Catmachine

The problem with fiction is that if it tries to reflect the real world too accurately you run into all sorts of logical problems. This is particularly noticeable with long running TV series - especially soaps - as they strive to reflect the real world more and more. Take Eastenders . Its grim portrait of life in the east end of London is on several times a week at prime time with an omnibus edition on Sundays.  This raises the question - in the Eastenders universe what is on BBC1 at the times Eastenders is shown in ours? Are they watching us? The problem is of course that soaps often are a big part of the viewing public's lives and the omission of itself as fiction from the world it portrays means that a soap such as Eastenders will always have an air of unreality about it. But there's nothing really that could be done about it - the invention of another fictional soap to fill the gap would have the opposite effect and make things appear even further from reality. Some...

A long time ago in the days before mobile phones we took appointments far more seriously than we do now. In some ways this was a good thing but in others it meant that you could end up having to wait for someone for a very long time - sometimes hours. I had occasion to be both ends of such embarrassing situations. Both were, I guess, dates. I can't think which of the two situations - being late or being stood up - was the worst to be in. The time that I was late came first. Admittedly I did have an excuse - I'd been at a gig in Bath the evening before and had spent most of the night hanging around the station, variously walking about and attempting to find somewhere for a quick doze. Eventually the first train of the day heading for London arrived. I can't remember what time it was but probably something like six thirty or so. You'd have thought that it would mean that I had plenty of time to get back, but the train seemed to be stopping at every single little pla...

Walking down the street this afternoon I found myself in a part of town that I hadn't really visited that much of late, although it was an area I used to frequent more when I first moved down here some fifteen or so years ago.  Fifteen years!  Quite absurd of course to consider that such time had passed. It only seemed like the other day that I made my way down to the coast from London and... Actually no. I realised that it did seem like a long time ago. The biggest difference was how I felt. Walking down that street again evoked in me a Proustian rush, I recalled just how free and excited I felt back then. I'd made a big change to my life and uprooted myself. The possibilities appeared endless, above me an infinite blue sky that reflected my state of mind. I instantly became depressed. Things were so much more negative and gloomy now, the world a far more depressing place. What was it that had changed so much so as to skew my outlook to such a large degree? Aside from...

Recently Channel Four screened an interesting drama - a bizarre eight part story from France called The Returned (Les Revenants) . Like many TV viewers in the UK over the past few years I've found the subtitled European drama on offer quite gripping and what with the supernatural elements of the show that were obvious from the trailers, I made sure I watched the whole series. It was as good as I hoped. For me the fact that it was made in a different country and therefore in a different language probably added to its otherworldliness, but nevertheless it certainly didn't need any help in that direction, being both alarming and disturbing in equal measure.  I had never seen anything quite like it before although - like many contemporary shows - it could be said to have some of the DNA of Twin Peaks in its genetic makeup. The show thrived on mystery, often the viewers being left to work things out for themselves. Personally I have always found drama that does this far more in...

Aside from all the science fiction I consumed, when I was a child my favourite books were those in which children visited other worlds - not via spaceships, but by using magic. Although to be honest I didn't see that much difference between the two methods of travel in my mind and as far as I was concerned Narnia may well have simply been in a parallel dimension. I particularly enjoyed the alchemical feel of The Magician's Nephew - there was something pseudo scientific about the whole method of travel between worlds, with the logic of the green and the yellow rings and the Wood Between the Worlds with its portals into other universes. Furthermore when Digory and Polly discovered Charn my SF heart leapt at the description of its sun as a red giant with small blue dwarf companion star; likewise at Digory catching a glimpse of Jupiter "quite close - close enough to see its moons" whilst travelling back to London from the Wood Between the Worlds. As far as I was c...

Our memories are a very useful manual on how not to live your life. Never mind the rose tinted spectacles, for a lot of us the events that really spring into sharp relief are those viewed through blush-tinged goggles. We torment ourselves over and over again over how much of a fool we made of ourselves in such-and-such situation, despite the fact that ninety-nine per cent of the time the only person that remembers these faux pas is ourselves. There is one exception to this rule. When we get drunk and make a fool of ourselves there is a tendency of some people to never let us forget it. However this behaviour is most often observed in people who often do the same thing themselves and their attempts to get everyone else to remember that time you went swimming in the fountain in the town square at the end of the evening are merely an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they pissed on a policeman's shoes the week before. But most of the time we're the only ones cri...

Firstly I'd like to make it clear that by writing this I am in no way implying that people taking part in today's boycott of Twitter are in the wrong. Freedom not to speak is as important as freedom to speak. This is more an explanation as to why I'm not taking part. Not that anyone would really notice or care one way or another whether I took part or not and this in itself is probably pertinent. Of course the fact that I (and many others) feel the need to explain why they're not taking part is in itself interesting.  Despite statements that people are free to do what they want to do (or not do what they don't want to do) I feel an unspoken implication that the good people are taking part in the boycott and that therefore if you don't take part then... Not that anyone is actually saying this or even thinks it - it's just an unavoidable side-effect of what's happening. Perhaps a side-effect that exists only in my head. But it's there. I can...

"That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a wilful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still." Jerome K Jerome, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow We are one of the first generations who can precisely replay many elements of our childhood memories on demand. This has never happened before in the history of human beings. Strange as it may seem, in the distant past they didn't even have TV. It was a civilisation changing invention, sitting between the Printing Press and the Internet in the communication triumvirate that holds sway over our hearts and minds. Never mind those senile old fossils the Wheel and Fire, it's talking to each other and telling stories that has made us what we are today. And yet TV i...

As you may be aware, on 1 June an anthology was published that included a short story I'd written. The anthology, The Root Cellar and Other Stories , is available for purchase as an eBook right now should it take your fancy.  It also contains are twelve other dark tales aside from mine, all of which are well worth reading and which cover a wide range of subjects. Anyway, as a result of this in common with all the other contributors I gave a short interview, answering a series of questions about my story and other related matters which I hope you might find mildly diverting: nerinedorman.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/five-minutes-with-chris-limb-2012-sa.html I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

There are many problems associated with suffering from depression. One of them is that you find it difficult to talk about with other people which is ironic because this is the one thing that received wisdom would have you believe is good for alleviating it. Or so they say. Is this the truth or just urban legend, a word of mouth remedy which has no basis in fact? It's hard to find out because of course the one thing you don't want to do when depressed is precisely that. Such is the strength of the urge not to talk about it that even talking about not talking about it feels taboo which makes the writing of this blog tricky. Why this should be is another matter; there is probably no single reason but a concatenation of several which is what makes this negative compulsion such a strong one. The first of these may be to do with the nature of the beast itself. Depression is a condition of the mind, of the consciousness and the mind and consciousness are emergent properties ...

As has been chronicled several times in the past I was a child obsessed with the space programme. And no wonder; those were exciting times what with the moon landings, Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz Test Project . What with the Space Shuttle on the horizon I was sure that my future lay off world. It was only a matter of time. One of the most exciting things I'd read about in the Brooke Bond Race Into Space picture card set and Reginald Turnill 's The Language of Space was the Manned Flight To Mars . This was likely to happen in the mid eighties. I imagined that by the time I was in my forties that it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that I'd have been to Mars once, the Moon two or three times and the various space stations more often than I could remember. Spaceflight would be commonplace in the 2010s. Civilization's failure of nerve and imagination since the 1970s has never failed to disappoint me. We are living in an age when even the prospect of re...

I've noticed that a lot of people don't like sitting backwards on public transport. Occasionally I've heard people discussing this - claiming, amongst other things, that it makes them feel sick. Personally I've never experienced this reverse nausea and actually prefer sitting backwards. Why? I have no idea. Sitting facing forward certainly doesn't make me feel ill or anything, it's just that there's something appealing about not facing the direction of travel. Whether this says anything about me psychologically I have no idea (too much time dwelling on the past rather than looking to the future?) but one benefit is that it means I'm more likely to get a  seat. Until recently I was only able to indulge my preference on trains, the sole mode of transport that offered backwards facing seats. However a few years ago they began to introduce the bendy-bus to Brighton. These were London Transport's cast-offs and apparently hadn't been popular. I hav...

Another interlude that takes place during the novel I started during 2012's NaNoWriMo containing some more of Wendi's backstory. January 1990 After a while the appeal of working in the record shop began to wane for Wendi. She earned little more than she would have by signing on and had only taken it in the first place to get the Restart people off her back. The free promos from the record company reps were all that kept her going - and she wouldn't be able to get them anywhere else - but finding the money to go to gigs and to rehearse with the nascent band her and Peter were putting together was becoming difficult. In the end SoundStore made the decision for her. A new contract from senior management came round which all staff were obliged to sign. One clause said that all promos received from reps were " the property of SoundStore Ltd " which was a bit of a coincidence given that one of the senior managers had just set up a mail order rare records se...

Sometimes it seems as if the world we now live in at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a particularly awful one. There are so many things going on that are simply wrong and make you see red. But don't worry - if you're feeling this at all it means that you're alive and furthermore do have a sense of morality. At least you're not giving up and at least you care. Of course having discovered that you do care, the problem can be where to start. To which of these causes - all of which are valid - do you offer your support? There are so many of them. OK, so you pick the one that means the most to you, the one whose underlying injustice brings your blood to boiling point the quickest. You do what you can for it whether this means donating your own money or your own time. You do what you can to raise awareness. But most important of all, you always remember that you are not doing this to feel better about yourself. You are doing this to fight injustice and if y...

Disclaimer: given that this blog entry is about the correct use of English there will no doubt be a large number of typos and incidences of misuse. One thing you hear a lot about these days is the so-called bastardisation of the English language . These complaints take many forms but seem to boil down to a couple of main griping areas: The old complaining about the way the young use language (thinly veiled youth envy) The British complaining about the way Americans use language (thinly veiled xenophobia). Language is a constantly evolving system. Two key ingredients of evolution are vast numbers and swiftly changing environments in which those numbers exist. The population explosion of the past fifty years combined with the way information and communications technology has enabled an exponential growth of the number of channels via which language can be used and transmitted mean that English is probably evolving far faster now than it ever has before. However the existence of me...

There is simultaneously something sad and laughable about the sight of redundant technology being thrown away. These old plastic and metal boxes, most of them that off-white grey that was so popular for a while, tumbled together in a skip or a dustbin. How clunky and huge they seem, how ridiculously inefficient and pathetically low in capacity. That shoebox-like cabinet that used to sit on someone's desk with a total storage of 100MB, an amount of data that would now fit into something the size of a toenail clipping ten times over. How far we have come in such a relatively short space of time. And yet in a way this old tech is also oddly exciting. When we look at it we remember how not that long ago such a thing was an object of desire. That it epitomised bold new developments in technology that seemed so groundbreaking and enviable. That hand-held scanner that I was so desperate for in the early nineties that looked like a bizarre hybrid of a torch and a miniature vacuum cl...

The most annoying thing about buying a new jacket is the way that the pockets are all sewn up. I mean, why? Pockets are there for a reason and it's a very good one. You need to carry stuff around with you. There's always the wallet and the keys and the phone and not to mention the two separate travel-card holders - one for Brighton and one for London (I have to keep them separate in case the Key and the Oyster card interfere with each other somehow). These are the bare minimum of pocket essentials. Sometimes I might want to carry a USB stick, a padlock, a pen or a Kindle around with me. Which is why it's nonsensical that they sew up the pockets. It just means I have to spend an annoying ten minutes undoing what they probably had to spend an annoying ten minutes doing. It's pointless. Every time something like that happens it's another victory for our old enemy entropy. Some would argue that pockets are sewn ...

There's something a bit creepy about logging onto Facebook these days. What's happening, Chris? I can't help imagining these messages from the system in the voice of Douglas Rain, otherwise known as Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey . How are you feeling, Chris? However, it's not the Halness of these pronouncements that's creepy. It's that they share something with Hal's mode of speech which is a major contributory factor to what made him frightening in the first place. Just what do you think you're doing, Chris? Inappropriate use of a person's name. Of course there's nothing wrong with calling people by their name when saying hello or trying to attract their attention. However, once engaged in a conversation - either electronic or physical - I find it increasingly uncomfortable if the other person keeps using my name. It's almost like being inappropriately touched. The thing is, Chris... Yes, I know you're talkin...

A Christmas interlude that takes place during the novel I started during this year's NaNoWriMo . It's not part of the novel and not written in November so is probably more of a NoNoNoNo... Saturday 25 December 1993 Wendi opened her eyes to find herself lying on the sofa in front of the muted television. On screen Noel Edmonds was wearing an obscene jumper and talking on the telephone. She felt about for the remote and the cathode ray tube relaxed into inactivity with an electric sigh. The sun was shining through the large glass window and against the odds - it had been pissing down the night before - it was a nice day. She wrapped the blanket around herself and stood up. The penthouse flat was bare and undecorated. The record company had purchased it only recently and were intending it to be used by the more successful members of the talent whilst in London. Whilst Beam certainly were flavour of the month in some quarters they were hardly the most lucrative act on the...