I'll post another set of chapter illustrations in a few weeks. It has been a rather fun exercise, and I am still working through them. Sarah Jayne has warned me no to give too much away. I shall try to follow her advice. Watch this space ...
John Ironmonger's Random Blog
John Ironmonger (author of 'Not Forgetting the Whale' - and other books) ... blogging about life, and travel, and books, and family, and writing, and Javan rhinos ...
AI Illustrates 'The Wager and the Bear': Chapters 1 - 6 (11 October 2024)
I'll post another set of chapter illustrations in a few weeks. It has been a rather fun exercise, and I am still working through them. Sarah Jayne has warned me no to give too much away. I shall try to follow her advice. Watch this space ...
Landfill (a poem): 10th Sept 2024
I've never posted a poem before. But then I thought, hey, why not? So here are some lines I wrote last night. Landfill.
That brand new coffee maker in its box
The pedal bike you sometimes get to ride
The Merry-Christmas-music-playing socks
The blanket chest that someone left outside
The candelabra and the cordless drill
The painting of a piglet in a sty
The matching set of cases
And the shoes that lost their laces
And the bucket with a hole
And the little plastic troll
Well they’ll all end up in landfill
Yes they’ll all end up in landfill, yes
they’ll all end up in landfill by and by
The 3D television
That was wholly your decision
You couldn’t quite envision
Why it gathered such derision
But one thing you can very clearly say
It will end up in a landfill one fine day
The foot spa and the heated hostess tray
The banjo and the yellow plastic sleigh
The printer that always seemed to jam
The winter coat, the retro children’s pram,
The assegai, the ink supply,
The faded regimental tie
They’ll all end up in landfill
Yes they’ll all end up in landfill, yes
they’ll all end up in landfill by and by
Well there may be little trinkets hidden somewhere in your
home
That might survive the disregard of others yet to come
There might be space on a junkshop shelf
For those dumbbell weights
Or that Christmas elf
But don’t expect the future to
Make room for plastic caribou
Or that trendy bomber jacket
That cost a blooming packet
Or those solar lights or stunter kites
Or cricket whites
Or body tights
Say what you will, yet they will still
Go in the spill … and why?
Because they all end up in landfill by and by.
The green enamel shower tray
That didn’t match the loo
The tangled box of cables where you don’t know what they do
The hardened glue, the leaky shoe,
The shirt you wore for that interview,
The microwave, the aftershave
The wristband from the Oxford rave
The bass guitar the pull up bar
The items from the school bazaar
Their days now surely numbered are
You’ll load them one day in the car
And drive them to the local tip
And chuck them gladly in the skip
Where unloved things are left to die
And off they go to landfill
Yes off they go to landfill
For they’ll all end up in landfill by and by.
Every carpet ever woven
Every fridge and every oven
Every book and every toy
Every box of Christmas joy
Every single DVD
And every tiny bonsai tree
And every leather backed settee
And every helium balloon
And every card that plays a tune
And every tool in ever shed
And every mattress, every bed
Every strimmer, every mower,
Every useless autumn blower,
Every screw and every nail
And every package through the mail
And everything you’ll ever buy
They don’t have long before they lie
Lost, abandoned and forgotten
Deep in landfills dank and rotten
No one there to wish them all goodbye
For all of them .. and me and you
When all our days on earth are through
will all end up in landfill
Yes we’ll all end up in landfill, yes
we’ll all end up in landfill by and by.
"How terribly strange to be seventy ..." July 2024
In case you don’t recognise the quotation … it’s from the song, ‘Bookends’ by Simon and Garfunkel from the album of the same name. The full stanza is: ‘Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy.’ I have often thought about that line – especially in the past few weeks as I passed my own seven-decade milestone. ‘How terribly strange …’
But here’s the thing. And I hope this is a welcome reassurance
to anyone reading this who still has a way to go before reaching the dreaded
birthday. It isn’t strange at all. Seventy
is normal. There’s nothing to look at here. I’m living my normal life. I’ve a
new novel coming out next year and one already in the blocks following behind.
I’ve finished the manuscript for a book I’m calling, ‘The Climate Crisis
Picture Book.’ I’ve been walking the
Offa’s Dyke Path with Sue and with friends. I’ve been on the zip wire at Blaenau
Ffestiniog. I still go to rock concerts. I still travel. According to the Stepz
app on my phone I walked 4.7 million
steps in 2023 which works out as around 13,000 steps a day. And I don’t say
this to brag, I say it because every seventy-year-old I know (and I know a few)
would tell you much the same thing. I couldn’t imagine sharing a park bench
quietly with any of them.
A week or so ago a whole crowd of my family and my very good
friends ambushed me with a surprise party. It was a genuine surprise. It was
lovely. We partied into the night. I love every single one of them for being
there and for keeping the secret and for being such amazing people. I was too
shocked and unprepared to give a proper speech, but if I had I’d have told them
every day of our lives is a precious gift. And don’t be afraid of seventy. It’s
ok. For me, seventy is the same as fifty but with problem feet.
The album ‘Bookends’ came out in 1968. Paul Simon and Art
Garfunkel were 26 years old when they recorded it. Of course they
thought seventy would be terribly strange. When you’re 26 even 30 is pretty
strange. Today they are 82. Older than Joe Biden. I bet they think differently
now. I do.
The Wager and the Bear: COVER REVEAL 28 June 2024
Announcing the Polish edition of 'The Whale at the End of the World' 17 June 2024
How many giraffes were on the ark? (and other musings) [22nd April 2024]
So how many giraffes do you think there were on Noah’s ark? (By the way you don’t have to believe in Noah or his ark to answer this. It is a theoretical question. You only need some familiarity with the mythology.) I’m asking because this is a question that pops up in my novella ‘The Year of the Dugong’ and the answer sheds an interesting light on our knowledge (or lack of it) of the natural world. Stay with me …
It might surprise you to learn that a giraffe is not always
a giraffe – or rather that two giraffes randomly admitted onto an ark might not
necessarily be the same. We are used to using the one word, ‘giraffe’ to
describe them all. But that’s our laziness or our ignorance, not a recognition
of reality. The four species most zoologists agree upon are the Masai giraffe, the
northern giraffe, the reticulated giraffe (sometimes called the Somali giraffe),
and the southern giraffe. It isn’t all that difficult to tell them apart. The
reticulated giraffe, for example, has a rather distinctive pattern. It doesn’t
have spots. It has a kind of continuous, smooth, white line on a nutty brown, almost
orange background, creating large and slightly irregular polygons, like
something drawn by a graphic designer during a coffee break. The Masai giraffe
is a whole lot darker, and its pattern is blotchy. It has smaller markings that
are sometimes described as ‘star shaped’ but are more like the kinds of
explosion-shapes you get in comic books. The northern giraffe looks something like
the reticulated giraffe, but with smaller markings and a wider white line. You
can spot a northern giraffe because its pattern ends at the knee (which is not
strictly a knee, but you know what I mean). The southern giraffe is lighter –
often very pale – with spots on the lower legs.
And there could be more. There are zoologists out there who
insist that the northern giraffe is not one species, but three; these people
are cheerleaders for the Kordofan giraffe which lives in hard-to-get-to places
like Chad and the Central African Republic, the Western giraffe (mostly
confined to Niger), and the Nubian giraffe which lives in East Africa but isn’t
really happy there. Equally the southern giraffe might be two species –the
Angolan giraffe, and the South African giraffe. Which would give us eight.
This is all rather confusing, and somewhat unexpected. This
is the Twenty First Century after all. Surely, we know how many species of
giraffe there are? But no. It seems we don’t. The fact is, while zoologists can
get very worked up about identifying species, giving them names, describing
them in guide-books and so on, nature itself tends to get on with things in a
much more messy way, content to leave the cataloguing up to us. Most
dictionaries define a ‘species’ broadly,
or approximately, as ‘a group of living
organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of interbreeding,’ and
this is an important definition because the idea of a species is a fundamental
concept in biology, in the same way, perhaps, as an element is in chemistry, or
a date is in history. A species should be something with hard boundaries, about
which we can all agree. But take a look again at that definition. ‘Similar’ is a rather vague word to have
in a dictionary definition. Is a reticulated giraffe similar to a Masai giraffe? Well yes. Tourists might see both in
parts of Kenya and not be aware they’ve seen two different giraffes. But can
they interbreed? Now this is harder to establish. We know from studies of giraffe
genes that the four species described above have not exchanged genetic material
for over a million years. But this doesn’t mean they couldn’t. Maybe they have
been separated geographically for so long they haven’t had the opportunity to
try. Perhaps if Noah found two frisky, fecund giraffes – one reticulated and
the other, say, a Nubian – they might be persuaded to breed. This isn’t an
experiment we can readily carry out, and even if we could, there are powerful
ethical arguments that would (and should) prevent us. But even if we were,
somehow, to cross a Masai and a Nubian giraffe, it wouldn’t necessarily mean
they were the same species.
Consider the lion and the tiger. No one would dispute these
are different, very distinct species. Yet there exists an animal known as a
‘liger’ which is the offspring of a female tiger and a male lion. (A ‘tigon’ is
a similar thing where the parents are the other way around). Ligers and tigons
only exist in captivity, and no evidence has ever been found that lions and
tigers have ever interbred in the wild (even though their ranges cross in parts
of India). We know from genetic studies that lions don’t have tiger genes, or
vice versa. There was once an assumption that these liger and tigon hybrids would
always be infertile in the way that mules are (a mule is a cross between a
horse and a donkey), but this doesn’t seem to be the case. In 2012 a Siberian
zoo successfully bred a ‘liliger’ which is the offspring of a lion and a liger.
So where does this leave us? Are lions and tigers the same
species or not?
On 11th July 1978, shortly after nine in the
morning, a 22 year old Asian elephant called Sheba, who had been behaving
rather strangely, surprised her keepers at Chester Zoo in the north of England by
delivering a calf. The only bull elephant Sheba had encountered for well over
two years had been a rather temperamental African elephant known as Jumbolino
or ‘Bubbles.’ No one had expected an Asian elephant and an African elephant to
be able to interbreed. The calf, called ‘Motty’ (after George Mottershead the
founder of Chester Zoo), had ears like an African elephant, but just one ‘trunk
finger’ like an Asian elephant. A day later the baby elephant was on his feet
and bottle feeding, and within four days Sheba was feeding him normally. Sadly
he didn’t survive very much longer. He died of septicaemia aged just ten days,
but there is no reason to think he couldn’t have lived for very much longer –
perhaps even a full elephant lifespan.
As you’d expect, these are by no means the only animal
hybrids, or even the best known. The world of hybrid animals is characterised
by an apparent desire to mangle a name for the new creature out of the names of
the parents. So we have zeedonks
(zebra and donkey), jaglions (jaguar
and lion … although surely jagons
would be more conventional), grolar bears
(grizzly bear and polar bear), and even camas
(camel and llama). There was once a fashion for creating such animals, although
most zoos would look dimly on such an idea these days.
But perhaps the real surprise should not be that some
animals can be persuaded to interbreed, but rather that so few do, and
especially that this hardly ever happens without our encouragement. It seems
that the word species might need a
bit more definition. Perhaps we should redefine it as ‘a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable
of interbreeding, and generally disinclined to breed with any other species.’
This is important because the whole idea of the species is
so fundamental to zoology. So while we are about it, shall we dispose of some
of the other words people often use when they try to talk about a species?
Let’s kick off with breed. I can’t
tell you how irritated it makes me when I hear someone call, say, a chimpanzee,
a breed of monkey. To begin with a
chimp isn’t a monkey – it’s an ape. More importantly a breed is something we humans
create. We breed dogs for hunting or for fetching or for pampering and the
resulting specimens we call a breed – cocker spaniels, German shepherds, French
poodles – these are all breeds. Throw them together and they would have no
hesitation in creating all manner of cross breeds, and these are breeds too
whether or not they are recognised and named by the Kennel Club or anyone else
for that matter. We have breeds of sheep, of cattle, of domestic cats, but we
don’t have breeds of giraffe or chimpanzees. While we’re on the subject of
breeds, we could throw in varieties.
I have heard this word used too when the speaker clearly meant species. You can
have varieties within a species. Some people have red hair, others are dark.
Some giraffes are taller than others. Variety is the motor for evolution, but
varieties are not taxonomically significant – which is to say they don’t affect
the way we classify or name animals or plants. Variety is often used by breeders to describe variations within a
breed, and they can be given names of their own – especially with plants. Any
competent horticulturalist can create new varieties of say, roses, by selecting
seeds with the characteristics they would like to see. Mix and match, and a
couple of generations later, hey presto, a rose named after your grandmother.
That’s a variety.
So having cleared that one up, let’s turn our attention to a
much more slippery word. In a park in Williamstown, Kentucky, about an hour’s
drive south of Cincinnati, you will find a very curious tourist attraction. Ark Encounter is a building designed to
look like … well, an ark, albeit an ark on land. Apparently built to the
dimensions provided in the book of Genesis, it’s aim is to convince us that
Noah was a real historical figure and his ark was a proper boat, and that,
guess what, he did indeed sail away in a flood with two of every kind of
animal, and there on board to help prove the point are models of hundreds of
animals including dinosaurs and even a couple of unicorns. But did you notice
the contentious word? Kind. This is
the word that enables Ark Encounter to get away without providing sixteen or eighteen giraffes, or six thousand snakes, or seven hundred thousand beetles. Their
website explains it like this: “Species
is a term used in the modern classification system. The Bible uses the term
“kind.” The created kind was a much broader category than the modern term of
classification, species.”
There. With a single judicious use of an ambiguous word
translated roughly by seventeenth century scholars in England from a seventh
century Greek translation of a bronze age Hebrew manuscript, Ark Encounter are
able to sweep away a thousand years of biological science. This is very
convenient for creationists. They no longer have to house loads of giraffes on
the ark. Two will do. A website called ‘Answers in Genesis’ goes even
further; it argues that the giraffes on the ark not only became the ancestors
of all of today’s giraffes, but also of okapis, and a host of now extinct
creatures. (That sounds suspiciously like evolution to me but let’s not be too
provocative.) The Answers in Genesis site goes as far as proving us with a
picture of what the giraffes on the ark might have looked like. They label the
picture ‘Shansitherium.’
There is no point really trying to argue with this. Creationists
will believe what they want to believe. But can the rest of us please agree
that the word ‘kind’ does not belong in any discussion of taxonomy. And while
we’re about it, can we dispose of another contentious word: race. Race
might once have been a useful (but informal) term in biology to describe a
genetically distinct population of individuals within the same species, but the
word has become hijacked by disagreements within our own species, so I would
suggest we set it aside completely. Along with the word ‘strain.’ There
may be races and strains of giraffes – there probably are – but I don’t imagine
even God expected Noah to collect every variation or every strain of giraffe on
the ark. If he had there wouldn’t have been room for anything else.
Now here’s another tricky word. Subspecies. The idea of
the subspecies can feel like a rather helpful way for zoologists to avoid
too many disagreements. We tend to call a group of animals a subspecies when we
find them in a different area with particular differences in size, shape, or
other characteristics, even though we might suspect that the different subspecies
can probably interbreed. You might have read about the imminent extinction of
the Northern white rhino. There are only two known individuals of this
subspecies still alive. Both are female, so sadly this is almost certainly the end for the
Northern white rhino. The two rhinos are called Najin and Fatu. They live in the Ol
Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya where they are protected by armed guards. When they
go it will undoubtedly be a great loss. But there is a sense that the loss of a
subspecies is less of a tragedy than the loss of a species. Northern and
Southern white rhinos have been living separately for at least half a million
years, but the differences that are visible to us are subtle, and you would
need to be an expert in rhino morphology to confidently tell them apart. There
may be other differences, of course, that are not visible, and
this might lead us to wonder if there are more rhino subspecies than the ones
we know. This could also be true of giraffes. Noah would surely have had quite
a challenge to untangle this. But the key point for us, and for Noah is this: if you have two subspecies that haven't interbred for half a million years, you do need to put both on the ark. Sorry. Remember that according to Bishop Ussher the flood that floated the ark was in 2349 BC, just 4,373 years ago - a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. (Not really long enough by the way for a giraffe to evolve into an okapi but I did promise not to be provocative.) The IUCN (the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature) who are the arbiters of these things, officially recognises nine subspecies of giraffe. Here
they are in the illustration below (happily a royalty-free image: thank you
Alamy).
So the answer to our original question (memo to Mr Noah) appears to be eighteen giraffes. We have to hope the ceilings on the ark were high.
But there is a follow-on question. Why don’t we all know this? Why don't illustrators of the ark know this? Why isn’t this taught in schools? How is it that we can identify soccer strips and car marques and fashion logos but we can only collectively identify one giraffe? We knowledgeably and assertively distinguish grape varieties and wine labels and cheeses and breeds of dog, but if you ask one hundred people what species of rhinos still walk the earth, most, I fear, wouldn’t know. (There are five, white rhinos, black rhinos, Indian rhinos, Javan rhinos, and Sumatran rhinos). Why does this matter? Well if we can’t tell animals apart, we won’t mourn them when we lose them. That is why this matters. As Toby Markham says in 'The Year of the Dugong:'
"Do you know how many moths there are in Suffolk? How many species? Probably over two thousand. And how many people do you think could identify a single moth? Just one species?’ Toby raised a finger. He paused to look at the silent crowd. ‘I doubt if one person in a hundred could do that. So, if no one can identify even a single moth, how many people are going to notice if two thousand species of moths become one thousand? Or one hundred? How many people are really going to care?’
Natural history is becoming a dying art. That’s sad. I don't expect people to identify two thousand moths. But more people ought to know how many moths there are. Because if we don't care, then one by one they will surely go. And so will the Northern white rhino. And one day there may really only be a single species of giraffe. That's heartbreaking.
Check out my website: www.johnironmonger.com
The Wager and the Bear [Posted 29th Feb 2024]
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE 21 Jan 2024
One Step away from the Precipice: Climate Change in Fiction [Posted 20 Nov 2023]
This was my article yesterday in La Repubblica - Italy's biggest newspaper. The title translates as 'One Step from the Cliff' - and it is an artcle about climate change in fiction, and about my novel 'The Wager and the Bear' (Soon to be published in English I hope).
David Bowie had a remarkable
talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to
listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom, sitting in a
tin-can, drifting forever into space.
But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells
a very simple story. News has reached us that the earth has only five years
left. The planet is dying. In the song, the newsreader weeps. All around the
market square people lose their minds.
What would it be like, I have
often wondered, if we really were told this news? If a solemn news report,
backed by all the world’s serious scientists, was to tell us we were running
out of time? How would we react?
Well we now know the
answer to this question. Newsreaders wouldn’t weep. No one would go crazy. We
would ignore the danger and carry on with our lives as if nothing had changed. We
know this because this is what we do. Every few months the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces a new report telling us the planet is
running out of time. Every year the COP climate change conference makes dire
predictions. Every year we learn that the previous year was the hottest on
record. We watch forest fires in Canada and Brazil. We see dramatic floods,
powerful storms, devastating droughts. We watch the collapse of animal
populations. World leaders fly in and out of conferences. They make vague
promises. But very little changes. And the world continues to die.
The challenge seems to be
a failure of human imagination. Perhaps it is the timescale. If the world was
doomed in just five years, we might be more alarmed. If it was an asteroid hurtling
towards us, we might make a real global effort to find a solution. But climate
change seems to be a long unfolding tragedy. We are like passengers in a
slow-motion train crash. The train is heading for a precipice, and all the
pieces are in place for a terrible disaster, but everything is moving so slowly
we stop worrying.
All this presents a
particular problem for story tellers. Climate change is the biggest story of
our time, yet very few novelists are ready to grapple with this. Ten centuries
from now, if humanity is still around, I suspect historians will only be
interested in one story from our generation - how we responded (or failed to
respond) to this existential threat to the planet. Science fiction, in general,
has done us rather a disservice here. Writers have sold us either Mad Max-style
desert dystopias, or impossible tales of starships taking survivors to new
green planets. What we don’t have are real world stories that could help us to
imagine the kind of earth we are creating. And that is a shame, because imagination is
what we need, now more than ever.
Once again, timescales seem
to be the challenge. Novelists need a central protagonist with whom readers can
identify. This character needs to have a story arc, and human dramas are
typically too short for climate change to feature very much. There is a second
problem too. It is hard to imagine any
character playing anything but a very minor role in what is a huge global
drama. No one is going to step forward like Bruce Willis and save the world. For
a writer, that is an unhelpful backdrop. We do not like to set up a jeopardy
for our characters, without giving them some way to fight back. But how do you
fight back against a warming planet?
In ‘L’Orso Polare e una
Scomessa Chiamata Futuro’ (The Wager and the Bear) I hope I may have found
a way to navigate a little around these two problems. The narrative unfolds
over a whole human lifetime, and the central characters are front-seat
observers of the climate disaster. The story involves two young men. One,
Monty, is a politician. He is a climate change-denier. He lives in a grand house
on the beach in Cornwall. He has a splendid lifestyle, and like so many of us
in the slow-motion train crash, he doesn’t see the precipice approaching. The
second man, Tom, is a climate scientist and campaigner. One drunken night, over
too many glasses of cider in the local inn, the two men get into a quarrel. It
ends with a deadly wager. In fifty years, either the sea will rise enough to
drown Monty in his home, or Tom will accept the jeopardy himself, and will walk
into the sea and drown. A video of the wager, posted online, goes viral. How
will it all work out?
Well we have fifty years
for the story to unfold. The lives of the two men cross several times, leading
them both onto a melting glacier, and ultimately onto an iceberg floating down
the coast of Greenland where their only companion is a hungry bear.
The story is not entirely
without hope. It is set against the backdrop of a campaign to restore some of
what the world has lost. Neither Monty nor Tom can save the world. But there is
at least hope, as well as despair.
Climate change doesn’t
have to be front and centre in contemporary fiction. But we shouldn’t be
ignoring it either. As writers we have a responsibility, sometimes, to make the
future seem real. We are hurtling towards a world of human-made disasters, of
dying oceans, of rising seas, of failing harvests, of droughts, of economic
collapse, and of climate-driven conflicts. We cannot ignore these things. If
these aren’t part of our fictional landscape now, then they need to be. Otherwise one day we may find we have just
five years left. And it won’t just be the news readers weeping.
Check out my website: www.johnironmonger.com
A brilliant but rather scary Italian cover for 'The Wager and the Bear.'
Check out my website www.johnironmonger.com
The Wager and the Bear (Der Eisbär und die Hoffnung auf morgen). [Posted: 27 April 2023]
The challenge with any story about climate change is to accommodate the long timescales. The climate catastrophe is something that might be almost instantaneous in geological terms, but measured against human lifespans it is ponderously snail-like. (See my last blog post https://notablebrain.blogspot.com/2023/04/climate-change-cats-and-spaghetti-essay.html) So unlike ‘Not Forgetting the Whale’ (Der Wal und das Ende der Welt) this story unravels over a whole human lifetime. And during this lifetime we will come to discover if Tom really is the hero and Monty the anti-hero. Or is it more nuanced?
I do hope, if you can read German, you will discover this book. If you do, please write to let me know your reactions. You can message me through this blog. If, like me, you are limited to reading in English you might have to wait a little longer. I suspect UK publishers want to wait to see how well it does in Europe – and this is because my last novel, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild’ didn’t sell all that well in Britain. My counter to this is to explain that ‘Heloise’ hit the bookshops in hardback when shops were closed due to Covid, and the paperback launched when bookshops were closed again. It launched with virtually no publicity. There was, I suppose, very little point publicising a book when the shops were all shut. So it goes. It had a beautiful cover – but (in my mind) the title was wrong. My original title was, ‘Katya’s Gift,’ and I can’t shake off the feeling that it would have done better with that title. Heloise is still my favourite novel by the way. And it is still out there if ever you’re looking for something new to read.
Anyway – all that aside, I can’t wait to see ‘The Wager and the Bear’ in print. Here again is that beautiful cover. And thank you once again to the wonderful people at S.Fischer Verlag for having faith in me.
Cats, and Spaghetti, and Climate Change [13 April 2023]
I can’t remember when (or where) I first heard the expression, ‘herding cats.’ I don’t think this idiom was around when I was young. So far as I can tell, it was invented sometime in the 1980s and it took off. Soon everyone was using it. It’s a great little saying because we all know enough about cats to understand right away what it means. ‘I did my best, but it was like herding cats.’ At once we appreciate the futility, the complexity, and the sheer absence of co-operation from everyone concerned. You don’t get herds of cats. They are too bloody-minded.
My father had a saying that meant almost the same thing. But
not quite. He would say, ‘it was like trying to organise spaghetti.’
Somehow, for me, organising spaghetti feels like an enterprise even more doomed
to failure than herding cats. The cats may not want to be herded, but there is
at least the possibility that they might eventually succumb. Spaghetti on the other
hand will never submit to organisation. And unlike the cats this isn’t due to wilfulness
or contrariness. Disorganisation is a property of the spaghetti itself.
Efforts to resolve the climate-change crisis are often
compared to herding cats. In this metaphor the ‘cats’ are the 195 countries on the
planet, across 7 continents, where no two countries think alike, or act alike,
or have the same priorities, or enjoy similar political systems, or possess the
same resources, or have the same levels of understanding. How do we ever herd
these slippery belligerent cats into the same box? Even so, I worry that the problem is more like
organising spaghetti. There is no way to do this. We’ll never get everyone on
board. Perhaps we ought to accept this and find a different way.
There is, by the way, a rather clever online tool called ‘Google
NGram Viewer.’ It can help you to figure out when (but not necessarily where) a
word or an expression arose. It searches millions of books over the past two
centuries, and if the words you’ve entered appear in 40 books or more in any calendar
year, it counts them and plots a graph to show how the frequency has changed
with time. Forty books feels like quite
a high bar to me. If you enter ‘herding cats’ you won’t find any use of
this expression until 1938. In 1942 the phrase disappears, and it doesn’t
reappear until 1987. After that the frequency graph rises meteorically, like
the lift-off of a space rocket. It is as if there was something that happened
in the Eighties that made this expression useful.
If, by the way, you try ‘organised spaghetti’ in NGram
Viewer you don’t get any results at all. Maybe this expression was exclusively
my dad’s.
If I look up from my keyboard, and glance out of my window,
I can see a storm coming. The clouds gathering over the estuary look as grey and
heavy as gunmetal.
And now, in the time it has taken me to type that last
sentence, the storm is upon us. The rain is driving against my window. I no
longer have a view. Funny how the weather
can do that, and we all accept it. We look at the forecasts and we plan our
days around them. Let’s do the beach on Sunday when the rain stops. But
if we’re told the whole global climate is changing, we go into a complex form
of denial. We don’t really know how to plan.
We hope that tomorrow will be much the same as today, and on the whole it is,
and that gives us comfort. It makes us think this is nothing to worry about. Yet.
One metaphor I have heard used about climate change is ‘a
slow-motion car crash.’ I used this myself in a novel, ‘The Wager and
the Bear.’ The image I wanted was of
an impending catastrophe where the parts are all in motion, where no one is yet
hurt, but where terrible death and destruction await if no one acts to stop it.
A slow-motion car crash seems to tick all of those boxes. But all the
same, I’m not altogether happy with this metaphor. For a start it seems too
prosaic. (I’m using the word prosaic to mean lacking in poetry – but also
to mean lacking in purpose.) I’ve tried to think of a better image. A train
crash is better perhaps, because it involves more people. But slow-motion is
insufficient to describe the slow and gradual increments of change that the
climate crisis delivers. Sea levels are rising by around four and a half
millimetres a year. In ten years, at this rate, they will rise four and a half
centimetres. And the sea, as we know, moves up and down, sometimes quite
erratically so that doesn’t feel like a threat. Not really. In a century the
sea might rise forty five centimetres. About knee high. And none of us likes to
think forward more than a century. Do we?
Isn’t that odd? We don’t have this blind spot with history.
We’re fascinated by the lives of the Tudors (Henry VIII was on the throne 500
years ago). We love stories about the Romans (2,000 years ago). And yet we don’t
speculate much on where our descendants might be in 500 or 2,000 years – what kind
of world they will inhabit. Or what (since we chose this measurement) the sea
levels might be. So let’s speculate then. Assume that sea levels keep on rising
at 4.5mm a year (in reality the rate will almost certainly accelerate but let’s
ignore that for a moment.) Our descendants in 2000 years will inherit seas 9
metres higher than today. The map of the world will have been altered
irreversibly. Britain will have lost most of East and Central London, and great
swathes of the Thames Valley including towns like Dartford, and Kingston.
Hundreds of seaside towns will have been wholly lost to the rising waters -
places like Portsmouth, Southampton, Middlesborough and Blackpool, Cardiff and
Newport, and Gloucester. Lincoln (now 38 miles from the sea) will be a seaside
town. So will whatever remains of Cambridge. So will York. So will
Taunton. Across The Channel most of the
Netherlands and much of Belgium will be underwater. So will huge tracts of Northern Germany.
America will lose thousands of communities down the Eastern seaboard. China will lose Shanghai and Guangzhou. Bangkok and Kolkata and Ho Chi Minh City will be gone. And Basra, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
And here’s the thing. The water will still be rising. It
still has a way to go. If all the ice melts (and it probably will if global
temperature rises by 4 degrees) then sea levels rise seventy metres or so.
9 metres of sea level rise puts the Netherlands underwater |
And sea level changes are, perhaps, the least of our
worries. A 4 degree rise would make most of the world between the tropics practically
uninhabitable. It would certainly make agriculture almost impossible. It will cause
catastrophic drought . And the Northern farmlands which will now be warmer will
not take up the slack. Celestial mechanics will still restrict sunlight in
winter, and the soils are anyway very unproductive. And anyway a weird side
effect of climate change might mean that as the world gets hotter (and sea
levels keep rising) Europe curiously will get colder as ocean currents slow
down.
Finally there is a terrifying threat. This is how it might be in, 'The Year of the Dugong.' If atmospheric CO2 levels exceed 1,200 parts per million (ppm) (and they could) it could push the Earth’s climate over a tipping point. This would see clouds start to break up, and, a cloudless world will reflect away less sunlight. According to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience, this could trigger another 8°C rise in global average temperatures. Game Over.
So slow-motion train crash doesn’t work, does it? ‘Ultra-slow
motion asteroid-collision,’ might be better. A disaster movie that runs at
one frame a year. But the disaster is still going to happen. And it is inevitable
unless we can herd the unruly cats who govern us and get them to start
organising the spaghetti. Now.
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
More Movie Cliches ... [31 March 2023]
Back in January I wrote a blog post bemoaning lazy cliches in movies and on TV. https://notablebrain.blogspot.com/2023/01/movie-cliches-tropes-and-memes.html This, in turn, was prompted by an earlier blog post grumbling about the gun-related cliches in the new Avatar movie. https://notablebrain.blogspot.com/2022/12/avatar-2-and-all-american-love-affair.html
Well, as often happens, those posts got me noticing plenty more lazy cliches that movie makers use; so here, just for you, are a few of them. You’re welcome…
1. PSYCHO KILLERS ALWAYS PASTE THEIR BEDROOM WALLS WITH NEWS
CUTTINGS. When the cop finally stumbles into the lair of the serial killer/psycho
that’s how we know they’ve found the bad guy.
2. OLDER COPS ARE JUST ABOUT TO RETIRE. One extra case eh…
3. SENIOR COPS ALWAYS
BAWL OUT THE GOOD COP. This seems to be a rule. There is always a more senior
cop usually with a glass fronted office that looks over the incident room, and
he (or she) is NEVER pleased with the way the case is going, never says, ‘well
done,’ usually threatens to take the good cop’s badge, and generally pulls the
good cop off the case.
4. IF THE SENIOR COP ALSO HAS A BOSS, THAT BOSS WILL BE BENT
5. COPS NEVER CATCH ANYONE IN A CAR CHASE. Did you ever see a
car chase where the cops catch the guy they’re chasing, even if they throw a
hundred cars at it? No. The guy (who is being chased by cops usually because of
a misunderstanding) always gets away.
6. WRITERS ALWAYS WEAR SPECS. Also they either live in a cabin by a lake or in a New York apartment.
7. HEROES ARE NEVER HAPPILY MARRIED. Usually the wife has died.
Or else they’ve had an undeserved separation. Whatever, they are now available
but only reluctantly.
8. TEENAGE SONS ARE ALWAYS REBELLIOUS. If the hero dad gives
his teenage son an order, you know the son will flagrantly ignore it in the
next scene. But in the end the teenage son comes good, sees the errors of his
ways, and makes up with the dad.
9. TEENAGE DAUGHTERS ARE ALWAYS SUPER SMART AND USUALLY ABOUT TO
GO TO HARVARD.
10. DOCTORS ARE ALWAYS READY TO TELL YOU HOW LONG YOU HAVE TO
LIVE. AND IT’S USUALLY JUST SIX MONTHS. But protagonists with six months left
always look reasonably fit, they don’t spend the six months suffering in bed,
they get out there and fight the bad guys.
11. NIGHTCLUBS/SEEDY DIVES ALWAYS HAVE A STRIPPER IN THE
BACKGROUND, BUT NOBODY IS ACTUALLY WATCHING HER
12. IF A MOVIE STARTS WITH A HAPPY COUPLE MOVING INTO A NEW
HOME, YOU KNOW IT WON’T TURN OUT WELL.
13. IF A MOVIE INVOLVES A SINGLE PERSON MOVING INTO A REMOTE
CABIN IN THE WOODS, THEN DITTO.
14. MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS WILL ALWAYS QUARREL
15. THE HERO COP/DETECTIVE WILL CASUALLY SPOT A CLUE THAT THE
WHOLE CSI TEAM HAVE OVERLOOKED. Hmm. I wonder who left this cigarette butt …
16. IF A SCENE TAKES PLACE IN PARIS, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO
SEE THE EIFFEL TOWER IN THE BACKGROUND OR THROUGH A WINDOW. In London it’s
usually Big Ben.
17. THE BAD GUY’S HENCHMEN DIE FIRST. Finally he’s the last one
left alive, but he’s also the trickiest to kill. Also, have you noticed;
henchmen never have any lines. No henchman ever has a wisecrack, or says
something poignant while dying. A shot henchman simply does the decent thing
and dies quickly and quietly. Also where does the bad guy find all these
henchmen? Are they amazingly well paid? Do they get paid holidays? Do they
grumble over their conditions of employment?
Why are they always happy to do as they are told even when it looks as
if they’ll die doing it? Why do they never say: ‘hey, this isn’t my fight.
Leave me out of it.’ And on that subject ...
18. HELICOPTER PILOTS EMPLOYED BY VILLAINS ARE STUPIDLY RECKLESS. Where do you employ a guy who is happy to fly a helicopter into such a dangerous situation that he and his helicopter will end up as a massive fireball? There must be an agency somewhere specialising in suicidal pilots ...
19. THE UNIFORM ON THE PEG/DEAD GUY IS ALWAYS A PERFECT FIT WHEN
SOMEONE ELSE NEEDS IT. We never see a character struggling to get into a stolen uniform. A side door just opens and out they step, dressed up. And amazingly no one will question them.
20. WHEN THE BAD GUY GETS HIS CHANCE TO KILL THE GOOD GUY HE
ALWAYS CHOOSES NOT TO. Why would you do that?
21. BIG PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE ALWAYS EVIL. So are the
billionaire owners of social media and tech companies except for Stark
Industries
22. IT IS REALLY EASY TO KNOCK SOMEONE UNCONSCIOUS. If you’re
cool and you know how.
23. IT IS REALLY EASY TO KICK DOWN A DOOR. If you’re cool and
you know how.
24. IT IS REALLY EASY TO SNATCH A GUN OUT OF AN ANTAGONIST’S HAND.
If you’re cool and you know how.
25. IT IS REALLY EASY TO HACK INTO JUST ABOUT ANY COMPUTER. If
you’re uncool and a nerd hacker.
26. IT IS ALWAYS EASY TO PARK. There is always a convenient
space.
27. GIRL WAKES UP IN BED – WONDERS WHERE HER LOVER FROM THE
NIGHT BEFORE HAS GONE – DON’T WORRY – HE’S COOKING UP BREAKFAST. And actually
he’s an amazing cook. Who would have guessed?
28. IF THERE IS A POKER GAME – SOMEONE WILL ALWAYS HAVE AN
UNBELIEVABLE HAND. One protagonist has a once in a lifetime hand. But what do
you know. Someone else at the table has a better one.
29. IF THERE IS A CHESS GAME IN PLAY, IT IS ONLY EVER ONE MOVE
AWAY FROM CHECKMATE.
30. IT ONLY TAKES A SECOND TO PAY FOR A CAB. Movie people just
pass over a banknote and get out without speaking.
31. IF YOU CHASE ANYONE DOWN AN ESCALATOR AT A TUBE STATION,
GUESS WHAT? THERE WILL BE A TRAIN RIGHT THERE AT THE PLATFORM (OR JUST ARRIVING) FOR THEM TO HOP
ONTO. Yet whenever I run down an escalator at a tube station I find I just missed the train.
32. THE HERO ALWAYS MISSES HIS DAUGHTER'S BIRTHDAY PARTY / CONCERT. It isn't his fault. He'll be forgiven at the end.
I'm beginning to think this is an almost endless seam to be mined. If you've spotted any more lazy tropes, let me know, or drop them into the comments. I daresay I'll keep noticing them.
Please check out my website for more information on my books. https://www.johnironmonger.com
The Key to a Great Safari: A Great Safari Guide [9 March 2023]
Paul Mbugua |
But what’s the alternative? Safaris are expensive. They’re
complicated. They don’t always go to plan.
Well I thought I knew the alternative. We were travelling with friends and that would spread the costs. I would plan our
safari myself. It would be way cheaper. I knew Kenya. I knew where I wanted to
go. So I googled safari lodges, and I read online reviews, and I worked out an
itinerary that would suit us. We’d do Nairobi National Park and the elephant
orphanage. We’d visit Lake Naivasha, and Crescent Island, and Hell’s Gate. We’d
stay at Lake Nakuru for the flamingos. We’d go on to the Masai Mara and we’d
spend time in the conservancies as well as the Mara Triangle. It would be
awesome.
And so I booked it. Six hotels/lodges. Twelve days. I flirted briefly with the idea of self-drive but
quickly abandoned it. I contacted Rhino Safaris because I trust them. I wrote
to Lacty, the owner, at info.nbo@rhinosafaris.net
. And I told him I needed a good safari land-cruiser and a first class guide
for ten days.
Readers – that is what we got. And it reminded me how
essential a great guide is for a good safari. Paul Mbugua was more than a first
class guide and an excellent driver – he was a splendid travelling companion
too. His knowledge of Kenyan wildlife and geology is astonishing. And
considering he was ferrying two smart-ass zoologists, and a geologist, including
one who felt he knew it all already (that would be me) he still had a whole lot
to teach us. Crucially he had enthusiasm. In spades. He would urge us to set
off early and return home late and it always paid off. Once we did two
back-to-back nine hour days and he never tried to rush us, or to set off before
we had seen what we wanted to see. He persuaded us several times to change our
agenda. Once was to break with the plan and visit Lake Elementeita. What a good
decision that was. Another time we swapped days around because he’d picked up
rumours of a leopard. Another good decision. His knowledge of every park was
amazing. And the only time we flummoxed him was when we told him we wanted to
visit Mount Suswa for the caves on the way back to Nairobi. Well, he’d never done
that trip before. So he hired a guide too. This time a Masai guide called Kiano
(kianosempui2018@gmail.com ) And
what a trip that was.
AI Illustrates 'The Wager and the Bear': Chapters 1 - 6 (11 October 2024)
Writers are forever looking for ways to generate interest in our books, and publishers are always keen to encourage us. So I had this idea...
-
Up river in Ujung Kulon looking for Javan Rhinos ... I'd be the first to admit that Indonesia isn't exactly a top destination o...
-
[ This was posted to my blog on 12th February 2020 when we were only just beginning to hear about Coronavirus - just in case you wonder why...
-
This gorgeous cover-design is for my novella, ‘ The Year of the Dugong’ (Das Jahr des Dugong )’ due to be published in German on October 2...
-
At Kenton ... The Stanley Nairobi Back in January I shared, on this blog, my anxieties about going back to Nairobi. ‘Never Go Back,’ was the...
-
What is it like to hear someone read your writing aloud? I don't think I'd ever had that experience before. Not really; not read...
-
Perhaps I shouldn't admit to this. Maybe I should post a youthful photo and pretend to be thirty five. Oh dear. This is harder than I th...
-
Lava flowing into the sea I really should have consulted a map. But I'll blame the guidebooks all the same. They all say that Krakato...
-
Orang A village on the Sekonyer river A Klotok Proboscis Monkeys Enough of books and book prizes and the stresses and ...
-
Never go back. I’ve been given that piece of advice plenty of times, by lots of different people, but always with reference to one partic...