Save Our Forests - What would be the reason for buying a forest?

The UK government are talking about selling off the publicly own forests. If I had the money to buy a public forest what possible reason could I have for doing so? I have access to such land now and, I suppose, I can use it for whatever purpose I choose so long as it's not destructive. That must therefore mean dog walking, taking the kids out, nature rambling, etc.

So why spend a large amount of my own personal wealth on such a project? The only reason that I can imagine would be to restrict access so that I alone can use it. Anybody who wishes to buy our national forests should not be allowed to do so because of that very possibility.

Sign the petition here

Danger of publisher's offer going down the pan

Back in the autumn I submitted a couple of proposals to publishers that were accepting submissions from unagented writers. I spent weeks writing a suitable proposal with the help of a consultant who knows about these things because it's more of an arcane art than the occult practices that I write about.

Then I waited...

And I'm still waiting.

The afore mentioned publishers said that they don't enter into correspondence. I'm sure they got the text for that disclaimer from the small print of competitions on the back of cereal packets from when I was too small to sit on a chair and touch the floor. You had to read the competitions because there was nothing else to do while eating a bowl of Wheataflakes with milk and enough sugar to give you cancer.

So I find myself wondering what happens if they actually do like a submission and how much trouble they go to when they get back to you? Will they send one email or will they try to find a phone number? Or will they even try to track down your blog or even your book?

My greatest fear is that someone will reply to me and the message will end up in the spam trap only to get deleted amidst all the ads for fake Rolex watches, erectile dysfunction drugs (if you are lucky pellets of chalk that wont kill you) and special offers for septic tanks.

Observations of similarities with Terry Pratchett are to be discouraged

The life of a writer isn’t always full of glamour. I’ve spent the last two months writing a manual for a laboratory machine that incubates water and tests for pathogens. I had the summer free because there weren’t any photocopier manuals to be written. Apparently Terry Pratchett used to be a technical author working for the Central Electricity Generating Board and he used to write press releases about how there hadn’t been a radiation leak. Really, there hadn’t! And I get the impression that he would have been about the same age as I am. So if the similarities don’t end there then perhaps there’s hope for me.

I’m currently rushing home each night in the hope that I’ll have enough energy to edit the next chapter of the first Hidden Masters novel. I’m hoping to tighten it up a bit and put it out as a second edition with a new ISBN. That way hopefully Amazon won’t list it as out of print. It’s not out print even now; if Amazon tells you that the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil is out of print they are lying to you! Let them have me for defamation or whatever they want. I bet Terry didn’t have this trouble. Apparently he used to rush home to work on the next Discworld novel. This was before he was really famous and he still had a day job. But he didn’t have to deal with the slings and arrows of outrageous small press publishing.

What’s the point of all this? Not much really. Blogging about the publishing life means you have to post something and sometimes it’s not all that glamorous. But why should it be any more entertaining for you than me? Well okay you are the reader and I have an obligation to entertain you. So here’s a poem I once wrote about a spoon:

How I wish
I had some tea
for my spoon
so sad to me

Oh God
can’t you see
that my spoon
would wish to be
a greater spoon
a boon to me

If you could grant
just a little tea
but please quite soon
or I might swoon

So please grant
my wish so humble
treat my spoon
and I’ll not grumble

So much happier
I will be
if my spoon
could stir my tea

Inspired by Nick Harrison (who is not a spoon)

Extract from the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

From Chapter 2 - The Hidden Masters on Astral Travel

The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil contains many mysteries, mostly relating to how three middle aged pauncy blokes can drink that much and still manage to save the universe. However, occasionally the book contains insights into the world of paganism and the occult. One such pearl of wisdom, from Chapter 2, covers the subject of Astral Travel.

* * *

For some years now The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, had cherished a theory about astral travel which goes a bit like this.

Many people say that it is possible to leave one’s body and travel on the astral plane to visit other places while the practitioner’s body stays put. There is also an idea that there is a silver astral cord which connects the astrally projected presence back to their body. However, there are differing ideas of how this works, and about whether it is possible to visit places that exist in reality. The question is always one of verification.

If you choose to examine the issue, the point is this. Let’s say you travel, or project, onto the astral plane and go around to the chip shop in Queen’s Square, which is a short hop from where two of our heroes live. There you see your friend Pete buying a chicken and mushroom pie and a portion of chips with a can of Coke. Quickly you return to your body and phone Pete up (assuming they haven’t yet invented mobile phones that work on the astral plane). Would it turn out that he had really been at the chip shop buying pie and chips once with a side order of Coke? In other words, do the things you witness while travelling on the astral plane really correspond with what, for the sake of argument, we have to call the real world? Furthermore, if this is the case, can horny single male magicians visit the bedrooms of women they fancy and… well, let’s not get into all that just now. (Try to stop shivering, girls, it’s never worked so far.)

This is a philosophical debate, which is a bit odd in itself because the old pie and chips experiment is probably quite easy to set up, so it ought to have been resolved by now. However, none of our heroes had ever met anyone who had successfully identified someone buying pie and chips once, with or without a side order of Coke. On the few occasions when they had heard of someone who had tried this sort of experiment the results had been less than clear. For example it turned out that the character Pete, who I have just made up for the purposes of this illustration, was in the habit of buying pie and chips on most nights. Thus it would have been a good guess that he was going to be in the chip shop anyway.

Of course, a specialist in the philosophy of science such as the Grumpy Wizard of the West might suggest that this is all nonsense. You see, his perspective would suggest that the fictitious character, Pete, is likely to be so fat, having undoubtedly eaten all the pies, that he is the first person anyone would see when approaching the chip shop from either the astral plane or anywhere else. Actually he wouldn’t say that, but what he might say is far less likely to be amusing.

What is really needed is something so unlikely and easily verifiable that there can be no mistake. So imagine you astrally projected around to Queen’s Square—apparently so named because she opened it in her coronation year of 1952, though I don’t suppose she remembers—and found Fat Pete being arrested for having broken into the Post Office to get some money to buy pie and chips. During your astral vision, there was a reporter photographing the event for the local paper which came out the following Thursday, with Fat Pete the Post Office burglar all over the front page. Then you might say that this was all so unlikely that it had to be verifiable. In this case, you could go up to the Grumpy Wizard of the West and say “Ahhhaaaaaaaa!” But then again, he’s not known as the Grumpy Wizard of the West for nothing, and even then he might try to wriggle out of it. You see, the Grumpy Wizard of the West is one of those magicians who does not actually believe in magic.

Anyway, that’s the sort of argument you will hear in the debate on astral travel when you talk to many magicians, witches, scholars of the mysteries and the like. On the other hand, there will be those who will resist all attempts at debate on such matters, and will never examine an issue in case they discover something they don’t like.

However, our heroes saw the old astral travel debate in a completely different way, for they had come up with another explanation. They had noticed that amongst their magician friends there was often an unbreakable bond to the place where they lived. Usually this bond would go deeper, attaching them to a particular location in their home, namely a favourite chair—often with a good view of the TV—known as the ‘god spot’.

The concept of the god spot, or more pointedly the concept of godhood, comes from the idea that magicians are considered to be the centre of their universe, surrounded by an ever-shifting sea of possibilities. The magus commands the universe and those who inhabit it, in a similar way to that in which the Christian God is said to command us. (Of course, all this talk of magic is okay but I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to believe in God!)

Now, The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, had this theory that the bond attaching the magician to his god spot was where the idea of the astral cord had come from, and any idea of astral travel was just a development of that concept. On the occasions when they had observed magicians abroad in the world, such as visiting friends far away, they had noticed that there seemed to be some sort of pull on the magician which tugged him back towards home at the earliest possible opportunity.

After all this philosophising, and the odd bottle of dark rum, our heroes had concluded that the much-debated practice of astral travel, along with the idea of the silver cord, had come from this truth that they had observed. The travelling magician is attached by a length of silver elastic, which connects him to his god spot and, inevitably, returns him there before too much time has passed.

Taken from The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

Read another extract

Among those recently deified:

Duke of Edinburgh: worshiped in the South Pacific by a cargo cult
Elvis: shrines all over the show for years
Princess Diana: Apparently there are churches to her now
I’ve heard of similar things happening with Michael Jackson

And on Monday morning Claire Rayner: The Patients Association on the BBC Today programme declared themselves as her representatives on Earth.

Halloween

Last weekend was Halloween. Okay, so it wasn’t but for our local pagan community we made it Halloween as certain people couldn’t make it the following weekend. Halloween, or Samhain as it’s known by most modern pagans, is seen as the time of the year when the veil between the worlds is at it’s thinnest. It’s seen as a time for divinations and the like as the spirits that communicate with us at the time find it easiest to get through.

You can see this how you like. As a philosophical rather than a theological pagan I tend to see all forms of divination as being the same. Whether by Tarot cards, astrology or contact with the dead the result is the same, that we manage to gain information or insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have. All these divination systems free up our intuition and seem to enable these insights and the source becomes irrelevant.

The actual date of Halloween is also a bit of a moot point as it’s more a factor of the time of year. We are finally saying goodbye to the summer, autumn is no longer in doubt and to an agrarian dweller the world seem to be dying. So the date, give or take a week is somewhat irrelevant.

However, Halloween isn’t only about Tarot cards and apple bobbing. It’s a time for remembering our dead. Many pagans have a respect for their ancestors, but remembering some amorphous people who’s names we hardly know and certainly never met seems a little distorted when each of us most surely have been to a funeral or two. So when we come to remember our ancestors let’s pay homage to those recently departed, Aunty Jane or Uncle Bob, or even Mum or Dad. It matters not that they may not have shared our path because despite the fact that they may be different to us, may have opposed our pagan perspective or may never have known who we really are, these people are our ancestors. These recent ancestors are our flesh and blood we should remember them for, perhaps, nobody else will. And if we do then, perhaps also, those that come after us will remember us.

I am an arse - well partially at least

It seems publishers are beginning to look to self published authors for their next talent. This is great news for self published authors waiting to be discovered. But look just below the surface of these claims and you discover that publishers are looking for self publishers who have achieved good sales of their self published books. So they seem to be using successful self published authors as a way of reducing their exposure to risk.

Read Alan Rinzler's blog about this here

I’m a pretty incompetent publisher. I’m a fairly incompetent marketer. I’m a completely incompetent publicist. When it comes to being a self publicist I’m a total arse! I am a self publisher.

I can’t phone up a venue to say I’d like to do a book promotion for my own book because I feel like they will think I’m a wannabe, unable to find a publisher because I’m crap. I know that’s not the case but it’s what’s going through my mind. During the brief time when I had a publicist I did readings, signings, all sorts, and I had a great time. Having somebody else to represent you gives you credibility. I can do all the web promotion, social networking, all that’s easy. When I started I chose a pen name so I could pretend to be a second person when I was acting as my publisher. That way I might disguise the fact that I was self published. It didn’t really help much because what I really needed was another team member.

I’m a writer, I’ve been writing for twenty years, mostly corporate or technical content with some copywriting and a bit of journalism thrown in for good measure. Now I’m trying to break into a new field, writing popular mass market comic fiction.

Saying that publishers are going to judge the potential of a self published book on sales seems ludicrous. I know these are businesses but, surely, when a manuscript lands on their desk they judge it on the manuscript. It’s got potential or it hasn’t. Expecting self published books to show fantastic sales is just saying that they only what to publish books by business gurus. I write deeply absurd comic fiction with philosophical themes that make people laugh out loud on the train. I know that’s true, my readers have told me so. But I don’t have tens of thousands of readers out there because I have no way of reaching the mass market. Even blogging and tweeting isn't going to  bring you to the level that the industry are looking for as people follow bloggers when they have whiff of success, rarely before. Plus some of the bigger on-line sellers list print on demand books as unavailable or out of print! The industry is actively blocking the one man bands.

Publishing insiders claim that there isn’t a wall around the industry. Saying that self published writers are welcome, then picking up one or two as an example to show how open the industry is, just means they have extended the wall to block a minor breach. The rest of us are still on the outside.

Druids are recognised religion - Daily Mail journalist turns out to be mystical seer

The past couple of days we’ve heard that the druids have been recognised as a religion. As I understand it the truth of the matter is that The Druid Network has been granted charity status by the Charity Commission and this was because they needed some sort of legal status due to the fact that they are collecting money from their membership. The fact of the matter is that they applied for charitable staus, presumably because their organisations isn’t set up to make a profit and one might imagine that there are no shareholders. We might imagine that the Charity Commission have had to have a box to put them in and the only box available was religion. The alternatives might have been anything from a sports foundation an animal welfare organisation. It doesn’t necessarily mean they are recognised as a religion by the state but apart from the relationship between the Monarchy and the Church of England I’m not sure that the UK recognises any religions anyway.

Today there was a wonderfully disapproving article in the Daily Mail by Melanie Philips complaining that the whole world is going to rat shit and no doubt Christianity should be the one true faith and all that.

See the Daily Mail article here

 

Ironically I think Melanie Philips (see Daily Mail article) has a surprisingly good grasp of the changing times we are living through. She's just raging against the new reality. She recognises the weakening of heavily structured top down faiths and its partner, heavily structured rational perception. She understands how there is a continuing upsurge of bottom up, grass roots religions where people gain some autonomy but also have to have a sense of responsibility rather than externalise all their experiences both positive and negative. What she fails to understand is that there are other established faiths and practices, such as Buddhism, which don't have this top down structure and they are stable if not growing.

So apart from that last little oversight I reckon Melanie Philips, bless her undoubtedly Tory cotton socks, should be revered as a prophet and a seer. ;o)

Read my book about this very subject here

Extract from the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

Chapter 3 – Ritual Mechanicians

Having broken down on their way to Blackpool, to save the place from becoming a seedy, tacky and depraved town, our magickal heroes are wondering how they will be able to continue their journey.

Inside the crowded motorway services at Knutsford, The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, sat around three cups of coffee and three doughnuts. Nigel’s hair steamed gently as it dried off in the warmth of the café. Around them, the sound of The Girl from Ipanema wafted gently above their heads in a version almost, but not quite, specifically designed to induce madness.

“What do you propose we do now?” asked Wayne.

“Well, I left my tools at home, so I could get all the gear in the boot,” replied Clint.

“That was a spectacular idea,” responded Wayne with a sarcastic tone.

Clint looked at Wayne with an irritated look, but didn’t have time to say anything as Nigel spoke. “I’ve got a multi-tool.”

“‘Scuse me, can I borrow your sugar?” asked a burly caricature of a truck driver. He sat down at the opposite table with a copy of Steven Hawkin’s Brief History of Time and a folded copy of The Sun newspaper.

Wayne passed the sugar to the truck driver who proceeded to pour a long stream of its contents into his steaming mug of tea.

“A multi-tool?” quizzed Clint.

“Oh yes,” replied Wayne enthusiastically, “rather clever, brushed steel devices similar to a Swiss Army Knife, except that they have spanners and scissors and contraptions attached. They are awfully good.”

“I had a Swiss Army Knife once,” said Clint, “it was made in China.”

“That would be a Chinese Swiss Army Knife then,” responded Wayne.

“That’s what I used to call it.”

“Can I look at it?” asked Wayne of Nigel.

“No, that’s a bit personal. Piss off!” replied Nigel.

The truck driver glanced across at them briefly over the rim of his mug.

“I think he means the multi-tool,” said Clint.

“Oh yeah, sorry.” said Nigel in response “It’s in with my stuff for the weekend.”

“Surely not in with your magical equipment?” asked Wayne with a mock tone of shock.

“No, with my spare t-shirts and clean underwear and stuff.”

Clint raised his eyebrows at Nigel. “You brought clean underwear! I bet you won’t use it.”

“There speaks the voice of a true festival goer,” replied Nigel.

“That all depends what we come up against this weekend,” injected Wayne in sympathy. “I remember the last time we saved the universe, I nearly …”

Nigel interrupted before Wayne could say anymore, “Too much information!”

Clearly, Wayne’s grammar school education, which he sometimes claimed was a fee paying education, had only influenced his accent and had not affected his sense of vulgarity, or rather lack of it.

“We could try to suss out what’s wrong with the car,” said Clint bringing the subject back on topic. “The way it happened so suddenly, it sounds like electrics.”

“On the other hand, it could be mechanical,” added Wayne.

“Or fuel,” continued Nigel.

“Well, that would just about cover all the options,” said Clint completely unimpressed, “I suppose, I should check it out.”

Clint was definitely the most mechanical of the trio, not that he did much of that sort of thing these days, preferring to trust to the infinite cycle of the second-hand car. Having been in the Royal Navy as an engineer, he had experience of all sorts of machines from the huge Deltic diesel engines, used in locomotives and ships, right through to some of the first nuclear power plants in submarines. Having left the navy so many years ago, he didn’t do much with engines now. These days he drove a road sweeper for a living, described as having more instruments than the Starship Enterprise.

“I think we should enchant to get it started,” said Nigel hopefully.

Clint looked scornfully at Nigel. “No way, man, you can’t do a ritual to repair a car!”

Nigel continued. “Well, if it’s an electrical fault, and a wire has just come loose, then surely a microscopic or quantum level of change might just be enough to make a contact.” The truck driver raised an eyebrow, glancing up from Stephen Hawkin as he took a longer look at the trio.

“I think you’re a bit out on the edge there,” responded Clint.

“We could draw a sigil in the oil on the top of the engine and perform an enchantment.” added Nigel becoming enthused.

“Let’s have a look at that multi-tool of yours,” replied Clint, trying to ignore Nigel’s madness, “and who said there’s oil on my engine?”

Nigel was, by now, scrawling a phrase on the back of the till receipt that read ‘Get us to Blackpool’. He crossed out all the letters that occurred a second or third time in the phrase and was quickly left with ‘GETUSOBLACKP’.

“Look dudes,” continued Clint, “you two are weirding me out! I can’t believe you are even thinking about this!” Clint’s complaint was tempered by an attempt to avoid raising his voice. Looking about, he checked that there was nobody paying any attention to them.

Wayne looked on silently for a moment then added, “Perhaps it would be a good idea to add something pertaining to getting us home again?”

Nigel stopped and gazed into the distance for a moment, as he is inclined to do. Some think that at these times he is consulting his inner oracle while others suggest he is listening to the voices, others believe it’s down to indigestion. “No I don’t think so. Once we’re there we’ll be fine. We’ll get back okay,” he replied with confidence.

“I think, perhaps, I can detect a Ten-inch Pianist coming on,” said Wayne with a note of concern, but without any care for people who might overhear the statement.

The truck driver glanced up briefly from his book and frowned.

* * *

The Ten-inch Pianist is a term The Three Hidden Masters use for any magical working which could go awry. The idea came from the joke about the man who walked into a pub and put a tiny man and a piano on the bar. When the barman asked for some explanation the customer explained how he met a Genie who gave him his wish for a ten-inch penis, but he happened to spell his request wrong. It’s an old joke, but it serves a purpose.  So the Ten Inch Pianist is used for acts of magic where the magician gets exactly what is asked for, rather than what is desired.

The fact that the truck driver and a couple of other people in the café thought they heard Wayne say ten-inch penis was completely missed by our three heroes.

* * *

Nigel tore off and discarded the part of the till receipt with the original phrase, so he had just the string of letters remaining. Then, on a separate scrap of paper, he started to draw a diagram made up of each of the letters in the string. This left him with a jumble of letters, some large, some small, some upright, some inverted, which people in the know will recognise as a sigil. Those of you not yet in the know can think of this as a magickal symbol. The original piece of receipt, with the string of letters, was discarded into the ashtray and he held up the finished sigil.

“Okay, orrff we jolly well go,” he declared.

As The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, got up, they nearly bumped into the truck driver as he stood up to make his way towards the toilets. Stepping back carefully, the truck driver let them go in front of him making a mental note to avoid any contact with them again.

* * *

Out in the drizzly car park, now with more wind than rain, they stood in front of the slightly descript Japanese car. The bonnet was up as Wayne held a torch for Clint as he looked at the engine, gently tugging wires and leads to see if any had come loose.

“Here it is,” said Nigel emerging from the boot as he squeezed from between Clint’s car and an elderly Volkswagen Beetle which had parked close behind them. He proudly held aloft a small elongated leather pouch with a press stud closure.

“That is nice,” declared Wayne taking the pouch from Nigel. He was fascinated by the quality of the workmanship as he looked at the fine stitching and smooth hardened leather. “This looks like one of those devices available from Sunday supplement catalogues for executive toys.” He popped the press-stud and removed the smart brushed steel multi-tool from inside.

The folded device was about ten centimetres long and perhaps two or three centimetres across. The ends were pleasantly rounded with a pair of rivets through each end. The rivets at one end were connected by a hidden hinge between the two sides and each side had a small elliptical cut out, which Wayne grasped as he pulled the two sides apart.

Unfolding the device, he pulled the two sides outwards and back on themselves as they rotated around the rivets at the connected end. This left Wayne with a pair of pliers about 15 centimetres long and a series of other tools now revealed where they had been hidden in the handles.

“Where did you obtain this delightful device?” asked Wayne as he passed the tool to Clint.

“Oh, I treated myself to it when I left my last job,” replied Nigel as Clint examined the various penknives, screwdrivers and things for getting boy scouts out of horses’ hooves. “It was in the shop at work where you can buy all sorts of executive stuff like in those Sunday supplement catalogues.”

* * *

What none of our heroes knew was that Nigel’s multi-tool was an imitation of a device known to many as a Leatherman. Quite where Nigel’s multi-tool originated they knew not, but it may very well have been from China. Of course this would be another example of synchronicity and the interconnectedness of all things. Perhaps then, all multi tool copies—whether they be Chinese Swiss Army Knives, imitation Leathermans (Leathermen?) or other such cheap versions of useful camping equipment—are connected in some way by a sort of symbolic representation of handy screwdriver and boy scout removing essence. There may even be a demi-god of imitation multi-tools, subordinate to the god of genuine branded multi-tools, all paying homage to the greater god, Grand Old Penknife himself who leads the pantheon from his palace in the shape of a neat little pouch hanging on the belt of the supreme deity of all campers, Ray Mears … or something.

* * *

As Clint tried the various options offered by the multi-tool, tightening screws, fiddling here and there, Nigel leant forward to look at the top of the engine.

“Has it cooled?” Nigel asked.

“Sure, it’s okay,” replied Clint “Try turning it over,” he said looking up at Wayne.

Wayne climbed into the driver’s seat and tried the ignition…

Nothing.

Clint continued to fiddle under the bonnet, but he knew it was really just for show.

“I don’t think this is really doing any good.” Clint was growing a little frustrated by the situation. “We’re hung up without my full tool kit.”

Nigel leant forward over the engine and brushed his finger across the edge of the air filter cover. Looking at his finger tip, he observed a thin film of blackened oily grime. “Hmmm.”

Clint looked up at Nigel but said nothing. His silence, however, was enough to show his disapproval at what Nigel was clearly suggesting.

Wayne stepped out of the car and stood with the other two staring at the engine.

“I think we should put our robes on,” declared Nigel.

“This is rubbish!” replied Clint.

“Well, we have to do it properly, if we’re gonna do it at all,” responded Nigel to Clint’s complaint.

“What sort of magical weapons would you recommend?” asked Wayne.

“Not you as well!” said Clint increasingly irritated as he tried crimping a wire as a last ditch attempt at rationality. “I suppose you’ll suggest you want to use the sacred soldering iron of the art!”

Nigel was not at all fazed by Clint’s sarcasm. “Well, there is an argument to suggest that in this sort of circumstance the mediaeval elements and weapons would be inappropriate.” As he spoke, he was already carefully copying the sigil from the scrap of paper onto the flat circular space on the air filter. “Grab my robe from my box, will you Wayne.”

Wayne opened the boot and pulled his robe from his violin case and then rummaged around for Nigel’s from the tarot chest.

“All right then dude! Just what sort of magical weapons would you suggest?” Clint spoke in a defiant tone.

“I’ve got a multi-tool!” exclaimed Nigel smiling. He was clearly gleeful at having got the better of Clint.

Wayne handed Nigel an unkempt bundle of grey fabric as he struggled to pull his own black robe over his head.

As Wayne and Nigel climbed into their robes, Clint looked on in some disbelief. The large car park was quite dark with cars peppered here and there but mostly away from where they were parked. Their robes were of different designs, but they were similar in that they were both hooded and very flowing. Nigel’s hood was detachable where it was attached to a diamond shaped tabard the width of his shoulders. Once in place, the matching grey tabard came to a point at Nigel’s waist both at the front and back.

Wayne and Nigel tied knotted white cords around their paunches, leaving the loose ends hanging down to one side. They pulled the hoods up, giving them some protection from the wind and rain, but also obscuring their view as the deep cowls were blown across their faces.

“I’m getting in the car,” said Clint. “You two are going to get us busted!”

“Ready?” enquired Wayne. Nigel nodded in response.

Unnoticed by the two magicians, a figure came out of the building and started walking towards them.

“The abbreviated version I think?” asked Nigel of Wayne in a deliberately overacted voice with more than a touch of pretension.

Wayne nodded in response as the wind blew their robes flat against their bodies causing the rolls of fabric to outline their contours as they billowed like sails.

Holding up the multi-tool, Nigel began his magic with the standard incantation that he used in most of their rituals. This was the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram. There is a Greater Ritual of the Pentagram, but they tended to use the lesser as it was easier to remember and they couldn’t be bothered with the extra complications of the full version. It was adapted from the works of Aleister Crowley, who undoubtedly got it from someone else, probably McGregor Mathers who, in turn, had probably got it from someone further back in history, in much the same way that second-hand cars change hands.

The Greater Pentagram ritual can be used for both banishing or invoking, but The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, tended to use the lesser ritual, just for banishing at the beginning and end of their ceremonies. Effectively, it was like a magical air freshener, which banished the mundane world at the beginning and banished any unwanted magical influences at the end. (The Grumpy Wizard of the West might have interpreted this with the idea that it primed the mind for magical practice and made you feel like a magician.) This time, because of the circumstances, Nigel shortened the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram even further to its most basic elements.

Bringing the multi-tool to his forehead, he spoke with a deep, vibrant, serious tone, “Ateh.” Touching the tool to his chest, “Malkuth.” Touching his right shoulder, “ve-Geburah.” Touching his left shoulder, “ve-Gedulah.” Clasping both hands to his chest with the multi-tool between them, “le-Olahm.”

As the truck driver approached he stopped dead for a moment, almost dropping the collection of chocolate bars, CDs and other stuff he had just bought in the shop along with his copy of A Brief History of Time and The Sun newspaper. As he stood there, he felt the wind gusting, blowing the rain into his face.

Holding the multi-tool in his right hand, Nigel drew a five-pointed star in the air above the engine and chanted, now in a more guttural tone, “Ye-ho-wau, Adonai, Eheieh, Agla.” When delivered, each word was almost reduced to a single syllable, forcing the words out with a punch on each breath.

Extending his hands out to either-side, he spoke again, his voice now strong and clear, the bat-wing sleeves of his robe blowing dramatically. “Before me, Raphael; Behind me, Gabriel; On my right hand, Michael; On my left hand, Auriel. For about me flames The Pentagram, and in The Column stands The Six-rayed Star.”

Dropping his left hand to his side, he raised the multi-tool to his forehead again and repeated the first sequence of movements, only this time with greater resonance. “Ateh, Malkuth, ve-Geburah, ve-Gedulah, le-Olahm…”

The wind seemed to blow stronger, his voice trailing off on the wind and rain as he paused, standing before the car in silence save for the sound of the weather. Clint looked on in continued disbelief from his position in the driving seat.

Looking around to see if anyone else was taking any notice, the truck driver continued to walk towards his car. Apparently he wasn’t a truck driver at all, or if he was it was his day off. He ducked his head down to escape the worst of the rain in his face.

Nigel stepped back, his work complete for a moment, as Wayne took his place and began to enchant with his face raised to the heavens and the wind and rain lashing his thick black beard.

Nearly all of Wayne’s words were lost to the lorry driver as he neared them. He did hear something sounding like ‘give us the swiftness of the beasts that we might run’ as he skirted round the back of the Volkswagen Beetle, fumbled for his keys and quickly climbed inside. He never took his eyes off the two robed figures standing in front of the Japanese car, dripping with rain by the time he sat behind the wheel.

Wayne finished his incantation and stepped back from the engine of the still silent car.

Clint sat in the drivers seat with the door partly open, not daring to look at the figure whom he had seen climbing into the car directly behind. He called out to the two magicians. “I told you man! You can’t start a car by magic!” The others seemed oblivious to the off duty lorry driver behind.

The lorry driver sat and stared at the antics, as he watched Wayne lowered the bonnet while Nigel approached Clint’s door.

“Do you feel better having tried that?” enquired Clint.

Thinking it was time to leave, the lorry driver, grasped the gear leaver of the Volkswagen Beetle, depressed the clutch and turned the ignition key. The engine of the Beetle burst into life, his wet foot slid off of the worn clutch pedal and the car shot forward at as much speed as an ancient Beetle might muster under such circumstances, perhaps even more!

There was a crunch, as the front of the Beetle pushed forward into the slightly descript Japanese car, denting the rear—so making it that little bit more descript—causing its boot lid to close as the whole car rolled forward. Having been left in gear, with the ignition on and the handbrake off, something microscopic took place deep within the mysteries of the engine, and the Japanese car burst into life continuing to roll across the car park, towards the exit.

Wayne, still standing in front, leapt out of the vehicle’s path as Nigel looked on in amazement. Their hooded faces looked at each other across the space where the car had been, stunned for a moment, as it started to move away from them, the engine revving as it receded. Then, taking to their heels they chased after Clint as he wound the window down shouting for them to get in.

The driver of the Beetle–now half sitting, half standing in the open door of his car—called out to the disappearing magicians, shouting after them.

“Sorry … my foot slipped!”

Wayne and Nigel clambered into the back of the increasingly descript Japanese car amongst a flurry and tangle of hoods, batwing sleeves and general hanging out robes. At the same time, music started to emerge from the tape player, something appropriate about leaving.

“Who left it in gear then?” asked Clint of Wayne.

“You must have left the handbrake off,” replied Wayne.

“And you left the ignition on,” continued Clint.

“I would have sworn that bloke was a lorry driver when he sat down next to us in the café,” said Nigel, “it just goes to show how you can never tell people by their appearance.”

Meanwhile, back in the car park at Knutsford Services the driver of the elderly Volkswagen Beetle thought exactly the opposite as he spoke to himself.

“You can always tell a bunch of weirdoes when you see them!”

Taken from The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil

Read another extract

Have we reached the peak of the scientific model of reality?

Radio 4’s Today programme, today, had a short feature on the thoughts of a physicist named Russell Stannard. In his new book he suggests that we may be coming to a point where science has made the majority of its major advances and that we may not be able to learn a great deal more about the universe.

This is very interesting as this concept is the absolute core of the subject of my first (non fiction) book written back in 1989. In Satanic Viruses I suggested that by observing astrological events I could predict that the Age of Aquarius, that people thought had been a flash in the pan, would really begin to take off in the last decade of the twentieth century and continue to accelerate into the new millennium. People may not remember how the seventies and eighties really were but many of the ideas that have come to be acceptable in our culture simply would not have been given air time or a place in people’s thoughts before the turn of the nineties. We can easily see the flavour of the change in that we have gone from a culture that asks ‘where do we live?’ and ‘how shiny is my Porsche?’, to one that also includes concepts of ‘how are we going to survive as a community, or even as a species?’

Without repeating the whole book my thesis was that we were moving from an age that was characterised by heavily structured modes of thinking into one that would be more fluid. Religion, for two thousand years, has been characterised by hierarchical, top down, structures but those religions would soon be faced with the prospect of people seeking more personal bottom up solutions to their philosophical and theological dilemmas. People would seek answers from within rather than from a god that lies without or above.

Over the same two thousand year period, hence the subtitle of the book ‘The fall of the Roman Empire and how to bring it about’, science has developed hand in hand with the dominant religions of the world. However, science, as we know it, is also greatly dependant on those heavily structured models of thinking. So my thesis was that we might be about to witness the end of science as the dominant world view.

Now it seems some scientists are beginning to say something strikingly similar. Russell Stannard, described in the Observer as a high energy nuclear physicist at the Open University, has written a book titled The End of Discovery. He seems to be suggesting that humanity may soon reach a time when the peak of scientific discovery may be behind us.

Much of what science now investigates, particularly in his field of physics, now requires such massive experiments, such as the Large Hadron Collider, that we will soon no longer be able to investigate the next level down. Apparently Stephen Hawkings cherished M-theory, associated with string theory which few people really understand, would require a collider the size of a galaxy to perform the required experiments. It seems some physicists are so attached to M-theory, despite its lack of an equation to define it, that they are saying it must be right because it is elegant. Elegance is often a feature of that which is described as truth in science but it’s hardly the only test. This is beginning to sound like faith and may be evidence of the change taking place before our eyes.

It strikes me that we have been faced with other apparently insoluble problems in science for some time. One example is complexity theory, where our models have to be so complex that we can no more predict their behaviour than we can that which they model. Weather forecasting improves with the increase in computing power but there may be a scale of diminishing returns as the models become more complex. Another field that may suffer from the complexity problem is the study of consciousness which has been promising results just over the horizon for as long as I can remember. However the brain is so complex that we can’t model it for the same reasons as we can’t model the weather.

Obviously Stannard, and I, may be wrong as this sort of end of science has been predicted before. The Observer article describes how, in the 19^th century, it was predicted that science had discovered everything that there was to discover. I remember an old issue of the Fortean Times that quoted a Victorian gentleman who said that transatlantic communication would be impossible because the flag would have to be as big as Ireland. Clearly there are some developments that we can’t predict but this time things may be different. Science has become massive and expensive. Some research can only be performed by nation states or even conglomerates of nation states and many companies are unwilling to fund blue skies research because they want a return within a reasonable period.

It may turn out to be the case that there is research to be done but who will want to fund or perform it? If, as Stannard suggests, new developments start to become less frequent over a longer time scale, people may just decide to do other things with their lives.

However it comes about, either by us feeling we have learned as much as we need, or finding that’s its just too much trouble to learn any more, the result will be the same; a diminishing of the influence of science and, perhaps, a consolidation of the benefits we can glean from what we already know. It seems then, the end of the road might be within sight. Of course with a two thousand year time scale the end may not be any time soon but it looks as though it may be on the way.

Link: Satanic Viruses - The fall of the Roman Empire and how to bring it about 

Link: Observer interview with Russell Stannard on his new book The End of Discovery

Just remember I said this in 1989.