A friend asked me about China…

A friend asked me whether I thought the “Uyghur Situation” was an example of Sinophobic anti-China propaganda. I tried to answer on Facebook, but alas Facebook allows comments that are only so long, so, here’s my answer to that:

It certainly seems that way, yes. Let me ask: in every historical instance where genocide has occurred, there have been huge numbers of refugees. Xinjiang is China’s biggest province. It has thousands of miles of borders, which border onto countries that are all muslim majority, many of them are pretty iffy about China. So where are the thousands upon thousands of refugees? Either Chinese border guards are *insanely* efficient, way more than say American border guards, with their walls & listening devices and all that, or it’s just not happening.

In Chinese law, historically, ethnic minorities get better treatment than the Han. During the One Child Per Family era, it didn’t apply if you weren’t Han. Uyghur families were typically 8, 9, 10 kids or more. This is why the explosion in Uyghur population up to about 10 years ago. But then they brought in a less stringent law for the Han, saying, if you’re a city-dweller, you can have 2 kids, and if you’re out in the countryside, 3, but Han rights campaigners said “OK, sure, but apply it all round – everyone gets 2-3 kids max.” So Uyghurs were required to exercise a bit more restraint, and their population growth tops out. Still growing a bit, but not shooting up like a rocket.

One of the countries Xinjiang shares a border with is Afghanistan, where in the 90s, the US were training people to resist communism, to fight the Russians. They made use of, and deliberately radicalised, anyone they could get to fight. Some of these were ethnic Uyghurs, who got it into their heads that they could do likewise in Xinjiang. They attacked civilian populations in Xinjiang with bombs and with knives. (see https://time.com/83727/in-china-deadly-bomb-and-knife-attack-rocks-xinjiang-capital/ for an example) You may have seen the videos of Chinese shopkeepers training to stop knife attacks with these nonlethal pole weapons designed to hold an attacker safely at a couple of metres’ distance. That’s the Chinese response.

There hasn’t been a terrorist attack in Xinjiang since 2014. Part of the reason is they do what we do here & in France: if you’re found spreading terrorist material, literature, videos etc, that’s a prison sentence. If you’re falling in with the wrong crowd, if you’re at risk of becoming radicalised, here in the UK we have the PREVENT programme, and in France they have separate wings in prisons for radicalised inmates to stop the spread of radicalisation. In China they have vocational schools where people learn marketable skills to get a good job, and you’re helped into a job that’s good enough that you can send money home. The way China is though, a lot of jobs involve travelling away from home for a long while. Now, here’s the thing: I’ve seen these on videos from Europeans living in Xinjiang, where the local authorities let muezzins use the local PA system to issue the call to prayer. That doesn’t look like they’re trying to stamp out Islam there. There are 24,300 mosques in the region.

There are 3 main sources for the “Uyghur Genocide” story. 1 is a German anthropologist called Adrian Zenz. He’s never been to Xinjiang but he says he’s interviewed 8 Uyghurs, who said that 1 in 10 of their friends were in jail. Zenz factored that up, based on the idea that there are 11 million Uyghurs, and concluded that 1.1 million Uyghurs must be in prison. Zenz, by the way, is a Born Again Christian who says it’s his mission from God to destroy Communism, so, a fair and unbiased source with his finger on the pulse of local life in Xinjiang. Zenz works for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-government set-up (by act of Congress) and funded institution which exists to combat communism.

The second is the ASPI, the Austalian Strategic Policy Institute. This is a think tank set up by the Australian government & funded by their department of defence. They like to take satellite photos of bits of China & say “This is a prison camp! That is a labour camp!” – these have been roundly debunked by people actually going there and showing with photographic evidence tied in with GPS data, that no, this is a school, that is an old folks’ home. You may have seen reports of people “forced” to go work as cotton pickers. They’ve chosen the Xinjiang cotton industry particularly because to us in the West, we think of cotton-picking, we think of African-American slaves in the Deep South, right? Must be slaves. Er, no – China has a managed economy, that uses the market without letting the market rule. They’ve been engaging in poverty alleviation programmes, where if you have no job, they’ll fix you up with one, and yes, again it might be far from home, so they’ll put you up while you work on that cotton harvest, and you can send money home to Mum & Dad. Which they do. Last year, the Chinese government announced that they had completely ended absolute poverty in China. By absolute poverty, we mean malnutrition, starvation, homelessness. In China, people’s basic Maslovian needs are covered. Anyway I digress. Oh and everything’s a “camp” because they want us to think Nazis or Soviet gulags when often it’s just some temporary accomodation on a building site because the workers live hundreds of miles away.

The third source of disinformation on China comes from the Falun Gong aka Falun Dafa. Falun Gong sound like a nice traditional Chinese Tai Chi and dance company – you might see them exercising in the park. The truth is they are a far right racist cult. They believe that if you do what Li Hongzhi says, he’ll put a wheel of energy in your stomach that will give you super-powers like flying & stuff. Li Hongzhi is against Communism because it originated in Europe. He doesn’t think people of different races should marry, and he considers Chinese people to be racially superior to all others. They’ve been spreading this thing about organ harvesting, that FG/FD prisoners in China are being killed for organ transplanting, because according to them their qi gong makes their internal organs extra powerful. It’s insane, really. China bans Falun Gong because they’re basically fascists who want to destroy socialism within China, but also because their reliance on Traditional Chinese Medicine has actually killed a bunch of people. Like, take this herbal tea for your cancer – don’t bother with surgery, just meditate & do some qi gong, it’ll go away. If left unchecked that would become a major public health issue, quite apart from the racism.

So, with these 3 very shaky sources, we have a dominant narrative in the press and online of Xinjiang as basically Nazi Germany. What’s the motivation? Well, we’re past the Hubbert Peak with a lot of fossil fuels. Xinjiang is a vast oil and natural gas reservoir. Everybody wants that oil, which frankly is killing the planet – it’d be better off left in the ground.

China is set to surpass the US as the dominant economy, and they have plans to make a lot more friends around the world. They’re building ports and power plants, railways, all kinds of things, mostly for poorer nations. They’ve come from being poorer than the average African nation when they first had their revolution, to having the highest average purchasing power in the world (better than America already) and they’re set to eclipse America completely within 10 years or so. The Belt and Road initiative is set to help a lot of developing countries out of poverty too. It’s soft power projection, leading by example. If they can show people around the world prosperity from socialism with Chinese characteristics, they expect other people will want to set up socialism with Nigerian characteristics, socialism with Argentinian characteristics, and so on, adapting the system to fit wherever. They realise you cannot build communism in one nation only. You need to do it globally or it will fail, smashed by major capitalist powers like the USA. Xi Jinping’s government is all about learning from the past, and learning from others’ examples, without throwing away the baby with the bath-water. They’ve said that, for example, the Cultural Revolution was a *massive* error, like, let’s never do that again. They’ve been trying to build Chinese national identity as a group thing, bringing all their minorities on board & allowing everyone to express their cultural traditions. I really think that China holds the key to achieving world communism. The next few years, if America can avoid getting into another cold war with them, will be exciting.

Taking Up Skateboarding, When You’re An Adult

I used to be vaguely into skateboards when I was a kid. Basically, when I was at secondary school, I used to play tuba in the school wind band, and the local council lent me a tuba, which came in a bulky blue case, and I had a journey to school of around 3.5 miles, which was pretty epic. The bus did not always allow me on with it, and so when I couldn’t get the bus, I’d get my green plastic skateboard with yellow wheels and put the huge blue monster on top of that & trundle it all the way to school. You can imagine how much I loved my tuba. Not at all. I’d have dumped it in the canal if I thought I could get away with it. Sure, the experience of playing it in itself wasn’t bad, but the sheer logistical nightmare of taking it anywhere outweighed (literally – the thing weighed a tonne to my feeble asthmatic 13 year old frame) any fun to be derived from playing it.

But anyway, so I had this little green trashy skateboard, it was about 1983 or 4ish and so often when I was waiting for my lesson with Mr Clive Allsopp, a session musician and jazz trombonist from Yorkshire, who was quite a decent sort – he didn’t deserve the kind of grief I gave him as his unwilling pupil – I’d trundle around on my skateboard in the car park, carving big wobbly arcs on this thing I could barely fit 2 feet on.

After I gave up the accursed tuba, around 17 years old, I still had my skateboard, and I was in the habit of riding it anywhere and everywhere. It wasn’t tremendously glidey, so I’d push it like crazy & get where I was going anyway. For some reason I gave it up later – I don’t know what became of the board. Nowadays Penny Boards sells the same sort.

Penny Board similar to the one I had. https://uk.pennyskateboards.com/

So anyway, fast forward about 15 years and I hear about these guys calling themselves “Middle Aged Shred”. I’m about 32 or so at this point & working for Capgemini up at the HMRC in Telford, so I get on their forum & check out what they’re doing, and I end up buying a couple of boards. There’s a 7″ wide black “popsicle” shaped board with Independent trucks and Spitfire wheels (75a 60mm – squishy!), and there’s a huge beast of a longboard, billed as a “Green Fog Homewrecker Longboard”, with 65mm 78a Kryptonic wheels. It’s not bad but the damned thing weighs a tonne to carry, but it’s smooth as it gets on the ground. I take them down my local park, and have a go.

Witton Lakes Park – Image from Sutton Computer Services here: https://suttoncomputerservices.co.uk/

“What you got that for?” “Why you on a skateboard?” Kids gather round in moronic hordes. I just want to be left alone. I have a wobbly push to the end of the park, then take my board home, where it gathers dust for another 15 years.

15 years later, I’m kind of in a health crisis. It’s the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and I’ve been sat on my fat butt for the best part of a year. I have diabetes and I’m not in a good way. My dad’s gone into a 24 hour care facility the other side of town & it’s been about a year since I’ve seen him. I decide to get some roller skates, having seen some 30-somethings in the park zooming about on theirs. Trouble is I have a slow-healing wound on my foot & the skates I order from skatepro.uk are VERY tight, so in the interest of giving my foot some time to heal I get out the old longboard.

Which brings me to my point. When you’re a fat old git like me who’s not done much exercise in a year & gotten considerably fatter than previously, what do you do, how do you learn this young man’s sport?

First things first: you need balance and strength, and you’re going to fall over a lot. Get the right protective gear. Do not be afraid to pad up – when you’re 10 you bounce back from a fall. When you’re 50 you may need an ambulance. So, helmet, knee pads, wrist braces. All correctly sized and ready.

Before you get your board out, do this: get up out of your chair, very slowly. Take 20 seconds to fully stand up. Now sit down again, very slowly. Do that till it’s easy. It might take you a week or two. Now, do the same with no seat: do a slow, slow deep squat, right down, & get your knees onto the floor. Sit on the floor a bit. Get used to moving around on the floor. You’re going to be on the floor a lot learning to skateboard, so get used to it. Move from kneeling to sitting, to a crab position, to all fours, back to kneeling, rock back on your haunches, and slowly, slowly get up. Do that a lot for the next few weeks. Get so that being on the floor is nothing, getting up of the floor is nothing. You may want to try some “Animal Flow” exercises.

By this point you’re developing the muscles you need to avoid injury. Add some press-ups into your floor routine. Do everything slowly – you get huge benefit from doing it this way, and there’s much less chance you’ll pull anything by accident.

At this point we need to find out what your natural stance is going to be – are you an orthodox, left front forward, or goofy, right front forward, rider? Try to imagine when you were a kid, running up to a patch of ice or a polished wooden floor to skid over it. Which foot do you have forward skidding into it? That’s your front foot for your skateboarding. There are 2 main stances you need to know on the skateboard. The first is what we’ll call “pushing stance” – your front foot faces forward, and your back foot alternates between pushing you along, and resting across the board behind the front foot, usually across the hardware, the screws that secure your rear truck to your deck. The second is what we’ll call riding stance. We’ll get to that but for now let’s concentrate on pushing stance. Put your board on some carpet or on some grass. Stand on your board, front foot on, then back foot. Now balance on your board just on your front foot. Get used to how the board flexes and how it rocks side to side. Get so you can keep your balance for 2 minutes like that. Keep your front knee bent. Let your back foot just rest lightly on the ground beside the board. Feel it pull in your front quad. This is developing the muscle you’re going to need for riding the board.

Now let’s practise riding stance. In riding stance both feet are across the board, over the front & rear hardware most usually. Get used to controlling which way the board leans. When it leans towards the frontside it’ll turn that way, and when it leans towards the back side where your butt is facing it’ll turn that way too. Switch between riding stance and pushing stance, lower your back foot almost to the floor, then bring it back up behind your front foot & switch back to riding stance. Get confident getting on the board, getting into riding stance, going back to pushing stance, and getting off the board.

When you feel ready, it’s time to do all that on a flat concrete or wooden floor. Everything you’ve done so far, get used to doing it here. The difference is that when you shift your weight forward or backwards too dramatically, the board is going to try to roll in that direction. It may even dump you off and fire off in the opposite direction! That’s something to get used to – when you’ve done it enough you’ll get to know what you can get away with and what you can’t.

Now, finally, it’s time to push – why does this sound like a childbirth blog? Well, it feels like it’s been about 9 months of prep at least, though in reality I think we’re really looking at 4-6 weeks tops. Get on your board, on concrete, on a level bit of path or car park where you’re not going to be disturbed. You’re going to push a tiny bit, and get your feet on the deck, go from pushing to riding stance, then back to pushing stance, and push again. When you’re in riding stance, you can steer the board easily (if you can’t, you maybe need to loosen your trucks a bit). While pushing, it’s often harder to steer – consider unweighting your front foot from off the board if it’s veering to one side and adjusting where it’s pressing on while on the push.

That’s basically it. Just get used to pushing and riding the board. This should be your first couple of months’ riding at least before you try to do any tricks. We’ll get into ollies and the like later, but what I’ve laid out here is the safest way for an oldie like myself to get back into skateboarding, and that’s the method I’m using.

DISCLAIMER: If you do any of the things I’ve laid out here, you need to know that I’m not a doctor – this is not medical advice. I’m not a fitness instructor either. I’ve written this on the basis that you’re an adult and can make your own decisions. Skateboarding is a pursuit that will almost certainly get you injured in interesting and serious ways, but it’s also one that will teach you character, to get up after that fall & try again. I accept zero legal liabilities here – you do any of these things entirely at your own risk. I wish you all the best & have loads of fun out there.

Cyberpunk 2077, a review of sorts

I gotta say I approached this game with a huge degree of wariness, but my son had requested it for his Christmas present & I guess I had to address it from a position of knowing what’s actually in the game & what isn’t. What made me go “Agh!” was that there were adverts in the game featuring a trans or non-binary person whose body was objectified & who had a massive, MASSIVE, prn-star sized c*ck visible through their clingy skin-tight clothing. I thought, I don’t want to play a game that objectifies NB and trans people like this, this sounds nasty. But, having played the game a fair bit now I can say that yes, that advert is objectifying, but the game makes a point that *everybody* is objectified by the mega-corps like Arasaka and Militech. Everyone. There’s an ad using a woman’s boobs to sell dog food, another with a dude on a leash with the caption “Zeig Dich” in German, (“Show yourself”). S*x and human bodies are used as advertising throughout, and the whole point is the capitalist dystopia of Night City is a meat grinder that uses up and kills people. People made the point about the well-endowed trans person that HRT makes cocks quite small & not very functional, but we meet a guy in Watson early on whose crotch is smoking, because he’s had a cheap cybernetic dong grafted onto his body & it’s shorting out. Anyone, *anyone* therefore can have pretty much any kind of body if they want. Cybernetics is at the stage where folks get artificial arms as a fashion statement. There’s a gang who replace their eyes with a spider-like array of multiple sensors, and their leader looks like he’s had his frontal lobes removed & replaced with cybernetics. Anything is possible.

HOWEVER, within the game there are some lovely, heart-warming, sometimes heart-braking, attractive, well-written LGBTQIA+ people. The main ones that leap out are Judy, a feisty, nerdy lesbian lass, and Claire, the barmaid at the Afterlife club, who is trans, & who likes to race her truck in these highly competitive street races – but who’s only really into it because she wants to avenge her husband who was killed by a dilletante corpo. You can help her get her revenge or talk her out of it & help her that way.

Folks said it was copaganda, but the majority of cops in the city are murderous thugs, members of the biggest, most well-armed violent gang in the city. But even then you meet ex-cops who are either in desperate mental straits (Barry) or who were genuinely trying to help but got kicked off the force for trying to do the right thing (River). It’s a big city, lots of people, lots of stories. Some just awful, like the snuff-film makers who killed a Pastor’s kid & recorded the experience on a medium designed to let the user experience everything. I took the film off them & then visited karma upon them, killing the son before the father. There are the Voodoo Boys, with whom I sympathise greatly & think they’re fundamentally right but who are also so xenophobic against anyone who isn’t a Haitian from Pacifica that they use people & kill them off so as to maintain a firewall of security around their Reso Agwe, their island of separateness.
Yes, this is a violent game with some very dark themes, but it also has some great points to make about our world. It is so well-written that it’s had me shedding tears at various points, laughing at others and when it works right the art, the graphics are chef’s kiss. I’m glad I didn’t condemn #Cyberpunk2077 out of hand. Like they say of my home-town, Birmingham “It’ll be great when it’s finished”.

Fascism in the Mainstream Media

OK so this morning Abi Wilkinson was asking on Twitter what we should do about tabloid newspapers like the Express, the Daily Mail, the Sun & the Star, when we see them peddling out and out racism. Personally I don’t buy any of them, and I’m very ambivalent about the Mirror too. The worst in my estimation is the Express, which gives its support to UKIP. Its headlines are always screaming about asylum seekers “vanishing” or “NEW MIGRANT RUSH TO BRITAIN” or “HOW MASS MIGRATION MAY KILL OFF CORE BRITISH TRADITIONS SUCH AS CHRISTMAS”. 

Newspapers like these, in my opinion, are at the heart of why we idiotically voted to leave the EU. They’re at the heart of the rise in racist violence. They’re the ones fueling the kind of hate that sees hijabs ripped off the heads of girls and women just going about their daily routine, going to school or work, and that sees a frail old Muslim man get stabbed to death, like Mohammed Saleem 3 years ago in Birmingham or kicked and stamped to death like Muhsin Ahmed in Rotherham last year. 

In Liverpool you can’t buy the Sun. You can’t buy it because in the 80s the Sun started a campaign of demonising the working class beginning with the miners’ strike in ’84-’85, blaming miners for their horrific beating at the hands of mounted riot police while trying to picket Orgreave colliery, trying to save their industry which Thatcher threw under the bus in the name of globalisation & free market economics. This continued with the demonisation of Liverpool fans at the Heysel stadium disaster in 1985 and the Sun’s relentless condemnation of Derek Hatton’s rebel Liverpool city council who stood up against rate caps & restrictions that would have meant vulnerable people dying (as they are now under today’s Tory austerity), and then finally in 1989 the Sun broke the camel’s back by blaming Liverpool fans again, this time for their own deaths at Hillsborough. You can’t buy the Sun there, and if you could, you’d be vilified & rightly so. 

We’re seeing the same crap coming from all the tabloids these days. Xenophobia & racism. This affects us all. There have been Polish people stabbed and beaten for speaking their own language among friends. We as a society are turning into 1930s Germany. The Germans look at us and see history about to repeat, I shit ye not. 

So what can we do?  I think we can learn a lot from the “Don’t Buy The Sun” campaign. Billy Bragg did a song about it. People made stickers, and still do, and you can see them on lampposts & bus shelters. Get the word out. Talk to people. Challenge them. Assume that they’re reasonable & don’t want to be labelled a racist. Granted, a few might, but I’d lay odds that most wouldn’t. Have a friendly, non-threatening word with newsagents. Lastly,  maybe we need a poster campaign. We might need images of death camps – because that’s where these papers are leading us. Alan Kurdi is what happens when we swallow the Express’ shit. 

White feminists, now will you listen? (Trigger Warning)

Reblogging this from my mate Sam cos frankly it’s bloody important. TW: Rape

Left at the Lights

The more I think of the way she suffered, the more I feel an anger rising up amongst the bile. My stomach twisted as I heard of the ways in which she’d been savagely assaulted; having been violated with an iron rod, her intestines had to be removed. She was raped for over an hour by a group of men who did this only because she was a woman.

She could be one of my friends. She could be me aged 23. The rapists didn’t think about her family or her career as a paramedic. They weren’t bothered by her male chaperone. She wasn’t a person to them, just a thing to use, an object. While she lay fighting for her life in a hospital bed, another young woman ended hers. Oblivious to India’s extremely negative profile on the world stage, police officers in the Punjabi region of Patiala advised…

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RIP Pterry

I think I wrote about this before, but I’m not sure where I stashed it. It was some months ago, & I said something along the lines of, that although we’ve had plenty of warning, that when Sir Terry Pratchett finally shuffles off this mortal coil how bereft I would be. I wrote that this lovely old chap, who as Neil Gaiman says, burns & seethes with barely contained righteous anger & who isn’t really that avuncular old chap many perceived him as, this amazing fellow had been so much a part of my life since as far back as I can reliably remember, that his passing would leave me like the passing of a dear family friend. His books have made me laugh & cry, & above all made me think. And he wrote SO MUCH, and SO WELL. 40 Discworld novels, 70 books all told. I think I probably said that I was glad he was handing off to his daughter Rhianna, that she was a pretty darned excellent writer in her own right, and that anyone whose first & favourite old school game was MAZOGS on the ZX81 couldn’t be bad or wrong.

Well, it’s happened. I expected it, but yeah, that. It’s fucked up that he was ripped away from us at 66, that the disease that took him was one that attacked the very things that his identity was built upon – his imagination & his way with words. This gets me more than losing Leonard Nimoy. Leonard was special of course, but I never met Leonard. I did meet Sir Terry, and he was great – he signed not just my book but also a couple I’d got for friends who couldn’t make it, and he dedicated each one with a personal message to that person. A lot of people would be just *bosh* *scribble* there you go, generic squiggle, that’ll be a tenner, but no Sir Terry asked about my friend’s unusual name & when I told him its meaning nodded approvingly – it was a girl’s name, and it meant “rage”. Being the awkward aspie I am I got nervous & took my books & hastened out but I’m glad he took the time.

I first read “The Colour of Magic” in the early 80s after reading a review by Dave Langford in the old-school White Dwarf magazine before Games Workshop went all “in house games only”, back when they had Thrud the Barbarian & Gobbledigook as their regular comic strips, and published scenarios for all kinds of round the table RPGs like traveller & D&D, Call of Cthulhu and so on. Dave was spot on of course, and so from about 13-14yo I was hooked. My wife will tell you similar, and my brother in law’s shelves are festooned with not only Discworld books but also DW memorabilia – a resin sculpture of The Luggage for example, and Death.

Since his passing earlier today, it seems from Twitter that he was indeed universally loved. It’s not just me & my geeky family. It’s hundreds of thousands of us. We all lost someone significant today. My thoughts in particular are with those who knew him better, and especially his family & close friends. If I, a mere reader & fairly lazy collector of his books, can feel this bad that he’s gone, you guys… We all knew he was going, we knew for ages, but…

So anyway, before I start sobbing, I’ll raise another glass of wine & say “Here’s to you, Pterry!” – if you want to honour his memory, there’s a justgiving page here:

https://www.justgiving.com/Terry-Pratchett

A Man Walks Into A Bar…

From http://writingexercises.co.uk/quick-plot-generator.php

Your main character is a cruel 36 year-old man. The story begins in a bar. Someone telling the truth isn’t believed. It’s a story about loneliness. Your character offers to lend a helping hand.

I haven’t done any writing of this sort in nearly 20 years, so bear with me if this is a bit rusty. Nothing you see here is likely to be of what I’d call publishable quality for quite some time: Here is where I’m putting my doodles & ideas. We’ll see where this gets us.

The rain lashed down in big wet sploshes, deluging down through the branches of the forest, running in streams down between the trees, bringing twigs and the occasional leaf with it, downhill, washing down into the gutter at the side of the road. The parking lot was a small pond, muddy water inches deep around the tires of the trucks, lapping up over the bottoms of the wheel rims of a row of assorted bikes parked in front of the truck stop. Sodium orange streetlights blurred with white halogen & red neon, looking blearily through the downpour to the bar. The flickering sign above the bar door read “dies”. Welcome to Eddie’s Bar.

A greasy-haired man huddling by the door, cigarette flares as he takes a last drag. He coughs as he flicks it out into the parking lake. It fizzles before it hits the water, extinguished by mid-air raindrops. He’s through the door, out of the constant white-noise din of the rain & into a din of a different sort. Rock music from a rig at one end of an L-shaped bar, dark, warm & cozy enough for those that come here. The room jostles with life, men mostly, standing 2 or 3 deep at the bar, shouting their orders to the bar staff. Beers flow from draught taps into glasses, business is brisk. The clientele are a mix of mesh-back-hatted truckers & guys with lank, greasy hair, ink & tattoos. Each keeps to their own, tough old birds of a feather.

Down the far end away from the PA rig, a game of pool is in full swing.

Round the pool table, there’s a couple of old truckers playing pool against two biker types. One of the bikers is about 6’2″ tall, head shaven, sports a beard & moustache. He wears leather jeans & a Brando style jacket, cruiser style gear like he’s a typical Hell’s Angels kind of guy, but he wears no kutte – no MC insignia on a vest over his leather. His jacket is painted, words of an old, old story on the back panels in small, neat letters. The letters belong to an older time too: they are runes, and it would take a trained eye, or a learned one at least, to tell you what the story is. There’s a bet on: money in a stack on the edge of the table, and they’ve an audience. The other biker is stocky, dark haired, a goatee beard/moustache combination, His ink is conventional & unoriginal to say the least – an old sweetheart’s name later blocked out with the sort of “tribal” swirls that were popular in the 90’s. His jacket hangs on the back of a chair, the chair his current squeeze, a 20-something woman with raven hair, now occupies. The truckers are both overweight but you wouldn’t want to get into a fight with them nonetheless – they might not last 5 minutes in the ring but a bar-fight is usually down to who hits first, and if they can hit hard enough. These guys can. The older of the two lines up his shot, carefully – he’s on spots, 3 left to sink before the black, 3 to the bikers’ 1. There’s a hundred dollars of his money on this, but the beers he’s drunk tonight make his eyes blur just that little bit. He blinks hard & bends himself over the table to get the shot. He pulls back the cue, *smack*, sinks his ball, rebounds off the cushion, and juuuust clips the black, the 8-ball. It would have been perfect. But the 8 was right on the lip of the centre right pocket & hung there for a moment, before going in. “Shit,” he thought, “that’s the game – lost!”

“Bad luck, friend,” says Runes as he puts his hand on the money, & whips it away just as the second trucker smashes a pool cue against the table where the money had just been. Shit just got real. Runes drops into an open fighting stance, hands in a placatory “I don’t want to fight you” gesture, as the cue swings again now at his head. Pivoting on the balls of his feet, Runes turns in towards his opponent, the cue swinging uselessly beyond him, hip driving into the trucker’s mid-section, still turning, bowing downwards as the trucker sails overhead & crashes into the jukebox, the wind knocked out of him. Runes grins at the trucker’s friend, a grin that says “Just give me an excuse”, but the second guy is backing away, “Not my fight, man!” as he hurriedly exits stage left, not pursued by any bears, but happy to face the possibility of a soggy grizzly outside in the flood than risk what might happen if he tangled with Runes.

“Fucker!” the first man yells as he comes back again, renewed energy making him seem fearsome. People step back away from the combatants, instinctively. As the man charges, Runes blocks with an inside block, steps to his off-side & lands jab, jab, right hook, coming in close now, grabbing the man’s head, knee in his face, elbows now against the trucker’s crown, back of head, neck, and back as he starts to crumble. Runes demolishes the guy, blood dripping from the ruin that was a nose. As he goes down, Runes kicks him in the head, and there’s a crunch as he plants his face on the tiled floor near the bar. The fight is over, but Runes is looking happy, grinning a crazy, off-kilter grin. His fellow biker pool buddy grabs him & drags him off the trucker, Runes whirls round, ready to knock this guy out, but he grabs Runes in a clinch, yells in his ear “Hey, it’s *ME* – ROB! IT’S MARK! CALM THE FUCK DOWN, OK!”, and after a couple of seconds the spirit of rage leaves him. He gives  last desultory kick to the mewling, wheezing mess on the floor, spits a chunk of ear at him, and goes back to his seat, the one with its back to the wall, clutching the money in his fist. He grins to the other bikers with his bloody mouth. All the other guy’s blood. He’s a king, still. Nobody, *nobody* beats him, ya hear? The rage is going, and he’s clear again.

A few hours pass. The bar is a bit less busy, and the music is turned down low. Rob is holding court with his biker pals in a booth, when the door opens and in staggers a grizzled old man. He’s soaked through and shivering, dripping water on the floor, tap tap tap tap as he comes up to the bar.

“Evening, stranger,” greets the barman “What’ll it be?”

“I’ve no money, barkeep – but I’m in sore need of shelter & hospitality. Will you help an old man who’s weary of the road and needs to get out of the rain?” the hooded stranger replies.  “I may not have money, but I will pay back anyone who’ll help me.”

“Sorry, old-timer – I’ve a business to run here. I’m not running a flop-house or a food bank, or any kind of charity here. See the sign? Says ‘Don’t ask for credit’. So don’t ask.”

The old guy grunts at this. “Time was, we had a thing called the law of hospitality. When I was young, we never turned anyone away – because you never knew when it’d be you in need, and because it’s the right thing to do.” He turns, addressing the bar collectively: “When I was young, you might be caught out in the wilds, miles from home, needing to get somewhere for help, and the wolves would come after you. I tell you, once a pack gets your scent, and they realise you’re alone, that’s it. We used to make up stories that the trolls had taken them, them that disappeared in the snow. Wolves’ll eat everything and anything in the middle of winter. Nothing to find. Nothing to bury. Nobody wants to go out like that, eh? So. You help each other out, yes?”

“Trolls? Wolves? Are you trying to be funny, mister?” jeers a trucker in a blue puffa jacket, looking up from his plate of king-size burger & fries. “That’s fairy story stuff, or else you’re from Alaska or someplace. There’ve been no wolves round here in centuries.”

“No joke, sir. When I was young, there were wolves so big you could ride them – and winter was the Frost Giants’ time. You’d hear the howling of the wind, and shudder. You’d not know if it were wolves or trolls, or just the icy North wind. Now, would you help an old feller out?” he says, looking longingly at the food.

“Man, I work for a living – you get your own food!” – the trucker takes a bite of his burger & looks to his friends, and they turn away from him. Not welcome here, old man, go away.

“Listen, mister,” says the bartender. “You’re disturbing my customers here. I’m gonna have to ask you to l-”

“Leave him be.”

Rob is standing up again, strides across toward the old man. He looks him hard in the face, though his face is in shadow. One eye hidden by an old piece of rag tied across diagonally, and a long grey beard the colour of steel.

“I… I know you don’t I?” says Rob. “You’re… Look, come & join my guys over here. Bartender, give him whatever he’s after: it’s on me. I won’t have you turned away, no sir.” – and with that he brings the old guy over to his table, gives him his own seat, and sits down beside, a look of wonder and not just a hint of fear on the scarred fighter’s face.

The truckers across the way, the guys who’d been eating burgers & fries before, get up to leave. As they walk out the door, a flurry of snow blows in. Things outside have turned a lot colder. A sound like a rising & falling keening floats in over the snow, and the truckers shiver involuntarily.

The barman brings over a big plate loaded with steak, egg, potato wedges, you name it. Our strange visitor tucks in with a grin, slicing through the meat with gusto. “Who is he?” Mark asks. “Never ask him. You must never ask him. Just treat him right. Seriously, Mark – you fuck this guy over & you’re dead. There’re stories, I know: I’ve read them.”

Old one-eye glances up from his meal & grins at Mark, a wolf grin. He looks at Rob’s rune-painted jacket & nods his approval, as he tears into the meat.

Outside in the parking lot, a mini ice age has taken hold. The water, 6 to 8 inches deep around the trucks’ tyres is now a solid sheet of ice. You would have more chance of skating to the next town than of driving there – and the snow piles up, thicker & deeper all the time. The guy in the blue puffa jacket has just about given up trying to start his Peterbilt Bullnose rig. Frozen solid, inside of 20 minutes. He gets out of the truck again thinking to get back into the bar, slipping and sliding on the car-park ice as his foot hits it, and he sees them in the near white-out. Eyes, pairs of eyes and the puffs of vapour, breath clouds. And then teeth. “Oh God! Oh godohgodohgod!” he whimpers, warm wetness leaking down his pants as he takes off sprinting towards where he knows the bar to be. It’s just a few yards, surely, but he hears their panting & snarling getting closer, slips on the step leading up to the bar entrance, chins himself on the kerb as he falls, and knows no more. They are upon him. It’s a small mercy that he’s knocked out from the fall as the pack tears him apart, strips of flesh & sinew & cloth & bone, until all that’s left is a MASSIVE bloodstain & many, many footprints, like those of giant dogs, in the snow. And still the snow falls. The last signs that he’d been there are covered over, red fading to pink as the snow drifts deeper, to white.

“So, Robert, son of John, son of Harald, son of Joseph, son of Wilhelm, son of Sven, descendent of Sigurd the Berserker of the Geats, I must thank you for your hospitality!” says the old man, to Rob. “I see you know something of the old ways, and you respect the traditions. That’s right – I know more about you than you do yourself. I see more with this missing eye than most do with two. That’s an interesting bit of poetry you have there on your jacket. You know what it says, don’t you?”

Rob smiles, a flicker of nerves passing over him. “Yes, sir. It says:

I know that I hung there
on the windy tree
swung there nights, all of nine
gashed with a blade
bloodied by Odin
myself an offering to myself
knotted to that tree
no man knows whither the root of it runs

None gave me bread
None gave me drink
down to the depths I peered
to snatch up runes
with a roaring screech
and fall in a dizzying faint

Wellspring I won
and wisdom too
and grew and joyed in my growth
from a word to a word
I was led to a word
from a deed to another deed”

The old man grinned his wolf grin & applauds.

“Well said! Remember it, lad. Remember always. I remember it. I remember writing it when I first discovered the runes.”

and with that, he vanishes. Not out the door, no bang or flash, he’s just… GONE. And outside, the snow is already being washed away in a heavy torrent of rain, big drops splatting down through the leaves of the wood, a white noise hiss which almost, but not quite drowns out the faint sound, the faintest hint of a sound…

Howwwwwwwwllll…

Writing Exercise: “Who from your past do you wish were still around?”

(From http://writingexercises.co.uk/subjectgenerator.php)

It’d be easy to pick one person in particular here. The obvious choice is to pick an elderly relative who you miss, who died. And yes, my first impulse would be to pick my Grandma. My mum’s mum. When I was a wee lad she pretty much brought me up. My mum went back to work as a teacher, and my dad was out & about trying to grow a small business, so both myself & my sister were brought up by our Gran, certainly through our pre-school years up until we went to secondary school. When we were little she took us to play group, and used to treat us to fingers of fudge from the local shop, or a bar of Caramac, a light brown caramel fudge concoction. She was there for us until the stress of living with us all under the same roof got to her & she moved 3 miles away to Bentley Heath. Even then, I made a point of cycling the hilly route to her bungalow every weekend, and I’d cut her hedges or mow the lawn as needed throughout the summer. She for her part would push cake & tea on me, and when I smoked would crash her fags with me.

The thing is though, when she moved closer, round the corner to Alston Close, I’d go round, but it became a mercenary thing – I was broke & she’d always crash me some fags or something, but she was all out of stories of the old days – they’d been told to death, and as a teenager I was not a great listener. I’d go out of a sense of duty, more than anything. Sometimes it was fun. I made a point of giving her my old cast-off video recorder & I’d hire Voyager VHSes from the video store on Dovehouse Parade. Gran got me into sci-fi. When my dad was being a pig I’d go & sit with her & we’d watch old Star Trek episodes or Doctor Who, so when Voyager was out on video but hadn’t yet made it to broadcast syndication in the UK, naturally I brought them to show my gran. But really, towards the end, it was kind of tedious. I’m sorry – it sounds awful, but to a 20 year old, 80-somethings are pretty boring, when they’ve told you all their tales a dozen times.

When she was gone, I felt horribly guilty thinking that. She’d given so much for us, and I was grateful, honest, just… how awful her life had become, housebound, stuck in that bungalow with only the TV & me & her one surviving friend who came round. She’d got gradually sick over decades, osteoporosis leading to a curved spine, leading to a hiatus hernia, which in turn squeezed against her heart & gave her angina when she ate anything more than a mouthful. Every so often she’d have a serious angina attack. Not a proper heart attack as such, but she said the pain was excruciating. We’d go & visit her in hospital.

She lived long enough to meet my wife, when we were still just dating. I think she died before we married. It’s a long time ago now & I’m not sure of the timing exactly, but I remember thinking, at last her suffering is over. She’d wished for it so often, when the angina struck. We buried her in Robin Hood cemetery in Shirley, in the plot she’d laid her husband in 3 decades earlier. I do miss her occasionally – it’d be nice to introduce her to the kids.

But still around? No. She’d be 100 years old now. Think how decrepit she’d be! She’d probably hate it for the most part.

No, I reckon my gran earned her rest, & it came at the right time for her. She’d done all she’d wanted to & just wanted to go on to the next thing, whatever it was. Gran was a devout Catholic, and she fervently believed in a heaven & hell set-up, and knew with some certainty she was going upstairs. She’d been a daily communicant as a girl, never missed her confession, always said her rosary.

There is someone I would like to bring back, assuming he came back with his full faculties & wasn’t a brain-crazed zombie. One of my old school chums, who I named my son after. He had a fairly turbulent time of things, in his teenage years. F was half Ghanaian & half English. He was a skinny kid, great at distance running, and also pretty handy at judo as it happens. He spoke with a stutter a lot of the time. The teachers used to say his brain was working 10x as fast as his mouth & his mouth just couldn’t keep up with all he wanted to say.

F was one of my clique at school. We were the nerdy kids. He liked chess, and we all liked computers. We’d go round his, a big gaggle of us, to play games on his ZX Spectrum. His parents’ place was huge, or so it seemed to us. They didn’t heat it much in the winter. I remember seeing a big bluebottle fly on the wall there when I was there to play computer games. It was so cold this poor thing could hardly move, and ended up falling right off the wall, unable to carry on.

When we were at college, F fell out with his dad. I suspect it was probably 20% his dad being concerned that he was going to fulfil his potential, and 80% F being a stroppy teen. He moved out into a homeless hostel where some crazy guy downstairs from him flipped out when F over-filled his bath & flooded the downstairs flat. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, if some skinny dude kept flooding your flat.

Only F had a reason why this happened, and it was the same reason his teeth were all chipped. Throughout school, F had been prone to these absences. Not absence from class, but he’d start doing some rhythmic activity absent-mindedly, such as bouncing a ball, and he’d just not be there. You couldn’t get his attention. Well, it turned out that was petit mal epilepsy & later as a teen & 20-something, it became grand mal. As if nautical nonsense was something he wished, he’d drop to the deck & flop like a fish – a tonic-clonic seizure. One time, crossing the Stratford road, he caught that faint odour that meant it was coming on, and had to fling himself across so he wouldn’t get run over. He dove onto a pile of sand & gravel & smashed his teeth on the stones.

It was actually pretty rare that I’d see these seizures. My sister also has epilepsy & I’ve seen her fit more than F did, which was why it was such a surprise when the big one came.

F had finally managed to turn his life around, in his mid-20s. He’d passed his A-levels & was studying at Surrey University, in Kingston. His sister found him. He’d apparently had a seizure, and for whatever reason, he’d had a brain haemorrhage. He was dead, and that was that.

So that’s why I’d wish him back – if F had all his faculties, there was *so much* he could have done, so much he wanted to do. His stories hadn’t been started, hardly. His life was a first few opening chapters, and then a big stretch of exposed spine where all the pages had been ripped out. My gran, sure, she was a lovely woman, but she wouldn’t want to be back. F had missions he wanted to fulfil, so many things, so much potential.

Statement of intent

I’ve made a break, of sorts. It’s a sort of break that’s happened before, and I daresay it’ll happen again.

I got into the Internet in a big way when I was at university, in around 1993 or so when we had JANET, the Joint Academic Network, and we’d use command line IRC clients & Telnet & the like to get into *nix talkers, MUDs, MOOs and so on.

Then there were web-enabled chatrooms where we’d use graphics as signatures & spam up the whole chat with pictures of Dana Scully in PVC & think we were awfully clever using Japanese pseudonyms.

Then usenet, uk.people.gothic, alt.gothic and so forth. Whole scenes revolving around usenet. And then we all moved en masse from upg and ag to Livejournal. And that was good for a few years. And then they were sold to the Russians, who wanted to monetise us, so we went to Facebook & Myspace, and left Myspace for Facebook.

And for a while, Facebook was The Thing, and Livejournal was uncool & covered in Miss Havisham cobwebs, and she still sits in her Russian wedding feast festooned room, weeping at our loss for all we know. Myspace was barely my anything before we left.

So anyway, lately, Facebook took bad against us, and banned us because our names didn’t meet with their approval. Google Plus had been a thing, briefly, but they burned our trust thinking it was the coal in their boiler room. I’m still kinda half-heartedly there a bit, but that’s in lieu of having anywhere solid for us to coalesce around, we nomadic net.goth ghosts.

Currently the thought is this: distribute. Don’t put too many eggs in one basket. Be everywhere, and yet nowhere. If a site proves untrustworthy, cut it out. Facebook is now in my hosts file. It redirects to “NO”.

Different things for different things: Twitter & to an extent Tumblr for random, often political shit. Here, will be dragons, and pirate ships, tank battalions & aliens. I’ve decided that here will be for creative writing and hopefully mostly positive blogging about writing. G+ will be my pseudo-Facebook for now, though I reserve the right to uproot that yurt & trek off to new steppes with my horde – or my dribs & drabs as they’re becoming. Many remain on Facebook yet, but I feel like being a pioneer.

Anyway, so mote it be. Papa Legba – Ouvri barrière pour nous!