Short Story

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the centre.
Kurt Vonnegut

GRAVITY FAILED LAST TUESDAY. One tried to take it seriously, a wondrous scientific experiment (and the costliest of all time, isn’t it, at US$9 billion?) that might just show us how it all began. One might wait on it with some fear and trepidation. How small is a small black hole? Does size matter if one is near to the singularity? How long is a piece of string? Things we just don’t know, cannot measure. What really matters?

Someone posits: There is no such thing as ‘mind’ ... There is only ‘matter’ ... ‘Self’ is a necessary fiction. These conclusions come easily once one has thrown the holy child out with the font water.

One wonders just who (a fiction?) is in charge at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, (a non-fiction?). This is the way the world will end ... Not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a dream, and dreams are the airiest of inventions, somewhere in the brain, chemicals. A dream only exists (have you noticed?) when one wakens, leaves it behind. When it cannot be completely retrieved. In Xanadu...

So, we have Elvis and Janis, Jim, Mama Cass and Jimi, Marilyn and Jesus and Jacko coming out of the Large Hadron Collider. Dancing and singing down a dusty pavement that turns to Revelation’s gold beneath their feet. The Time Warp. And clocks run backwards. And Toblerone chocolate bars take wing. That’s my dream. Where I awoke.

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet. Act I, Scene V)

THE PHOTOGRAPH was taken in the 1950s and that’s my great-grandfather John Lavender Crow, and my great-grandmother Jessie Caroline Moon Crow. They were both alive when I was born. Jessie died before I could meet her in person, but I was presented to John Crow for his inspection and approval. I was about eleven years old. When we arrived at his home in Uxbridge (the one in the picture) my great-grandfather was at the pub. We walked to his local and escorted him home. Pubs closed in the afternoon then.

Great-grandfather Crow was a tiny man. My Nan Eldridge, his daughter (he had six sons as well), would not have been five feet tall, and in 1961 she was taller than her father. I suppose he was about my size. It did not seem so short at that time. The leaves were high.

The photograph you see may have been taken to mark some special occasion. Perhaps their sixtieth wedding anniversary in 1953. The photograph turns up in all the family albums. When I visited my great-grandfather I did not take a photograph of him with my Brownie Camera, even though I had the opportunity to do so. I took a picture of the pub sign where we’d tracked him down. I’d been to London Zoo earlier that day and snapped the giraffes and elephants, and not the lions and zebras. Priorities.

John and Jessie Crow had raised their seven children (born between 1895 and 1908) in Battersea, across the Thames from Chelsea. I could tell you the Eldridges lived over the bridge, and my Nan moved to an apartment on the King’s Road in Chelsea when she married Charlie Eldridge, a sailor and friend of her oldest brother, Jack, who was also in the Royal Navy. John Crow was a compositor according to the census reports I’ve seen. I suppose that means he set type. The old-fashioned way, by hand. Like Virginia Woolf did at the Hogarth Press.

I believe my Nan inherited her love of gardening (might I add, her success at it) from her father, rather than from her mother. In 1961 great-grandfather’s garden was well overgrown, though there was a path down the middle of it to a shed or outhouse.

I’m not sure why my great-grandparents got so far into their garden for the photograph. It appears that someone placed a chair in amongst the plants for Jessie and her dog. She seems to be in her best funereal black. I wonder if she was buried in those clothes. (Not in their garden, of course!)

My Nan looked like her father, judging by this picture and my distant memory of the old man. Her mother may not have her teeth in, she looks pretty grim. I’m told she was more fond of whisky than company, and would stay in the kitchen when visitors came, sucking on a bottle. This may be totally untrue, though I rather like the thought of it. She seems fond of her little dog with its strangely human face, so anything can be forgiven her. I wish I knew what the dog was called. The Crows were big on names: My Nan was christened Charlotte Caroline Victoria. Nan’s brothers included a Cyril, a Percival and an Aubrey.

My Nan told me that she’d been named for the last three queens of England at the time of her birth in 1901. Perhaps that was so, but it happens that she was also named for her mother and grandmother.

As short as the Crows were, my Nan’s husband, my Grandfather Harry Charles Christopher Eldridge, was tall. Charlie was rather a handsome fellow with fair skin, and wavy, golden hair (in shoulder-length ringlets when he was very small posing in a sailor suit) and blue eyes. Nan, Lottie, had olive-coloured skin and black hair and eyes. I cannot tell from the photograph or memories of my great-grandfather whether he, or his wife, or both, contributed the more exotic colouring to the family gene pool. My father was like his mother, as are one of my sisters and one brother. I have the lighter complexion and blond, curly hair. Well, when I had hair it was curly. I’m not all that tall. My sisters are shorter, my brothers taller. No telling what will crawl out of the pool on a particular day.

When I look in the mirror I see my father, muddled in with my mother ... another story ... in facial features, if not in colouring. Eldridge. Not Crow. I don’t see the couple in the photograph in my mirror. That’s because my mirror is not full-length. I dare say my more compact body owes something to John Lavender Crow. In the day I wore my trousers with the waist across my nipples, tie tucked in.

Taking a tape to John and Jessie Crow, I can measure them up and down and place them here or there. They are the matter of my life. My mind, if it exists at all, has nothing to do with them. My brain is what tells me I’m hungry, that I fancy a cup of tea (I do, right now), that it is bedtime. My brain processes the thoughts, the memories of the Crows. My brain chooses the keys that I strike to get this down on the page. John and Jessie allowed me a little (perhaps a lot) of the structure of their brains. I am not infused with their spirits, and not with those who came directly before and after.

Philip Larkin said: “They fuck you up, your mums and dads.” I believe he was meaning their treatment of their children, rather than the blue eyes or dark hair. One’s height doesn’t necessarily come into it. One can dye the hair, wear coloured lenses and platform shoes. My self is something of no importance, is it? My self is just a name I borrow for my lifetime, perhaps a postal address.

What matters are the footprints one leaves in time and space. The X one makes on the page.

And John and Jessie Crow come out, down the glittering, golden pavement. And their little dog barks.

That Ice & Snow: The Swiss Role in It

Exhibit A: Large Hadron Collider

Exhibit B: Euro-Tunnel

Exhibit C: Amble Minimart Item

WE'VE ALL GOT A WINTER OF 2009-2010 STORY, haven't we? I'm hoping this is the winter I remember a few years from now when the promise of Global Warming is honoured and I'll be sitting down by the River Coquet in January watching the flamingos mucking about. I'll be wearing my Bermuda shorts.

Amble in the Ice is somewhat off the beaten track. The Northumberland Council is only gritting vitally important roads (and paths and pavements are not even mentioned at County Hall). The A-1068 is getting a very little grit now and then and one can slide through the edge of town. Our few shops and the minimart are not getting much attention.

We don't have a supermarket. We have a minimart operated by the Co-op. A year ago the Co-op managed to cram a great deal of food and drink into their small space. In early summer they closed for renovations: out came about a quarter of the shelves and one of the check-outs, and in came … Well, less of everything and none of some … And a large empty area was created for people to queue in unhappily, and a few racks of rubbishy children's summer gear were tucked just inside the door. The liquor section was extended (successfully, I think, as our only off-licence has closed at Christmas) and the butcher's section vanished under shrink-wrapped packets of slightly off-colour meat products.

So, Amblers tend to shop out of town. Goes without saying, though I've said it anyway. There's an ASDA Superstore miles south of us. I don't have a vehicle. I use the bus and get lifts. I rely on our Co-op minimart for basics.

For over a week, the minimart has had the look of shops in East Germany before Reunification. Empty shelves 98%, some unusual items 2%. Just after New Year, our minimart had no dairy products, no fruit or vegetables, no meat or poultry or seafood. It did have a very large heap of butter-substitute products: spreads as they are referred to properly (margarine is toxic, hasn't been sold for decades). And there were many two-litre bottles of Co-op Diet Lemonade. For fuck's sake, I thought, and came home with Lemonade and two cartons of I Can't Believe it's Not Butter, and my Lotto ticket.

Yesterday I trundled (there's a good word!) through ice and snow across to the Co-op minimart and found … well, I didn't find … Except for a considerable quantity of Toblerone Chocolates in different sizes (the shape remains the same or it ain't Toblerone). I'm the odd person who doesn't much like chocolate. Go figure. Already having this week's Lotto ticket (the winner, I hope!) I trundled (still quite a good word) back to the flat empty-handed.

Last night the BBC told us, early in the evening, that it was the same temperature as Moscow (-20C). Later in the night they updated this to the same temperature as the South Pole (-22C). This is cold fucking comfort for you! And, today, the story is that it will get worse. And how? Polar bears ice-fishing in the Thames? "I am the Walrus" becomes the new National Anthem? Gordon Brown attacked by penguins. Wait, I'd pay money to see that.

A month or so ago, once the baguette that had been dropped accidentally into the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had been picked out, a crumb at a time, the scientists in Geneva fired up that fucker. And then we hear some star a few thousand light years away is going super-nova and will destroy all life on Earth with an inter-galactic fart. Some Nigerian nut-job sets his knickers on fire in the name of God (Allah-ing matter!) while flying above Detroit*. Trains freeze to a halt in the Channel Tunnel. Ice and snow come rolling over Britain from the east. Food vanishes from the Amble minimart. Toblerone bars suddenly appear in an otherwise empty shop.

Vortex is a good word, like trundle. I'll use it, never mind I'm not sure what it means. I think the Large Hadron Collider is to blame, we're in a vortex, and while Switzerland may be spitting snow and chocolates at us today, any time now a Black Hole will open there for business, dairy cows will spin around us, and Global Warming will start to look pretty mild by comparison.

Turn the Collider off! Well, just after the penguins get the Prime Minister.

*The fuckwit, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known as 'No-Diddy' to his mates, has pleaded not guilty to charges filed against him ... claiming the incident was just the result of a Vindaloo he'd had in Amsterdam.

The World Always Ends on TV

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
Right after these commercial messages
T. V. Eliot (The Wasteland)

I'VE HELD OFF writing up my brief notes on the Large Hadron Collider experiment just in case the other shoe dropped and there wasn't much point in doing it. No computer. No Barking Mad blog. No Internet. Nobody out there. No Amble. No out there.

But the experiment is incomplete, even though the news headlines announced that the universe had not ended. The news of our survival may be premature. The risky bit, when the particles going clockwise around the LHC accelerator in Switzerland meet the particles going anti-clockwise, will only happen, they now coyly say: Some time in the next month, perhaps. The other shoe is yet to drop.

Last Wednesday morning, 10 September 2008, just after eight o'clock, the LHC was to be fired up, and if the red standby light turned green, big things were going to happen. And it was going to be on the television. Some said it would be the end of the world, the end of the universe, live from Geneva.

There could be small Black Holes created when these miniscule protons bumped into each other at very nearly the speed of light. [99.999999% of the speed of light, apparently, which is almost as fast as the speed of a dachshund grabbing a bit of steak. I'd like to race wiener dogs round that 17 mile track.] Black Holes worry people, even if they really haven't got a clue as to what they might be. If only they'd been called Pale Blue Holes, everything would be hunky dory.

The things that could be discovered, that will be studied, and the measurements, the names, the contortions, and logic, are so peculiar (the Higgs boson, electromagnetic symmetry breaking, masses and decays of quarks, dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, the string theory) that my mind would be wound up tighter than Stephen Hawking's voice machine if I tried to think too much about them. [Please note that I have my own String Theory: No matter how long you cut a piece of ribbon to tie up a Christmas present, it is always too short.]

I was home on Wednesday morning. Optimistically, I even made my bed. I skipped my bowl of cereal and wondered about a beverage to consume while watching the big Switch-On on Channel 80. Tea? Coffee? Hemlock?

Cailean joined me on the sofa as I settled down with my coffee. I reached for my TV remote. The upper left button should switch the flat-screen on, but the battery is loose and I had to whack the remote a few times before it made contact. What do you expect for £250?

White men, a very few white women, and no people of colour that I noticed, were standing around or sitting around on what might have been the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Lights were a-flashing, screens were a-screening, and a voiceover from London told us that we were watching the control room at CERN in Switzerland. Then we got to see some animation. We even had a bird's eye view of that part of the Swiss-French countryside with a dotted line superimposed to indicate where the LHC was buried. I wondered if it ran under anyone's bedroom. Imagining Claude calling Marie to the window and saying, in French, of course: There's a big dotted line coming straight towards us from the east, and going out again to the west. WTF?

The voiceover said that it was about time to turn on the Large Hadron Collider. I was astonished to hear that it might just not work. That's what they said. The whole project was so far out: Who could be sure? And what do you expect for £5,000,000,000?

If it had refused to operate, I expect some boffin would have called out: Try switching it off, then on again.

A sip of the coffee, I stroked Cailean's ears. I waited to be dragged by a mighty wind across the North Sea, up into the Alps, and through a small black hole, surrounded by millions of spinning chocolate bars and Rolex watches to find Tom Cruise being crowned Grand Poobah by tiny, green aliens fresh from a tear in the Space-Time Continuum. Nothing. Not one Toblerone wrapper.

The television news team went over to another story. A banner on the screen promised an update regarding the Big Experiment later in the morning. No World's End, just Credit Crunch. This reminded me I'd not had breakfast. I got on with the rest of my day, but left the TV running, the sound muted.

It was mid-morning when the headline came up to announce that one beam had gone around the LHC successfully. Hopefully a second beam would take the opposite track in the afternoon. But the real experiment, to get the beams to collide: Some time in the next month, perhaps. In fact, the second single beam made its trip before day's end, before the world's end.

As we survivors of this non-event know, some time next month might be around 21 October. Put it in your Doomsday Book. And pray the Universe has a Reset Button.

That might be the end of this post, but I saw a programme on the TV last night that included an interview with a man in America, outside his home on the Texas Coast as Hurricane Ike approached. All the residents in his town had been told to evacuate their homes immediately, there was almost certainly going to be some heavy weather, perhaps a huge storm surge that would wash anything in its way from the face of the Earth. The man insisted: I'm not going. I believe in God, and he'll look after me. I'm a Christian.

And a damn fool, I thought.