So I now live and work in the wild and turbulent wastelands of Yorkshire, which is…different, to say the least. I will say I was certainly more used to having an intelligent conversation now and then, which is something that seems to be head and shoulders above what many of the people I’ve met here even seem capable of. Even a dysfunctional mess like me is given cause to wonder about how they continue to exist and function as humans. The place I work is a family-run business, with (obviously) several members of the same extended family in various jobs. There are two brothers, their mother and the mother’s partner. He’s sort of the brothers’ stepdad, but he and the mother are not married. There are a few additional staff members other than myself, but they don’t work as often.

They’re crazy, putting it bluntly. Barely a day goes by without an argument, some member of the family getting angry at another one for something they’ve done, or not done, or said or whatever. This makes the workplace a rather stressful environment for me, especially considering all the parties involved have virtually no redeeming features whatsoever. Of the four, one’s a criminal, one’s arrogant, moody and stupid, one’s a shrieking illiterate bunny-boiler and one’s a Daily Mail reading racist homophobe. Of the others, one’s a member of the BNP, one’s way too damn pushy when she’s drunk and the other is astonishingly actually a decent human being. Then there’s me, holding my ears and trying to block them all out by humming to myself.

I am becoming deadened to them now. A few days or weeks ago (I can’t remember, they all blur into one) I was at work while some kind of shouting match was occurring in the back of the establishment. The assembled customers (all 5 of them) looked around in confusion and then looked at me as if I wasn’t aware of it. My response was to turn up the stereo so I couldn’t hear the shouting any more. It was pretty much unwritten rule #1 to Not Get Involved. It’s also not after every job interview that you receive a series of advanced apologies from staff members for all the dreadful things they’ll be saying and doing to me and each other in the future. It’s not normal, and it’s just not right.

This is not how a workplace is supposed to be. I’ve had to state my case -several times- that I’m not there to document or comment upon the epic family saga, much less get involved. I’m just there to work, so they will pay me money so I can pay my rent and buy food and all the other stuff. That’s it. My interaction starts and ends with with paycheck. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called upon to weigh in on some ‘vital’ issue or another, in a series of classic “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” moments. They just don’t seem to understand that I simply do not care. Do something to prove you’re not idiots, or just make it worth my while for putting up with it.

In summary then; I need a new job or soon there will be murders.

The first diagram is the statistical distribution of medical phenomena, as seen through the eyes of the fervently religious.

The second diagram is, one presumes, how the fervently religious believe the statistical distribution must look for those without the personal blessings of God.

That is all.

I love kids’ fiction. I really do. I love how much more imaginative they are than most adult books and how, in a surprising number of cases, how much more readable they are. What I don’t like, however, is that despite the thousands of new titles published every year the best sellers are utterly predictable. And, in almost all cases, will be bad titles. Anthony Horowitz? Awful. Darren Shan? Dreadful. Stephenie Meyer? So, so dull and with dreadful writing to boot.

What annoys me most about this is the unwillingness for parents’ to try new books for their kids. Of late, I’ve been attempting to sell the work of Chris Wooding, an utterly wonderful author, whose books really ought to sell a lot more than they do. However the fact that a large number of people have never heard of him or his books before, combined with the utterly horrible covers his publishers have slapped on them (curse you, Scholastic) has left me being almost entirely unsuccessful in my quest.

But this reticence in trying new things hasn’t gone unnoticed. Last year the Publishers Association enacted a new initiative to have age banding on the back of all kids’ fiction, with the aim being to help parents choose books that would be more suitable for their children. Of course, this wouldn’t help consumers who shop at most book stores, as the majority already have their children’s section sub-divided into different categories such as ‘Teen’, ‘9-12’ and ‘5-8’, and any that have swearing or adult themes are stickered as containing such. With the age banding guidelines being along the lines of ‘13+’, ‘9+’ etc, you can see how it really doesn’t affect a thing. And, if the shopper is still unsure about the suitability of the book, there are booksellers available in-store to direct enquiries to.

So what’s the point then?

The answer, I fear, is to enhance the ease of book buying in supermarkets. I have nothing against supermarkets, they are a convenient place to acquire delicious groceries, but as a place to buy or, more appropriately, browse for books they are just not a good place to do so. The range they stock is limited at best, and the staff will, on the whole, simply not know as much about various books as the average book shop employee. I realise that the previous statement might appear to be derogatory, but it’s not intended to be. Of course, there will be staff who work in ASDA, Tesco or whichever supermarket you happen to be shopping in, who know a lot about books, in some cases more than the people running the book stores (I’m looking at you here, Gerry Johnson), but on the whole I reckon not. And this is without the fancy tools that booksellers have to find out the answers to your book-related queries.

So, it’s the supermarkets that come out the rosiest from this age banding scheme. Supermarkets who, with their spending power, have the ability to undercut every book shop that exists in Britain at the moment. Just look at the ‘Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows’ debacle – ASDA sold it for just £5, whilst everyone else was selling it for £9.49 which was still half price! This is something that book shops simply cannot compete with.

If age banding takes off (there is a sizeable petition against it, featuring such luminaries as Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett), it will strike a blow against books shops. And that, I feel, is a bad thing for everybody. Because the likes of Waterstone’s, Borders et al are good for the country. Reading is important and discovering new titles and authors is a magical feeling,  and it’s the ability to enable that which makes, among many other things, book shops a far better place to buy your books than supermarkets.

The idea of more modern arks is something that has surfaced from time to time in both fact and fiction. The concept is to me a very evocative one, and I’d like to explore a few of the more prominent examples here.

Firstly, fact. One of the most amazing feats of this decade has been the construction of the great Seed Vault on Svalbard. A colossal deep-freeze storage unit containing seeds and genetic information for every key crop and plant that our race has come to rely on. Behind huge blast doors, 120 metres beneath a mountain in the frozen wastes of a remote, polar bear haunted island in the arctic circle, no matter what floods, droughts, plagues or infestations strike the crops of the world, there will be a frozen ‘backup’ on Svalbard.

The construction of the Vault was entirely funded by the Norwegian government, which claims sovereignity over the island. Recognizing the potential importance of the project, however, the cost of upkeep is paid for by a vast consortium of nations, including both leading economies and developing ones, as well as at least one legendarily wealthy philanthropist.

This is an entirely pragmatic and self interested project, though no less noble for it. It does put it rather at odds though, with the purely optimistic nature of the one Ark project that is even more incredible.

The Voyager satellite recently left the very outer edges of our star system, travelling at a speed of 3.6 AU per year, one AU being the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or approximately eight light-seconds. Although it is not the satellite’s only function, Voyager carries on it a message from Earth, consisting of over a hundred images, the sounds of the natural world and of human civilisation and industry, greetings in a great many languages, and a selection of musical movements, from Bach to Chuck Berry, going via traditional music from dozens of cultures.

This information is encoded on a golden disk, coated with an incredibly pure isotope of Uranium, chosen for its half-life of  4,510,000,000 years. Numbers that large are hard to properly assimilate without something to compare it to, so imagine it this way – our planet was formed from the swirling dust and gasses of the newly formed star-system only 4,540,000,000 years ago.

If some disaster were to befall humanity, wiping us out entirely at this very moment, the Voyager satellite would be the very last thing to survive of humanity. When the winds and storms of Earth had scoured the greatest monuments of mankind into dust, Johnny B. Goode and the Brandenburg Concerto will still drift through the interstellar void, untouched even by the most distant solar winds.

As a comical side-note, the major record label EMI was approached with regards to including ‘Here Comes The Sun’ by the Beatles on the Voyager disk, but they refused.

There have been innumerable references to the ark as a store of biological information in fiction – usually science fiction. Almost every notable science fiction TV series has had something approximating it at some point, whether it’s an automated system set to wipe out the protagonists in an attempt to restore an extinct race (as in Stargate SG-1) or a more peaceful remnant, seeking only somewhere to set down and rebuild (as in Star Trek : TNG). Rarer but no less intriguing is the fictional equivalent of the Voyager disk – not an attempt to save a species, but to preserve something of it, so that it is not lost entirely to the ravages of time. In reality, this is a good deal easier to achieve than saving the species itself – a lot of work went into the Voyager disk, certainly, but not nearly as much as it would have taken to outfit the satellite to carry a sufficiently large colony of humans to replicate with a safely sized gene-pool, along with habitats, food, water, air, and enough energy to sustain them indefinitely. You only need to look at how difficult it has been to sustain the international space station (ISS) with only a handful of astronauts, even with regular supply missions, a near Earth orbit and no pressure on those astronauts to reproduce to see that such a thing would be completely outside human capabilities at the moment.

In science fiction, of course, colossal hindrances in engineering limits and even the laws of physics are easily overcome. That is rather the difference between ‘science fiction’, and ‘science’. So it’s little wonder really that science fiction authors and scriptwriters tend to go the whole hog with the fully blown species preservation, rather than settle for the achievable but innately tragic idea of a small capsule containing the great masterworks of art, preserving something of a doomed species’ endeavours.

This said, there are still one or two examples, usually drawn either from settings which aren’t technologically that far ahead of our own, or in at least one case a civilisation LESS advanced than our own. In the recent film ‘Children of Men’, adapted quite heavily from a book by P D James, humanity is doomed to a slow death, the result of sudden global infertility. There are no new children, and the remaining adults are slowly dying as a result of panicked anarchy, a countermovement of totalitarianism, or simple old age. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, as T.S Eliot put it.

The protagonist of the film at one point goes to call in a favour from his cousin, a government minister tasked with overseeing a huge repository of precious works of art, referred to as the ‘Ark of the Arts’, inside Battersea Power Station. Interestingly, in an early draft of the script, the repository was referred to as the ‘Noah Project’. We see works by Michelangelo, Picasso and even the graffiti artist Banksy, and hear strains of King Crimson playing inside the building. In a nice little reference, a huge inflatable pig has been suspended over the power station, in tribute to the ‘Animals’ album, by Pink Floyd.

Another poignant example of this comes in the 1870 novel ’20,000 Leagues under the Sea’ by Jules Verne. In this, the infamous Captain Nemo has assembled a fully self-sufficient submarine, and taken to shunning the land and all its Empires. He explains that to him, the human race is already extinct; or at least devolved to such a point as to no longer be worthy of notice. He has gathered on the Nautilus all of the finest examples of art and pure endeavour – tomes of poetry, history, scientific knowledge and philosophy, totalling 12,000 tomes in all. They are accompanied by countless paintings and sculptures of an incalculable value, and the sheet music to a great deal of composers, both long dead and contemporary. He explains that to him, there is no difference, and all of the creators of these art-works are long dead and equal in their timelessness.

“These composers,” Captain Nemo answered me, “are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade.”

In a strange way, Nemo was the self-styled curator of a post-apocalyptic sanctuary of all that had been worth saving from humanity, with the strange twist that he was living in a decidedly pre-apocalytic world, in which humanity still thrived, in complete ignorance of his existence. And if that doesn’t spark some shiver of wonder in you, you just aren’t imagining it hard enough.

As we can see from my colleague, pirates are in the news with their recent aquisition of the oil ship.
Keeping in trend with this, I present an interesting development in the world of pirates and archaeology.

The late Captain William Kidd’s ship “The Adventure Prize” is believed to have been located off the shores of the Caribbean island Catalina. The 500 tonne merchant vessel, originally branded “Quedah Merch­ant“, was to be Kidd’s last ship, forsaking his original command the “Adventure Galley“. Kidd is thought to have scuttled the merchant ship after making off with the silks and treasures being transported aboard her.

Kidd was eventually hanged in 1701 for piracy and murder, having turned against the British kingdom whom originally established him, in an effort to attack our enemies (French and Spaniards).

Though this may not seem a great event, it is amazing to consider the wreck of this great ship rests a mere 10 foot from the coast of the island in the Dominican republic in only 70 foot of water. The discovery also comes shortly after the bulk of research was completed on “The Queen Anne’s Revenge”, the last vessel of the equally infamous Cpt. Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach).
All in all not a bad few years for piratical and archaeological discoveries.
What remains to be seen is if either of these two over romanticised (but who can blame you?) chaps had anything to do with the mysteries at Oak Island; and is this the next big discovery to be made?

If any one knows, these people probably do and it seems fitting to mention them: http://www.oakislandtreasure.co.uk

You can also find photos of members of the forum (including myself) at the Captain Kidd pub on the Thames – just down from where Billy was hung.

One last thing…Is it just coincidence that Captain William Kidd has a remarkably similar name to another popular folk hero and bad guy of the old west? Yes. It is.

Of course, now that these visionaries have hijacked something that people give a shit about, it’s in the news. In reality, the areas off the Somalian coast have been rife with acts of brutal piracy for years, in the wake of the ongoing unpleasantness. The town of Eyl, located on the North-east coast of the country in the troubled Puntland reigon has become something of a haven for modern pirates, with an entire industry set up to cater for them, Including restaurants where they can feed their hostages. Five years ago, pirates attacked and took control of the Dewi Madrim, a chemical tanker passing through the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. They apparently left again, after seizing the technical manuals.

This, of course, caused some concern among the intelligence community, who feared that the pirates may at some point steal a tanker containing liquefied natural gas (LNG), then either destroy it or sell it to someone who would (eg, those villainous terrorists we keep hearing about). Such an explosion would be the equivalent of a 650 kiloton nuclear blast. Or, put another way; 50 times Hiroshima. Which is a lot. What makes this scenario even more fun is the fact that many large merchant ships such as tankers and container ships are often staffed by relatively few people. The tanker seized by the pirates on Sunday has a crew of 25, double the number of crew often found on such vessels.

Apparently, shipping firms are under tremendous pressure to maximize profits (there’s a surprise) and so these floating leviathans are often staffed with as few as 12 sailors. They also frequently get around maritime law by designating the cook as security officer, after a brief training course, according to sources at Blue Water Security, a firm which provides anti-pirate training to companies and governments. Which to me, doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement of such organizations. Considering that over 30% of the oil us jolly Westerners use comes through The Gulf of Aden, an area which suffers piracy on an increasingly regular basis, I’m frankly pretty stunned that no analyst or think-tank has seen this kind of thing coming. I mean, isn’t oil one of the things we’re allowed to kill each other for? Didn’t I pick that up somewhere? Or is all this news starting to melt my brain and make me think that the Americans are mighty moral crusaders for justice and freedom?

So, I suppose we’ll see what happens with this in the next few days. Many authorities are now calling for a major crackdown on the pirates. There have been ships from at least three other nations patrolling Somalian waters for some months now -including France. I’m sure the pirates are terrified – but I guess they take Sundays off, or the radar was on the blink that day because they didn’t seem to be there when one of the biggest ships in the world got ‘arf inched. “Honestly, you take your eyes off the screen for a few hours, then all of a sudden you’ve got some Saudis angrily asking where their tanker is at.” What many of these “security advisors” and government agencies fail to realise however, is that -put simply- pirates are cool. We know this, Johnny Depp told us.

But, as far as I can see, this is the problem with the people – Everyone thinks their story means something. Everyone expects special treatment, everyone thinks that their special little bubble in the world is important. It’s not that you’re not interesting (you might be, but I don’t care enough to find out and am willing to remain self-satisfied in the suspicion that you’re not) but you are part of the same world as the rest of us. You will que with the rest of us. You will pay bills on time like the rest of us, and you will put up with the same bullshit as the rest of us.

No more talk about changing the world: If you all wanted to, it would have. The truth is we developed this world and everyone is too scared to turn their backs on it, presented with the knowledge we don’t know the alternative is better.