Catmachine

So the World Cup is upon us again? I can't entirely believe it. Surely all that business with the vuvuzelas was only last year? Or a couple of years ago, maximum. Four years ago is just... stupid. Not that it makes a huge difference to me anyway as I am not now and never have been interested in football. This is a fact that occasionally people seem to find hard to get their heads around. Every so often when meeting someone in a social situation they will ask What team do you support? When I tell them I don't follow football they look at me as if I've just told them I haven't got a head. I must admit that from the outside the whole football fandom thing does look insanely complex and it's a relief that I have never been into it as it's probably a lot of work. But on the other hand it does seem to give people a lot of pleasure and for that reason I can't justifiably complain about its existence. The world isn't created and run for my benefit and ...

This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve written a blog whilst miles up in the air, but it has been a while. In fact it’s been a while since I flew anywhere at all – and even then it was the same place I’m heading for now. Why the gap? I don’t know I just don’t seem to have had the time or inclination to go anywhere abroad. Plus my passport ran out a couple of years ago. But the thing is that’s just an excuse, I like travelling about and part of my MO these days is to ensure that I keep doing different things in an attempt to fool my brain into thinking time is lasting longer. Or perhaps when I do different things time is lasting longer. It’s all subjective after all. Anyway I thought it was about time I wrote another blog entry as I don’t yet have one for May 2014 and that month is nearly over. It’s a far cry from the days when I used to blog on an almost daily basis. In those days my blog was something I used to look forward to and I enjoyed uncovering fresh topics to...

I clearly remember when I felt that TV as I knew it had truly died. It wasn't video that did it. Video may have killed the radio star but it was a close friend to TV, enabling people to enjoy their favourite soap opera even if they'd planned to go out for the evening. If anything it helped, giving TV a shot in the arm - no more did people say Oh well it's just a TV show when real life got in the way of their planned viewing. Instead they'd tape it, a word which we still use today even though there's no magnetic tape involved. Oh have we got a video? Weird that the technology that inspired that raw excitement and freed us from the shackles of TV scheduling is now obsolete and almost forgotten. Remember how magical it was at first? Re-record, not fade away. No the death of TV occurred far more recently. There were many enhancements along the way that served only to bolster the screen in the corner. VHS's companion technology the Laserdisc was stillborn...

The Science Museum was another matter altogether. Sometimes I entered it from the passage that led from the Natural History Museum and on other occasions I approached from the main entrance in Exhibition Road - at the far end of the " Foot Tunnel to Museums " that led from the tube station; a tunnel so long that the end appeared to disappear with the perspective and you wondered whether it had originality been designed to carry trains. The entrance to the Science Museum was deceptive - it was nothing like the grandiose frontage of the Natural History Museum but more like you imagined a Victorian office building or part of the Ministry of the Defence. However the interior took you by surprise - a cavernous hall filled with light and lined with machines in glass cases, brass mechanisms the purpose of which was often obscure. Off to one side a wide curved staircase surrounded a stairwell in which an enormous pendulum swung to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. It was...

As a teenager I used to like going to the museums at South Kensington on my own. This might sound like an odd thing to want to do, but what with the cheap tube tickets (half-fare was for a time set at a flat rate of 10p even if you wanted to go to Ongar) and the fact that the museums had no entry fee it was a cheap way of entertaining myself. As a younger child these visits with adults had always been a special treat but had been slightly frustrating as you were subject to the whim of your guardian (whether parent or teacher) with regard to how long you could spend staring at things. This could get annoying if you wanted to try one of the demos - more often than not there would be a scrum of five year olds around the button jabbing it pointlessly and not waiting to see whether a tinny voice would start to emerge from a speaker or the intricate brass mechanism within the display case would start to operate with slow inevitability. By the time it became free you'd have been dra...

One of the most enjoyable extra-curricular activities I took part in as a child was called the Children's Theatre Workshop. Nothing to do with the Children's Television Workshop who produced Sesame Street (although at the time in my head they were somehow linked), this was a group that met every Saturday morning at an office space in the West End of London, tucked away in a side street somewhere behind Bond Street tube. I must have only taken part between the ages of seven and ten but in retrospect it seemed like a long and happy time. We would meet up and devise short plays, scenarios and sketches as well as taking part in more drama workshop type activities of the standing up, shaking your arms and legs and pretending to be a tree type. The workshop was supervised by a handful of adults and consisted of twenty to thirty children of between eight and thirteen. There were only a handful of the older children there and they all loomed large in the scenarios. They felt like t...

I recently wrote a blog entry which described the effect fantasy novels - and I used the term very loosely, intentionally including SF - had on me. In particular I talked about the way I considered it essential that the Other World visited in the story was real and that, even if the protagonists returned to their own world at the end, the Other World still existed and was emphatically not Just A Dream. Revisiting some stories and thinking about others I've also come to recognise another equally powerful ingredient contained in fantasies I enjoy. These tales of other worlds are far more powerful if they also contain scenes set in this one. Fantasies set in the real world have an extra frisson of excitement about them. If set in a real location then it is always possible for you to go and visit the location after reading, a fantastic experience which makes the book almost real . I have yet to visit Watership Down (and if I ever found myself in the vicinity I think I have t...

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...