Catmachine

We’ve all been there. You're halfway through a biscuit, perhaps as part of a tea break. Then someone knocks at the door or the phone rings and you put the biscuit down somewhere so you can deal with this new crisis. You get distracted. By the time you've got back to your routine you've forgotten where you put the biscuit. It was a spur of the moment abandonment—stored only in the Very Short Term Memory. You retrace your steps. No sign. It's not anywhere near where you were sitting nor is it next to your cup of tea. Part of you is trying to insist that it doesn't matter. It's only (half a) biscuit. You've got a whole packet of the things in the kitchen. But that's not the point . You are not concerned with the material loss of a few grams of pastry and sugar. You are concerned because there is an unfinished process in your brain. Whatever part of you that tracks progress is in an uncompleted state, taking up memory space it can only free up by completing...

"The first thing to realize about parallel universes is that they are not parallel. It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either." — Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless I have been reading about The Mandela Effect. This is a name for collective false memory whereby a significant amount of people will swear blind that something in the past was one way whereas in actual fact it was another and furthermore there's written, photographic and filmed proof. The most likely explanation for this is that misconceptions which lead to a false memory of something are common misconceptions and that people susceptible will develop similar false memories, which they can then reminisce with each other about thereby strengthening them. A more outlandish theory—and much more interesting from a fantasy point of view—is that the people remembering things differently are now living in a different parallel universe from the one in which the memory was first...

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Here's the thing. If they ever thought about it, most people who know me might say that because I'm quiet or reserved, shy, don't make a lot of noise in groups or anything  — aloof or secretive as the people who don't like me might put it – that I would also not want to stand up in front of a load of people and talk or perform. Oddly (they might think) the reverse is actually true. For example when I was working as part of the user facing section of a department at a university every autumn the Welcome Talks would come round where we'd have to take turns to deliver a "welcome to our services" talk to a large lecture hall full of freshers. My colleagues — who were as a rule all more social and gregarious than me (I still remember that brief moment when I ended up standing there with no-one talking to me while all around people were chatting in groups at my own leaving do ) — all dreaded it. I was absolutely fine. No, more than that, I actively looked forwar...

“This will be my year!” That’s a mantra I often used to hear people repeat on New Year’s Day. Probably trying to exercise the power of positive thinking. Fair enough, I say. In the end sometimes it was their year and sometimes it wasn’t. Personally I don’t remember having “a year” or even thinking that in particular – I was cautious about tempting fate. But this year – finally – I was ready to hope for “my year” as my debut novel was due to be published. The release date had already been put back twice due to the pandemic but I was sure that 21 January 21 was an auspicious date for it to finally be released upon the world. I hadn’t counted on the pandemic coming roaring back stronger than ever and us all being in lockdown again. Of course being confined to our homes isn’t nearly the drawback it would have been in the past. People could buy the book online  from all the places people normally buy books. However, I suspect having to rely on online only promotion and sales meant sligh...

It turns out that there are a number of very real autistic traits which are not "textbook" at all – in other words recognised by mental health professionals in the official literature – but nevertheless are very familiar to anyone who has experienced them. None of these are official diagnostic criteria, but they are nonetheless real. When I was part of a group of autistic people who met regularly to share our experiences we discovered several of these that we all had in common but which hadn't even occurred to the group's NT facilitator. One was an aversion to the overuse of names in conversation. It's fine when there's a group of people as of course you need to be able to know who is being addressed but when it's one to one it just feels... unpleasant and sinister. No matter how illogical that may actually be. Another of these non-textbook traits is what I think of as the Selfishness Paradox. During our group discussions we all discovered that we had a te...

Self-help books as a genre tend not to have a good reputation as even before you open the cover of some of them there’s always a whiff of making a fast buck about it and once you get inside you find yourself flicking the pages over and over faster and faster. “Yep… knew that… yes, I know… yep… stating the bleedin’ obvious…” What a lot of them boil down to is writing common sense down and identifying the problem. That's all very well and good but most of the time I know full well what the problems I’m experiencing are, there’s nothing mysterious, no cathartic epiphanies to be had. I realise what the issue is but doing something about it is another matter (sometimes even if I kind of know what the solution is). This is why I've never found CBT particularly useful - it actually increases my anxiety. What to Do When You Can’t Move Chapter one: Check whether you’re trapped inside a collapsed building. If you are, then the reason you can’t move is because you’re trapped inside a coll...

Some of this may cover similar ground to parts of blog entries I've written here in the past but none of them quite combine the topics in this order so I thought it was worth tweaking this short piece (originally written as an update for Unbound) and making it available here. Oddly, considering the subject of my debut novel Comeback, I never thought I would end up writing Fantasy novels, Urban or otherwise. When I was younger and first expressed ambition in the direction of writing professionally, I was convinced I'd write Science Fiction. This was partly because that was what I'd mainly been reading in adulthood up until that point. And yet the majority of the genre writing I enjoyed as a child was fantasy. I can't quite remember what the first novel I read was but do remember reading C S Lewis's Narnia and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books quite early on. Other favourites included Richard Carpenter's two Catweazle novels, Paul Gallico's Jennie and - to a...

I'm not that keen on zoos in general but one afternoon I had a lot of time to kill waiting for my train. Given that the station I was due to depart from was called Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten , going to the zoo was an obvious choice. So I put my suitcase and bass guitar in left luggage and headed there. I had been to Berlin Zoo before as a child – back when there had been a Berlin Wall and everything – but all I could remember were the tigers. Genuinely nothing else had stuck in my mind. The tigers had lived on an island but you could walk through a tunnel built through the middle of it and look out at them through thick perspex windows built into cave mouths on the island's central peak. Arriving at the Tiger Island as an adult, it turned out this setup was still in place thirty plus years later. The tunnel was shabbier than I remembered, but the perspex windows were still there. And there, curled up next to one of them like a giant housecat, was one of the tigers. I lo...

I’ve talked before – both here and in other blogging arenas – about how locations and landscapes in dreams seem to be consistent from dream to dream, almost as if there is a place we go when we sleep, or if the brain retains the architecture of dreams like a computer storing the map of an imaginary place on its hard drive ready for when we next play that game. I don’t think we’re computers though, and even though people describe the latter as “electronic brains” I suspect they way they work is very different, just as different as eyes and cameras. A lot of what we see and the resolution is down to the brain interpreting visual (and I suspect other) signals to give us a picture that makes sense. This is probably why I see cats both when there are cats there and when there are not. It makes sense for there to be cats. But I digress. There are a multitude of dream buildings and cities that are often there when I fall asleep – the twisted versions of childhood houses and the large oceanic ...

There is a famous quote from Douglas Adams about power and government which always resonates; especially in these unenlightened days: "Those people who want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." I have been thinking about this recently. The problem I see is that – according to the above definition – most of the time anyone who tries to get made ruler is doing so in order to exploit the system for their own benefit rather than to help people. And the problem with this is that people who try to exploit systems tend to be either criminals or the very wealthy (and frequently both at the same time). This puts people who do care at a distinct disadvantage; because in order to compete successfully under the current rules you have to lack something fundamental. You have to lack empathy. The wealthy – especially those born to wealth – very rarely have it...

This year was my twelfth year on Twitter. It's grown from one of many experimental social media platforms back then to something everyone has heard of. Despite its now corporate nature and the way it can be constantly abused and used as a channel for bile and hatred by the cowardly and the loud, there is still something about it I find compelling. Many of the important features that have come to define the platform (@-ing people, RTing a tweet) were first invented by early users of the system and it's partly these home-grown origins that I like ("...the street finds its own uses for things..." William Gibson, Burning Chrome) but what keeps me coming back is something else, something personal. I can of course see where the main criticisms are coming from but I disagree with them. "Oh it's just boring, who wants to read what someone had for breakfast every morning?" If that's all you're seeing then you're following the wrong people. ...

It's unlikely that anyone is really thinking this—I don't for a second imagine that there's anyone hanging on my every online word—but it may have occurred to some people that I haven't written a blog entry for a while. What has caused this gap in the torrent of words pouring forth from my brain into this arena since 2006? Laziness? Writer's Block? It's neither (not that I don't suffer from both on a regular basis). I have actually been writing elsewhere. Last summer I was lucky enough to have my novel Comeback accepted by a publisher called Unbound . However this didn't mean it was all over bar the editing. Unbound have an unusual business model in that they crowdfund for their production costs before a book can be published. This means that—unlike more traditional publishers in today's understandably risk averse market—they can take chances on books, which is good news for someone like me. At this point I think it is important to clarify a...

Following the post I made at the end of last year which discussed my reaction to having been officially diagnosed as having Autism Spectrum Condition (a.k.a. the Syndrome Previously Known as Aspergers ), I've noticed that there are a few misconceptions that have made their way into received wisdom about how I must behave. These are not true for many reasons. For a start not everyone with ASC is going to behave in the same manner. Everyone is different no matter where they sit on the spectrum. It is perfectly possible to have ASC and be an introvert or an extrovert. Some people might exhibit certain symptoms whilst others don't. One of the most common preconceptions that people seem to have is that I will take everything they say literally. That if they use an idiom or colloquialism I will think they actually   mean that someone has (say) eyes bigger than their stomach. Well no, of course not. That would be silly. I have enough of a sense of the real world and what...

Do you remember the pointless lies you told yourself as a child? I do. I remember them quite clearly. They were harmless but very powerful and sometimes I almost managed to convince myself that they were true. As far as I can see they served one major purpose: to make life more interesting and more like a story. They were micro-stories. One that clearly stuck in my mind was almost convincing myself that I'd heard a cuckoo. Of course it was really a wood pigeon, but a cuckoo was more exciting. Cuckoos belonged in fairy tales and clocks, and how much more exciting would it have been to live in a fairy tale? Or indeed in a clock. The important thing was not to question it. Of course there was that tiny nagging rational voice at the back of my mind whispering "Pigeon... pigeon... pigeon..." but who was interested in pigeons? Pigeons were commonplace, part of the mundane, the everyday, the here and now. Hearing a pigeon was not anything to get excited about. Hearing ...

Anyone who read this blog in May 2010 might have seen a post entitled Intellectromagnetic Spectrum in which I wondered - having read up on some of the symptoms for reasons which are not going to become readily apparent again at this juncture - whether I might in fact have Asperger Syndrome . From what I could see I considered it likely, but I couldn't quite silence that little nagging voice at the back of my mind. You are probably familiar with That Voice yourself. It's the one that constantly puts you down and emphasises your worthlessness. In this instance it was whispering Of course you don't have Asperger Syndrome! You're just saying that to make yourself seem interesting, you're using it as an excuse for your social failings. You don't have it at all. You're just shit at life and don't you forget it . Hardly the most cogent of arguments, but there's always been something convincing about That Voice. No matter how much you might try and dismis...

I'd much rather get the train to Scotland than fly but it's just not financially practical any more. For some reason the main advantage of flying these days is no longer that it's quicker (although it still is) but that it's far cheaper. Time was when air travel was a luxury you indulged in when time was of the essence whereas students on a budget went backpacking around Europe by train. No longer. For some reason low-cost airlines are a thing whereas low-cost train routes aren't. Why is that? Mind you, if you fly on a low cost-airline you can certainly identify where they're cutting the costs. The fares themselves are cheap but everything you might want is extra. Hold baggage? Extra. Drinks and food? Extra. I wouldn't be surprised if they start charging for the use of the toilet soon. Everyone should experience flying by Ryanair at least once if only because it will make them realise that Easyjet aren't actually that bad... One thing Easyjet ...

Everyone has experienced The Confusion. We all know what it's like. We're on our way home from work after a long day. It's later than it should be. We're sitting on the top deck of an overlit bus. Outside it's dark and it's pissing with rain, the hateful hiss of tyres on wet tarmac a cosmic background radiation to our fatigue. Red traffic lights shout their noiseless commands into the chaotic evening, fragmented into violent splatters by the rain drops on the window. Sleep drags at the back of our eyeballs and we close our eyes, leaning our head against the glass. But the vibration of the engine makes dropping off impossible, our skull reverberating from hundreds of tiny impacts. The traffic is moving so slowly it would probably be quicker to get off and walk, but there's the rain to contend with so we stay on board until the last possible moment.  It's only a short walk from the bus stop to our flat but even that's more than enough time to g...