Three sheets to the wind

I start work at 3 pm tomorrow so have been out with me old cronies at smoky-drinky tonight. Also, for the train geeks, Western Gladiator is back to full working order and Deltic (not a deltic, the Deltic) just needs decals. All from ‘spares or repair’ on ebay. Except the body for Deltic which I’ve had for years.

So no sense is to be seen here for tonight. Sanity has packed its bags and taken the first train out.

It will come crawling back. It always does.

Meanwhile I’m off to see if Baker Gurvitz Army is on YouTube. And then Golden Earring.

 

The truth is disgraceful.

I don’t see why this interview is labelled as ‘disgraceful’. Seems to me he is right in at least a sense. If we stop imposing our ‘better way’ on other countries they will either stop attacking us or at least will no longer have any valid reason to do so. Which means we could tell the apologists to just get lost.

It’s not as if our own system is corruption-proof, is it?

Science discovers that dirt is dirty.

In full drooling imbecile mode,. someone claiming the title ‘scientist’ has discovered that things left outside have bacteria on them.

Outdoor grill contains 1.7 million microbes per 100cm sq – 124% more than a toilet seat – and just 36% of people clean it more than twice a year.

That number is trivial compared to what is on your skin and compared to what is in your gut, it’s nothing at all. Outdoor grills are unlikely to be used more than twice a year in the UK unless we get really lucky so that is a fair number of times to clean it. When that grill is hot enough to put food on, it is sterile. None of those bacteria will survive the heat and nothing at all can survive an open flame.

Bin lids have next highest bacteria count – a staggering 1.2 million per 100 cm sq, compared to 759,950 on a toilet seat.

Bins are where you put rubbish. They are also flat surfaces these days and the smell of the rubbish will attract birds and insects who, while most can’t get in, will all crap on the lid. 1.2 million per 100 sq. cm is a trivial level of contamination for something outdoors that is regularly handled by people who have just emptied the kitchen bins. There are more live ones left in 100 ml of pasteurised milk. The toilet seat number is made up. No microbiologist would report that number, ever. It is impossibly precise.

Incidentally, they say ’100 cm sq’. Is that 100 square centimetres or a square 100 cm to a side? There is a big difference. If they mean the latter then the area is 100 times bigger, the number per square centimetre 100 times smaller and even more insignificant than it already appears.

Microbes in the garden include e-coli, salmonella and listeria all of which can cause vomiting and diarrhoea.

Listeria is naturally found on grass which is why silage-makers have to be so careful to keep air out. It won’t grow without air. ‘Listeria’ alone has no meaning. If it is Listeria monocytogenes in large numbers, it’s dangerous. If it is Listeria innocua it is, as the name indicates, no risk at all.

Salmonella, E. coli (NOT e-coli, that is the way utter dickheads who think it is something like email and transmissible by wire [ooo, idea] write it) and also Campylobacter and other nasties are found in bird shit, mouse shit, insect shit and all sorts of other shit. Even if you don’t have pets, those bugs are present all over your garden and no matter how clean your house is, they’re in there too. You can’t keep all the spiders out, and spiders sometimes have to squat-and-squeeze too.

Salmonella has a fairly high threshold for infection, which means you have to eat an awful lot at once to get infected. E. coli comes in many variants, some of which are nasty but most of which are harmless.

Saying ‘this is present in your garden’ is the very height of stupidity. Of course it is present. Your garden is made out of dirt and dirt is, as ‘science’ has apparently now proved, dirty. What should we do about it? Nothing at all.

Dr Ackerley said: ‘We often see our gardens as an extension of our homes but they could become a reservoir of harmful bacteria.

If this person has a PhD, I would suggest shredding it, mixing it with broken glass, loading it into a shotgun and inserting it anally at high speed. This would also stop the voice that is evidently coming out of there.

‘They potentially give rise to illness and infection if transferred to your food or your mouth by your hands.

Right. So if you’re having a barbecue, resist the temptation to rub bird shit all over your hands before tucking in. I think I can do that, in fact I have successfully resisted that temptation all my life.

‘To help keep the family safe, I would suggest cleaning and disinfecting garden furniture and barbecues prior to use.

I would suggest not coating your garden in chemicals as a better way to keep your family safe.

‘And, if you have small children, then remember to clean areas that may come into contact with their hands – such as decking and play equipment.

Alternatively, make them wash their hands after playing outside. Worked when I was a kid, even when I came home with handfuls of frogspawn. I don’t think they are allowed to take it home these days.

‘Using an appropriate disinfectant could significantly reduce this risk and lead to a healthier, safer outdoor experience for all.’

Or you could just… enjoy nature as it is instead of disinfecting it and killing it all. If you have a fishpond and follow this advice all your fish will die. If your furniture is on a lawn and you spray it regularly you will have the yellowest, deadest lawn in the neighbourhood. You will have no birdsong in your garden, just the stench of little feathery corpses.

There is a part of Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ where children are taught to hate and fear anything natural. This sounds like a real life equivalent.

Still, it’s a new thing to scare drones with. I can never have too many of those.

Crap

I had a long post written based on this and this and my machine managed to lose the lot.

Damn. I’ll look again tomorrow and leave those links to remind me but I am not doing it again tonight.

Drink.

Feck.

Arse.

 

A history lesson.

A guest post by Rose, whose encyclopaedic knowledge has graced many a blog.

I’m taking a night off to fill in one of those forms that expect far more than the average stockroom-boy should be capable of. If I get this one I’ll move to a stable five-afternoon/evening week doing less disgusting things. If I don’t, then I will have learned more about how to get the next one.

There is a new category – blogbook. I’ll use this to round up any guest-post blogbook entries and will go back and tag a few of mine. It’ll make it much easier to pull them out when we have enough to go for it. If other bloggers would like to tag their preferred posts in a similar way and then let us know about it, we could get this thing moving pretty quickly.

And so, I leave you with A Brief History of Tobacco, from Rose. I have lightly adjusted the format because scientists are like that. We just can’t leave anything alone.

 

A History of Tobacco Growing in England

Apparently the first tobacco to arrive in Britain was Nicotiana rustica, brought in by Sir John Hawkins and his crew. (1)

Famed as a powerful medicine, Nicotiana rustica had up to 20 times more nicotine than the tobacco we know today and reportedly when burnt gives off clouds of thick smoke. It was supposed to cure all manner of things.(2)

This exotic new import eventually became a great attraction to the rich, fashionable gentlemen of the Elizabethan court.

They were called the “reeking gallants” and reportedly went around making a general nuisance of themselves, smoking with great ostentation and a variety of stylish equipment, they were lampooned and complained about by those who had to endure it.(3)

This so exasperated the new king, James 1st of England, 6th of Scotland, that in 1604 he was moved to write a ferocious attack on Nicotiana rustica and all who used it in ‘Counterblaste’, assigning smoking to the sin of drunkenness and proclaiming it as an offence against God, summing up with the line.

“A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.” (4)

But tobacco was one of the few things the new American colonies produced that could cross the Atlantic in the hold of a ship and arrive in good condition, so instead of banning it, King James raised the tax from the previous two pence to the sum of six shillings and eight pence a pound, so that in theory only the very rich could still afford it.(5)

Unfortunately, the Colonists were still growing the inferior N. rustica, while the Spanish were exporting the much preferred N. tabacum, but eventually they got hold of some of seed from Trinidad and in 1612 John Rolfe raised the first crop of Virginia.(2)

Then the trade from Virginia really took off.

“Indeed, it was largely due to this fact that England kept its hold on North America. In 1616 the first successful shipload of the New Virginian tobacco was sent across the Atlantic”. (3)(6)

James 1 never amended his Counterblaste when the new variety N. tabacum arrived and continued to raise taxes on it unmercifully.(7)

Meanwhile the English farmers had started growing tobacco themselves, apparently it was widely grown in the Cotswolds, the Vale of Tewkesbury and in an area which extended as far south as Wiltshire.

Until in 1619 James 1st  banned commercial tobacco growing in the whole of British Isles, in a deal between the Crown and the Virginia Company, who had previously been given the monopoly by Queen Elizabeth 1st, in return for a 1 shilling/lb. duty on Virginia tobacco, just as the first crop of English tobacco was coming to maturity.

Supposedly to give the Colonists employment but possibly so that all the revenue would go through his hands as it came into port.

The English growers resisted and even though it was now illegal, apparently continued to grow tobacco on a large scale and there were repeated disturbances.
As a result of such disturbances a second Act of parliament was passed banning the growing of tobacco in 1652. Which was ignored again until, in 1667, a platoon of Life Guards was sent in to destroy the entire crop and deal severely with anyone who objected.(8)

And that seems to have been the end of tobacco growing in England until in 1910 when the Liberal Government of the day repealed the Act.

As explained in 1922 by Viscount Wolmer.

NEW CLAUSE.—(Excise duties on homegrown tobacco to cease.) 1922

“What we are asking for is the protection of the industry of tobacco growing in this country until such time as it shall be able to establish itself. The reasons upon which this is put forward are, briefly, as follows: Tobacco was once grown on a very large scale in this country. It was once grown in no fewer than 31 different counties. In the year 1660 it was prohibited by Act of Parliament.

In 1910 a Liberal Government made the growing again permissible, but the Government not only did that, but on 1st January, 1911, they granted a protective rebate of 30 per cent. to English-grown tobacco in order to establish the tobacco-growing industry, thereby following out the well-known maxims of Adam Smith and Cobden that an infant industry can be protected consistently with Free Trade principles.”

“It is a complete fallacy to think that tobacco cannot be successfully grown in this country. At the present moment it is grown in my constituency. I have cigarettes here which were grown in my constituency, which I shall be delighted to offer to any hon. Member. The tobacco is very much like Rhodesian tobacco of a light sort.”

Q -” What do you call the cigarettes?”

A – “Hampshire cigarettes.”

“Tobacco is grown on the very lightest soils. It is grown on the sands round Aldershot, which will not bear an ordinary crop. For that reason it is grown in parts of Berkshire and Norfolk.

Therefore, if you encourage tobacco growing, you can bring a great acreage of soil under cultivation which you cannot do with any other crop, and that soil, subjected to high manurial treatment, becomes capable of growing oats, barley, and potatoes, and can, therefore, be made a potential food reserve in time of war. It is worth while establishing this industry, which was once flourishing and was destroyed by the action of the State.” (9)

And as reported by the BBC:

Hampshire Tobacco Farming

“Phyl Ralton a member of the Fleet and Crookham Local History Group, contacted the programme with information about research they have been involved in about a surprising crop that was grown in Hampshire between the two world wars – tobacco.

Phyl told Making History that tobacco growing was illegal until 1910 and soon after that, several people started experiments. The leader in this field was Arthur J Brandon who grew up to 35 acres of tobacco plants in Church Crookham, near Fleet in Hampshire from 1911 until his death in 1937.

He harvested up to 800 lbs per acre and demonstrated that it was possible to grow, cure and sell good tobacco products but he could not make a commercial success of the business against cheaper foreign competition and the amount of duty levied on his crop.” (10)

“At Redfields Farm Mr A.J. Brandon commenced to grow tobacco as a commercial crop. This proved to be very successful and within a few years a large staff was employed to cultivate the plants and cure the leaves. The crop was then packed into huge barrels and sent to Salisbury to be blended and made into pipe tobacco or ‘Blue Prior’ cigarettes. Tobacco was last grown on this farm in 1938″ (11)

Which apparently is now a garden centre.

One further but non-commercial, English tobacco crop was grown during WW2, when my Grandfather, along with many others, grew their own tobacco in back gardens and allotments across the country.

References:

(1) http://www.historian.org/bysubject/tobacco1.htm

(2)http://archive.tobacco.org/History/monardes.html

(3) http://archive.tobacco.org/History/Elizabethan_smoking.html

(4) http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/blaste.html

(5) http://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/james/blaste/index.html

(6)http://www.nps.gov/jame/historyculture/tobacco-colonial-cultivation-methods.htm

(7)http://www.academia.edu/328763/Power_In_Smoke_The_Language_of_Tobacco_and_Authority_In_Caroline_England

(8) http://www.cotswolds.info/cotswolds-heritage.shtml#tabacco_leaf_growing

(9) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1922/jun/28/new-clause-excise-duties-on-homegrown

(10) http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/making_history_20080603.shtml

(11) http://www.fleethants.com/allhistory/fleet/fleet.htm

 

Scaredycats.

Something is up with WordPress tonight. They are meddling with settings somewhere down the line in the name of ‘upgrade’. The Dr. Who fans will regard that in the same way Trekkies regard the phrase ‘resistance is futile’. Commenting seems to be difficult and might remain so until the Cybermen stop fiddling with the wires.

I thought the new Cybermen were a great improvement on the older versions, while the new Daleks look like Fisher-Price versions of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. They are not supposed to be human-sized because they do not contain humans, they contain squidgy little aliens. And they have never used the primary school paint palette. Stop it, BBC. Daleks get made into toys. Toys do not get made into Daleks.

The ‘you will be upgraded’ part of new Cyberspeak fits with the way I’d expect them to think. They are socialists, devoted to equality and have the absolute belief that they are improving your life by ripping out your brain, making it utterly compliant and putting it into a machine. In fact, they are so final-solution socialist I’m surprised the BBC haven’t let them win.

I have to say their cyber-shout of ‘delete’ when firing sounds cheesy. It sounds like a bad rip-off of ‘exterminate’. Cybermen never announced their intention to fire before. They just fired.

Okay. Right. I have digressed right from the start this time but then I am a Doctor (not ‘the’ Doctor) and we’re allowed to be mad. If I made it to Professor then nobody on the planet would make sense of a single word I wrote. Incidentally, did you know… Arrgh! I’m turning into a professor I used to know! Nice guy but ‘on topic’ was an alien concept to him.

So what was this about? Daleks never scared me. I thought they were great. We all had toy ones and I now have some talking toy ones. Cybermen never scared me, some kids when I was young had cybermen suits with the vacuum hose and plastic golf balls on the arms and legs. No, the only scary ones were the autons, the showroom dummies sung about by Kraftwerk many years later on the ‘Man Machine’ album. They were the only ones you’d see in real life.

Made-up stuff like Daleks and Cybermen weren’t scary at all, they were and still are just fun.

There is something out there scarier than any of it and you cannot see it, smell it, taste it, hear it or feel it. It does not announce its intention to kill, it just kills you. No warning. No hint of anything amiss. You can spend time in a hotel room where the monster lives, have a great time there and leave with no idea of the horrible death about to befall you. You think you had a great time, you had no inkling of the presence of the monster, but within days you are dead.

It’s not one of my horror stories although I wish it had been. No, the latest tip from SB, one of the regular Email tipsters here (sorry I can’t use all the tips, maybe when I get a less seven-days-a-week job) points to a group who would have a cardiac arrest the first time a Sontaran looked them in the eye.

Yes, there are people who believe that even if they use a non-smoking hotel room they will die because of the smoking room three floors away. Even if it’s in another hotel.

Even the Joker can’t laugh this hard.

These people are so weak, so feeble, so useless that I see no reason to encourage, promote or continue their existence. They are not only scared of a little bit of burning leaf, they are scared of traces of that smoke from a tiny bit of leaf.

Let it be so. Let them be scared. This pushes even the Autons into the shade as far as scariness goes. This scary thing does not even exist, not in any form at all and yet we should soon be able to induce anything from a heart attack to dandruff in each and every drone out there.

The cannot see it. They have no way to find it. This means that they have no way to know for sure it’s not there and therefore are open to being convinced it is there in any situation anywhere.

For a writer of the macabre, this is the ultimate monster. For a smoking writer who loves to scare people for fun, this is an absolute gift. This monster will kill you and it does not even exist. As far as horror originality goes, this one knocks even Stephen King and Clive Barker out of the ball park. Best of all, it will work most effectively on those I despise.

Any house you live in, any car you buy, anything second hand, anything on ebay (even with disclaimers, they could be lying), anything at all could have been owned by a smoker. Anything you buy brand new could have been built by a workforce that includes a smoker. Anything you touch could have been touched by a smoker and forty years ago, almost everyone was a smoker. See that park bench? Oho. It was there before the smoking ban. Still want to sit? Go ahead, it’s only smoky roulette.

Oh, the paranoia to induce. Oh, the terror to instil. Oh, the fears to heighten and the agoraphobia to trouble the NHS with. Oh, the fun to have. It’s all boundless thanks to the Dreadful Arnott, her Righteous drones and unintended consequences.

I feel we need a blend between the Joker and Ronald McSmoky.

Why so serious? I’m lovin’ it.

 

Saturday night booze.

Tomorrow is my first day off in many weeks. I have decided to hasten the process of moving jobs. Even though I quite like this one, it’s leaving me with no time at all. It was supposed to be a part-time job to cover the bills so I could get on with writing, and also take on any other projects that came along. Currently it’s seven days a week and knackering.

However, I do have one day off tomorrow, parents visiting and expecting to be entertained, a garden in desperate need of a visit from many sharp things and it’s pouring with rain. So I have a litre of Whyte and MacKay and the third season of ‘Supernatural’ and will be sinking into oblivion for the evening.

It’s Saturday night anyway. Nobody wants to hear about the madness of the world on Saturday night.

It’ll all still be there tomorrow.

 

Blog books.

Okay, we keep talking about it, let’s do it.

Here’s my thoughts. We smoky bloggers can put out our own blog books and do with them what we will. Charge, don’t charge, set the royalties so high that only Tony Blair can buy a copy or set them low for a trickle income or set them zero, that’s up to the individual.

The combination book would be a free promo item. I’m willing to put that together and get it onto Barnes and Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple iStore etc but not Amazon because it can’t be made free on there. We can have  Kindle version on Smashwords, download a copy and pass it around.

No copy protection, We want this thing copied far and wide.

Copyright to anything in this freebie stays with the original authors, Nobody signs away anything. You want to re-use the article in another book, it’s still yours to do with as you will. The only things I’ll have copyright for are the articles I put in and (maybe) the cover image – unless someone else has a better one, in which case copyright to that image will be theirs.

I’m thinking one or two articles per blogger, but I am not running an editorial dictatorship. Everything is open to discussion. My initial thoughts are that we could each put in up to five links to posts, let the readers vote for the best two and put those two into the book. Each post would be marked as copyright of the originator and each will have a link to the writer’s blog.

The posts should avoid being too time-sensitive, perhaps more along the ‘thoughts’ or ‘instructional’ line than the ‘current affairs’ line so that the work doesn’t become out of date. But the final decision is flexible.

Financial requirements – zero. This costs nothing but time and not too much of that since the posts are mostly already written. I will change nothing unless I spot a typo.

Ebook version will be free and everywhere except Amazon because they don’t do free unless we relinquish copyright or give them an exclusive. Neither option is acceptable.Sod them, we can get the Kindle version prepared and just give it away ourselves. Those who can have a downloadable files section on their blogs/sites can have all the formats ready for anyone who visits.

We can do a print version via CreateSpace which will get it on Amazon, and via Lulu which won’t sell many but neither option costs anything to set up. Print versions will be at cost – no royalties. I am not piddling around sending cheques for pennies to multiple authors. The blog links will lead people to the blogs, anyone who has a book or books out can advertise their books on the blogs and hopefully make a few beans that way. This compilation is an advertising venture. Nobody, including me, makes a penny from it directly. It’s not about money.

We can’t use any images or video unless we have copyright, so no Lolcats or newspaper images unfortunately.

We can do this and we can do it for free. So, who’s in and I’m not just talking to bloggers here – the likes of Harleyrider and Rose and many other commenters have come up with a great deal of quality research and writing. The print version shouldn’t be too big because they charge by page numbers but a free eBook can be the size of War and Peace and it’s still free.

The stuff is already written. The words are already in the right order.

Al we have to do is compile it.

These are initial thoughts. All of it is malleable except the parts where I don’t want anyone’s copyright and I don’t want to make money from it. We can maybe make a bit from individual books, and I’ll tell anyone who wants to know how I self-publish at no cost.

Discussion time.

Irony Man.

Nigel Farage was branded ‘racist’ again by anti-English-chanting Socialist doublethinkers.

Mr Farage, who travelled to the capital to meet journalists, was told to ‘go home’ to England and branded ‘racist Nazi scum’ as activists – mainly students – chanted anti-British slogans.

Do you hear that ‘whoosh’ sound, Lefties? That is the sound of irony as it zips right over your heads. Or perhaps through, since there is nothing in there to impede its progress and it might even move faster in a vacuum. If there is anything in the universe with any chance of being faster than light, it is the speed of irony passing over a socialist’s head.

So now the three (four in Scotland) socialist parties have mobilised their drone troops to physically assault the party they regard as no threat at all. What was it Gandhi said again? We are at the ‘then they fight you’ stage for sure. As I recall, the next stage is ‘then you win’.

This has hardened my resolve to vote for, and to promote as far as my limited abilities allow, UKIP at every election everywhere. And this…

An angry mob of left-wing and pro-independence protesters stormed an Edinburgh bar and hurled offensive abuse at the politician.

… this means I will definitely vote ‘no’ on the independence referendum. I had considered abstaining as I don’t really consider it any of my business but if these arses are going to get violent about it, I will definitely vote against them. I do not want people like that to win anything, ever. They are detestable. They do not want democracy. They want a fascist dictatorship and not one of them has enough of a brain to even realise that. These idiots truly believe that democracy means that only one viewpoint is valid and that all others can legitimately be violently silenced. That is fascism, and that is what they claim to be against while forcibly promoting it. This is the very pinnacle of doublethink.

They should look at what their Nazi heroes did to opposition parties. Hitler did… exactly what they are attempting to do.

Lefties like to pretend that Hitler was ‘right-wing’ but no, no he wasn’t. He was exactly – EXACTLY – the same as all of the all-shout-no-thought loonies recruited by the UAF and their ilk as stormtroopers for imposing their democratic will by threat of physical harm. If there is ever another Holocaust it will be Lefties who do it. Again. If there are more Gulags it will be lefties who do that. Again. Another Khmer Rouge, another North Korea… lefties all the way.

There is serious doublethink, verging on the ultimate goal of doublethink – no-think – in the Leftie mind. They protest about mild oppression by enforcing serious oppression, they aim to improve the lot of the workers by making them all slaves, they shout ‘democracy’ while stabbing anyone who wants to vote for anyone else.

I planned to corrupt this song to make it about leftie loonies but… there’s no need. Most of the words are fine as they are.

The Wriggly Diet.

Parents are visiting for a week, starting tomorrow, so I have been urgently… fitting directional lighting into a Class 25. Well, the place is already clean. I’m a professional cleaner now, you know. I’ve learned some speed-cleaning tricks in this new job that I wish I’d learned thirty years ago.

Fitting directional lighting (lights come on only in the direction the train is moving) is a doddle with these new LEDs. We used to have to fiddle with diodes and filament bulbs but the bulbs are the diodes now. One resistor and two LEDs wired back to back, and it’s done. Then re-seat them the right way round and it’s finally done.

Tonight I achieved this on a diet of vegetable pakora (I had five, so I’m sticking to the rules here, and the chilli sauce also counts as a vegetable so that is six a day) followed by a lamb bhoona with poppadoms. I wonder how well I’d do on a diet of spiders and scorpions? Neither of those are insects but they are also, apparently, edible. I would have to wipe out my garden’s entire supply of spiders for one curry and I’d rather not do that. Spiders don’t eat my plants, they eat some of the things that eat my plants. So I won’t harm a spider. Besides, they have such sweet little faces with all those big round eyes and that fat moustache with teeth on the end.

Insects are made of chitin, and chitin is poly-N-acetyl-glucosamine. The same glucosamine you buy as a health food. Incidentally, fungi are largely made of chitosan, a deacetylated form of chitin, so it’s just a long chain of glucosamine. Eat Danish Blue or Stilton cheese and you get all the glucosamine you need. (I once did a three-year project on chitin degradation in estuarine sediments so I didn’t need to look it up, which is good because I picked up a Ben Bracken tonight. Might as well make the most of the small amount extra I get from the overtime).

Aside from the toxic ones, the ones that bite and/or sting, the ones that burrow into your skin and live there, the ones that insist on hovering in front of your face when you’re trying to concentrate on something, insects are perfectly edible. Their insides are protein and their outsides are sugar. Whoops, now the drones will try to get them banned on the basis of their sugar content.

Locusts are actually not unlike prawns except you don’t have to peel off the shell, and might make a pretty good curry. Reptile-keeping people tell me they aren’t all that hard to breed either. I wonder if I could breed enough for a plague? It would be a short-lived plague, here in Scotland, but the drones are likely to panic in most entertaining ways.

Also from the reptile-keepers, the way they get vitamins and minerals into their non-vegetable-eating lizards is to feed the veg to the insects and then feed the insects to the lizards. The veg is wrapped in insect so it’s sort of sneaked into the lizard’s digestion. Rather like getting a recalcitrant Scot to consume a healthy boiled egg by wrapping it in sausage meat, rolling it in breadcrumbs and deep-frying it.

The downside of eating insects, as I see it, is that you have to eat a hell of a lot of them. They are very small, even those regarded as ‘big’. You aren’t going to be cutting steaks off any of them.  Okay, there are a hell of a lot of them out there but even so, it’s much easier to catch and kill one wild pig that will last you for weeks than to catch and munch a hundred or a thousand (depending on size) greasy little larvae every single day. I mean, it’s okay for a gecko that weighs about fifty grams but a full size human needs a lot more. We eat the thing that eats the gecko because we are much larger animals and geckos are very small and very fast indeed.

That is the basis of the food chain. Little things are eaten by slightly larger things which are eaten by slightly larger things until you get to the low cunning of the larger animals who will gang up on something bigger than themselves and share it. Lions do this, crocodiles do it, and of course humans. It is not unnatural, it is how a tribal creature lives. A fox can manage quite well on rabbits but a pack of wolves needs a sheep now and then.

Cows, sheep and goats can live on grass. Humans, no matter how tatty the beard nor how unwashed the Che Guevara T-shirt, cannot. Those animals are ruminants and could even, at a pinch, survive on a diet of pissed-on newspaper. Urea and cellulose is all they need for basic survival. They won’t like it and they’ll run out of minerals but they are capable of doing it for some time. We are not, not even for an hour. Ruminants get very little from their diet. The bacteria and protozoa in their rumens convert things mammals can’t eat into easily digestible microbial protein. No problem getting particular amino acids in their diet, the bugs can make them all.

Ruminants get almost zero sugar from their diet because the microbes get it first and turn it into fatty acids. The animal converts fatty acids into sugars in its liver. It is an enviable digestive system – they can live on the most useless materials, stuff that is simply free for the taking because nobody else wants it.

However, humans are not ruminants. Some things we cannot make for ourselves. Certain amino acids, certain fats that are essential for cell wall construction, and much more. We have to get those things in our diets. We have to eat them.

Insects are actually a pretty good addition to the human diet. Well, the non-stinging, non-toxic ones at least. And not bot-fly larvae. Eating those is a very bad idea.

The UK site Firebox.com sells many things, none of which are necessary to anyone’s life. It’s a fun site to visit. Some years back I bought lollipops containing scorpions and ants to give to squeamish people for Christmas. The scorpion is edible, as are the ants, and they did a third one I’ve forgotten now. I think it was some kind of worm. They also did a small bottle of vodka with a scorpion in the bottom. Last one to drink gets to eat the scorpion. Like that Mexican drink with the insect larva in the bottle. So the idea of eating insects/arthropods has been sneaking into Western public consciousness for some years already.

There is a big push at the moment to get us all munching on house-flies and woodlice. In a horror writer’s mind, this kind of thinking hits odd links.

If people start to eat insects by the truckload, someone is going to have to farm them. There will be a production line of insects rather than some back-of-the-market stall run by two brothers who rake the woods for them and sell them fried and kebabed on cocktail sticks. The availability of insects as food will become a simple matter of visiting the supermarket.

Many reptiles eat insects. Human-sized reptiles would need a hell of a lot of them and would want to set up a good supply chain.

The name ‘David Icke’ keeps floating into my head…