Scorpions in the Post Office

I was in the Post Office the other day and I discovered, much to my dismay, that they had rearranged the whole place and introduced a new queuing system. The idea of queuing systems, in themselves, are a bit on an anathema but to be taken by surprise by one is that much worse.

So I walked through the maze and found myself immediately at the front and stood there waiting for a vacant counter. After a few seconds the nice man behind a counter to the side waved me over from where they sell all those peripheral things that aren't stamps and parcel deliveries but the Post Office depends upon for its survival. As I approached he pointed up at the ceiling to a sign that explained that this counter could also be used to buy stamps and parcel deliveries as well as all those peripheral things, etc.

bottom-on

In response to the nice man gesturing at the sign that was by now directly over my head, and therefore completely out of view due to the fact that it was end-on (or rather bottom-on if you'll excuse the inference) and thus unreadable, I suggested that the sign was not really very useful to people as people don't look up. The nice man weighed my two promotional copies of The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil that I was sending out to reviewers and while he was doing so I explained that people looked at the floor because that's where all the scorpions are. I think, at this point, the nice man decided to give the whole situation up as a bad job and refused to communicate any further and just pretended that he had missed the whole of the preceding conversation. I was equally happy with this result as by now my packages had been weighed in the balance and, having been found wanting for twice two Pounds and seventy Pence I completed the transaction, made my excuses and left. However, I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to explain myself. So I'll explain it to you.

You see I heard something on BBC Radio 4 recently (where one eventually hears everything of any interest if one waits long enough) that said that the human head naturally tilts forward such that the field of view is 15 degrees below the horizontal. I think they put it down to the weight of the brain or something but I put it down to scorpions.

shoes

You see if you are walking through the African savannah in bare feet, because you don't have any shoes due to the fact that they aren't due to be invented for another two million years, you need to be looking at the ground just so that you don't tread on a scorpion. Of course you could tread on a snake or big spider or anything else and these things could also drop on you from trees so looking at the ground exclusively would be a bit of a problem (and that's not counting the sabre tooth tigers) so field of view is a bit of a compromise as things far away might also be important, such as rapidly approaching sabre tooth tigers. But the point is we have perfectly good reasons for looking at the ground and it's not just to spot dog shit, although that's a very good reason especially if you grew up in the seventies.

So when they design signs for Post Offices or supermarkets or airports, perhaps they might like to consider what life was like on the African savannah two million years ago before the advent of cobblers, which might be what you've just been reading.

Who are the Hidden Masters and where do they come from?

I had my first media interview on Tuesday evening with Bill Thompson of the thebookcast.com to talk about the recent global release of The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil. The experience was a little nerve-wracking but not as bad as I might have imagined. (As the experience recedes I suspect I'm forgetting the worst of it.) Naturally I feel I answered some of the questions better than others but one question sticks in my mind.

The concerning question was how the main characters, the very Hidden Masters described in the title, got to be the people they were. For those of you not in the know, the heroes of our adventure are apparently perfectly ordinary individuals whom you might meet in the pub. Their only difference being that they are practiced in the arts of the occult to the point that they save the universe at weekends before going back to work on Monday mornings. They are extraordinary individuals who do not look like the people they actually are.

uncanny

However, when asked how they came about I was stumped. I do have some back story for them, Clint was in the Royal Navy and now drives a road sweeper, Wayne sells beer for a living and might have cheated his school entrance exams and Nigel, well I still can't remember his back story but I'm sure I put one in. I also had ideas about where they get their extensive knowledge about everything under the sun with one constantly hanging out in museums of all kinds across the world, one having an uncanny ability to find any information on the internet no matter how obscure and the other addicted to Open University courses but he never bothers to take the exams.

But how did they get to be these guys? I simply hadn't thought about that. When asked the question I blabbered on a bit about people coming to paganism from all sorts of paths until I realised I was talking generally about paganism rather than the characters in the book. Since then, while I was painting the windowsill in the room upstairs the answer occurred to me.

pianist

Each of us has no idea about the bloke who sits across the isle from us on the train every morning. He might be a mechanic in a bus garage or an administrator in a dog food company. However, more difficult to detect is the thing he does at the weekend. How often have you discovered that the person you meet in your first day at a new job has an extraordinary skill, perhaps being a wonderful pianist or a talented salsa dancer? They don't make any money at their skill because there is no way to do so but they have done the 10,000 hours practice that are said to be required to master a skill completely.

There are extraordinary people walking amongst us every moment of the day but we never know it. They're not gods or immortals; they're just ordinary people who are quietly getting on with life. They don't brag about it, they just do it. Aleister Crowley once said that every man and every woman is a star. The Three Hidden Masters, two from Hemel Hempstead and one from Bricket Wood, are extraordinary in that very way but it didn't take some miraculous back story for them to get there because, basically, they are just like you and me.

Find out more about The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil here.

See the You Tube video here

A banker a jouranist and a security guard walk into the Olympic village

We've all been equally horrified with the revelations of phone hacking and bankers' irresponsibility.

Hacking celebrity phones was something we didn't get too worked up about over the years, I even remember the story of the phones of the royals being hacked and nobody cared too much. Then it turned out they had hacked the victims of terrible crimes, families of murder victims and we all got up in arms. Many of us have long felt uncomfortable with the self interest of the British press. Before the hacking we've seen stories with blatant bias or bare faced prejudice, but we've had to shrug and get on with life.

spotty

Meanwhile we've all felt that the financial services industry has not been 'serving' us for decades. There has been one miss-selling scandal after another: endowment mortgages; inappropriately risky investments; payment protection insurance; hedged interest rate risks on small business loans; churning; section 32 pensions; unsalable auction-rate securities; interest rate swaps; long term care funds; free-standing additional voluntary pension contributions; state earnings related pension opt-outs; and that's to name but eleven. However, we've all known this for years. We instinctively know this when the spotty oik in the electrical superstore tries to persuade us to take out an extended guarantee on the fridge we are buying. We know that the policy is just a financial scam to increase their profits and will most likely be a total waste of money. In short we know not to trust it.

So what's the connection between the two? Why have they been able to get away with this for so long? The answer is fairly obvious, they're both influential in the corridors of power.

cowed

The media are able to hold the government to ransom, that's any government of any colour. Don't get fooled by the suggestions that the previous government didn't regulate the media so this government aren't as bad as the last lot. They are all cowed by public opinion and that public opinion is massively manipulated by the press. If the press doesn't like what the government does, any government of any colour, they manipulate the coverage, sometimes in subtle ways but often less subtle, and make life hard or impossible for the government. And so they influence government policy.

The financial sector, meanwhile, hold the purse strings of power. Granted left wing governments are more likely to get funding from unions but by no means all of it comes from them and to survive in the modern world they have to have funding from industry. Plus once they are elected the markets have much greater power as we can see every day in the levels of interest paid by government to fund the country's borrowing. That's governments of every colour.

So the problem seems to be one of democracy. The people we vote into power don't really have any control over what happens. Governments can fiddle around the edges with tax and spending but they are ultimately operating at the discretion of the major corporations be they banks or the media.

lympic

As alarming as that may seem there are plenty of other examples. The Olympics (perhaps I shouldn't use the word lest I get my collar felt for naming the official brand?) is now on us and the event is sponsored by food manufacturers that peddle the sort of food that the athletes just wouldn't touch; McDonalds, Cadburys and Coca-Cola, laced with sugars that make us fat no matter how much exercise we do; Dow Chemical infamous for the Union Carbide disaster in India; throw in a couple of financial institutions, an oil company a credit card company and you get the picture. Then we hear that deals have been struck where the sponsors get exclusive use of the word Olympiks (while the café round the corner has to paint out the O and become the 'lympic café') and they get away without paying tax.

To state the obvious the thread through this whole series of issues is that the companies are too powerful and hold us and our elected representatives to ransom. However, there is a fight back and it's the Olypmics that might be showing us the way.

cock

For the last week we've been hearing about the massive cock-ups at G4S the company tasked with supplying security staff. Consider that this is a mission critical responsibility. We’ve heard all sorts of stories about them not being able to recruit enough people. Today on the BBC Radio 4 World at One a reporter said, "Staff are paid only after they do the training and when they do the job." Then on the day significant numbers don't turn up for work. What could be the possible reason for this?

"Now Mr Smith, you've been on benefits for six months now so you have to take a job if it's offered." Mr Smith nodded cooperatively at the young woman opposite and kept a poker face while he waited to find out what the deal was. "There is a guarantee of work for you working for the security company at the Olympics. I think they are called S4C." Mr Smith looked a bit surprised having been to Prestatyn on holiday the previous year but didn't say anything to the clerk. "You'll get free training (but won't get paid for your time) and a nice uniform with a badge. Of course if you refuse to do it you might lose your benefit because it is guaranteed work. I'm afraid it's quite low wages but what else are you going to do? And I promise they won't take you to London and drop you under a bridge in the middle of the night and tell you to sleep on the pavement." Mr Smith looked unsure. "I promise Mr Smith, that won't happen again. Of course you have to be available for work and when it's all over you can go back on the shelf," Mr Smith looked taken aback by the sudden attack of honesty, "…err back on benefits." she added hastily. "And we expect you to be grateful, reliable and loyal to your new employers for the trouble they are going to on your behalf."

Anyway, I don't suppose it was like this at all, well not much anyway.

bubble

We are told that market forces are the way to run the economy. Laissez-faire policies came in with the deregulation of the financial markets in the eighties and that conventional wisdom has tied the hands of any politician who might have recognised we were in a bubble before the 2008 collapse. It didn't take divination skills to see that it was coming, the only doubt was when. At the same time we've had hands off regulation of the media, particularly with the Murdoch empire but others too and if any government tried to reign in the media they were crucified for their efforts. (The most memorable criticism I can remember of Neil Kinnock was that he had red hair! I mean what the fuck?) In the mean time corporations refuse to pay their tax or use their muscle to push governments into doing as they say.

The problem isn't so much the colour of our government (although politicians that have connections with these corporations will be less likely to reign them in). Laissez-faire means letting the corporations have their way. If we want things to change we have to stand up to these people.

The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil in paperback

I'm pleased to announce that the new paperback (third) edition of the Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil is now available.

This is the book that many of you will have read in the first edition with the green cover or the eBook edition with the black cover. This edition has been published by Twin Serpents of Oxford and is based on the tighter editing that was produced for the eBook which included the new dialog passage in the first chapter. The new paperback edition also includes one extra joke which isn't in any of the earlier editions.

The link here is to the Amazon UK page. It's also on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other main retail sites. If anybody has any trouble finding it let me know I'll see what I can do to track it down in your area. (ISBN 978-1905524334).

Here's the promotional video on You Tube

Would the Daily Mail care how dead people write?

It's difficult for dead people to write in the first person. That's what I realised when I wondered about the writing style for my main web site. I checked some of my favourites but it was the fact that Douglas Adams can't write in an engaging voice that helped me decide. I don't write about comic science fiction but I hope to do for the irrationalities of paganism what Douglas Adams did for science fiction.

Daily Mail

Paganism is said to be the seventh largest faith group in the UK but we're still waiting the results of the census on that one. You'd think they'd tell you when the results are due but perhaps they're as afraid of the Daily Mail taking them to task as the rest of the world seems to be. Well I'll tell you this about me, I don't give a flying fridge magnet about the Daily Mail.

chickens

I write about the modern pagan movement that we used to call occultism. It's a very philosophical world and doesn't involve cutting the heads off of chickens, if you think it does you're confusing it with farming. Recently I've been concentrating on comedy stories about three blokes who go away for the weekend, drink way too much strong drink, smoke pot until it comes out of their ears and perform candle lit ceremonies that some people would mistakenly describe as Satanism. What can the Daily Mail do to me that I haven't already done to myself?

Satanic Viruses heads for fourth edition

Further news is that I've been working on an update of my first book Satanic Viruses: the fall of the Roman Empire and how to bring it about. This was published in 1989 and has been released in various formats since. It's an examination of the way the world is changing and has been said to predict the structural changes in society we are witnessing now. The final part of the book which sought to suggest a way for people to circulate their ideas through information viruses has now been rupersceded by viral communication on the Internet. It's this part that I'm currently working on. I have also found that there are other recent commentators, such as Alain de Botton, who have been expressing similar ideas to mine about the whole left in society by people's move away from religious perspectives. All this and more is to be found in the future release of the book.

One important change will be that I'm retitling the book. It's been suggested that the term Satanic Viruses suppresses sales in the US. This may be the case. The title was originally a play on the title of Salman Rushdie's infamous Satanic Verses although the two books have nothing to do with each other. The reference to Satanic is related to the book's reference to occultism which some people might mistakenly see as Satanism, though Satanism is a spinoff from Christianity so it's not really about that. The viruses references is about the information viruses to which I've referred earlier. Anyway, the plan now, is to title the book Age of Aquarius and use the old title in full as the subtitle. The book does make reference to the idea of the Age of Aquarius and, really, that's what it's all about so that's going to be the new title.

Ennui and the art of motorcycle maintenance

This appeared on Facebook a little while ago.

Interestingly BBC Radio 4 just broadcast a dramatisation of Zen the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (one of my favourite books) and it seems strangely apposite. I've read the book a couple of times but not for many years now and I'd forgotten a great deal of it.

I've always understood the dichotomy between reason and romanticism (as he describes it) but I'd forgotten that he uses the idea of quality as a resolution between the two. I know that some people have suggested that his ideas are flawed but I'm not a high level philosopher so the idea of quality has always appealed to me and in such cases I choose not to look too closely (to not apply too much logic) for fear of destroying the thing that appeals.

Only when hearing this dramatisation does it strike me that I've lived my life with the idea of quality as a guiding ideal. Being influenced by antiques dealers and collectors at an early age, getting drunk in philosophical conversations, being introduced to proper musicians despite my inability to play any serious instrument; all these things bear the same theme, quality.

Of course the ironic observation seems to be that he, Pirsig, was reacting to what he perceived to be a lack of quality in the modern world (he rails against what had gone wrong with the 20th century) yet I find myself feeling the same about the world of the 21st century. We live in a world of cheap fizzy beer, X Factor pop music, conglomerate industries feeding the public low quality high profit products; but he was experiencing the same in a time that we, today, might well look back on as having higher values and greater quality.

Or perhaps he was wrong and this is just an experience of getting older.

Here's the link for the broadcast. It'll probably be available for the next week or so. Not sure about non UK computers.

Hidden Masters on the move again

After a move away from self publishing early last year my books haven't been available in print for nearly a year and a half. The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil came out in eBook form at the end of 2011 but I've realised since that readers really do still prefer paper books.

So I'm now happy to say that my first novel The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil has just gone to the publisher this week. It bounced back once for some changes but hopefully that should be it for any more changes. For those of you who have read the first edition the new paperback edition is taken from the eBook that had tighter editing but this new version includes an extra joke. That's a brand new joke that wasn't in the first or second editions. Let me know if you can spot it but don't get too excited now.

In the mean time I've done some work on the second Hidden Masters novel (tentatively titled The Hidden Masters and the Techno Knights, set on the south Wales borders) and I'm really keen to get back to it. It's currently on chapter four or six depending on how I chop it up. It features a mad religious cult, a geek with a grudge and bad hair and hopefully some Morris Men with violent tendencies. As soon as I clear the other projects it's full steam ahead.

In the mean time here's the link to the eBook:

Here's the You Tube promo video

No Names No Pack Drill - Splendid Isolation

I'm in the process of hiring in a service from an external supplier. I'll not say what the supplier is for reasons that will be apparent but it's caused me to make an observation. I may be wrong in my observation but I'll let you decide.

On phoning the reception I was told that I'd be put through to the woman's voicemail as she was not immediately available. I asked for her name before I was put through as I often forget to ask for a name in an introductory conversation and end up putting the phone down without any record of who I've spoken to. Now bear in mind that this is a service where I'm likely to be paying a four figure fee so I expect to do business on some sort of professional basis. However I was told that the company have a "no names policy on reception." Reluctantly I left a message and made my note of the company name with no idea of who I needed to chase if I have to call back. That, in itself, may be a factor in my decision of which supplier I choose to do business with.

weirdoes

Of course I understand why they have this policy. I'm guessing that they are concerned about weirdoes, stalkers, hawkers, all sorts of undesirables and general ne'er-do-wells. I understand that there are risks in the modern world but I wonder if there is a parallel here. The common comparison when we talk about risk management is often that of crossing the road. "Of course we take a risk every time we cross the road but we don't stop crossing the road do we." Well actually we did experiment with not crossing the road and since then we've seen the consequences of that experiment.

In the nineteen sixties, as traffic and pollution began to increase, we started to experiment with urban planning schemes. We saw pedestrian precincts, elevated walkways to remove people from traffic, and all sorts of great ideas to mitigate the risk of people and traffic being in the same environment. But what has been the result of those mitigations thirty years later? Housing estates with pedestrianized centres have become empty soulless places that people scurry through as quickly as possible, raised walkways have become muggers' paradises and pedestrian shopping precincts have become dangerous places to walk once all the shops have closed. In many situations it's even lead to the total separation of cars from people that has spiralled into the horrors of urban motorways running right past peoples' homes while pedestrians are reduced to subterranean dwellers in tunnel complexes beneath while the pollution it was supposed to resolve has increased consequentially

ne'er-do-wells

Of course protecting ourselves from stalkers and ne'er-do-wells is important. I've personally been the target of someone using the anonymity of the Internet to get information out of me and it was a horrible experience. But we have to ask, as we build further walls around ourselves, what will be the consequence of this increased security? If we want to cross the road safely perhaps we should remember to look both ways, judge the danger and speed of the traffic, in short train ourselves to deal with the new dangers. Where those dangers can't be mitigated install crossing points. In the same way, if we are concerned that we don't trust every individual who phones reception perhaps there are ways we can manage those new relationships rather than moving towards a situation where we are more cut off from each other than ever before.

Traffic crossing madness

For many years I've wondered why pedestrian crossings have a delay when you press the button?

Today I walked up to Screwfix to buy some screws, believe it of not, and had to cross the road on the industrial estate in the process. Pressing the button causes you to wait what seems like fifteen seconds, just long enough for you to get across the road if there is a break in the traffic before the lights change.

So pressing the button I duly waited the fifteen or so seconds, during which there were no cars coming and I felt like a lemon standing there and could easily have crossed the road twice over. After the delay the lights changed to red just in time for a few cars to come along and have to stop. How many times have any of us pressed the button only for there to be an immediate gap in the traffic so we cross the road and then the lights go red and there is nobody there to cross?

So why do crossings have this strange delay? I think about these sort of things because I'm a bit odd like that. Is it because the designers thought that the cars might be stopped twice in a row if there are more people wanting to cross and the lights would always be red? In which case just put a timer on the circuit so that it can't go red twice in a set period. Then you'd only have to wait if there were lots of people crossing. Drivers would never have to watch someone cross as they approach only for the lights to go red when they've finished.

It's just a thought, but a thought that's been driving me mad for years.