Showers and Sharks

Monday 6th May

It’s been boiling hot lately – 25C up in the village and 30C down in Makrigialos – so on Sunday we decided to go for a swim. It being Paska we found that most of our usual haunts were closed so tried one called by some ‘the shack’ (I tried translating the Greek name for it and its comes out as something like ‘service’). There we had some souvlaki before venturing down on their sun beds where, despite the umbrella, we were soon frying. Into the sea for a cool off, therefore... I have a feeling that we have been in the sea before at this time of year and my recollection of the experience is the same. It was too hot not to go in the sea but the temperature contrast was almost painful. I got past that by throwing myself in head-first when the water was deep enough (about twenty yards out) while Caroline dithered standing on tip-toes with the water up round her waist. I later took a swim to the harbour, checking everything unusual under the water because of someone telling us of a nine-foot shark recently caught off the coast here.

Tuesday 7th May
Of course when I write about our time here on Crete it always reads like Paradise but, unfortunately, Paradise has its snakes. The first snakes we encountered where neighbours that just would not leave us alone until I finally got angry enough to shout at them. At the time we got on okay with another neighbour called Yorgos. Now things have switched around. The neighbours that were originally a pain are no problem at all now, while Yorgos is a dick. He plays his crappy Cretan music at ridiculous volume as if it his prerogative to ensure everyone in the village hears it. Meanwhile some new neighbours have turned up between us and him. Three houses next to us are owned respectively by three daughters but have only been used occasionally. Now one of the daughters, after a divorce/depression/affair saga three years ago, has moved here with her new squeeze. We’re hoping they’ll tire of Yorgos’s loud music and shout at him in his own language.

Wednesday 8th May
After I’d polished off my 2,000 words yesterday we went down to Makrigialos more in hope than expectation of a swim. It was a mistake. It was hot up here and as we drove down it got progressively cloudier and cooler. In the end we found ourselves sitting in Revans buggering about on the internet, drinking wine and watching hardier souls than us braving the sea. As we returned here the temperature steadily rose again and we ended up sitting outside until sundown. Later we returned inside and got all soppy watching Forrest Gump.

Thursday 9th May
We had a down pour yesterday but, even so, the temperature was up in the 20s. It was really needed because after a dry winter and the soil here was like powder. As usual I did my 2,000 words then spent the rest of the day finishing off Elizabeth Moon’s Trading in Danger (brief review here). Later we started on the third season of Deadwood – it took me one episode before I even understood half of what they were saying.

This morning there’s a bit of cloud about but whether or not it’ll rain I’ve no idea. I wish it would. After just one day of it the plants out there are looking a lot better – rain always boosts things better than any equivalent amount of watering. And, regarding plants, as is becoming a bit of a tradition now, here a picture of how my salad veg is getting on just to annoy Heidi (next door neighbour in England) and my brother Paul:

Friday 10th May
Two days of cloud and a brief heavy shower and we wake this morning to rumbles of thunder coming from Sitia way. I suspect we’re in for a hammering but it’s needed. The downpour of the day before yesterday still left dry patches under various shrubs and other sheltered places where the soil remains dry and powdery. I am also still finding places for our waste water, while last year at about this time I was using it to wash down paths.

Writing: Penny Royal III is clear of 130,000 words but I’m now working a bit slower as I chop out large chunks of text and shift them around. It’s very unlike me to do this but yesterday I chopped out a whole space battle, shifted it off the end of the book where I keep such ‘spare’ bits, then wrote a whole new one at a different location. Why? Because there was something the Polity AIs had to know that would stop them dead in their tracks, while there was something a nasty AI had to know (not Penny Royal) that had to put it on a different course. There are fine lines to walk here. I am writing about entities with superior intelligences who won’t be fooled my something a dumb human would miss, so they have to be a few steps ahead of the story. Meanwhile I don’t want to insult the intelligence of my readers, but simultaneously I don’t want them to be confused by what’s going on.

Saturday 11th May
Yup, it did absolutely hammer down yesterday and I finally had to admit that two of our roof windows weren’t dripping condensation but are leaking. Off to Sitia today for shopping inclusive of a couple of tubes of mastic for repairs. Then down to the taverna this afternoon to put up this blog post along with the two book reviews prior to it.

Trading in Danger - Elizabeth Moon

Elizabeth Moon is a name I’ve heard in science fiction for a long time but I’ve never read one of her novels before. She’s American (and a former marine) and I may have come across her in Asimov’s. I guess the fact that I’ve now read one of her novels is down to the power of having a book, with an eye-catching cover, sitting on the shelf in a book shop. Now I have read one I’m happy to discover she’s written over 20 of them, and I’ll be happy to buy some more.

Trading in Danger has a slightly old-fashioned feel to it in that it could have been written 30 or 40 years ago. You’ve got the space ships, space marines and merchants, the needle guns and the ansible that were all staples of the kind of books I was grabbing from the second-hand book shop to feed my rapidly expanding teenage SF habit. No off-putting slide-rules are being used to calculate a ship’s course and there are concessions to the modern age in cerebral implants and advanced medical technology however, that there isn’t much detail about the tech you’ll find in the Hamilton GNR or in my books doesn’t matter at all, because this is about the characters and story. I began to care about the people quite rapidly, thoroughly enjoyed their interactions, and was engaged and dragged along in their story from page one. Highly recommended.

Great North Road - Peter F. Hamilton

    

It’s been a while since I picked up a Peter Hamilton book, mainly because of an aversion to great big doorstops. However, I really shouldn’t have let that effect me since I very much enjoyed his previous enormous tomes including a trade paperback version of The Naked God that made my wrist bones crunch every time I turned a page. My version of The Great North Road weighs in at over a thousand pages and, had I not started it in England and then finished it in Crete (with much ado between) I would have finished much sooner than now. Was there stuff that could have been cut without detriment to the plot? Well, yes, but that was world-building and thoroughly enjoyable. Did I find myself skipping any of this and thinking, ‘Oh get on with it?’ Not at all. Right from the start I enjoyed this look into this future and every time I put the book down it was with growing confidence in future enjoyment when I picked it up again. A great big sprawling enjoyable science fiction read. Does what it says on the tin. I finally closed it with a sense of satisfaction and the intention to now get hold of the Void trilogy...     

Into May

Sunday 28th April

The new taverna at the bottom of the village is a handy addition for us here. I’ve learned that it’s called ‘To Avli’ which translates as ‘The Yard’. We like chilled white wine in this climate while the old kafenion down there was limited to beer, coffee, raki and soft drinks, not so the Avli. We don’t have internet in our house here because, until recently, every option seemed to work out at about €50 a month. Our only internet connection was a 20 minute drive away, but not any more: it is now available just a couple of minutes stroll away. It’s free for customers, but purchasing a €2.50 carafe of wine, with free mezes, is no hardship. Civilization is now reaching Papagianades, which comes as a surprise since Greece as a whole is still falling apart, tourism is down, unemployment is 27% and money is tight.

Tuesday 30th April

Back to work today, which seems a shame what with the temperature having climbed about 10 degrees in the last week. When I say work I of course mean writing. I was going to start yesterday but I had one more thing to sort out for the house. Our way of stopping insects getting in through the terrace doors has been a bead curtain. After last Autumn, which I shall call the Autumn of the Wasp, I decided we needed something a bit better. The problem, however, was a combination of doors and shutters which, due to the thickness of the walls, only have 90 degrees of movement, while the gap between them in just an inch or so, which leaves little room to manoeuvre. So I spent yesterday constructing a fly screen hinged at one side and in the middle, secured with magnetic catches, and with chunks carved out to stop it snagging on various items. They work, but warped wood and some slightly haphazard sawing means they are still, ahem, under development.

Wednesday 1st May

Damn, not a very good day yesterday at all. It was over 20C in the house and higher outside yesterday but I felt cold and quite rough. Too much wine, too many cigarettes? No, in retrospect I realise I wasn’t treating the sunshine here with the respect it is due. Having spent most of Monday in direct sunlight with little in the way of protection my head was roasted. I believe I was suffering from sun stroke. Daft really, since we always warn visitors here of that and chortle at the lobster tourists on the beach.

After further work on the fly screen it is now past the development stage and working properly i.e. I don’t have to bugger about it every time we want to open and close it. Now I just need to tidy the thing up: fill in various screw holes where I moved hinges and catches, paint the thing, cover the rough edges where I cut the netting ... but I have to say I prefer this kind of work to mixing up cement to fill holes in the outside walls.

Thursday 2nd May

You gotta laugh at the white man’s guilt at the BBC. A clothing factory collapses in India and what do they concentrate on? Do they examine the rampant corruption in India, the politicians planners and local officials taking back-handers, the builders who increase their margin by putting just a bit less cement and reinforcing steel in their concrete, or the inspectors looking the other way either because they’ve been paid too or because they’re too lazy to get off their arses and step out of their air-conditioned offices? Do they buggery. No, in BBC land this cannot be the fault of anyone with dusky skin. It’s our fault for buying cheap clothing. What do they honestly think would happen if the price went up? Would the extra money in any way reduce the corruption and inefficiency? No, the people involved would just end up pocketing more.

In a partial answer to this a sour faced harridan said that the EU must place restrictions on such trade until such places get their act together. Oh yeah, that’ll work. The EU already has trade restrictions on other countries. Many African farmers, for example, cannot sell their goods to the EU. The result of this is less wealth heading that direction, and poverty. But that’s okay, because then we feed them money via the likes of the DFID making them dependent on charity. They can look admiringly at their fucking windmills while they starve. Gotta keep them in their place. Strange how those who are so active against racism cannot see how implicit it is in their attitude.

Rant over. I did my 2,000 words yesterday and I’m back on track. Penny Royal III has reached 123,000 words and I’m now into the end game.

Weeds 'n Stuff

Wednesday April 24th


So, we’ve been back on Crete for six days now, the first three of which were colder than in England and required us firing up the stove throughout. It is much colder than last year because then we only used the stove in the evening, and that was upon arriving here two weeks earlier. There was surprisingly little wrong with the house. Yes, the paint is flaking off part of one wall in the hall and there are patches of mould here and there, but we’re now a long way from the days of black ceilings and water features in our bedroom. I’ve also found a way to deal with that flaking paint/damp area. I’ll do what I did, and which seems to have worked, around the lower half of the kitchen arch here: after scraping it I put on a layer of waterproof tile cement. There have, however been other annoyances, some unexpected.

The car we left here over winter became the home for a mouse and the little bugger ate through the HT leads. This wasn’t too much of a problem as the guy looking after the car for me had them replaced. However, since then a warning light has been showing. The garage guy traced this to an emissions sensor on the exhaust and blamed water in the petrol. My concern is that it might not be that and that somewhere else in the car bastard Micky has chewed through some other wiring. I also recollect my mother having similar problems with cars she owned – in one of which the dashboard caught fire because the wiring had been damaged.

The garden of course was a jungle, as you can see by the pictures here:

No problem, thought I: I’ll just get out there and pull them up. This will be good exercise for me and a welcome change from my sedentary winter. The problem was that my sedentary winter had turned me into a wimp. After one day of pulling up weeds I was thoroughly knackered, aching all over and had the grip of a pack of wet sausages. Three days of weeding later and this is where we’re at:

We spent two days at the house working on the garden and tidying stuff up. Not having any shopping in we tried the new taverna that had opened in our village last year. Positive points and negative points there: It’s cheap – a half litre carafe of white wine costs €2.50, and a souvlaki €1.50 – they have internet down there, just a short stroll from our house, but the owner, with typical Greek lack of foresight, even knowing that we are here now for six months, overcharged us on both occasions we were there. First time a couple of €s went on the bill for no reason at all, while the second time he charged us for a carafe of wine we didn’t have. My inclination is to say fuck him and never go back there, but that would be shooting myself in the foot. Next time we go down there I’ll warn him, ‘Oshi extras’ and if he questions that I’ll show him the two bills and explain.

It’s warmer now and we’re venturing out in shorts. We took a visit down to Makrigialos yesterday, had something to eat in a cafe called the Obelix, played about on the internet and paid for the next level of that highly addictive game ‘Sugar Crush’. Interestingly, while checking Twitter, I found a tweet from someone claiming to have been about to buy my books but being put off by my ‘abhorrent political views’. As a guy called Jim Braiden pointed out on Facebook: ‘Remind me again which side of the political spectrum spends so much time extolling the virtues of tolerance?’

Quite.

Friday 26th April

In the evening here it was time for us to delve into the collection of DVDs we’d built up over the winter. The first film we watched was called Contagion starring Matt Damon and Jude Law. I usually enjoy this sort of stuff but the film was simply rubbish: disjointed, completely lack of emotion; completely lacking of fear. Oh look, people dying, sigh. Then, a couple of days later, I see a news story about bird flu killing people in China and now appearing outside that country...

The next film we watched was Passengers ... I say ‘watched’ in the sense that we looked at it for a while in a way one would perhaps experience Vogon poetry. I turned it off before my small intestine crawled up my spine and throttled my brain.

We did enjoy the first season of Alcatraz – in fact just about anything with Sam Neil in is good – however, after a few episodes and having nailed down the formula, we wondered if we wanted to watch about three hundred episodes to discover what the hell was going on. Perhaps those who financed this thought the same, since it was cancelled after this season.

And while I’m on the subject of films: I watched a clip of Robert Redford being interviewed concerning his Sundance film festival. Apparently, with the way the film industry is now, he wouldn’t have become an actor but chosen some other career. What a berk. So, you’d have been off to Waitrose to apply for that job at the checkout would you Robert? Seriously, these actors don’t live on the same planet as real people. Oh, and that reminds me of one of the presenters on BBC World talking to someone about pensions and investments. Even he flinched after coming out with, ‘But how does that apply to ordinary people like us?’

Snigger.   Update: Having just checked under ther bonnet of my car I see Micky did chew right through the wires leading to the emissions sensor.

Open Thread

Okay, since I'm going to be away from an internet connection for a while, fill your boots.

Mrs T.

Martin Durkin’s excellent documentary last night perfectly outlined my thoughts on the dangerous subject that is Margaret Thatcher. You can see it here on the Channel 4 catch-up site.

Many years ago when I received my first poll tax bill I of course did not like it at all. It was only in retrospect that I realised that there it was in black and white: this is how much your council, your police, your fire service … are charging to provide their services and here’s the bill. The knee-jerk reaction to this was to protest because of course it was all the fault of the evil Tories. I didn’t go to any protests because, unlike most of those throwing chunks of paving slab at council offices, I had a job to do. It was a stark reality check. The Poll Tax never went away and was just made more unfair by being rebranded Council Tax and then aimed at a target that couldn’t duck it: the home owner. No subsequent Labour government removed it. In reality it was as unfair as any tax to fund state-run organisations because you have no choice; all taxes are demanded with menaces. Which brings me to the 1970s.

A lot has already been written about how things were back then: just about everything state-run and inefficient, unions demanding ridiculous wage rises and striking at the drop of a hat, 33% and 83% income tax rates, rubbish piling up in the streets, endless blackouts, dead bodies going unburied and stacking up to the extent that one city even considered burial at sea, trains running a damned sight more erratically than they do now. However, one small thing can illustrate it better for people now: you didn’t even own your own telephone. We had the British disease; we were Cuba without the sunshine. Britain, prior to 1979, was under the dead hand of the state. And the British were sick of it, which is why Thatcher got in, three times, with majorities that today’s parties can only dream about.

So, Margaret Thatcher started closing down our industries and putting people out of work. She destroyed our country yada yada. Well, no, what she did was stop us having to subsidize moribund, unionized, inefficient, pretend industries that simply could not compete in the real world. We were living in the illusory world of twenty people building a crap car while hurtling towards us was the reality of one person and a series of robots building a good one. And yes, that did hurt and did put people out of work. However, that was because previous governments had been doing just what many governments are doing now with the financial crisis: kicking the can down the road. Reality was going to bite; it was just a question of when.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed our coal mining industry … except it was the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (managing to restrain himself from kicking that can) who closed three times as many pits as her, but that was okay, because Wilson was Labour, and a man. Never let it be forgotten that the coal miner’s strike was firstly illegal because Scargill couldn’t get enough miners to vote for it, and was secondly an attack by Scargill, and other left-wing apparatchiks, on the Thatcher government. It was about who ruled the country: an elected government that won three landslide victories, or the unions. That man used the miners as cannon fodder and, when it was over, it wasn’t him on benefits, oh no, he just toddled back to his 1.5 million mansion.

Anyway … the interesting thing that Durkin documentary highlighted was that Margaret Thatcher fought the establishment, both Labour and Tory, on behalf of the working class. The Tory ‘wets’ didn’t want the working class to have social mobility because, well, shudder, they didn’t want the plebs having the wealth to move in the same rarefied strata as them. Equally, Labour didn’t want social mobility because shit, if the oiks toss away their flat caps, buy white vans or mobile phones and start making money, where’s the sense of grievance and the client-base that gets Labour elected? The very idea of these people buying their own homes or buying shares in companies was anathema. In fact the unions told their members not to buy shares, and were ignored. Both parties had and still have their total snobs. You can see this attitude reflected in the term ‘yuppies’ and in Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character – this is the awful sort of thing that happens when oiks and plebs dare to rise above their station. Shudder.

In the end, of course, the dead hand of the state came back with Blair, Brown and the EU while, damn it, I would prefer to see people working in industries rather than as clients of the state – meaning either uselessly employed by it or on benefits – but how do you get round that? How do we get full employment in an increasingly mechanised world? A world which, in their way, the Luddites were right to fear? That’s a post for another time perhaps.        

Waffleblog

Right, I just managed to do my 2,000 words. This was after drinking far too much red wine last night, which resulted in me waking up at 3.30 in the morning and only dozing intermittently thereafter. And this was after I’d deleted some drunken tweets from the night before and while our house was overrun with plumbers – doors open, central heating off, electric fire just managing to stave off the cold. I’m not sure they’re very good words, but they’re down now and I can knock them into a shape another time. I then felt I should do a blog post and asked for suggestions on a subject. These included: hovering robotic coffee cups, steampunk prador, xenobiology and neural warfare.

Nah, as I noted on Twitter, I have a dead pigeon in my mental reservoir.

So I’m just waffling to see what surfaces (hopefully not the pigeon). Some bright spark suggested I do a post about Margaret Thatcher but, just like some of my old posts on Global Warming, I suspect that’d go down as well as bacon sandwiches in a Mosque. People’s opinions on both subjects have petrified and long since moved into the territory of confirmation bias. I have to wonder how much spittle is being wiped off computer screens lately.

More about the Night Shade Books thing perhaps? All you need to know is that I’ll be signing up for the new contract and crossing my fingers. I haven’t got the time to be too paranoid about books I wrote years ago because I’ve got books to write. And as for another idea I’ve been toying with – of all that’s been involved in getting my books published in the US – that I’ve promised elsewhere.

A book review perhaps? Well, I’ve just started Peter Hamilton’s Great North Road so there won’t be any reviews here for a while. Enjoying it btw, and was amused to see a character in there who works in publicity at Macmillan.

No, I’ll go back to those 2,000 words even though it’s territory I’ve visited before.

It’s not actually 2,000 words in total but of fiction. In reality, after I get up in the morning I first fill in a page in my journal so that’s about 200 words. This is sometimes quite difficult as you would expect in extending ‘got up, pissed about on the internet, wrote 2,000 words, ate stuff, went to bed’ to fill a page. Then there are the tweets, occasional blog posts and stuff on Facebook. I kid myself that this is all justifiable advertising and that writing on twitter is a good exercise in précis, but I just enjoy that shit. So, as I alternately muck about on the internet and write, I normally do my 2,000 words of fiction by about 3 or 4. On those occasions when things are going a bit slow the count might be 1,000 to 1,300 at that time, and by then and I’m thinking to myself I’m not going to hit my target. At 4 we have a dance to the Wii because the glamorous life of a writer is sadly lacking in exercise. After 4 I then usually polish off any remainder within an hour. Don’t ask me why. The workings of my brain are a mystery.  

 But next week things will change because we’re heading back to Crete. There, without an internet connection, I open up my laptop and have few alternatives but to write. There, because hell it’s sunny and I want to get outside, I usually polish off my word count by about 2. This year it’ll be the same for a few weeks as I complete the first draft of Penny Royal III, then I’m going to spend plenty of time editing and generally tidying up those three books, also writing synopses and blurbs. I look forward to the time, after that, when I can sit down and work on some short stories.

So, how do I end this? I know…

That’s all for now.

Final Days - Gary Gibson

"Science fiction asks what it means to be human; how we relate to our technology; and what our place is in the vastness of time and space" - Gareth L Powell (Ack-Ack Macaque). Gary Gibson’s Final Days fits neatly in there with its wormholes, ancient alien technology, questions about predestination, much more closely linked networked technology (in the form of contact lenses). But it also does all this in the form of Philip (Mortal Engines) Reeve’s reply to Gareth: "But crucially it asks these questions through the medium of explosions and running about in corridors." Both of them have put their finger on it. And this book is another fine addition to the vast questions with explosions genre. Enjoyable.

Update: I have to add that he's definitely been watching those video clips of 'Big Dog' from Boston Dynamics!