Off The Cuth

This video popped up on my YouTube feed while I was doing the washing up, because, of course, the YouTube algorithm knows me well. It was clearly a short section of a longer interview and I recognised Christian Whitehead right away. I was fascinated by his actions during a terrorist attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in 2018. and knew him from that footage. Plus, the UK military in general and special forces in particular has been an interest of mine since childhood.

Christian Whitehead was a member of the UK armed forces for over 20 years, with the bulk of it in the SAS. He’s chosen to use that pseudonym to share his story with the world, such is the secrecy surrounding the SAS and its members. In this interview he is unwilling to talk about anything that could impact that secrecy including the kit he carried on operations.

For this ‘Every day carry’ discussion, Whitehead gives some hypothetical items for a hypothetical mission, but the thing that interested me is what he’s keeping on him when he’s on the streets of the UK. He always ensures he has an automatic watch that can’t run out of battery, a small but powerful torch and an external battery pack, just in case that period of time is longer than the remaining battery on your phone. He also recommends having your phone fully charged at all times when you’re at home, just in case you need leave in a rush.

Now, the first thing I thought was ‘I do that!’

I have a small and old, but mighty, Surefire torch that is in my bag and goes with me wherever I need a bag, and I have a couple of external battery packs for just in case. I generally keep my phone topped up if I know I’m going out.

But then I realised, I use a smartwatch the majority of the time, I haven’t tested the torch particularly recently because it’s in a bag I rarely use and I’m coincidentally waiting on a new battery pack to arrive because my old faithful Anker one finally died on my last trip and provided zero extra power at all that day! So that’s not exactly being prepared.

Then it occurred to me - the me that prepared all of this stuff is not the me of today.

Previously I would have had a bag prepared to go immediately, even if I never used it for its intended purpose. More recently, I might be able to tell you where all those items it held are kept around the house, but they’re certainly not packed and ready to go. These days I worry more about making sure the kids have the right clothes for the weather and any potential weather and the go-bag I am more likely to pick up as I’m running out of the door is the one full of nappies and changes of clothes, not torches, battery packs and phone chargers.

My preparedness or readiness since I stopped doing anything to do with the military. I’m less strong, less fit and less healthy than I used to be, and I could have told you that yesterday. But today I noticed I’m less prepared for any eventuality, because I barely consider any eventuality, and that’s a sobering thought.

I know very few people in the civilian world in the UK have these thoughts or conversations and even I might say that perhaps it’s fine I no longer reach the standards of ex-SF Christian Whitehead and his ex-SF interviewer? But it’s definitely a little sad I have to be reminded that I have let my own standards slip from 10-15 years ago. Now I need to decide if I’m willing to put in the effort to raise them again.

As someone who has owned an iPad since the first model, I’m always intrigued to read or watch anything that presages their death.

Luke Miani makes excellent videos, even if they typically have clickbait titles such as this, because of course, the iPad isn’t dying - they’re great. The hardware and software are rock solid. The iPad market is slow and steady and customers love them and the sales are only bad compared to other Apple products - most tech companies would kill for those numbers. Plus, average people use them for years because the hardware never dies - the upgrade cycle is very slow, possibly the slowest of Apple’s major product lines. My son is still using a 3rd gen from 2012 and I’m still using my first-generation 12.9-inch Pro from 2015, and the only thing I want to do is get the battery replaced, but it’s now so old that Apple no longer stock them! 🙄

The current iPad line is a little confused and disappointing with the older style 9th generation iPad with the home button hanging around at £369 ($329) because the 10th generation clearly can’t hit a sufficiently low price point whilst maintaining Apple’s margins for a base model iPad, as its starting price is £499 ($440). There is a big jump up to £669 ($599)for an iPad Air with a frankly rubbish 64GB of storage. And of course, if you want to store more than that you have to pay an extra £180 for 256GB at £849 ($749)! The next rung on the ladder is the base model iPad Pro with a more useful 128GB of storage for a ‘mere’ £50 ($50) more - the old Apple upsell is in effect, and there isn’t really a model I’d be tempted to pick up at those prices, especially with the poor USD to GBP conversions going on right now. If the base model iPad Air came with 128GB I’d be tempted, but not in reality, no thanks!

However, Luke’s mainly talking about the Pro market. The iPad software is absolutely unexciting, which is great for the average user, but the messaging around ‘Pro’ software features is nascent and garbled, and Apple’s attempt to market for Pros is simply not good enough, and Luke is right, with the M1 MacBook Air often at a comparable price to an iPad Pro which comes with a keyboard and trackpad. While most iPad models are fine for the average punter, I just don’t think it’s going to truly capture the Pro market from the Mac. A current iPad Pro is a beautiful piece of technology, but the software simply doesn’t back up such an awesome tablet. As much as I might want one, whenever my iPad dies, I can’t justify an iPad Pro at those prices, when the experience is almost exactly the same.

I’m not in the Pro iPad market anymore and I’m being priced out of the iPad Air market too. In my use case, no iPad is as functional as a Mac, and spending extra money is just for nicer hardware. For now, I’ll always want an iPad, but we’ll have to see whether Apple can tempt me back to the higher-end ones.

I wrote this nearly a year ago after we’d been unable to go to the library for three months. I’m so glad the libraries are open now, and reading this again makes me very grateful. I hope you are able to take advantage of your local libraries now that they’re opening back up again!

Wherever you are at this moment with the world as it is right now, I hope you are safe! But more than likely, wherever you are, many public institutions have been shut down because they aren’t seen as critical for life. I’m not sure about you, but while I completely accept that it’s unnecessary, my local library is still the one I miss most.

There’s something about being able to go somewhere specifically to ‘do work’, whether that be actual work for your real jobby-job or to grapple with that novel or blog post you’re working on. It’s like having a co-working space or coffeeshop table you don’t have to spend money on and your mind can immediately switch into work mode. For me, sitting down at a desk and opening my document gets me into that writing mindset better than I have ever been able to at home. Away from the devices and distractions of home, I’m able to do good work. I’ve found that out over the past few months of being stuck at home, and I miss that level of productivity!

Ok, you knew it was coming - simply being able to request and borrow books is obvious, but it’s still awesome. I really do miss being able to go to the library and take home the books I want to read. For free. There was never a time didn’t go to the library, but I do remember being passed a special card with my name on it. Although she held onto it because I bet I’d have lost it as soon as possible! But that card allowed me to pick books I wanted, walk to the front desk and take them home for a few weeks without having to pay for them was amazing to me. And it is still amazing today! Even though we can totally borrow eBooks and audiobooks from libraries remotely, there’s nothing like a physical book with its heft and feel and smell, and I miss that too!

Then there are the quirks and oddities. The people you only see at the library, the folks who are constantly working on the old library computers, the riotous parent and baby groups, people with massive, old laptops with large power bricks they’ve hefted to the library just for the free WiFi. All of these different people are making use of the awesome potential of the library to work on their magnum opus or sing at the top of their little lungs or just print out the route to their caravan park because they don’t believe in using a smartphone. I miss that tiny sense of camaraderie and the curiosity that builds each time you sit down at a desk, although bringing headphones to avoid the singing toddlers and parents is always advised!

You know when you’re in the library, or even a book shop and you’re just browsing for the sake of it? Being able to just walk around the aisles perusing the books, looking at the curated displays or just glancing over the book spines. This is definitely something I really miss now that I know I can’t do it. I find being able to interact with the library, even if just subconsciously, helps me think and develop ideas. It’s both inspiring and terrifying to see so many examples of people who put enough time and effort in their lives together to get their books published and on the shelves for anyone to walk up to and touch. As lovely as it is sometimes to have a nice big screen computer at home, this is something that sitting at my own desk just cannot replicate.

You know when that one book just twinkles at you in the corner of your eye and draws you to it? Whether it’s the title or the author or the design? You go over and pick it up because of course, you’re just browsing for the sake of it. This book is somehow just the kind of book you’d like to take home with you and read, even though a minute before you had no idea of its existence. The chance of finding that book is vanishingly small, and yet here it is in your hand. This has happened to me only a few times, but I found books that hooked me and still remember to this day. I even ended up buying some of them so I could re-read them whenever I want!

I know there are plenty of other reasons that this pandemic has made life far harder in more material ways than simply not being able to go to the library. This speaks of massive privilege on my part, and I accept that. But of all the non-essential places that I’m excited to see re-open when it’s safer, the library is definitely top of my list.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

This was one of those books I picked up from the library after reading just the blurb and looking at the front cover. Sometimes I enjoy the surprise of not researching a book at all. Since finishing it, I read that Corlett started writing again in 2011 while organising a move to the South West of England. She then started a freelance writing career around her day job as a solicitor and had short stories published in magazines and anthologies. The idea for this novel came about after a trip back to Northumberland and replaced a previous idea as her debut novel.

The Space Between The Stars is a science fiction story about a virus killing 99.9999% of the galactic human population and following a survivor seeking to reunite with her estranged husband back home on Earth. She remembered that the two of them had talked about a rendezvous in Northumbria in the UK if the end of the world ever happened and they had become separated, so that is where she seeks to go. Except when we meet her, she is stuck on a faraway planet without any way to get there.

We'll meet here, he'd said. If the world ever ends. How had something so throwaway become the thing they returned to when everything else was breaking and falling apart?

The story soon gets going and our protagonist Jamie meets other survivors - an ex-priest Lowry, an ex-scientist Rena and, perhaps most importantly for her intended journey, the captain and first mate of a star ship, Callen and Gracie respectively. Each of these different people have their own ideas for what to do with so much of humanity dead and gone and thoughts for survival in this new world.

There were some brilliant questions that the author poses that I really enjoyed watching the characters wrestle with, like what would you do if you woke up all alone with the rest of the population dead? If survivors managed to band together, what sort of society would you seek to build? Do the ends justify the means when it comes to humanity’s survival? Can you celebrate living when you have so much survivor’s guilt? Was this galactic pandemic the will of God? Coming up with my own answers for these types of questions is one of my favourite parts of science fiction and this book really sought to place the characters in those kinds of quandaries, and I enjoyed some theistic arguments between the different characters.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that I like them better when they're a long way away, and I can switch them off if I need to.

Another challenge the author threw at the characters, and by extension the reader, was different types of people living in ways the others did not initially understand. Our protagonist has suffered multiple loses during her life and one before she was even born. One of our other characters lived and worked as a prostitute, another appeared to be a minimally verbal autistic, another was quite happy being physically alone as long as she could communicate over the internet, others were living in a historical re-enactment of an older society to avoid thinking about the current situation. All of these people are different and the way in which the author presents them as people getting by in a horrible time to the best of their abilities was excellent, and the other characters are able to react to them, creating worthy scenes that I enjoyed.

That’s not to say there weren’t some problems with the story. The first was that our protagonist Jamie was grumpy, sarcastic, angry and lashed out at other characters around her seemingly at random. I get that the entire human race has crashed down around her, but she could certainly be a little more polite to the others. She’d flip and flop back and forth. That’s not to say she didn’t have her positive moments too, or moments where that anger might have been deserved, but I still found it quite tiring by the end.

The next thing that irked me was the world-building. I love a good science-fiction future universe where humanity has colonised the stars, and while I saw one review that criticised a lack of aliens as if that’s a requirement when you get out past Pluto, I’m more concerned about how empty and yet so close together the disparate planets felt. It felt easy to travel between the different worlds and each world felt empty, even Earth. The only thing our ship captain really seemed concerned about was being able to obtain enough fuel to make the next leg of the journey. Yet one thing we were told was that overpopulation was rife on Earth prior to this pandemic. There seemed to be little evidence of humanity forced to live close together. When our characters were near the end of their journey, it felt like a nice holiday destination, rather than a world recently in the grip of unsustainable population growth. Where were the shanties, the huge piles of rubbish, the thousands of ghost ships in orbit or flying along the busy space lanes since their crews had died during the journeys?

Finally, speaking of planets feeling like they were close together, there was little discussion about the type of space travel that was taking place. Wormholes, warp drive, hyperspace, slipstream, who knows? It isn’t important. But what is important is I have no idea how any character could suggest jettisoning heavy cargo so that they could continue to fly through space. It’s not like they’d just run out of fuel and stop. I’m sure I saw that happen in The Last Jedi, but that was an awful space chase scene, so using similar space physics probably wasn’t a good idea here either. A quick edit to say that landing with that kind of weight onboard could require too much fuel so they need to dump the cargo or something like that would have been fine, but instead I found it incredibly jarring against science fact and most science fiction.

Overall I felt like this book was a few edits short of a good story, especially as a debut novel. The structure is there, the characters are there, but perhaps it should have been set in modern-day post-apocalyptic Europe or USA. I feel like the space opera parts could have been entirely replaced and it wouldn’t have affected anything other than the scale of the story, but then the story would have made a little more sense! Not great, but still had good bits here and there.

⭐️⭐️⭐️★★

Yes.

Let’s start with some history. Reconstruction after the American Civil War began immediately with Abraham Lincoln’s federal government imposing the Thirteenth Amendment to completely abolish slavery everywhere in the USA. While Northern states ratified it quickly, Lincoln convinced, cajoled and forced previously slave-owning states to ratify it before they would be granted aid and resources to rebuild. Most did so grudgingly.

Less than a month after states had begun to ratify the Amendment, Lincoln has been assassinated and his Vice President Andrew Johnson, who was strongly opposed to his policies, decided instead to be lenient towards ex-Confederates so as to rush the defeated states back into the Union to get back onto the international stages as soon as possible. While he sought to ratify this Amendment as soon as possible, he vetoed bills that would give the newly-freed black people full equality as American citizens with the ability to vote. The fact that he was an ex-slave owner himself and associated with many more could have played a part in his decision, but frankly it just wasn’t high on his list of priorities.

Ulysses S. Grant, the ex-Union top General became president after that and overrode a lot of Johnson’s actions and enforced the new equality laws and crushed the KKK using Northern Union troops, but these troops were eventually withdrawn from all states by 1876, leaving southern black people to their fates. In some Southern states black men (5) were elected to Congress, but by the turn of the century, each previously seceded state constitution had been successfully changed to disenfranchise black voters and return to a complete white rule, something that the majority of their leaders had favoured all along.

Next you have the Jim Crow era. I’m sure you’ve heard of how well that went for black people. But don’t worry, those African-Americans were now ‘free’. Yay! But really, due to high rent and low pay for any work they did, as well as making travel as difficult as possible for them, coupled with lynchings and no real legal or democratic representation, freedom for African Americans was effectively the same as slavery. If you haven’t, read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird or watch the film. It gives you a good idea of how justice operated for black people during the Jim Crow era through the eyes of a white child.

But how does that impact on the modern USA you ask?

By the early 1960s, improving Civil Rights in the USA was a cornerstone of Democratic Party President John F. Kennedy’s manifesto, and just like after Lincoln’s assassination, after Kennedy’s in 1963, another Vice President Johnson became the man who had to support more rights for African Americans knowing many around him weren’t sure it was necessary. It would prevent him from receiving support from white Conservatives, and could actually lead to more violence against African Americans. However, he was successful in passing the law by convincing enough of the opposition party to back it. He is reputed to have said at the time:

"I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come”

This continues to be largely true over fifty years later.

The Jim Crow era only really ended with the passing of these laws. Is that modern enough?

Even after that the segregation and anti-miscegenation (racial mixing and blood purity) laws these states had until 1967! Is that modern enough?

Again, I suppose you think that this is only really those crazy racists down in the south, beating up on their African-American neighbours as they are wont to do?

The entire US electoral system has been, continues to be and is now increasingly rigged against African Americans. Gerrymandering and systemic voter restrictions, removal of polling stations close to mostly African American neighbourhoods, as well as downright lies about apparent voter ID fraud are all in the US-wide Republican playbook and have been for years. A playbook which they learned from the Jim Crow-era southerners.

This means that everything up to the Electoral College is skewed in favour of Republican areas with more dispersed populations, while those with large urban centres with higher African American populations have their votes reduced and marginalised.

There’s a lot of media flying around the internet with violence. This video involves no violence at all, but I think that it successfully explains why African Americans have every possible reason to be upset - the US system has been working exactly as designed - by white supremacist slave owners and their descendants.

Antonio French’s Twitter Account

Look. It’s been a few years since I taught this at school, but I can talk about this all day. It’s important to understand just how bad things are over there for African-Americans and I haven’t even touched on indigenous Americans. I think the vast majority of people would like to see things improve in the US as well as all around the world, and there are many different ways to do this right now including donating your money or your time, but a good basis is always education. We all need to teach ourselves why this situation is the way it is and why it is wrong. Without that it’s difficult to work to improve things.

So focusing on black lives in the USA:

I would recommend watching 13th on Netflix. It’s an award-winning documentary which will explain systemic and historic racism in the USA and how that has compounded how far behind black people are as time has gone on.

Or the movie Loving which dramatises a couple who were arrested on the basis of those miscegenation laws in the 1960s.

And if you want to read a book, to find out about how engrained racism is in the justice system, a good book on that would be Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It takes you up to around about 2010. Or again watch the film with Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan. It misses out some stuff, but you get a flavour of what has been going on.

Each tiny concession has to be fought for tooth and nail and the road is paved with the damaged and ended lives of the ‘uppity blacks’ who dared to fight for what they deserved.

Don’t feel guilty for starting small and just watching some TV to learn more. If you can then recommend more people in your social sphere watch them too, the difference you can make can become great.

I heard about this book when I saw the film adaptation way back in the late 00s. It was a movie aimed at children that looked like a post-apocalyptic cross between The Borrowers and The Wind Singer. The costumes were straight out of The Borrowers and the arbitrary allocation of your future by the state, even against your express wishes, was The Wind Singer. I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if it didn’t do that well, plus the cast was incredible. So, I thought I’d give the original source book a go when the audiobook was available on Libby.

So if my mishmash of references doesn’t help you, let me talk about the premise more plainly. A group of scientists, engineers and other professionals and intellectuals referred to as ‘The Builders’ have constructed a vast underground city called Ember in anticipation of a vast unnamed disaster. They have given the first Mayor a metal case that their successors will inherit and continue to pass on with instructions for how to leave the city once that disaster has passed in an estimated two centuries. However, during the intervening time the case ends up lost and unremembered.

The story follows two friends Lina Mayfleet and Doon Barrow who live in Ember about 240 years after the foundation of the city. They graduate school and are allocated their jobs for life by the Mayor. Lina is made a ‘Pipeworks Labourer’ and Doon a ‘Messenger’, both jobs that they each hate, leading to a secret swap between them.

In the course of the story, the two friends discover the increased dilapidation of the city, shortage of rations, as well as corruption among its leadership, that forces them to look for a solution to their increasingly difficult lives. Their curiosity is raised further when Lina’s baby sister finds a metal box in a cluttered room and starts chewing on its contents.

This book, released in 2003, is the first part of The Book of Ember Series by Jeanne DuPrau. I had only known her for this novel, but it turns out she has also published other short stories, essays and non-fiction books. I haven’t read any of the other books in this series, but this book can definitely be read on its own as its story has a clear end state with no immediate cliffhangers, although I may eventually read the next if I find it in the library.

There are many things I liked about this book, including the use of language and how it is supposed to have changed over time. Words fall into disuse over decades and centuries in a different environment, so in this story, words like ‘clouds’ aren’t understood and ‘elephants’ are not described accurately as nobody alive in Ember has ever seen one and all materials that suggest a past life outside the city have been destroyed. One example can be found when Lina is using her most treasured possessions, her colouring pencils. Wouldn’t it be strange, she thought, to have a blue sky? But she liked the way it looked. It would be beautiful - a blue sky. The change in the use of language from our own in a fantasy or sci-fi world is one of my favourite things when reading a new story, especially when it’s an evolution or offshoot of our own, for example in Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey. I enjoy when authors have clearly given some thought to it!

The relationship between the two protagonists is fun to follow. Although more time is given to Lina than to Doon, providing her with a bit more solidity, they are both characters we can root for. The relationship between them is believable and their complementary strengths and foibles make them a satisfying pair as they move from acquaintances to real friends.

Ember as the setting is a wonderful canvas for the story to take place upon. The increasingly decrepit and disintegrating city is brought to life by DuPrau and is almost completely believable. It feels very lived in - obviously over-lived in - to the point that everything is jury-rigged with ever-increasing ingenuity to keep it working. This is the best part of the story for me and if I could create a world as lived in and believable as this one in my own stories, I would be very happy.

When I started reading, I was really excited to hear more about the different Builders who created the underground city. I wanted to know more about the efforts that they put into creating a habitable settlement with plans for moving inhabitants in, generations living there and then a plan for leaving. That sounds pretty impressive to me! Instead, this is a children’s novel, so that isn’t the story we got here. It glosses over that kind of complexity and instead, we get the child-eye view of the city and find out how things are not as they should be. It’s a definite choice and it still works, I was just left wanting more.

With it being a children’s novel, there are some issues that stretch plausibility. There are no signs of population control, people who have left to seek life outside Ember, armed coups, written diaries or anything else likely to occur over 300 years of people living in a contained town. Either the government apparatus is excellent at silencing any subversive elements, or the population is remarkably passive. However, if you are looking for an adult book about that, then Wool by Hugh Howey is a good place to start!

Lastly, the way in which the characters made decisions that seemed at odds with common sense to move the plot in direction that it needed to go. Now, I get that I am clearly a cynical 30-something, re-reading this book, but when I read it the first time, I did roll my eyes at it too. Perhaps I was a cynical kid as well? I appreciate that this is a children’s novel, but there are moments that both the children and other adults that should know better, really do stretch believability.

Overall, I think that this is a good book. I can pick at it all day, but that would not be fair, based on the target audience. I guess that is the difference between a children’s novel and a young adult book? I think this is a step below where I am aiming for the story I’m working on, but I’ll definitely be taking that focus on language and setting to make the environment feel realistic and lived in! The premise, setting and characters are enough to easily recommend it to anyone around 10-12 years old.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️★

There is now a new Star Trek series that follows along from the Star Trek of my childhood. Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Jeri Ryan and others are back in a new series. I never thought I’d see the day! At the same time, today is Brexit Day, and I was reminded of something I wrote soon after the referendum itself back in 2016. It seemed appropriate to return to it.

We are a week since the In/Out referendum in which a majority of British voters supported leaving the European Union. I had not read much of the media leading up to that date as I knew which way I was voting and why. Days before the referendum itself I had dialled into the media to see where things were. Suddenly things were not the way I expected them. I knew it was going to be close, but I always assumed that the result was in favour of the “Remain” campaign. How wrong I was! I have lived within the privileged bubble of being born in the late 1980s with Britain’s EU membership a matter without question. It gives me the ability to travel to parts of Europe without messing about with a visa and the opportunity to live and work there, and with the increasingly interconnected continent of Europe on my doorstep. I could get a cheap flight on Friday night and back on Monday morning and be back in time for work. While I was there I was able to meet other Europeans who were also taking advantage of the benefits of the European Union to do the same thing. Perhaps this is why the younger voters felt so disappointed by the result. Something which offered them such potential benefits could be removed by the decision of others. Many of whom were voting for such different reasons as to stick it to then-Prime Minister David Cameron, to vote against the government, to curb immigration, to stop paying money into an organisation that gives us nothing back. There are many reasons people voted to leave, but I didn’t agree with a single one of them, so I guess that makes me opposed to the views of a great many people in the UK. That realisation was an interesting one. In the aftermath of the vote, I was left to work out why I felt as utterly bereft as I did. I felt worse than at any other major voting result in my life. No general election is that bad, as there will be another one in a handful of years. I think there are two different reasons for it. First, it highlights the privilege of being young, educated and well-travelled. The media has made mention of the young intelligentsia who overwhelmingly voted to remain, while others used a vote to complain about a wide variety of issues, few if any were actually related to the EU itself! The difference between the young and the old and the more and less educated is clear. Although, interestingly not as clear as the views on the death penalty. That’s a separate, scarier issue. Anyway, I feel both vindicated I made the correct choice, and then guilty for feeling disappointed in those that voted for the opposite when it appears a select group of media elements pushed hard for this result. Those opinions were clearly based on a logic that I didn’t have. Perhaps they thought they were doing the right thing for themselves and their families and therefore, who am I to say they’re wrong? Are my experiences or the knowledge I had somehow worth more than theirs? The second is that this vote and its resulting apparent licence for violence and bigotry triggered a deep-seated belief that this was a ‘step backwards’ for our journey into creating a ‘better world,’ whatever that is! From a young age, too much science fiction in general and Star Trek episodes, in particular, had taught me the way to a better world is for everyone to work together within large organisations, with the free flow of workers and families. The more people travel and meet each other, the more they can see that as a single species, all of our cultures are very similar, our similarities are far more important than our differences and that we don’t have to fear each other quite so much. And Roddenberry’s initial idea of a society that didn’t have any currency — that people worked for the common good of all — really showed how utopian that society was! This vote showed me how fear and anger overrode any sense of togetherness and common understanding. It showed how a group of small nations that form one country was so easily splintered into voting so differently from each other, with the larger cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester along with Northern Ireland and Scotland all going one way, and the rest of England and Wales going the other. That splintering shows the clear divides that had perhaps always been just under the surface, but it showed me just how far away we are from that global internationalist future I have always dreamed of, to allow humanity to progress further and faster. That future is still available to us, but increasingly under threat. And in my mind has moved further from being within my own lifetime. That makes me disappointed, as I’m impatient to see that future develop in front of my eyes. Perhaps I should set my sights lower.

Reading it back, my feelings have not changed on the matter. The depth of our understanding of the issues around traditional media and who owns it, money and where it resides, taxes paid and unpaid, foreign and social media interference and divisions have only increased. We know where this fight was won and lost.

So I will hold my family more tightly. My lost citizenship will not mean a single lost friendship, and hopefully that international future I grew up dreaming of may still come to pass. Who knows, perhaps my son will see it?

So this is a strange one and more of an audiobook exclusive - from what I can gather, it isn’t available in print, just CD and mp3. I borrowed this from my library network on Libby and I chose it as something different and relaxing to listen to whilst running. Thich Nhat Hanh was not a name I recognised, and the title of the book was enough to get me to download and listen to it, but it turned out that he is actually a very famous Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr back in the 60s and was in exile from Vietnam from 1975 until 2005.

So this audiobook is actually two different excerpts recorded from instructional lectures about meditation and mindfulness. It’s not a long recording, but I found Hanh has a relaxing and soothing voice and coupled with these bite-sized lessons, made for easily digestible thinking, even while I was running!

I suppose I was technically cheating by running rather than sitting still, but I found I was eating up the pavement as I listened to this man talk about comparing ourselves to water and mountains and imagining what it is like to behave like a tree. I seriously enjoyed it and since running is usually my time for digesting the day’s thoughts and trying to relax, this was a nice addition with some different ideas to consider. My favourite section was when Hanh was talking about the passage of time in his sing-song voice. One of the things he said was:

“The present moment is the substance with which the future is made. Therefore, the best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment. What else can you do?”

I have not seen this man in any video footage, but listening to this I always had the impression of a chilled out dude saying everything with a little bit of a shrug and a smile.

One potential downside is that the lecture sounded like it has been recorded onto vinyl, burned onto cassette tape and was then digitised at some point in the last 20 years - not the cleanest! I really like it and found it gave it an archaic, ‘found audio’ kind of feel, but I totally get it if listeners rolled their eyes and say the audio quality is rubbish!

The lectures also drop you in with little introduction and this man starts talking about his views on the world and how we can do certain things better, told through the metaphor of different things in the natural world. It’s not going to set the world on fire or blow people’s minds, but Hanh offers several different meditation techniques and their benefits. I am not a regular meditator, and I definitely wasn’t meditating while listening to this recording, but it gave me a small glimpse into this man’s views on the world. One thing I always enjoy is listening to someone far calmer, more experienced and incredibly knowledgeable talk about their specialist subject, and that was fascinating to hear, even if I had no idea who he was to begin with!

I would recommend listening to this recording, it’s only a couple of hours of your time, but it gives you things to think about and different mindfulness techniques to try if you’d like!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️★

Hillary Rodham Clinton needs little introduction and I felt some trepidation in reviewing her 2017 book What Happened, published the year after her second failed bid for the US Presidency to vitriol from both sides of the US political divide. However, when the audiobook became available, I thought I would give Hillary the chance to tell me, in her own words, What Happened. So here we are, with her post-action report about what went wrong, who messed it up for her and what could have been done better.

Hearing Clinton tell her own story about the process of gaining the Democratic Nomination, the call to Donald Trump to concede, give her concession speech and then finally go home to mourn her loss is such a far cry from anything I had read before. She was eminently more qualified than her opponent, she had made it to the final night as the frontrunner, thought she had it in the bag, won the popular vote by a wide margin and yet still lost and I found that fascinating!

As the London Evening Standard said at the time:

“Two decades after her husband humiliated her with his affair with Monica Lewinsky, she lost the prize she most coveted to a self-proclaimed “pussy-grabber”. She lost as an elitist against a second-generation New York real-estate tycoon who lives in an apartment gilded in gold. She lost as a devout Methodist among conservative evangelicals to a man who had rarely set foot inside a church. She lost as an expert on every big political issue, to an opponent who preferred big, blousy slogans to detail, and who got all his news from cable television.”

Clinton spends a bit of the book devoted to blame. Hacking authorised by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders for not supporting her sooner, imbalanced media coverage, misogyny, Mitch McConnell’s partisan politics, a late bombshell from then-FBI Director John Comey and plenty of others. However, she also reserves a chunk of the blame for herself, detailing how she feels she might have acted in that Presidential debate with Trump looming behind her, or her complete unwillingness to feed into the fear, hate and resentment that Trump revelled in, plus a chapter on those emails! She says: “every time I hugged another sobbing friend – or one stoically blinking back tears, which was almost worse – I had to fight back a wave of sadness that threatened to swallow me whole. At every step, I felt that I had let everyone down. Because I had.”

The little sly asides and comments about others from the political landscape are where this book really shines. Something that an ordinary civilian, miles from those conversations would never hear, and the emotion that they land with has heft even years later. Among my favourites, immediately after calling Trump to concede, she called Obama to say “I’m sorry I let you down.” At Trump’s Inauguration, she gritted her teeth and repeated her mantra, “Smile now, scream later”. On a happier note, George W. Bush’s suggestion that they should go out for burgers at some point. “I think that’s Texan for I feel your pain” She quipped.

I enjoyed Clinton talking about policy that she had planned to implement on divisive issues like gun control, how to prevent police shootings and how to improve immigration rules, among many others. All things that stand in stark contrast to the current incumbent’s policies. The wistful feelings continued throughout the book as I considered what a Hillary Clinton White House might have been. While I thoroughly enjoy a talk about government policy in this depth, and it is a topic that Clinton clearly revels in, I could see many readers finding it boring and worth skipping, and that’s something that Clinton herself recognises. She says that she more closely resembled a “spoilsport schoolmarm” compared to a Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders, who she said promised big with Universal Healthcare and didn’t have the budgets to back it up as a generous Santa.

My problems with this book are complicated. There were a few times I was listening to it and rolling my eyes or scoffing at the incredible privilege and hubris that Clinton must often forget she has, to be able to find it surprising that certain groups didn’t vote for her or didn’t turn out to vote at all, or her own grudging annoyance at the “bad optics” of getting paid millions for corporate speeches to Wall Street banks. “What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss.” But while I see these as clear errors in her judgment; the assumption of victory, already having bought the house next-door to cope with the extra secret service staff, the last-minute edits to her victory speech, they add to the pathos in the story and add more threads to the tapestry of this failed Presidential candidate. It built to such a great height that when it all comes crashing down she was even more broken for it.

Hillary Clinton is an incredible dichotomy with all of the experience and expertise that make her a great candidate for the Presidency. Yet who she is and what she represents to the American people precluded her from being the candidate that enough people in key states wanted to get her over the line. Since the woman herself cannot split those two parts of her, What Happened makes for a fascinating listen!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The story settles around Cora Seaborne. The recent widow of an influential London civil servant towards the end of the Victorian era. Her new-found freedom from her cold and abusive husband allows her to leave the bustling big city for village life in Essex to exercise her passion for palaeontology. Upon hearing the widespread rumour that the Essex Serpent, a creature from local folklore, had returned to terrorise the people and livestock and was blamed for a series of deaths in the area, that her passion is piqued.

In her excitement to verify the claims, she comes up against the local clergyman Will Ransome, who is intent on convincing his congregation that the monster is nothing more than fear and superstition.

The book is the award-winning second novel by Sarah Perry, published in 2016. This was my first introduction to Perry, who it turns out grew up in Essex to a strict Baptist family and spent much of her time with classical literature and music since access to more contemporary forms of media was restricted. She has described how the King James Bible was a strong influence on her writing and she studied gothic literature for a PhD as well. It’s clear to see how these have impacted on this book.

There were several things I enjoyed while I was reading this book. The interplay between Cora Seaborne, Will Ransome and his wife Stella. It was interesting to see how all three of them perceived the times that they met as we were given each of their thoughts. I also found the prose beautiful and engaging and operatic in its own way. It is like very few contemporary books, and that in itself makes it a fascinating read as it harkens me back to reading Frankenstein at school!

I found the locations and settings and their descriptions lifelike and believable and I also enjoyed the way in which the characters wrestle, at least to a small extent, with religious belief and superstitious belief, especially when a clergyman is forced to argue for one but not the other and when Cora challenges him on it, leading to my favourite quote:

“I had faith, the sort of thing you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad - to turn your back on everything new and wonderful - not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!” - Cora Seaborne

On the other hand, there was so little real conflict in the story. I was hoping for Cora’s entry into the rural life of Essex to make real waves, but we never get that impression. People just seem so polite that I found it a little bit dull. No drama, gossip, suggestions of impropriety between the married vicar and this interloping widow. I wanted more arguments, deeper discussions, and to hear more of Cora’s innermost thoughts. And when we finally got those, right at the end, the story was almost over.

I found it boring. I think it took me about three quarters of the book to begin to care about any of the characters. This was my biggest struggle with the book and really hindered my enjoyment. I just did not care for the different characters and only continued reading because a friend had recommended it to me!

Even if I didn’t engage with the characters, there are several things which I would take from the book. Perry’s ability to write in different dialects was excellent and it clearly showed another way to distinguish characters from different locations or strata of society. Couple that with the widely varied chattiness of different characters and it makes for clearly differentiated personalities in the story. Both of those are things I could definitely work on in my own writing.

Perry obviously did a great deal of research for the book, and the detail with which she described Victorian-era surgery was definitely a highlight for me!

Her clear descriptors for her different locations really caught my eye. It was easy to feel the difference between London and her invented Essex town Aldwinter. She definitely goes into a lot more descriptive detail than I do when I’m writing fiction, although that fits with the Gothic nature of this story.

In the end I found The Essex Serpent a book that definitely has positives, but I just didn’t find myself caring until the end. Reading it felt more like a literary exercise to complete than a gripping story.

⭐️⭐️⭐️★★

Get a library card! No, really, get a library card - they’re free. Support your local library, pop in, borrow them, read them and bring them back! That saves you paying anything for them, which is pretty cool and the more that we can do to keep libraries open for everyone, the better.

I mentioned before how I’ve been trying to get reading again. There are some awesome apps that I have found to make it far easier. They might still require that library card though!

LibriVox

You can get started right now with the free, ad-supported app, which provides free and paid audiobooks. It’s a great place to find out of copyright classics. For example it let me go through Jane Austen’s back catalogue and Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and get someone to read them to me for free! That’s pretty cool.

The downside is that the quality of the recordings can be wildly changeable with some being close to Audible quality whilst others can sound like they were recorded by 6 different people in different places with completely different mic settings. But it is free, so if you’re after an audiobook or audio play, and don’t want to pay for Audible, then this is a great place to start!

Libby

This will allow you to sync your library card to the app and give you access to all of the eBooks and audiobooks that your local chain of libraries has, to download onto your device. For free. It’s pretty awesome, and my current favourite way to get audiobooks and eBooks that normally I would have to pay for.

There are downsides, since it’s attached to your library card, it works just like a library. This means that it only has access to books that your local library system has access to. It has licences of a book, rather than unlimited sharing, meaning that if another user has withdrawn one and it is on their device, you’ll have to place a hold to get it once it has returned to the library’s collection, just like a real book. So if it’s a particularly popular book, you might find there is a hold list that’s several people long. But once you get to the top of the list, the book will be downloaded onto your device and will be ready for you. The best part of the system is that when the loan period is up, the book will be automatically removed from the device and sent to the next one. No late fees required!

This is how I’ve managed to get through so many books in the last few months - I’ve been using my library! I’m not slowed down by having to pay for them and I can listen to them on my commute or while doing the washing up. I really think audiobooks are a great option for people to consider. It has definitely helped me enjoy more books straight from my phone!

Librivox

Libby

I used to burn through books. This stopped dead in the last year of school, when I stopped reading for pleasure and instead read for academics. And for my own pleasure, I swapped fiction books for the internet, watching television shows and films. Then after arriving at university in 2007 I began listening to podcasts as well. I found that I only very rarely went back to reading and almost never went back to the books I had on my shelves.

On the other hand I have been trying to write several different novels on and off since 2011, which I have found really rewarding, at least when I’ve been able to dedicate time to it! Perhaps that’s an odd dichotomy - the writer who does not read, and while researching how best to complete my stories, I found that one thing that all novelists said was to read - as much and as widely as possible.

On the realistic, more physical side of things, I moved cities and couldn’t bring the bookcases and boxes of books I had been collecting for years with the faint, childhood notion of building a little library or study for myself. In the end I brought about 15-20 books with me and sold, gave away or donated the rest. I didn’t count them in the end, but I know it was several hundred. It definitely meant the journey up with all of my stuff was much easier!

I competed in Nanowrimo again in November, and read that piece of advice again - “Writers read. Read as much as you can!” But I still wasn’t reading. I knew that if I wanted to make my stories the best I could, I would need to read. So I did what any self-respecting human being does and copied a friend. I resurrected my Goodreads account and joined the Goodreads challenge - to read a certain number of books by the end of the year. I wasn’t sure I could meet his target of 26 books, but it was a target to strive for, and I do love a challenge.

I also loved the Goodreads idea of cataloguing the books I was reading and more importantly cataloguing new ideas that I might want to include or exclude from my own writing. That would make this challenge useful and beneficial to my writing.

So this is what I’m going to do - I’m going to write about that here, my own views on the books I’m reading, now that I’m finally reading again, in and among anything else I happen to write. Follow me here, on Twitter, or add me on Goodreads if you want. Let me know what you think.