between Hertford and Ware. It was one of those Jobs-Between-Jobs – in the odd belief that it would be easier to find work if you're in work. What it actually taught me was that I never wanted to do that kind of 'contract' work ever again.

The GSK Method had been to employ temps on what the company called 'a contractual basis.' That was a cheap excuse for cheap labour for a limited period of time – just before Christmas.

Come the finish I'd ended up talking to several people and had found a way into the network team. Better hourly rates and, to be frank, better company.

The group I'd originally been with had been mostly 'professional students' – dropping in and out of (the then) free education system while working part time – only to disappear out to Australia again. Go surfing until the money ran out, then back to the UK again to re-start the cycle.

It was something which had always annoyed me about the UK's education system. Why take up places in educational establishments when there are always others who are desperate for them?

It was from that short experience I got to learn enough about steroids to know I don't want them anywhere near me, if at all possible. I got most of my knowledge from Nina – the company Induction Trainer assigned to keep us in line. She was a true Essex girl, who had a chrome stud through her tongue which often clicked and clacked as she spoke to you. I remember thinking on the first day we met that if I could just piss her off enough it would probably sound like someone playing the spoons – or a fair to middling tap-dance routine.

Back on the side of the bed, and Den's still gasping like a fish out of water.

"Do you want me to ring for an ambulance?" I ask, the number already punched in on the land line handset, my thumb hovering over the green transmit button.

In between laboured breathing I get one of our agreed hand gestures, but I press the green button anyway.

Whereas other couples may have words, or expressions, or just simple set pieces to indicate reassurance, with Den's breathing problems we have hand gestures. Weeks before this latest attack, we'd been watching one of the David Attenborough nature programmes on the television. It was all about tree frogs. When one appeared on the screen, Attenborough's voiceover introduced it along the lines of:

"A South American Overspotted Queenie – so toxic they can kill their adversaries just by croaking, and so they only communicate with each other by hand gestures."

The frog, now centre of shot, obligingly turns to camera and does a passing imitation of our own 'I'm alright' hand signal Den uses when unable to speak clearly.

I smile, and even though I remain silent, I still get a jab in the ribs for my sins. In some peoples' books, thoughts are as good as deeds. But only when it suits them....

Then on the phone I'm through to the 111 operator. I always try not to go down the 999 emergency route – and the old 08454647 doesn't work in Hertfordshire any more (ah, tell me what does...) With the connection made, it now gets a little tricky.

"Are you calling about yourself, or someone else?"

"My partner, Mr Golden. He's a registered asthmatic and he's got problems with his breathing." I wait to hear what response I get.

Several years ago, the switchboard operator before last had sounded bored and half asleep. So I'd tossed in that he's also got a blocked artery and has a nitro spray for his angina. Cue mental punchline of a joke so old even I can't remember when and where I first heard it.

However, instead of that additional medical information speeding things up, the assistant had then kicked off a new set of 1,001 questions – until a nurse came on the line and apologised for the delay in getting someone out to us.

This time I'm not given the full GCHQ interrogation routine because the doorbell sounds, announcing the arrival of the medics before I've finished trying to work out where copies of Den's prescriptions have been hidden this time round. I keep saying I'm going to put copies of the damn things in every room in the house, because I can never bloody find them in the room I'm in when the operator asks about them.

But then he deliberately moves them. I know he does. I've not caught him doing it, you understand, but we have one of those pine Merchant's Chests that's stuffed full of drawers. It's got over 20 of them. 8 going up in two columns of 4. They sit either side of the shelving in the middle of the top half we bought for the unit, after we saw the full version in the same shop we got the Chest from in the first place.

But, hey, I mean, come on. 20 drawers? With his over-active OCD?

Even Ladbrokes would refuse to take the bet, no matter how much I dressed it up and tried to look like an innocent punter.

One of the medics – both women this time – starts talking to him, while the other starts making notes and filling out an A3 incident form. Then, while I'm filling in details that Den's forgotten, or misremembered in regard to time lines – all the while trying to put the joyfully discovered copy of his prescriptions in some kind of order – the note taker asks if I'm going off somewhere.

That's when I realise I'm still running around with my travelling bag over my shoulder. This is the first job I've had where I've found a canvas 'manbag' to actually be useful – even though I couldn't tell you exactly what's in it these days. I take it off and put it over by the wardrobe, then fish out the works' mobile phone. I rarely use the things, but I've put several contact numbers on this one, and so it has started to slowly insinuate itself into our lives.

People find it odd that I work in various aspects of IT, but almost hate the mobile phone with a passion. It's nothing personal, of course. If you want to be controlled by a device of the Devil, then so be it. It is, after all, what you like to think of as 'your' choice. And I can deeply appreciate how you really need to keep changing it for the next new thing, even though you've never ever pushed the last one to anywhere near its functional limits. I mean, can you tell me why the new version of the Operating System, now called 'Kitkat', needs a massive 512Mb minimum to run in? Without looking it up on the Interweb – via your smartphone, that is...

I use the works mobile for two reasons. One, I've already put the few site numbers I need into its address book, rather than the one on our land line, and two, I don't have to pay the bill. It also helps that I don't use it on a daily basis, which means the odd flurry of activity I occasionally create with it, is no doubt snaffled away and hidden by the over abundance of free minutes the company has it contracted on.

Back in our bedroom, the note taker – Julia – chats amicably with me while the other – Susan – does a second round of blood pressure, blood sugar and temperature checks – jotting down the figures herself this time. She does that because Julia is telling me how she's saving for her first house, because then she'd have more space to hang pictures like we have throughout ours. There's not a wall in our place which doesn't have something on it. There's also several plastic Tuff crates in the attic, full of pictures we haven't rotated since we moved from Chelwood Avenue. When we left, the house seemed bare and strange – the walls freckled with pollyfilla'd nail holes.

Julia tells me she doesn't mind the emergency call outs – mainly because she often gets to put the blue lights on and legally drive like a maniac. Gallows humour is a fallback I can readily understand.

Returning to the house buying topic, she tells me she wants to find a place in Cornwall or Devon – down along the south west coast, despite the recent flood plain problems – mainly because she just loves surfing.

Den croaks something about wanting to do that as well – which is news to me, until I realise he's talking about moving down to that part of the country as our 'final resting place.' As opposed to dressing up in black neoprene rubber and barrelling a curl or two before breakfast.

We sort of laugh, and a short four-way conversation ensures for several minutes as the two women pack up and get ready to leave. When they're gone I check on the time. 07:30-ish.

I ring Nick on site and say I'm not going to be in today – telling him that we had to call the ambulance out. Then call Lucy, to say the same.

Officially the unit isn't supposed to be manned until 08:30 due to Health and Safety. But we're four levels down, underground, in an old bunker, and so specialised that we're almost a law unto ourselves. Previously, I'd spent 7 years down a similar bunker in another part of the country, only more solo. I could go for weeks back then without seeing another person (human or techie) shambling along the maze of concrete corridors. I'd even made and carried around a credit card sized blank ID badge on a chain around my neck, the black-on-yellow Dymo message saying: "If found dead, please ring Next of Kin on..."

With work informed, I mither and dither about until 08:15, when the local GP surgery finally opens its telephone line and I can try to make an emergency appointment.

"Is it anything life threatening?" The receptionist asks.

"Well, I'm no expert2, but if you want to take down this call-out incident number from this morning?" and I flutter the A3 sheet Ambulance Julie gave me earlier. Silly, I know, but it gets me the desired reaction.

"Ten o'clock this morning. Doctor Cameron."

I resist the temptation of doing a Barbara Mullen Scottish accent and ask if Dr. Finlay isn't available instead. Ach, Janet. Nay-body remembers that far back any more. Anyway, both Den and I are just thankful it isn't one particular Dr. Neither of us have anything against doctors, but Dr. X's interaction and blatant inattention to the patient sitting across from them is notorious. To the point of pressing the 'Next!' button before we've even had a chance to ask about what she's just prescribed, and more importantly, why she's prescribed it in the first place.

Even my last run in with her had been a fiasco. I'd caught something from commuting – a chest infection that simply wouldn't die off. I've always been 'prone' to stuff like that. I have very fragmented memories of being either 5 or 6 – when my family were still in London – and being rushed into hospital with something which was always referred to as 'Pneumonia Patch.'

But I couldn't seem to shake free of it, and after being continuously nagged at by HMV, I ring up the local surgery and make an emergency appointment. That means it's pot luck when it comes to which doctor you get, so I end up seeing Dr. X. Not what I really need, especially after I've had a meagre 3 or so hours of sleep, interspersed with hacking up gobbets of stuff that looks exactly like the filling of a typical American Key Lime pie.

"Before we start, Mr Connor, we'd better take your blood pressure......Hmmm, that does seem a little high, doesn't it. What I'd like you to do is buy a blood pressure monitor – I'd recommend one just like this, I'll write it down for you. Then if you can take some readings, three times a day, for the next 4 weeks, then come back and see me?"

Believe me, that is precisely how things went. When I left, I went over to our regular fallback surgery – the Springfield walk-in, even though it still meant driving the distance – and ended up seeing another doctor. I explained the situation with the previous history, also ex-smoker, and with a partner who is a chronic asthmatic – but as yet seemingly uninfected. We talked about the joys of super bugs, resistance, etc, and once satisfied I wasn't just there because I had a little bit of a cough ("Seriously, Mr Connor, there's no need to bring up yet another fresh sample.") she issued a prescription for the usual 7 day cycle of Amoxywoxypoxy.

Back in the Now world, and with Den's appointment set, I settle down to a cup of coffee and a piece of toast, watching the news and the clock at the same time – until it's time to drive him to the local surgery. We get there a little early, admire all the people using their mobile phones – despite all the signs saying not to – and to our surprise we get to see Dr. Cameron just after 10:00.

He's a very pleasant, middle-aged quack, and after a short discussion he tosses in the amusing bombshell comment that what Den might actually have is a strain of Whooping Cough.

"Seriously?" I ask, before turning to Den. "Did Northerners know about such things as vaccinations, back when you were a child?"

Dr Cameron, not fully understanding that both Den and I protect ourselves with humour, quickly adds:

"Mr. Golden could well have been vaccinated as a child, but as people progress into old age, the protection steadily wears off."

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Had I realised Dr Cameron was still one of the unenlightened innocents, then I would have quietly advised him about not dropping the 'Old' bomb – especially refraining from its use when in the company of my sensitive 'better half.'

But, to my surprise, Den actually ignores it, and is more than happy to accept a stack of printed paperwork for a series of blood tests to see if it actually is Whooping Cough, or not. He's over 65, so all such medical procedures are free – and with a surname of Golden, what else can I say?

With the session almost over, I figure I could get myself a bit more VFM from the visit, and ask Cameron about my shins, mainly as they've been playing up again.

Pulling up both trouser legs and resting the heel of my right foot on one of the empty chairs, I tell him I don't think the original diagnosis of HSP was correct. Cameron rummages through my notes on his computer, but I know full well that – just like lawyers – you won't get a doctor to shop another doctor (well, not here in the UK that is.)

After some humming and hawing we both come to the conclusion that it is, was, and predictably always will be, a variation on Pemphigoid, regardless what other names might be given it – hence the occasional bursts of what feels like lots of small sewing needles being repeatedly stabbed into my ankles and shins, from time to time, as I slowly destroy myself from the inside. It's an Auto Immune dysfunction, with no real known cause, and no known cure. At least this time the blistering is nowhere near as bad or extensive as the initial attack had been.

To help soften the diagnosis, Den throws in a comment about how he'd always told me to get my legs insured for a million – a reference to Betty Grable which goes over Dr Cameron's head at around 30,000 feet. Then we're leaving, back to the car and over to the Lister hospital for the blood samples – and finally home again.

So far I've seen Den through severe gallstones – which led to several near-fatal bouts of pancreatitis, blockages and which finally culminated in emergency surgery (performed by the same arsehole of a consultant who originally dismissed the gallstones as an ulcer, despite the ultrasound scans showing otherwise.) Other things have included a thankfully benign prostate cancer, the onset of cataracts, and now (as of 17th September) early traces of Type II Diabetes.

"To lose one partner, Mr Connor, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness."

I try not to worry, or to smother, or over-protect. But it is sometimes so very difficult not to – which leads to its own internal and external frictions between us.

We already have our wills made out, and I have a large, three-drawer filing cabinet, that contains things like bank account details, insurance details, pension details (by the time I end up retiring – if I ever make it that far – I think I'm due around 7 micro, group policy pensions – mostly generated from having been made redundant 3 times in 6 years), passwords and login details for various other things.

They're not for Den, but if he outlasts me then he knows that all he has to do is pass the contents of the folders on to our 'financial advisor' – and Richard (never "Dicky") will start untangling things for him.

That's Den's protection – either he'll go before I do, or if I go before he does, then all he has to do is turn everything over to someone else to sort out.

And if he goes before I do?

Everything is laid out in several letter-style pages – including which Shirley Bassey songs gets played, and when. That's his go-to safe place – planning and organising on a grand scale. It's one of his 'distractions' from anything he finds distasteful.

But I don't mind that. He used to work the top floor of the Dorchester Hotel and never realised he'd been security checked until, many years later, during one of my own renewals, he remembered answering similar questions.

In an ideal world, of course, we'd both depart together – thus leaving someone else to sort out the mountain of shit that's automatically created and amassed through the vagaries of modern day living. But ideal worlds exist only in fiction, alas.

So I finish making the coffee, packing memories away into their little boxes, not realising that, on October 2nd, we would end up spending a day at the National Monument Arboretum.

Although the short week break had been planned, the visit to the Arboretum hadn't been intentional. We went self catering as we usually do, and this time we had found a place which offered various 'attractions' pretty much nearby. Well, without having to trundle and wind along B-road country lanes all the time.

We also came up good with the weather as well – only getting caught driving through the rain front that started to cross the UK on the Saturday we headed back home (October 4th.)

Rita, the grandmother who owns the farm and the 2 pine plank holiday 'cabins', had been sorting out our one when we arrived. She'd cheerfully listened to us talk about where we'd stayed in the past, and what we intended to visit this time round, which was when she mentioned the Arboretum.

It was something we just added to the rest of the information we'd gathered – though with Netherseal being on the edge of three or four county boarders, it hadn't been easy trying to work out where bits of interest actually were.

Still, we had a good start to the week – Twycross Zoo – with the highlight being able to feed the new Lorikeets from little pots of what looked like some kind of sugar-banana based smoothie. We even went round and fed them a second time as we were on our way out. Say what you will about the 'cute' Meerkats – scruffy looking itinerant omnivores IMHO, despite the adverts – nothing beats a stroppy, rainbow coloured ball of feathers running up and along one outstretched arm, over the top of your head, and down the other arm – just because you switched the pot of food from one hand to the other.

We also visited Calke Abbey – the National Trust time capsule. Held in the same state as when it was handed over to the Trust back in the 1980s. In reality, the large house is the model of what happens when the money and the bloodlines run out – all of which reminds me so much of the recently proposed Mansion Tax, where families are property rich but cash poor. But then, according to some Members of Parliament, £67,000 isn't a living wage these days – which is why, I suppose, they've also awarded themselves a second 10% pay rise.

Within the main house itself the rooms had gradually been abandoned, just used as storage areas, shut up for decades as the family slowly contracted itself down to living in just three or four of the ground floor rooms. The problem, according to the preservationists we talked to, is suspending the decay from decaying any further – a Dorian Grey-esque suspension which became all the more fascinating as doors which had been found half open, remained half open, giving just a glimpse of what the rooms actually contain.

Then, on the Thursday, after a rather disappointing look around a pottery museum, we came down the A38, with all the intention of heading back to the holiday cabin. However, as we came close to our turnoff, we saw signs for the National Monument Arboretum, and decided to spend the remaining part of the day there.

It's a remarkable place – a well respected repository for over 300 memorials to various sections of the Armed Forces, civilian organisations and voluntary bodies – containing quite a few which had been on the point of being abandoned, or actually destroyed. Various boards and notices outline their chequered histories and how they had been successfully relocated into the site.

It's also an unusually silent location – being close to the A38 I kept expecting to hear motorway traffic noise. Even the car-train (transport tricked out to look like some kind of locomotive) was unobtrusive as it took us on an initial tour of the grounds. That gave us our rough bearings for the day's visit.

As it was, the Arboretum became one of the few places we visited which left us talking about it – off and on – over the next couple of days. For while I'm not even vaguely religious, I still placed a poppy & remembrance cross against the separate South Atlantic - Falklands Memorial. Then later, I placed three more for a double handful of old friends – lost to Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the First Gulf War – GW1. It took long decades for the Shot at Dawn Memorial to be created, in memory of those victims of shellshock – aka PTSD and all its variants. Maybe one day there will be one put up, in recognition of all the GW1Vs who have been so badly affected by Gulf War Syndrome.

After time spent in contemplation, I walked back through and eventually out of the massive, circular Memorial. It meant going past many of the 16,000+ names of those Armed Forces personnel, killed as a result of conflicts or acts of terrorism since the end of the Second World War. Each one is carefully and precisely carved into the tall, curving sandstone walls – cut deep so as to outlast generations – and I have to admit I was struck by what I saw.

It wasn't the rows of names already chiselled into the stones that made me feel a mixture of emotional loss and sadness. It was the expanse of blank sandstone slabs also set solidly in place around the Monument's perimeter, their surfaces still smooth, but ready to receive the names of those yet to be killed.

Back home – our home – with everything unpacked and a load in the washing machine, I flash up the old laptop and download the photographs we've taken. A while ago I had gotten Den a digital camera and replaced the memory chip with a 2Gb one. It gives him the ability to run up around 1,100 photos before the files need taking off, and he keeps it on a shelf of the bookcase in the hallway – ready to take pictures of moths, or dragonflies, or crickets, or egrets, or herons, or anything else he sees during the day, that I've missed while working.

And yes, while I'll curse the fact that I'm going to be the one who ends up having to take our final selection of holiday photos to Costco – shopping around for an hour or so while the mountain of pictures are printed off – or going up into the loft while wondering why the hell it is we need five suitcases of Christmas decorations – or re-wiring bits of the house – or going out in the dark and the rain, to turn the light off in the shed, despite the fact I wasn't the one who left it on (even though I did forget the new box of washing powder I said I'd get when I was in there last, which is beside the bloody point) – I'll also be the one who wakes up suddenly in the middle of the night, deliberately holding my own breath until I can hear the reassuring sound of breathing beside me.

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# Congratulations!

You have just been rooting for your favourite celebrity as they compete in the all new Saturday Night entertainment show, So Goose Me! \- the wonderful multi-brand game show where celebrities are blindfolded and then shot into oncoming flocks of migrating geese using either a canon, a giant crossbow, or a trebuchet – the choice is yours! No, seriously, it's twice as funny as it sounds! Plus you get a chance to vote for your favourite goosing via one of our Premium Rate telephone lines!

So Goose Me is part of the Reality TV franchise more commonly known as EAYOR

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# Catch A Falling Star (Fiction Extract)

Journal Entry Dated Wednesday November 9th 1975

I've always hated skin work. At least I've always hated it since I found out what it actually was, rather than what it wasn't. That was when my boyhood dreams of becoming an internationally acclaimed porn star, were cruelly dashed on the jagged rocks of despair. It was precisely two minutes after the manager of the Brunchy Burger Bar handed me the furry cat suit, and told me to stand outside and start enticing the punters in.

Back in digs yesterday, after nearly four weeks of long and depressing day shifts, I flopped down on the sofa and had a good moan.

"I tell you, Billy, not only is it embarrassing as hell, it's also very demeaning."

"And waving your dick at a camera lens isn't? Look, Michael, you're barely street legal as it is, so be thankful you're getting paid. It might not go towards your Equity card, but it'll go towards the rent at the end of the month."

Billy Canning has been 'resting' for as long as I've known him. His last had been as one of thee people 'picked at random' who couldn't tell butter from some revoltingly strange stuff made from fermented Yak's milk. I was staying with him and some friends in an old three storey terraced house, which would've been converted into tiny bedsits, were it not for the renters' protected status. The landlords changed on a regular basis, and despite modernisation to the ground floor – which had been turned into several shop fronts housing an assortment of businesses over the years – the living areas still retained a sense of late 1950s early 1960s faded squalor.

Then the phone out in the hallway rang. It was Miriam – my agent – which was certainly an occasion for trumpets. She wanted to know if I would be available to do a short notice panto call, in some scout hut at the back of Ashley Street tube. I had to look it up in the A to Z while she was wibbling on.

"It's on account of someone having to drop out," she says, stating the obvious as if it were a totally new discovery.

"They weren't one half of a horse, were they?" After weeks in the cat suit I was in dire need of therapy, but there's little chance of that on the NHS! Miriam sounded confused, so no real change there.

"Would you rather play half of a panto horse?" Sound of her flicking through some papers on her desk. "There's nothing like that on the lists at the moment. Would a cow suit instead? They need one desperately in Reading – The Academy. It's not A-list casting, but if you think it would be a good fit?"

Give me strength! "No, dear, it's just if I'm part of a horse and I accidentally injure myself then they might be under contract to shoot me."

"What?" Her train of thought fought valiantly against being derailed, and despite my best efforts she successfully got us back on track. "The call's for a walk on in the second half. Ten lines. Twelve if you pad it."

Heaven forbid I'd upstage someone in panto. Oh yes you would! Oh no I wouldn't! Still, with the bad winter weather on the way it would be a damn sight better than being a freezing pussy out on the streets in December – ask any prostitute. So it was up at the crack of sparrow fart, pick a piece to memorise on the train, grab some toast and a couple of swigs of tea from the kitchen, then off on the Underground to Ashley Street.

Out of the station and into a bitterly cold North wind, and I'm half way down the street before I realise my nipples are like doorstops! Dolly Parton, eat your heart out! Of course, if I'd worn a vest as Billy had suggested then things wouldn't have been so obvious, but I've always felt that cotton vests were like Old Spice – given at Christmas to dirty old men, or your grandfather, which was pretty much the same thing in our house, as luck would have it.

When I finally got there the Scout & Community Hall wasn't too bad at first – sort of warm and inviting, like a middle-aged disreputable aunty – until I realised the smell from the extra paraffin heater and the creosoted walls was starting to jam the hell out of my sinuses. Wooden floor, wooden walls, wooden roof – even the wooden stage at the far end looked battle scarred and world weary. But I was determined not to let the atmosphere get me down, and on the positive side it looked like only five of us had tuned up for the call – all hopeful of getting to play the part of Third Cowboy.

God knows who originally put it all together – let alone successfully pitched it – but the production was Robin Hood and the Nottingham Sheriff. Sheriff as in 'bang-bang shoot 'em up' Roy Rogers. "More hay, Trigger?" "No thanks, Roy. I'm well and truly stuffed!"

The other four were there already, sitting on folding wooden chairs placed in a line along the far wall, and all holding little cards with numbers on them. I went over to the trestle table in front of the stage, pick up the remaining card – number three – then took my place between two and four. Number one looked as if he was part of some Alamo re-enactment society, and for a moment I wondered if it might've helped if I'd also turned up in costume. Several minutes ticked by before someone else walked in, and settled themselves in front of an old upright piano half hidden in the corner. But I was still concentrating on remembering the piece I'd decided to read for this new development to impinge on my reality.

The jury of my peers, when they finally arrived and got themselves seated, consisted of three nondescript people I didn't recognise (later, Clive Shenny would go on to direct and produce The Waterfall Boys in 1979 for Granada, to great critical acclaim – then have total failures for the next ten years and end up committing suicide on New Years' Eve 1990) and as we sat on the rickety wooden chairs, waiting our turn, I thought calming thoughts and tried to centre myself into the right frame of mind I thought a cowboy might have. The best I could come up with were black and white TV memories of The Lone Ranger, which then led to several minutes of self conscious leg crossing while I desperately tried to think of someone more appropriate, who had not been a schoolboy crush.

What dragged me back into the realms of reality, was when I heard one of the casting committee say to the hopeful dressed as Davy Crockett, "Now if you could just select a song from the top of the piano, we'd like to hear you sing."

Sweet John Julius Norwich! Sing? Miriam never said anything about having to bloody sing!

As the first two went through their paces I could feel my throat tightening up, little by little – not helped by the second bloke handing the pianist some sheet music he'd brought along for the occasion. Then I'm called to read. I do my best to sound manly and convincing, but with my tight throat and nerves I end up sounding like Tim Curry on helium, and knowing I've totally lost it I finish by doing several chunks of Romeo & Juliet on amphetamines: "Do-you-bite-your-thumb-at-me-sir? Who-sir?-me-sir? Yes-sir-you-sir!-Do-you-bite-your-thumb-at-me?"

There's a deafening stunned silence when I finally stop, then one of the three asks me to step over to the piano. As I start to shuffle through the sheets, the old boy at the upright smiles and whispers, "You're doing great, son. Who's your favourite singer?"

"Carmen Miranda," I say, not realising he's trying to throw me a much needed lifeline.

"Well, that's both of us fucked then." He smiles, then hands me something instantly forgettable, and I have to hold it up close to read it, which helps to cover my tone deaf rendition.

Out on the cold street again, I scurry around trying to find a phone box, then try to find one that hasn't been converted into some kind of Turner Prize entry. Local call to Miriam, so tupp'ences at the ready in case the ten pence piece isn't enough.

"How did it go?" she asks.

"Don't ask me to relive it all, otherwise I'll never come out of therapy," I tell her, desperately trying to forget the helium voice still in my ears.

"That bad?"

"Worse! They asked me to sing!"

"Oh...." There's a short pause, then she adds a little sheepishly, "Didn't I mention that when we talked about it?"

My anguished cry of frustrated rage is met by someone knocking on the telephone box door. "Are you finished in there, mate?"

"No! Now piss off!"

In my ear I hear Miriam saying, "Got to go, got another client waiting. I'll give you a ring if you get a call back." And then she's gone, leaving the machine to swallow my ten pence piece as I slam the receiver down.

I barge out of the box as several onlookers stare at me. The guy who knocked before suddenly pipes up, "You haven't broken it, have you?"

I resist the urge to turn on him. It's too cold and the post-failure depression is starting to bite just as deeply as the midday wind. Once home I treat myself to a large mug of hot chocolate with a generous splash of rum in it, then settle down for a serious slab of afternoon telly. Crown Court, followed a little later by the consummate professionalism that is Crossroads.

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But before we return you to our regular deprogramming, here's a picture of a pair of tasty Russian Army birds....

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# The Bicyclic Gene

As Syd Barrett probably didn't sing:-

I've got a bike

You can ride it if you like

It's got a nest of bats

A snake that sings

And boy this acid is good.

I'd give you some if I could

But I've swallowed it (all)

It's been a while since I last rode a bicycle. Well owned and maintained one, and ridden it on a more than just an occasional basis.

This time round the bike is somewhat different to what I've ridden in the past. For one it's a 'high street commercial' brand in the form of a Raleigh. And it's one of their Talus range – though I should point out here that because of my inside leg measurement, I went for the 29R variation.

And when I first saw one advertised secondhand, in fairly good to 'almost new' condition, it didn't appear to be anywhere near as expensive as I'd originally believed the beasts had become since Mountain Bike Fever had infected every poser and pedal-pushing Tour de Castleford wannabe.

So why was it being advertised for sale? Well, for those not in the know, June/July/August is often the time when a young man's thoughts turn to simple cash transactions in order to see them through the up-coming round of school/educational establishment breaks.

The fact that Mum (or, more likely, Dad) believed the Christmas-stroke-birthday-stroke-bar mitzvah-stroke-whatever present would be enough to break the hold of the Xbox-stroke-PS4-stroke-Duke Nuke-em-Vs-The-Slime-Bandits-From-Epsilon-Cygma-Poppet III is usually a mute point by the time it comes to the

Time-on-your-hands

–\-------- over –--------

Available-funds

equation.

It's not the first time I've worked this annual occurrence to my advantage. Way, way back, when I was sent to Gibraltar, I found the cost of local Spanish imported cycles to be far too much for what they were. However, over in the Navy quarters, with mum & dad about to be shipped back home – or after junior had lost interest because he/she trashed it in the first couple of weeks – the price of cycles were a lot cheaper. Yes, you had to go across into Spain and find a reliable source of spare parts (or get the cables shipped over from the UK) – but the 'hassles' were worth the effort. Sadly, the bike was stolen about 6 months before I was due to return to the UK. A Russian based container tanker had docked several days before, and there had been a massive crime wave of 'easily removable things' – prams, bikes, garden furniture and white utility items such as washing machines, fridges and freezers – all left outside, usually in Utility sheds or poorly secured garages.

But, a couple of months ago, during the Sunday supermarket shop, I found a Raleigh Talus advertised in the local TESCO. The supermarket has one of those old fashioned cork notice boards by the main exit – the sort where people can pin up three-by-five postcards that serve as adverts with For Sale across the top, and below that is often a picture of the item for sale.

I remember looking at it for several minutes, bemused by the fact the model had disk brakes as standard rather than the more traditional calliper version – or the Shimano 'v' style.

I wrote down the price, and wondered what had happened to the days of Yoko? When almost all the cards in post office windows used to have a price ending in ONO? Or Near Offer was standard.

Then, on the way back home, I stopped off at The Hyde and set about meeting Edd.

The Hyde is a sort of strip mall/shopping area not far from us. It's not the most attractive, nor the most inviting – in fact several friends had mentioned it to us, using a similar tone you'd use when telling someone that a particular part of town was a notorious No Go area. Both Den and I have never had any trouble – either during the daytime or the evenings when I've dropped down to one of the assorted convenience stores and picked up essential groceries.

I've even left my semi-permanent mark on the place – my tag, if you like – in weather-resistant paint.

A couple of years ago, during a mid-week morning when I was working from home, I dropped down to The Hyde to get Den's repeat prescriptions from the local pharmacist. There was a community project on the go, involving 4 large cement panels on the side of a building that forms part of The Hyde entrance way. The panels had been carefully prepared and airbrushed – red, blue, green and yellow – and the community project organizers had massive aerosol cans of black paint and around a dozen boxes of surgical rubber gloves.

There was also a line of people – some school children, some mums with toddlers, and several others who had obviously stopped to see what was going on. It's a British tradition. You see a line, so you automatically get involved with it.

As I'm beginning to get near to the front I'm given a surgical glove. Out of devilment, I take my watch off and put the glove on my left hand. Then, front of the queue, I'm allowed to pick a colour, pick an area I could reach, and within 30 seconds the outline of my left hand had been spray painted in black onto the coloured concrete. Then I'm told to take off the glove and drop it into the nearby dustbin. Next!

It was efficient, very clean, and in a sea of hands whose thumbs all point to the left, mine is one of the very few which points to the right. Even now, some three years later, every time I go into The Hyde via the main parking area, I look and find my hand print, and I wave back at it.

Yes, I know, I should be on medication, but....

Back to Edd. He moved part of his business to The Hyde around the end of 2013 – taking over the old YMCA Charity shop and the unit next door to that – some Credit Union that had been more closed than open. I'm not entirely sure why Edd picked The Hyde, but seeing the shop become locally successful has been key in regenerating my interest in getting another bike.

It's a bit of a strange shop – the layout still maintaining the basic two units, only now it has a massive rectangular hole cut into the dividing wall – and I find myself subconsciously stooping a little because there are bikes everywhere. Parked on the floor, up the walls, hanging from parts of the high ceiling. Edd himself is where he usually is, working in the open plan workshop located in the corner. He's a thirty-something uber-enthusiast, and I hate him for the casual and modest way he parades his whippet-thin fitness. That, and his forever-smiling helpfulness. If he was a grumpy old sod then I wouldn't feel so guilty about using him as a sounding board for a sale I initially had no intention of completing.

As casually as I can, I work around the obvious question until there's no getting away from it. Yes, he has a Talus 29R towards the back of the shop. It's brand new – the model isn't that old, but the design has been reviewed pretty favourably for what it is – cheap, but not downright budget.

He stops building up what looks like a carbon-fibre Anthracite black frame – tricking it out with matt black wheels and a jet black saddle – and I get that twitchy feeling in my leg. Not the one I sometimes get around 3 in the morning that has me jumping out of bed and working at the cramping calf muscle so it finally relaxes again. It's the one which says I want to swing my leg over, push down on the upraised pedal while pulling up on the handle bars, and hearing the unique sound of tyre tread on asphalt

Back in my pre-Navy youth I used to road race with a local club. I didn't have anything fancy. In fact a lot of it had been scraps and salvage. I learned how to drill out and re-tap threads – use PXR-5 oil to free up bearing races, then pack them with Mollyslip so that the graphite would make it seem as if they were almost frictionless, and spoke-spanner other peoples' discarded 'kinked' wheels so I had the luxury of a running spare should I get a punctured front wheel on my way to one of the evening meetings.

Then, back in 1974, while I was waiting for acceptance into the Royal Navy, I used to process turkeys by day, and in the evenings I would hit the local roads on a rebuilt 10-speed steel frame racer, with skinny 27 by ¾ inch tubs, leather block brakes, and a lot of dreams in my head.

And over the years, every so often, I revive some of those dreams, and end up with a bike of one sort or another.

The cycle before this Raleigh Talus was a beautiful metallic mid-blue Stagg Pegasus – bought back at the start of 1996 from a little corner bike shop in Northwood Hills. It was second-hand and needed some TLC – just like the TESCO advertised Talus – but it was standard for its time, ie, it only had 18 gears worked by two thumb sliders. There had been one of the first 21-gear Raleigh bikes for sale – cheaper than the Stagg because of the extra gear and the oddly modified back forks.

Four years later and after I snapped one of my Anterior Cruciate ligaments it was eventually sold on to someone else.

Back to the shop in The Hyde, and Edd wheels the bike out from some place without causing any domino effect with the rest of his stock – and I try not to be immediately seduced by an Eddy Merckx (pronounced Mercs) – it's price tag is a mere mid-four figures (£5,000) but they're rightly famous for quality, build, and design. Quite often they're hand built for an individual order.

I look away, afraid that I'd fall under its siren-like spell, and focus again on the Talus. It's rock solid, and as I give it a once-over I'm bemused by all the snap lock, or quick release, or just Allen key sockets. I doubt there's an old-fashioned nut and bolt in the whole of its construction.

He shows me that it's now all fixed point gearing – no slide and hope – and going from first to twenty-first is just a matter of clicking the triggers with your thumbs and index fingers. Disk brakes are standard....

He knows I'm hooked – I wouldn't be there if I wasn't – so he offers to throw in a front and back light for free. I ask about the tyres and air pressure – 35 to 40psi – better add a decent pump then. And a crash hat....

When I ask about the price he immediately quotes me a figure that catches me off guard. Instead of saying "Ah, well, that's a little too rich for me," and then walking away – I end up saying things like "This is a new one, isn't it? Not second-hand or anything? Customer return, maybe?" But it isn't. It seems Amazon have a sale on, and so he is forced in some respects to come down to their level in order to try and make a sale.

I ask if there's a discount for cash, and he looks at me. "For cash I'll throw in a pair of crud catchers," he says. They're sort of mud guards, but smaller than the ones I used to know. Later, as I'm still in the Gosh-Wow phase of riding again and too eager to bother to put the things on, I end up going at speed under a couple of local underpasses – and come out the other side coated from toe to tip in slurry mud – the result of overnight rain – cursing my own eagerness, and laughing at the inevitability of it happening.

That's one of the advantages of Stevenage. Being one of the early New Towns, the planners put in miles of cycle tracks and walkways that duck under (and a couple over) most of the main roadways – even under the main rail line.

It also means I'm slowly getting myself fit again. I've already found myself a nice little 6 mile circular routine, full of hills, that takes me around 45 minutes to an hour – depending on head winds, rain, or just personal enthusiasm. I'm not at the endorphin junkie stage yet. Been there, done that, and had the withdrawal symptoms when the ACL injury stopped me from running 5 miles in the morning and 5 in the evening. I still wire myself into an old (read vintage by today's technology) MP3 player, and listen to a variety of tracks which help keep me going – or drive me along. And let's face it, when I'm ripping down the Six Hills cycle tracks, singing along with the Eurythmics, or the Cramps, or Rizzlekicks – almost oblivious to everything around me except the road up ahead – I know I made the right decision in not buying the second-hand bike on offer on the TESCO noticeboard. It gives the seller one more chance to discover what it is they're missing.

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# Of Shoes, and Ships, and Sealing Wax....

It's official – I've been declared childish by He-Who-Believes-He-Should-Be-Obeyed – viz my other half. This all-encompassing declaration was made while we were both in the Kitchen section of John Lewis (For American readers – think of an up-market Sears, with hints of Pottery Barn, along with Crate & Barrel).

Sadly the declaration was not followed by the words "I'll see you at the car in thirty minutes" – which usually means sixty, but who-the-feck's counting?

The declaration was made after I had apparently broken my promise not to hunt out the clockwork kitchen timers. As in hunt them out, wind them up and set them to ring at different times. But, if they weren't meant to be tested before purchase, then why put them out on display like that? Anyway, I wasn't the one who did it that time.

Well, not directly.

But, apparently, if you supposedly encourage a kid to do it, and show them how to wind one up, then who am I to be held responsible if they decide to prime the other 8 or 9 various timers on display?

And no, I'd nothing to do with encouraging someone to activate and set the electronic egg timer that was shaped like a miniature mutant chicken – and let me tell you that looking 'smug' when it starts 'buk-buk-buk-BUK-KIRK!'-ing as we're finally leaving Kitchenware is not an admission of guilt.

I ain't no snitch, but it was that little bastard over by the electric can openers, the one wearing the flashing-light trainers, and laughing his head off.

Yet I wouldn't even think of doing something like that if I wasn't sort of bored – a condition I put down to being genetically different to the majority of my tribe.

When I go out to shop for something, it's because I actually want/need it. I know precisely what type of shop to visit in order to purchase said item. I go in, find the item, pay for it, then leave – the rest of the day being spent on doing other more productive things. Which is usually repairing/fixing/modifying/replacing something with an exact same something (or as near as damn it) that I went out into town for in the first place.

What I do not do, is think of something I need, think of at least half a dozen other things I don't need but want to look at just in case I can somehow figure out a way of making myself believe we actually do need one – and if we're going to get that then we really need to get the assorted accessories that should go with it, to finish it off – which, of course, means we're going to have to totally redecorate because that colour just won't go with what we've got in there already. And, of course, if we redo that room it will only show up the rest of the house, so that's going to have to be the next priority....

The first time I did the timer thing was in the large Lewis store at the bottom of Watford Parade, near the glass pyramid thing that in the past has been a bedding shop, then an electrical gadget shop, and at one time a carpet shop. We'd parked up in the section of the multi-storey aptly called Queens (the other three being Kings, Palace and Charter – sadly no Jacks) – and on the level where the John Lewis 'self-service' loading area was – around about the 3 or 4th floor. We needed to be on that floor for when we loaded up with whatever it was we were buying.

Whatever it was we were buying was way down in the basement – which meant using the escalators to go down all the floors in the bloody store. However, some (read 99%) of my tribe have genes which have obviously been spliced with those of a magpie, so on the way down to the basement, any and every sparkle, every scintillation, every shiny flashy thing, was duly noted and logged for future reference. That future beginning just as soon as we left the basement and had to travel back up to the 3rd or 4th floor – floor by painful floor.

But if that wasn't bad enough, days/weeks/months later there is always the danger of PTSD – ie Post Traumatic Sales Disorder, because somehow the said must-have purchase is now either too big, too small, too wide, too tall, or not precisely the right shade of the perfect colour because shop lighting can be very deceptive sometimes.

And believe me, no matter how sweet and joyous – how totally comparable to The Rapture – or however compelling the temptation may be, it's never wise to poke the dragon with the I-Told-You-So stick.

There again, in regard to the last Kitchenware incident, I can offer up mitigating circumstances in regard to the cause. You see, I was also in mourning because somehow I'd managed to lose my Sunday hag.

Her name was Gillian, and she was one of the pickers in TESCOs on the Sunday mornings I do the main weekly shop. I don't mind doing that on my own, because I know what I want, and I know how to get it – provided I know what isle and shelf it's recently been moved to.

True, I'd seen her a while back, pushing that large trolley loaded with little crates while I – armed with my trusty shopping list – wheeled my wheelbarrow down isles wide and narrow, muttering "Cornflakes" and "Pasta" all dried as dried oh.

However, it wasn't until what I fondly remember as The Bag of Chips Incident, did we actually start talking to each other.

You see, a long time ago – maybe 50+ years – I'd developed the habit of humming to myself. Not necessarily songs of the day, but mixed in were things like Summertime from Porgy & Bess, Mary Mason's version of Just Call Me Angel of the Morning or something more up-tempo like Psycho by The Sonics.

So one Sunday, about four months or so ago, I'm digging around one of the frozen goods open freezers looking for the bag of oven ready chips at the bottom because as any fule kno, the ones at the bottom stay frozen the longest. Especially when the checkout queues are fairly slow. And, of course, I'm humming the most appropriate song I know for those times when I'm rootling around in a freezer:- the 3rd verse of TV Set by The Cramps.

https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/60615/

I get hold of the bottom bag, pull it up to the surface with an "A-har!", turn around and am just about to drop the frozen potato chunks into my trolley, when I see Gillian beside her cart, barcode scanner in one hand, looking at me and suppressing a giggle.

Before I can say anything about my Public Embarrassment Module having ceased functioning decades ago, she tells me it's been ages since she heard any Cramps songs, and never in public. Then she was off, her barcode gun harvesting goods and items destined for those too lazy to come out and shop for themselves.

Several Sundays went by, and we'd nod and smile at each other – until the Idiots in Power decided to totally re-arrange the shelves, stock-wise. That would've been fine, only they didn't re-arrange the ceiling suspended notices – the ones saying 'Bread', or 'Chicken' or 'Here Be Seasonal Items We Haven't Been Able To Shift Since The Last Time.'

That change meant not only did I, but also thousands of other shoppers, no longer have a clue as to where the feck everything now was. Apart from the 'fresh' fish counter, of course. And the bakery. And the – well, you get the idea anyway.

It also meant I would sometimes ask Gillian where things had been relocated to.

Me: If possible, could you tell me where the inhabitants of Isle 24 have now been displaced to?

Gillian: Carton soup now Isle 12, yoghurt and milk now with butter and marg – down 19.

Then came our last meeting. She'd sort of snuck up behind me while I was ordering some cooked meat from the Deli counter. I didn't know she was there, and after I'd asked for some corned beef "sliced on number 4 thickness, so you can taste it rather than see through it" I then saw the display of Sopocka – Polish cured/smoked pork loin.

"And 8 slices of Peppa Pig should do nicely."

Behind me Gillian giggled like a St Trinians schoolgirl. "Honestly! They should never let you out of the Home!"

I turned round and said something in reply – along the lines of: "What do you expect when I've been off my meds for the last week?" Only when I turn back to collect the corned beef and the sopocka, the Deli counter assistant is giving me a really weird look – not helped by me adopting a Ronnie O'Sullivan (Cock-er-knee snooker player) voice and saying, "Only messin' abart, mate," before finally pushing my trolley off to wherever next I thought I needed to be.

As they almost said of Byron – Mad, bad, and far too old to give a flying rat's furry ass-crack.

But it wasn't until just after New Year that I gradually realised Gillian was no longer working at the supermarket. I asked several of the other delivery box fillers, and they all said she'd now left for places unknown. And for whatever reasons – I don't honestly know why – I no longer wanted to be doing the shopping on a Sunday anymore.

I can only put it down to the fact that those chance meetings with Gillian – as chance as the crazy starlings forever running around the TESCO car park – were enough to dispel the boredom of the mundane long enough for me not to really care about Sunday shopping, because there was always the off chance of having a little laugh during the hour or so it takes to trolley up and down the aisles and toss things into the shopping cart.

So that is why I'm back humming to myself again, scaring nosey little kids in the fruit & veg section by telling them that the green stripy cantaloupe melon – still with the vestigial remains of the stalk – is, in fact "a beumb" in a pseudo-Inspector Clouseau voice, and generally sinking back into a trolley-zombie mentality that seems to infest the isles on a Sunday morning.

It's also why I'm back letting the Devil take control of my idle hands, and why I now have an almost insatiable desire to own a mutant chicken egg timer that 'buk-buk-buk-BUK-KIRK!'s for as long as the batteries last.

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#  Me? I'm Just A Lawnmower

(Article/Opinion/Stupidity slated to appear in pro magazine CyberTalk #10 September 2018)

Danger! Danger Will Robinson!

No matter which way you cut and carve it, when it comes to serving up Artificial Intelligence to the general public then expectation far exceeds reality. This is not a new phenomenon. Witness all those wonderful 1950s publications that predicted futures full of flying cars, unlimited leisure time, and intelligent autonomous machines doing Humankind's bidding without so much as a complaint or a graduated pension plan. Sadly, due to imagination being brought down by the Curse of Reality, most of those post World War II prophesies failed to materialise – except in 1950s Sci-Fi B-movies, where the men were Men, women all wore bikinis, and 7-legged bivalves from Alpha Centauri finally got to know their place in The Order of Things.

Then Man Said: Let There Be Life!

However, according to some sources, AI became a commercial success 20 years ago – back in 1998 when the Furby was officially released into the wild. Thankfully, unlike mink, coypu, and Japanese Knotweed, the Furbys rise to dominance was halted by The Next New Thing – in this case the AIBO – potentially creating one of those 'If only Terry Nation had stuck legs on a Dalek' marketing moments. But why, having spent x-many millions on research, was the best launch application really deemed to be Artificial Intelligence powering a mechanical dog? AIBO ran (rolled over, shook hands and, if you took the batteries out, played dead very convincingly) for about 6 years – at least proving that an AI pet wasn't just for Christmas. After that, having been entertained by the spectacle of it all, like magpies, Humans ended up being distracted by the sparkle and shine of the new once more. And the jump from AIBO to humanoid (the Actroid series) via ASIMO at the turn of the Millennium, rapidly followed.

Yet, as we come to the end of the first quarter of this new 21st Century Era, the underlying presentation of AI hasn't really changed since Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It has the potential to be an equal, yet while we want AI today, rather than tomorrow, we also distrust the hell out of it. Otherwise why the 'reliance' on the likes of Asimov's Three Laws which, like talking to a naughty child, are based first and foremost on Thou Shalt Not rather than the more positive and encouraging Thou Shalt. Are we that paranoid in our perceptions of what AI should be capable of, that we immediately shackle the learning process with rules that bind rather than free the electrospirit? Is it that we expect something human-created to be as human-like driven?

Or is it the unpredictability – read uncontrollability? – of two identical sets of Hardware, each producing two differing AI 'personalities', that takes us down such avenues?

And make no mistake, there will always be some element of deviation owing to Engineering's in-built design and budget-limited Manufacturing's reliance on a +/- Tolerance when it comes to Quality Control.

'But don't you worry about that – it's only a small variation. What? Well, yes, so maybe one of them turns out to be a sociopath rather than socially acceptable – but, hey, that just means our products are actually as near to Human as we can get them.'

I Rarely Use Oxygen Myself, Sir. It Promotes Rust.

So do we really want our AI-powered automata to be as Human as possible?

According to General Consensus and Major Opinion, the answer to that question is a resounding 'No!' – both from a historical/hysterical viewpoint – 'Open the pod bay doors, HAL' – to that of modern day research and advances such as those from the likes of Boston Dynamics. It seems those people have not only stuck legs on it so it can climb stairs with ease, but also given it spatial awareness and object recognition along with rudimentary cognitive capabilities. And that means the 'mechanisms' learn by their mistakes, as well as evaluate and analyse new situations so that potential mistakes don't happen in the first place.

So who cares if the funding has its foundations in the US Department of Defence? It's bound to have more commercial uses. Eventually. Well, at least the Hardware still looks like a Steampunker's wet dream, and doesn't try and pass itself off as Near Human – something that some Roboticists seem to feel is important.

Into The Uncanny Valley

Humans are fickle creatures at best, and as such have a revulsion to things that are too imitative of themselves – 'Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I'll rip your Sensor Modules off.'

A ready example of non-Humanesque acceptance is the amount of 'Smart' units in and around the home today. Everything from ovens, washing machines, fridges and freezers, down to waste bins that scan bar codes and send electronic post-it notes to your smartphone, telling you that you need to buy more of whatever it is you've just possibly run out of. That way you'll never forget. In fact, if you just marry it to another, GPS-based app, it will then be able to tell you where you can get the item(s) from a conveniently nearby store....

At least Pavlov used a bell.

And what Society creates, Society will also subvert. Witness the MiraiBotnet DDoS attacks using just the power of the Internet of Things. While I would be immensely proud to say "My toaster brought down the CIA," sadly it's just a simple handraulic model – and slow, and burns the toast on the second load of slices if you put them in almost immediately after the first load have dutifully popped their golden brown heads above the chrome. Such is the nature of Life, I suppose – always disappointing once the novelty wears off.

So while we're happy to have our robots looking like mechanical constructs, it seems we are not happy with the social integration/interaction aspect. Especially if the intention is to perfectly imitate to some degree.

Is this, perhaps, because Humans are worried that the pseudo-meek will inherit the Earth?

Seriously, Would I Lie To You?

Recent studies have shown that while Humans are happy to lie to an AI construct, they get more than a little upset when said construct reciprocates with a lie. Yet isn't GIGO something that's been around for generations of electro-interfacing? As far back as 1957, in fact. And if they can lie, they can learn to scheme, and manipulate, and before you know it you've followed the white rabbit so far down the Conspiracy Hole that you reach the end of the line – which is supposedly a Skynet/slave uprising future.

All of which makes it look like we have come full circle and are back in that 1950s Sci-Fi B Movie country?

One film, Robot and Frank (2012), posed an interesting question: If the directive is to protect your human charge (First Law of Robotics), and the only viable form of protection is assisted self-destruction (Third Law), then is the erasure of cognitive sentiency an act of murder? It is impossible to 'rollback' to the last 'backup', because different – or even modifying/influencing – non-repeatable 'learning experiences' would have occurred post-backup. Like Death, there's no coming back once you press the OFF button.

The Future's Bright – The Future's Organic

And if Hardware doesn't cut it, is the next move Programmable Wetware?

At the moment, such an alternative is still very much in the realms of theory, and hopefully by the time it becomes a commercial reality, there will be an alternative to Dr Frankenstein's rather drastic reboot procedure.

Yet it was only a year after the Furby that William Ditto et al created the first Wetware computer from leech neurons – a construct capable of generating mathematical output in a similar fashion to that of a basic pocket calculator. So who knows? Maybe future bio-computing will have a residual taste for blood – on the basis that if it works then why fix it?

Fusion Conclusion

But have we – as in Humanity – already reached the cut-off point? In 2014, the term Digital Detox officially entered the Oxford English Dictionary, and shortly after there appeared rehab clinics for those who consider themselves to be Digitally Addicted. Is it time for a New Luddite Church to appear?

Some people think not.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai (February, 2018), Elon Musk stated that people would need to become cyborgs to be relevant in an artificial intelligence age. He said that a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence" would be necessary to ensure we stay economically valuable.

So, just like Robby the robot, I shall be off to give myself an oil-job, on the grounds that it always improves my self-worth.

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# Life At The Cutting Edge....

There comes a point in life when you realise that you're no longer invincible. I passed that point a long time ago. Well, not so much passed it, as kicked down a diversionary fork.

The fork came into sight on realising that both immediate sides of my parental families were more than a little prone to the vagaries of Cancer. And, in true "fuck you" fashion, I made light of it all. Even to the point, when various marks appeared on the backs of my hands, I would say that I'd wake up of a morning, and if I couldn't join the dots and make a big 'C', then things were just fine and dandy.

The same kind of laissez fairy attitude was also used when I discovered a lump on the top of my head some 10 years ago. Even the local GP at the time gave it the old "It's probably just a cyst." Maybe I should have asked for an intelligent second opinion, but I'm a glasses half cracked rather than a glasses totally smashed kind of guy.

Time, as is its wont, beat on its petty pace from day to day, until a couple or three months ago (around October time) I was having my hair cut at the local barber. Halfway through the scissor cutting (I've never been one for clippers – a throwback to the long deployment days, when various members of the ship's crew would be assigned the joys of buzz-cut merchant. No matter what you wanted it to look like, it was always a #1 all over) Martin leans over and says:

"I could be wrong, but that lump looks like it's bleeding."

I put my hand up and give it a vigorous grope – though not the kind that people used to do in the back row of the movies, before technology turned them into phone zombies. Yet when I have a look at my fingertips I don't see any incriminating crimson.

Martin leans in towards me again, like he's about to make me an observation I can't refuse. "I don't mean there's blood coming out of it. It just looks like it's bleeding. On the inside."

"Oh"

"You should get that looked at," he adds, totally missing the historical point that barbers also doubled as surgeons in the Middle Ages. Like the sign says, Welcome to Crowland – an Historical Market Town.

I nod in agreement, thankfully before he gets going with a modern cut-throat razor to the back of my neck.

Twenty minutes later and I'm puttering over to Abbey View surgery – so named because you can still see the remains of the old Abbey from the carpark – and take an 'emergency walk in' slot. Thankfully I draw Dr B. He and I had a bit of a rocky first meeting – Abbey View was one of the WannaCry ransom victims back in 2017. Since then it has updated the Mickey$oft OS, and as I type these final amends in late April 2020, during the on-going covid-19 pandemic, it is doing its very best to keep things running as smoothly as possible.

So as I enter the room we exchange polite pleasantries before I sit down and almost manage to stick my head between my knees and say, "What do you make of that then?"

"Bloody hell." And then he rolls his chair forward and we're in the back row of the cinema again as he gives it a serious going over.

Before I can ask whether that was a professional diagnosis or an emotional reaction, he asks: "How long has it been like this?"

"Seriously, doc, I check my balls and boobs for bumps, but that's as far as it goes."

"Here, look at this." He snatches up a webcam and points it at the top of the lump, which then appears on his 27-inch flatscreen monitor – no doubt in 24-bit colour. Bravely I resist the temptation to say something along the lines of 'Heavens, my roots need doing,' and just stare at the Malbec/Rioja Gran Reserve wine coloured thing. For some reason it reminds me of what shape you get when you sweep a dead cat under the hearth rug – or one of those extra large, round ravioli – the sort that usually has crab meat in them.

(   
Picture of a large round ravioli – not a dead cat under a rug)

We both agree that it's going to need a more specialist opinion, and while I shouldn't worry, he's going to tag my referral as 'Urgent.'

It's only later, talking to one of the librarians, do I find out that Dr B was at one time part of the Oncology Dept in Peterborough Hospital.

A fortnight goes by and I'm sitting in the reception area of some department in the self-same main Peterborough Hospital complex. I get the call forward, go into a little side room, and get the bump felt by someone I believe may be a middle-aged Indian woman. She then scribbles down some notes, takes a few measurements, and asks:

"Why haven't you had this removed before now?"

I want to say that we've become attached to each other, but I don't. It's the underlying fear that makes me revert to that kind of thing. Witty saying and snappy banter deflect from the reality that whatever it is that I've been carrying around for a decade or more is apparently nothing like I've always thought it to be.

We chatter for a minute or so longer, then she tells me to go wait in the reception area again, and someone will be along shortly to see me again.

When he arrives he's carrying a large digital camera around his neck. He's going to take some photographs – and I seem to slip into a parallel Harmony Hairspray world:-

"Photographs? Why?"

"Just in case."

"In case of what?"

"Just in case we need to do reconstructive surgery."

His 'studio' is in yet another medium sized room, with an area at the back complete with three white cotton draped walls. A massive lightbox. In the middle of the area is a straight backed wooden chair.

As I sit down on the chair I make a Christine Keeler reference, and behind me I can hear him laughing. Thank fuck someone realises what I need to hear at times like this. Ten minutes later and I'm back out in the corridor again, heading towards reception, the parking fee machines, and eventually home.

Time moves on, and I get the surgery appointment letter. It's on a Saturday morning, which is a little bit of an advantage, mainly as the car park isn't totally jammed to the gills. I go up to the section reception as annotated in the letter, and get myself logged in. Den is with me, even though he has absolutely no love of hospitals. Bad experiences after his car accident left mental as well as physical scars. He wants to be with me, and I'm concerned that he's going to upset himself. But that's what we do. He worries for the both of us, and I'm too stupid to see the down side of any situation. It's how we've stayed together for almost 20 years now.

I'm greeted by the ward nurse, given the usual hospital gown, and then Den and I are shown to the bed with the wraparound curtains. I change into the gown, the nurse comes with paperwork, then leaves after I've filled it all in.

Tea and biscuits arrive and are eaten, apologies are given when the original surgery time is moved right by a couple of hours. Then a gurney comes up and I'm asked to climb aboard. Den stays by the bed. He has his word search puzzle book which, given his profound dyslexia, always amazes me in regard to the number of books he completes successfully.

Down a passageway, into the operating theatre – all white, bright lights and 1980s Electro-Pop. The flap on the gurney is brought up and pillows arranged around my shoulders – the nurse asking me if I'm comfortable. I resist the old punchline of "I get by."

Before I know it, the bulging section of my head is shaved, dried, re-examined, and then marked up in various blue symbols. During the prep I ask if they're going to video it so I can have something to cherish later, but the nurse doesn't degrade herself by answering. Which is probably just as well because the surgeon comes up behind me and says:

"This might just sting a little, but it'll only be for a short while."

Then she's at the top of my skull with a loaded hypodermic and a hand like an electric sewing machine.

Before I can say anything about her Botox technique, the fecking enormous belt of pain does its drive-by routine, and seconds later I'm left asking the nurse if she has a tissue as both my eyes are watering.

Five or so minutes later, accompanied by the question "Can you feel that?" The procedure starts. Cue for me to simply retreat into my 'Happy Place' while all the cutting, tugging and finally cauterizing ("Do I smell barbeque?") takes place.

It's a successful technique that's worked for me in the past – amazing my sadly missed previous dentist, Chris – aka Christakis Mindikkis – because I fell asleep during his root canal work.

"You went to sleep!"

"What can I say? I trust you implicitly."

We were finally retiring the 'Miracle Tooth' after 20+ years. He's a perfectionist, but lost £5 to me back in 2000 when he didn't have faith in his own skills. Hence 'Miracle Tooth.'

I miss his professionalism, the pictures he stuck on the ceiling every time school holidays came around, and his incredibly sexy eyes.

Eventually they remove whatever it was I'd been playing host to for almost a decade, put it in a sample container full of clear liquid, and before sending it off to the lab for whatever they were going to do to it, they give me a chance to handle and look at it. Floating in its suspension, it reminds me of something I might have seen in an old B-movie rip off of Alien.

I look up at the waiting nurse. "Does this thing have a name?"

She looks a little confused, and remains silent behind the face mask.

As I hand it back to her I say, "Goodbye, Cyril." Well, for some reason, it looked like a Cyril.

After that it's just a case of being wheeled back to the ward, given yet more tea and biscuits, and Den. A little later, after all the release paperwork had been signed and collated, and a 7 day post op review appointment booked, I'm finally released back into the wild once more.

I drive home – Den doesn't have a licence – and on the way back we both agree not to talk about any 'What If?'s until we get the results back from the hospital. It's another one of our coping mechanisms in that we try and look on the optimistic side of things.

Thankfully several weeks before Christmas I received the news that despite the fact it had been slowly growing and haemorrhaging, Cyril was benign.

Looking back on it all it's been an interesting experience. I wouldn't say it was an enjoyable one – waiting for any medical results always puts me on edge. And I always hate surgery of most kinds – not for any fear of knives, or not coming out of it at the other end – even though that is becoming more and more a possibility as time goes on.

No, it's walking up with the cannula still in the back of my hand. It's the one thing I always want out of me, regardless.

And, despite the picture, the stitches have now been yanked out and my hair is now growing back again.

M   
ind you, it still doesn't stop me from telling people I've had an organic memory upgrade, in the form of a brain transplant. You'd be amazed at how many people actually believe it.

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# If You have Enjoyed This and Want To Get Involved....

The point of this FREE eBook is to help advertise eAPA to as wide an audience as possible. It costs nothing to join, except access to email or webmail. The only limitations are that you respect the other members (discussions and debates can get heated, but abuse is never permissible), contribute the minac requirement, and don't try and reprint the whole of the Internet (ie, original material.)

Apart from that, the World is your playground – though do watch the file size

You can use the email: eapa (spot) membership (at) gmx (spot) co (spot) uk in order to check on membership availability – or the website https://efanzines.com/eapa/

The regular eAPA distributions are password protected once compiled by the Central Mailer, but the October mailings have traditionally been unprotected in order to give potential members a taster of what the APA is like. The list of URLs below are for those October mailings, going back to the start in 2004.

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa6_oct2004.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa18.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa30.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa42.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa54.zip

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa60.zip

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa66.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa78.zip

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa90.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa100.pdf \- a Special 100th Open Issue

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa114.zip

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa126.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa138.pdf

https://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa150.pdf

http://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa162.zip

http://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa174.zip

http://efanzines.com/eapa/eapa186.zip
