Quick update

Still working here. I haven’t died.

Underdog Anthology 23 (Spring Broke) is in its final stages. I’m waiting for the return of one author contract and a couple of final-check responses, but I hope it’ll all be done soon. Still, it does give me a chance to catch up on other backlogged work.

I’m pretty much recovered from last year’s hospital stuff, still taking it easy a little since the months of doing little to no physical work mean I’m having to ease myself back into the garden work. In that sense, the lousy Spring so far this year has been useful. Nothing much has been growing out there anyway. Even the farms here have only just started planting.

It looks like barley prices are going to be very high this year. Many farms can’t plant at all. This is good news for the farms that can plant, but bad news for whisky afficionados. It’s bound to have a knock-on effect on whisky production and prices. Although maybe not immediately – it’s not legally whisky until it’s been stored in the barrel for at least three years, and the good stuff takes a lot longer. But it’s coming.

Anyway. I digress.

I’m not sure if some emails are stuck in author’s spam folders and sending another email to ask ‘is it stuck in your spam folder?’ seems futile since that’ll just go into the spam folder too. Instead, I’ll put out a notice here and hope the authors still check on my existence – and haven’t given up on me!

Here, then, is the contents page for UA23. If you’re on there, and haven’t received a contract or the PDF for final checks, please do get in touch. After checking that it didn’t get dumped in spam, of course!

It looks like being a decent sized book this time.

Eclipse!

Well, it’s been a while since the last post. I’ve had follow up scans and there’s no sign of any new kidney stones so that’s all over for now. I was at my niece’s wedding on the 19th, I won’t post pictures of the couple but here’s the view from the wedding venue –

That’s my dream home in the distance.

My mother came back with us for a visit for 2 weeks… so the car broke. Well it is 19 years old this year so a few teething problems are only to be expected. It has developed a nasty habit of breaking down on Friday evenings, and this time it excelled its innate evilness by doing it at the start of Easter week. Tomorrow a local mechanic will visit to check it, but he already knew what it was likely to be when I described the symptoms. So I guess the rear brake issue isn’t uncommon on this type of car at this age. Then I managed to develop a streaming cold, as if I needed one more thing to delay work…

The cold has now gone, my mother is safely home, the car can start its return to life tomorrow, and blogging has been on hold because any spare time had to go towards editing. The Spring Anthology has quite a few stories in it this time and as usual, most of them need very little editing so I’ll get that done soon. My own story isn’t finished because of time constraints, but well, who needs sleep? I mean I can’t drive anywhere anyway so zombification holds no terrors at the moment.

Anyway. Enough pointless rambling. What was I going to talk about?

Oh yes. I have managed to at least partially keep abreast of the insanity currently infecting the world. Today I learned that our maniac government has decided that they will solve the increasing problem of homelessness by fining the homeless for £2000 for the new crime of being homeless. I don’t know about you, but if I was homeless and I had £2000 to hand, I’d be spending some time in a cheap hotel or buying a really old camper van to live in. Then I wouldn’t be homeless. I can only conclude that our current government really don’t want to be re-elected, ever.

The Flat Earth mob are out in force lately too. The extent to which they are able to twist physics to support their point is truly magnificent. They are also ‘anti-vaxxers’ which leads me to suppose that they are part of an agenda to label anyone opposed to mRNA jabs (they are not at all anything remotely like traditional vaccines) as ‘flat earthers’ and thereby discount anything they have to say.

The biggest one at the moment is the upcoming solar eclipse on April 8th. We won’t see it in the UK, it’ll be a moonless night here, it’s going to track across the eastern USA.

There have been many, many solar eclipses. I saw a partial one from Scotland in the 1990s, can’t remember the exact year. Our neighbour at the time was a welder so passed around some welding masks for us to look through. It was interesting but otherwise unremarkable. The moon passed in front of the sun. We know how it works, we know why it happens and we’ve known it for a long time. We are no longer mediaeval peasants who think a dragon eats the sun and we are no longer Druids who think the sun will only come back if we garotte someone to death. We just watch it happen and think ‘Well that was interesting’.

Not this time. This time we’re back to prehistory and this eclipse is going to herald the End of the World. Shares in tinfoil must be soaring. It’s being linked to CERN starting up their huge particle accelerator on April 8th – but when it’s April 8th in Switzerland, it’s still April 7th in America. It would be a better link if CERN started up on April 9th. Now, I realise the CERN scientists follow the three rules of traditional scientific insanity –

1. Meddle with things you do not fully understand.
2. Unleash mighty forces you will not be able to control.
3. Tamper with the very fabric of life itself.

Even so, I do not see how this particular eclipse is going to be any different from any of the myriad of previous eclipses. But someone does.

Several US states along the line of the eclipse have declared states of emergency. Why? They’ve never done that for an eclipse before. It’s just the moon passing in front of the sun. It’s not a comet of dinosaur-extinction level heading our way. It has happened so many times before, and it has never caused any problems before.

So what’s up now? What’s different this time? Is it merely a symptom of the Western world’s regression to the days of Neanderthals and blind superstition?

Or is something planned to happen using the eclipse as a cover? Something that has nothing to do with the eclipse, but which will use it as a convenient scapegoat? In much the same way that all the bollocks Western ‘leaders’ get up to is conveniently blamed on Russia?

NASA is going to shoot some research rockets into this eclipse, something about looking at its effects on the ionosphere. So maybe this eclipse will take down global communications in a way no previous eclipse ever has. Sounds a bit better than ‘Oops, someone pressed the wrong button’…

There are also many Biblical links being brought into the equation, as well as some Talmudic ones. Many paranormal/psychic links too. Many, many things.

If nothing happens on April 8th, I will expect to see many accounts saying ‘Ah but it takes a few days, or weeks, or years. before the effect manifests’.

Call me cynical, but over the last few years I have watched so many countdowns to ‘something big’ reach zero with nothing happening at all that it’s now hard for me to worry about a natural, common and frequently observed and understood natural event.

Or maybe the world really will end. I’d actually be okay with that. The world is currently fucking insane anyway.

Dead or Alive

Still editing. There’s a lot still to do – I’m hoping to have most of it done by the weekend but I’ve been Summoned for more tests this week. Had to go for an X ray today – naturally the council have closed the most direct road so the event became a wild ride around the country lanes with CStM on navigation duties. Later this week it’s another ultrasound scan and then, at some point, I have to visit the Stone Nurse. Which gives me uncomfortable ‘weeping angel’ vibes. It’s all to make sure I’m not building another massive kidney stone, so it’s worth it, but it’s using a lot of time.

Someone else who’s had recent surgery is the Princess of Wales, Kate. People keep calling her Kate Middleton but surely she’s Kate Windsor now. Anyway.

She disappeared after Christmas last December. Apparently she was in hospital for major abdominal surgery and hasn’t reappeared in public since. The Tinhat Foilery is in overdrive on this one. A Royal Affair? Did she get pregnant by the Royal cousin who later killed himself (or was disposed of)? Did the future King Bill have some kind of weird fetish she was going to expose? Has she been Diana’d?

Well, if they wanted to kill her, the easiest way would have been ‘complications during major surgery’ or ‘post surgical infection’ but that didn’t happen. Lately there have been obviously photoshopped pictures of her emerging, so blatant that most news agencies don’t want to touch them. So what’s really happened?

My best guess, based on my own limited experience of recent surgery…

I had relatively minor surgery (kidney stone) at the end of September, followed by doctors insisting I had sepsis while I was sitting around drinking tea and sneaking out for the occasional smoke. If I did have sepsis, the massive doses of antibiotics they pumped into me worked exceptionally well.

Even so. I arrived home with a little hole in my back where the laser went in, two or three stitches, and thought ‘That’s it then’. I soon found out, the hard way, that the little hole was just the end of a really long hole they drilled through my back muscles and into my kidney. It took a few months to fully heal. Sure, I could sit at the computer again and wear a belt again but lifting things was out of the question and even picking things off the floor was unpleasant. I’d say maybe three or four months before I was fully back to normal.

That was, really, pretty minor surgery. Now I don’t know how old the Prince and Princess of Wales are but I’m sure I’m at least a couple of decades older than them. Even so, if she had major abdominal surgery just after Christmas, well, put it this way, if I’d had my stone surgery just after Christmas I wouldn’t have fully healed yet. It sounds like she had something much more serious so it’s going to take a long time to heal. If she could heal in three months, that would take us to the end of March. If it takes six months, she won’t be fully fit until the end of June.

There are claims that she would reappear at Easter. If the surgery was as serious as it sounded, I’d be surprised if she can manage that.

Is there something nefarious going on? Well, the royal family’s history would suggest that there’s always something nefarious going on somewhere, but in this case, I suspect it might simply be that she’s recovering from major surgery and that’s all there is to it.

So I’m ignoring all the distracting tinfoil hattery on this. I know it takes rather more time than you’d expect to recover from being stabbed with a stiletto by the doctors, it’ll take even longer if they’ve basically disembowelled you, stuffed it all back in and then stitched up the much bigger hole they’d made.

Maybe something dodgy has happened. Maybe not. I see no reason to get all worked up about a surgical recovery that hasn’t even been three months yet.

The Chancer’s Budget 2024

Okay, so I’m still plugging away at books here. I’ve also sorted the quarterly author payments (there was only one this quarter and it wasn’t me – as usual). I am attempting to get the backlog at least under control by mid March, before I have to start on the next anthology. It’ll be tight but it can be done, I think.

Well, today was budget day for the idiots we refer to as ‘government’. The Chancer, Jeremy Hunt (I will refrain from the obvious name twist even though the mad-eyed bastard thoroughly deserves it) has, from what I hear, deferred increases in tax of baccy, booze and fuel until October. Isn’t that nice of him? You’re not supposed to notice that that will be after the next election, of course. Oh no, don’t notice that whatever you do.

He cut the base rate of income tax by 2p in the pound, because the Tories are the party of low taxes despite presiding over the biggest UK tax burden in 70 years. He has also frozen the personal allowance (the amount you can earn before paying any tax) so the 2p cut is actually meaningless, and more and more low paid workers and pensioners will get caught up in the tax trap now.

I’m only going by the snippets I picked up online. Actually watching the thing would have required me to light the idiot lantern and I haven’t watched TV in many years.

The absolute topper of it all though, the part that will come to be known as his Trudeau moment, happened in the opening minutes of his babble.

Remember that time Trudeau honoured an old Ukrainian soldier in the Canadian Parliament? I bet he doesn’t want to remember it. He hailed this Ukrainian war hero who had fought so bravely against the Russians… without realising that fighting the Russians in Ukraine in WWII meant he was fighting for the Nazis.

As ‘oops’ moments go, this was a ten foot high pile of banana skins soaked in bacon fat and industrial lubricant. As I recall, he shifted the blame and quietly forgot about the entire episode. Nobody else forgot about it though.

And so we return to Jerry Smugface and his opening statements. He has earmarked a million fine British pounds for the construction of a monument to all the Muslims who fought in the first and second world wars.

Just the Muslims. The Christians don’t get one. The Jews don’t get one. The Sikhs don’t get one. The Hindus don’t get one. The atheists don’t get one. Nobody else gets one. Just the Muslims.

Now, if the thought of the Tories trying to get Muslims to vote for them doesn’t have you laughing hard enough to require a sudden change of all clothing from the waist down, nothing will. They have never voted Tory and they aren’t going to do it over some vague promise of a statue. Especially since Islam specifically forbids graven images. If they are stupid enough to put up a statue of Mohammed, well, we’re going to need a bigger tub of popcorn for what happens next.

Is this some sad and feeble response to George Galloway winning Rotherham Rochdale (thanks to commenters for pointing this out) ? Maybe, but as others have pointed out, his win was really no surprise. What must have cut the main parties to the quick was the number 2 in that by-election. An independent pushed Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems out of the way to get number 2. A rare event indeed and if it wasn’t for Georgy-boy, he might well have won it.

So that’ll be why the budget rises in tax from the party of low taxes were all deferred to October and why the sop of a 2p tax cut appeared.

Well, there’s one more thing ol’ Jerry Madeyes forgot. He forgot to check whose side the Muslim countries were on in WWII.

This isn’t just a backfire. This is an exploding exhaust that will burn out every valve in the Tories’ little 100 cc engine.

All we need now is for people to realise that the other parties are exactly the same.

The Frankenstein Lesson

Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ tells of a man who created a monster, was unable to control it, and eventually it turned on him. It should have been among the required reading for anyone wanting to pursue a career in politics, and this should have been the case several decades ago.

Yesterday the UK Labour party broke democracy. They gave in to a chanting mob because they were scared. Their simpering leader, Keir of the Loose Knee, persuaded the Speaker of the House to break with protocol and allow a vote on their amendment to a bill because he thought they’d all be lynched if they didn’t. He doesn’t understand the monster his party created, to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’ under Blairenstein. The monster Rusty Nutsack and all those before him in the allegedly ‘conservative’ party have continued to feed and allowed to multiply.

Big hint guys… that monster you’ve been feeding is going to eat you all one day anyway. It’s just waiting until it has grown big enough to do it. You will not be spared. It’s the nature of the monster, you only need to look at the other countries that allowed it to grow to see where it’s going.

And what was it all about? The baying horde outside wanted the UK parliament to vote on a ceasefire in a war on the other side of the world. A war between Israel and Hamas. As if the Israeli government, or any other country’s government, are going to feel bound by a resolution passed in a different country’s parliament. The vote, won or lost, was entirely irrelevant. The UK cannot make laws that are binding in Israel or anywhere else.

So the howlers at the moon won on an entirely futile gesture. Whatever the UK parliament decides, neither Israel nor Hamas will take the slightest bit of notice. All it did was reveal how pathetic and cowardly our government representatives really are. Instead of dealing with the actual problem, the screaming lunatics on the streets, they have decided to cave in and bow to the mob. Democracy died under mob rule.

So… will they do something about the mob? Or will they ramp up their own security and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves? Oh and charge us more taxes for their security into the bargain. Well, what do you think? They have now faced their creation. Will they admit they were wrong? Have they ever?

Meanwhile in America… the administration’s idea of bringing in a lot of new votes doesn’t seem to have turned out as they expected. So now they have their monster and it can’t do what they wanted it to do. They can’t send it away and can’t placate it and soon they won’t be able to feed it either. It will turn on them.

The thing about monsters is that you have to understand their nature before importing them. Neither the US nor UK governments, nor any in Europe (aside from those who rejected the monster) understood what they were importing. Well they’re going to find out very soon. Some already have.

It’s not their own populations they should be scared of. It’s their own creation. They won’t see that until it comes for them.

Their monster is turning on them now.

The Fear

It’s certainly ramping up now. All kinds of bizarre new diseases, many of which have never been previously heard of, some which are known but rare, some blasts from the past and even the totally imaginary ‘Disease X’ which has not been identified, yet they are developing a vaccine for it. Which is, of course not even remotely possible.

Measles is back, and it’s apparently become deadly since the 1960s when I, and everyone I knew, caught it. Why didn’t we all get vaccinated? That could have something to do with the measles vaccine not being available until 1968, by which time almost all of my age group had already been through it. So we already had immunity.

Measles was unpleasant but I don’t recall anyone dying from it. Nobody went to hospital, we all went through it at home. The adults around us didn’t catch it, most likely because they’d all already had it as children. Same for chicken pox, mumps and all the rest. We were actively encouraged to get mumps well before puberty since getting it after puberty can leave you sterile. That was a very nasty one – but again, I don’t know of anyone who died or ended up in hospital.

Oh and let’s not forget our old stalwart, Covid-19. Yes, it’s still around. Of course it is. So is bird flu, swine flu and the 1918 Spanish flu. All the old flus are still around. They just get weaker over time. Not by some kind of tinfoil hat magic, they do it by a form of natural selection.

They start out nasty, but these kinds of viruses are incredibly unstable and very, very prone to replication errors. Most of those errors result in a virus that can’t infect, or can’t replicate if it does get into a cell. Some will still be nasty, some will produce a milder form of the illness. If you get the nasty one, you’re advised to stay at home and avoid contact with people – well, if you get the nasty version of any of these, you really won’t feel much like getting out of bed. So it won’t spread easily.

If you get the mild version you’ll just get a cold. You can still function and still go out. The mild version will spread far and wide. Here’s the kicker – if you get the mild version, its protein structure is similar enough to the nasty one that your immune system will set up immunity that works against both. You get the mild one, you’re immune to the nasty one. Eventually the nasty one is entirely replaced by the mild one.

So why doesn’t the mild one die out too? Simple. It doesn’t make you very ill for very long so you just put up with it. Maybe take some aspirin or paracetamol and drink plenty of water and that’s it. There’s no big push to eradicate the common cold because a) it’s just an inconvenience and b) so many different respiratory viruses have now reached this stage that it’s not possible for one vaccine to deal with them all. You’d need at least 400 different vaccines, so many holes in your arm that you could rip it off like a stamp. I don’t think many people would put up with that for a cold, so there’d be a mass of vaccine production and very few, if any, customers for it. It won’t happen.

Anyway, moving on. I don’t want to get into lecture mode again.

There is now an mRNA ‘vaccine’ for cancer. Just like vaccines for an imaginary ‘Disease X’, this is just silly. Some cancers are claimed to be caused by infective agents, but many are caused by radiation, chemical exposure, other environmental factors and sometimes just plain bad luck in your metabolism/genetics. How do you vaccinate against non-biological causes of cancer? Your immune system isn’t equipped to deal with radiation or diesel exhaust fumes.

Okay, it’s true that your immune system routinely identifies and kills cells that have gone rogue. It’s always done that. Once in a while it’ll miss some, or it gets overwhelmed – but instead of researching why that happens and why it seems to happen more often these days, the Pharmers have developed something that works through the magic of unicorn tears and pixie pee.

They claim their ‘vaccine’ will train your immune system to deal with cancer cells. Your immune system already knows how to do that. Cancer charities used to claim that 1 in 4 of us will experience cancer in our lifetimes. They didn’t specify which, because cancer ranges from deadly ones like pancreatic cancer, to benign warts. Have a wart? Yep, you’re one of the ‘1 in 4’. Now the claim is that 1 in 2 of us will experience cancer. I don’t have it, so you’re out of luck I’m afraid.

Cancer rates have increased pretty much exponentially since the 1950s and have exploded in recent years. What could be the cause? Smoking? Well that’s declined massively over the same period so while smoking can be blamed for some cancers, a rapidly declining rate in the cause can’t explain a rapidly increasing rate in the effect. The same goes for traffic fumes. While there’s a lot more traffic around, engines have become much cleaner over time and the latest surge in cancers coincided with the rise of electric and hydrogen powered vehicles. Again, the declining cause cannot correlate with a rising effect.

Is the cause microbial? Hygiene, water cleanliness, food standards, have all increased over the same period so there’s no correlation with a rise in infection with a rise in cancers. So what is it? Many other causes have been postulated but as far as I know, none have been tested. I won’t speculate on them now, my tinfoil hat is at the dry cleaners. Maybe another day.

What is notable is that nobody is even looking for a cure for cancer. All the research concentrates on treatments. I don’t believe this lunatic ‘vaccine’ will work either. It’s currently undergoing human trials but how will they test who gets cancer and who doesn’t? There are so many possible causes it’s impossible to know whether that ‘vaccine’ has worked. How will they sell it?

Well, by a remarkable coincidence, King Jug-Ears has been diagnosed with cancer. Yes, he waited 70 years to get the job and then calls in sick. Which kind of cancer, we are not being told. Which is a little strange since the Royal Enlarged Prostate was all over the news recently (enlarged prostate is common in men over 60, nothing suspicious in that). So if it’s okay to discuss the Royal Nether Regions, why so coy about the cancer?

It has been speculated that it’s an excuse for the King to stand down and make way for King Bill. It’s also, rather credibly, been speculated that it’s all a marketing ploy. The King gets the ‘vaccine’, is miraculously ‘cured’ and the plebs all line up for it. Heck, it worked for him, it’ll work for us, right?

Well… only as long as they don’t specify which kind of cancer he was ‘cured’ from. Otherwise people will think ‘it worked on that kind of cancer, it might not work on the kind I have’. The marketing needs to be vague enough to cover all the bases.

There is a lot of profit in fear. Fear of disease, fear of cancer, these are things people are prepared to spend a lot of money to avoid. And yet cures are not on offer. Only treatments, many of which are lifelong treatments.

So what else are we to be afraid of? Well, there’s Putin and his Russian hordes who are imminently going to invade Europe and nuke the USA. To which some of the more astute have responded… why would he? We’re all busy destroying ourselves. All Putin has to do is get the popcorn, crack open a beer and sit back and watch. China is doing the same, while selling us the solar panels and windmills that are destroying our countryside, farmlands and wildlife. We get the unreliable power supply, China build more coal fired power plants and buys everyone else’s coal. We’re in the process of starving and freezing ourselves to death while irrevocably destroying our own culture and sterilising our youth. Why would Russia or China invade? What do we have that they might, in any way, remotely want to take home with them?

There has been talk of conscription. In most western countries, in lockstep. Conscription? Does the military really want an influx of noodle armed man buns with soy lattes and avocado toast, who will burst into tears if the enemy uses the wrong pronouns at them? Somehow I doubt it – although the top brass seem to have been well indoctrinated into the modern lunacy so you never know. Any enemy would be facing an army that can barely lift a gun, never mind fire it, and soldiers who want guns banned altogether.

I have no fear of Russia or China invading. They really don’t need to bother. All they have to do is wait. Give it a couple more years and we’ll welcome them. Just like when the UK government invited William of Orange to invade us because the King we had at the time was so much of a twat we’d rather be under foreign control. History does indeed seem to repeat, except this time it won’t be the government welcoming the invaders.

We are to be scared of global warming (it’s really not happening or all those who bang on about it wouldn’t be buying seafront mansions). We are to be scared of Islam and Zionists and we are supposed to pick a side. I hope they both lose. We are to be scared of the common cold and the common Jew even though we’ve had no issue with either for a very, very long time. Suddenly they are out to kill us. Meanwhile the ones who really are out to kill us, we keep voting for.

Next up, inevitably, are the aliens. Loads of new ‘alien sightings’ lately and much ‘leakage’ of allegedly closely guarded secrets which include surprisingly grainy videos. You’d think an advanced military would have better cameras.

There is much to be scared of, but they are all imaginary hobgoblins. They are there to distract you from the ones you really should be scared of. The ones who are really out to get you – but you don’t seem to be scared of them.

Instead, you vote for them.

Fossil fools?

A dearth of blogging lately. I’m attempting to sort out several books simultaneously, plus set aside one evening a week for my own writing – while learning Danish, loading up wood burners and, recently, scraping up a load of snow. If the forecast is right for once, at least the snow part of things should be easing off at the weekend. Today, a queen wasp appeared from its hibernation place somewhere under a cabinet. I considered it a mercy killing – coming out of hibernation in this weather meant she’d have no chance at all of setting up a nest. Also, I don’t like wasps.

Still, there’s always a little time available to watch the conspiracy theorists. Or in many cases, to watch the conspiracy theorists be proven right. Several countries have now banned the chemtrails few people believe are real, the Flat Earth mob are out in force (I still don’t think that one will ever be proven true, they are using some seriously twisted logic for it but in these crazy days, who can say?).

There is the current denial of my entire past career. It started with ‘Covid19 doesn’t exist’, and while I’m not sure about that, I can see the logic underlying that conclusion. It acted like a bad flu, killed as many as flu does every year, while the flu simply disappeared for a year. Were flu cases being recorded as Covid? I can’t prove it, I don’t have the data, but I have to say it does seem likely. After all, I knew from the outset that the PCR test was bollocks and set up to deliberately inflate the false positive rate, and that the mRNA injections were likely to do a lot more harm than good. But hey, nobody listens to microbiologists any more.

The ‘Covid isn’t real’ progressed into ‘Viruses don’t exist’ and now to ‘Bacteria don’t cause disease’. This is tinfoil upon tinfoil – although objections to the ‘germ theory’ are not a recent phenomenon. Still, as someone who spent an entire career dealing with disease-causing bacteria, I have to wonder how it is that the cures I devised actually worked. In vitro, in vivo, and in human trials. Of course, the pharmers won’t sell them because they used cheap and non-patentable components.

It’s rather like the discovery that dandelion root can cure at least some forms of cancer. Once the medical profession heard about this, they tested it and found it worked in vitro. So, did they tell people ‘get some dandelion root, clean it, chop it up, soak it in hot water for a while then drink the water’? Of course not. That would be free and also harmless, even if it didn’t work. At least it would get you a good dose of essential minerals. Instead, they set about isolating the compounds that had the anti-cancer effect. Then they’d synthesise those compounds, patent them, put them in a pill and sell it. They haven’t succeeded yet, as far as I know, and even if they do, it’ll be stomped on. Cured patients stop paying, so the Pharmers don’t want cures. We’ve known this for a very long time.

Anyway. The particular conspiracy theory for this post is fossil fuels. I have heard the claim, for some years now, that fossil fuels aren’t fossils at all, that they are produced naturally within the earth and will never run out. The theory goes that they were called ‘fossil fuels’ to give the impression of a finite resource, but they aren’t. Well, let’s consider it.

I have also heard the anti-oil brigade claim that when oil runs out, we’ll have to wait thousands of years for decaying trees to produce another batch. This is nonsense. It assumes that the conversion of decaying plant material into oil stopped thousands of years ago, and will only start again when we’ve sucked out the last drop. If oil does come from the decay of plant material, it is indeed being continually replenished with the burial and decay of plant material year on year. There’s no real need to come up with any other theory of how it is formed. What matters now is the rate of production vs. the rate of extraction. Unfortunately we have no idea of the rate of production, whether it’s from decaying plants or from some other chemical process.

So, to the base argument. Coal, oil, gas… are they fossil fuels?

Coal, definitely. When I was a pre-teen little ginger angel, we lived near a slag heap. No, not a pile of destitute wenches, this was the reject pile of a coal mine. We were warned it was dangerous (it was actually burning inside in some places), we were told to stay away from it and it was surrounded by a fence. None of which, of course, had the slightest influence on the thought processes of the average 11-12 year old at the time. We went exploring. Often.

It wasn’t like the one in Aberfan, it wasn’t poised on a hillside over a school so didn’t cause a disaster, but since that had already happened it wasn’t really surprising that we weren’t (technically) allowed to play on it. We did though. Somehow, someone had managed to get a derelict car to the top of it where it rusted most spectacularly. We used the bonnet as a sledge on the side of the tip.

There is a point to this. Hard to believe, I know, but there is. On that massive black slag heap, we’d occasionally find, in a split rock, the imprint of a leaf or maybe a bit of an ammonite. So yes, I’m convinced coal is a fossil fuel because it actually has fossils in it.

Even so, the processes that produced it didn’t abruptly stop a million years ago. It’s still being produced, year after year, but it takes so long that we can’t see it happen. There isn’t likely to be any noticeable production within a human lifetime but in another million years, the trees you can see now will be dug up as coal. Maybe the crappy coal we dig up now would become good quality coal if we left it for another few thousand years.

As for oil, well, I’m not a geologist or an organic chemist so I don’t have a good theory about it. Maybe it’s produced by chemical reactions within the earth’s crust. Maybe it’s produced from fermentation of buried dinosaurs, animals and plants. Maybe by another mechanism nobody’s thought of yet. I have no idea – but either way, it is being continuously produced, of that I am sure. Animals and plants still die and get buried, always have and always will. Proving either theory would need someone to discover proto-oil, an intermediate form that would lead back to where it came from. It’s not going to be me, I’m retired from an entirely different branch of science and I’m not feeling the need to study for another PhD. Even though it would be funny to be Doctor Doctor.

Is oil a fossil fuel? The answer is a definite maybe for now.

Now the diffcult one. Gas. Methane, to be precise. It’s also classed as a fossil fuel but…

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has lakes of liquid methane and ethane and a surface dusted with other hydrocarbons. It’s far too cold to support any life and there is absolutely no evidence htat there ever was any. So where did the methane and other hydrocarbons come from? No trees. No animals and definitely no dinosaurs.

On Earth, we know that methane can be produced by living things – specifically, a group of Archaebacteria called methanogens. They turn CO₂ into CH₄ and derive energy from the process. Incidentally, there is also another group of bacteria that can oxidise methane back into CO₂.

Yet Titan shows us that methane can also be produced, in large amounts, without the presence of living things. So can other hydrocarbons. It seems to require high pressure – such as that found underground here – but it can happen.

Cows are currently being blamed for methane in the atmosphere. Cows don’t produce methane – no mammals are capable of that. The bacteria in the gut, especially in the rumen, produce methane and that happens in every ruminant herbivore species on the planet. not just cows. If they get rid of the cows, the sheep and goats will be next. Then the wildlife. Oh, and horses, which are not ruminants but have a very active fermentation in the caecum. Then the nonruminants, which can harbour methanogens in the colon. And yes, that includes you. If you’ve ever seen a clip of a student lighting a fart – that was methane.

So basically, you’d have to wipe out all life on earth to have zero fossil fuels in the future and even then, methane and some hydrocarbons are going to be produced. Without life, they’d be a much biigger part of the atmosphere than they are now. Well, with no plants there’d be no oxygen so there’ll be plenty of room for methane.

In summary then, what’s a fossil fuel? Coal – definitely. The fossils are still in it. Oil – maybe, although even after a whole careeer in anaerobic fermentation I never found anything that could produce the mix of hydrocarbons in oil. Methane – some of it, maybe, but Titan has a lot more of it with no trace of any kind of life, ever. So maybe life has reduced the methane content of outr atmosphere, not increased it.

And maybe we shouldn’t be messing with it…

A little scientific history

There are people alive today who don’t know how to read an analogue clock. I’ve met one, they are real. Their only way of telling time is via a digital display. It’s all they have ever known. If they ask you fior the time and you say ‘It’s quarter to…’, it genuinely means nothing to them. They aren’t stupid. They’ve just never been taught what the rotating hands on a clock face mean.

There are people alive today who think a 3.5 inch floppy disk is a 3D printed ‘save’ icon. Who have no concept of ‘quarters’ and ‘thirds’, only the decimal equivalents. Who consider CDs to be old hat, and cassettes and VHS tapes to be archaeological artefacts. Who would stare at a dial phone, unable to use it.

I’m only 63. Aside from the dial phone, none of the other things existed for at least a third of my life. I wonder what they’d make of 5.25 inch floppies, or 8 inch ones that store a tiny fraction of the data their phones now handle. Mobile phones, they were the size of bricks and the stuff of Yuppies (bet they don’t remember those either) until they became smaller and close to affordable in my 30s. And those things just made phone calls. Text involved pressing the number keys to get to the letter you wanted. Internet? Well it was still in the Compuserve/AOL era. Bulletin boards and dial-up. Not even thought of as part of a pocket device.

All these things, all the devices I saw invented and discarded growing up – the Walkman, the cassette tape, the VHS player, the CD, are all the stuff of distant history now. And let’s not even mention reel to reel tape, 8 tracks, laser discs or Betamax. It all arrived and disappeared in just half my own lifetime. Even DVDs have already been replaced by streaming services.

With this rapid contraction of history, it’s not too surprising to find many people – even some who claim to research – believing that the coronavirus vaccines are just another iteration of a vaccine technology that’s been around for some time. They are, in fact, the very first mRNA vaccines to have been jabbed into humans on a ridiculous scale. They clearly don’t work and are far more dangerous than the disease they are claiming to protect against. But first, a little history.

Modern genetics is usually claimed to have started with Gregor Mendel and his experiments with pea plants in 1856. He observed the effects of his crossbreeding of those plants, he saw that it worked but of course he had no idea why it worked or of the molecular mechanism behind it. He didn’t have the tools to work it out. In fact, the same type of breeding had been done for millenia: Farmers selecting the breeding of cattle and sheep, horses being bred for particular characteristics… again, they did not know how it worked, they just observed that it worked and carried on doing it because it worked.

Likewise, local healers used mouldy bread poultices to treat infected wounds for hundreds of years before penicillin was discovered (1930s, Alexander Fleming). They had no knowledge of bacteria nor fungi, and would have had not the slightest idea what an antibiotic was, but they used it and it worked. You don’t have to know how it works to know that it works.

Anyway. DNA.

Science knew for some time (since 1869) that DNA was present in cells but didn’t know what it was for. Still, it was present in every cell they studied, from bacteria to elephants, so it must be important. It took some time (until 1943) to work out what it was for and why every cell had it, and the structure of it was finally found out and credited to Watson and Crick in 1953.

That means we are 70 years (71 if you count the first week of 2024) from the point where the structure of DNA was discovered. That’s only 7 years before I was born and I know there are those reading this who are much older than me. So the conspiracy theory that the Spanish Flu of 1911 was a bioweapon is easily bunged into the ‘utter bollocks’ bin. They had no idea how to do it then.

They do now.

Ah, now. MRNA (messenger RNA). basically, the photocopies of the original (DNA) plans that were transferred to the ribosomes (the actual builders). This was first described in 1961. I was one year old. It’s not quite ancient history.

And so, I see those who think themselves intelligent claiming that mRNA vaccines have been studied since the 1960s, and I will not engage because they are clearly stupid. mRNA was discovered less than 60 years ago and its role in gene expression was not even widely accepted at that time. And people think scientists were working on mRNA vaccines when they had only just managed to work out its mechanism? There are those who are arrogant enough to think that’s true, you know.

There has never been a successful mRNA vaccine for anything and there still isn’t. There is no mRNA vaccine for rabies and no vaccine of any kind for ebola. They were tried and they failed. The rabies vaccine (not mRNA) I had before going to China in 1991 wasn’t even going to stop me catching rabies, it was designed to slow it down enough to give me time to get treatment and anyway, when I got there the dogs weren’t going to bite me. They were on the menu.

No vaccine against any coronavirus has ever worked. It’s not possible. mRNA vaccines have never worked and still don’t. They never will. The risks will always outweigh any potential benefit and the entire field is an insane combination of death and profit. It is becoming ever clearer that few, if any, vaccines actually work – and this is a direct result of the nonsense mRNA covid vaccines. The Pharmers have blown their game wide open.

The next few years are going to be very interesting indeed.

Storm? What storm?

Well, we have survived the consecutive storms. It did get pretty wet and windy, to the extent that going outside was no fun at all. No trees came down in the immediate vicinity, there doesn’t seem to have been any serious damage beyond the barn doors blowing open, and the lid of the cardboard recycling bin opening to admit a load of rain. Just the cardboard one. Of course.

The electricity glitched, there was a bit of light-flickering but it stayed on. No serious power outage and no trees smashing into walls or blocking the driveway… we’ve had worse. Much worse.

The news keeps saying ‘Snow!’ as if that’s something unusual for the time of year. We had one day of snow, it was all gone by the following day. Yet the news threatens ‘Snow!’ daily and has repeatedly predicted the ‘exact day it will arrive’. It never does.

There are pictures online of cars ‘paralysed by snow’ and it’s not even halfway up their wheels. One side of the road has a line of ‘stuck’ cars. The other side of the road is clear apart from two furrows caused by the wheels of vehicles going the other way. I once drove from Aberdeen to Cardiff overnight in far worse snow. In a nearly-derelict Commer van, ex-Water Board (you could still see ‘Dwr Cymru’ on the side) that had a jammed accelerator and was only driveable at a constant 20 mph. It took a while but I got there.

So… you’d think modern cars would be even better in the snow than the rustbuckets I drove in the past, right? Well, they might well be just as good or even better, but the drivers seem to be only taught how to drive on lovely summer days now. They can’t cope with snow or even heavy rain. Car slides a bit, they panic. Going full speed is their only solution to any problem, and out here it can mean they meet a stray cow or wandering deer when they zip around a blind bend. Or a tractor, or a tourist just tootling along enjoying the view.

But I digress. The loony drivers are a different rant. This is about the weather, or rather about the weather forecasts these days.

All through the summer, there were continuous warnings of impending thunderstorms. They were going to be devastating. We heard a distant rumble once or twice, and that was it. Nothing like the big one of 2019. Not at all.

Now we get continuous warnings of ‘The Snow!’ and we had maybe two inches of it for one single day. The weather forecasts always seem to have yellow warnings on them which pretty much amount to ‘There’s going to be some weather! We’re all doomed’ and then it gets a bit damp and breezy and that’s it.

It’s going to be like ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ except the met Office cries ‘Weather’. One day they’ll put out a weather warning that really means it and nobody will take the slightest notice. Their forecast for the next few days changes by the hour and yet there are those who believe they can predict climate for the next decade. I don’t know why they don’t just say ‘It’s the damn UK, the weather does what it likes’ and all go down the pub.

One more thing. We are told that the best Vitamin D is the one we make ourselves (it’s made from cholesterol so if you’re on statins you’re pretty much fucked in that respect). The Vitamin D we make when we are exposed to sunlight. Oh, you don’t need supplements, just go out in the sun and that lovely sun UV will make your Vit D for you.

Here is our UV exposure for Saturday. It’s the bottom line.

Yeah, we can get 6 hours of level 1 UV exposure if we want to stand out in the cold for that long – and since it only works on exposed skin, that means it’s bluetit and button mushroom time. A year’s supply of 4000 IU vit D costs less than a single pack of cigarettes. Guess which option I went with?

You will also notice the yellow warning for rain and snow, while the chart shows some rain and no snow. The Boys who cry Weather have not learned a thing. This is Scotland. It’s two days to January. Rain is easy. Snow is what we expect. If we can still drive to Local Shop without skidding into the river it’s a mild winter.

I recall the summer weather charts where 20 degC was coloured red as if it was going to melt the very ground we stand on. We would be delighted to get 20C here. it’s pretty much as warm as it gets. Heck, we’re happy if it’s above freezing here.

Weather forecasts are no longer forecasts. They are scare stories. You are expected to believe that 30 degC will end all life on the planet while you book a summer holiday to somewhere where it routinely reaches 40 degC. You will be amazed when you find out how many idiots believe this. They take flights to those warm places for holidays while telling you you can’t heat your home when it’s -10 outside because ‘global warming’. And they cannot see any issue with it. They really can’t. They genuinely have no cognitive ability at all.

All they do is repeat the nonsense that ‘the science is settled’ and that a rise in temperature of 1.5 degC will kill all life on the planet. Well. where I live, the temperature can vary between -20 degC and +20 degC over the course of six months. Every year. Funnily enough, it hasn’t killed me or anything around me, although it’s tried, I have to admit that. A variation of 40 degC annually hasn’t had the effect claimed for a variation of 1.5 degC over a century.

They claim catastrophic seal level rise while their billionaire supporters buy up beachfront properties. They stand in the street to stop ordinary people getting to work or hospital while their billionaire supporters fly overhead in private jets. And they cannot see it. Even when they try to get their court dates changed so they can still have their holiday in a place much warmer than where they live. Yes, that happened. They cannot see the irony. Lenin’s description of ‘useful idiots’ has never been so apt.

The saying goes that ‘good times create weak men’. Well, we have experienced some very good times indeed and we have certainly created many extraordinarily weak men. Weak men create hard times, and this time around it’s likely to be very hard indeed.

But then, as the saying goes, hard times create strong men. If that holds. then the next men will be very strong indeed.

I wionder if I’ll live long enough to see the next Sparta.

Entertainment – The Anti-Christmas

Loads of stuff out there to moan about, debunk and ridicule, but it’s Christmas Eve so I’m going to let it all slide for the moment. I have many submissions to get through but I’ll be taking the whole day off tomorrow, no matter what Scrooge has to say about it. We’re having duck for dinner and I know there’s a bottle of something rather tasty under that tree.

Here, then, is a story for Christmas. Taken from the latest anthology (number 22! Blimey!) which contains some pretty dark Christmas tales – this time, I think mine is the least dark story in the book! Without further ado, I present…

The Anti-Christmas

“Ho ho ho.” Santa placed his hands on his ample belly and roared with laughter. The hands holding the belly were, of course, superfluous. That amount of fat wasn’t likely to be going anywhere.
Tiddles the elf didn’t even crack a smile. He simply stared at the fat idiot who thought he was in charge here and repeated his question.
“What the Hell are you talking about, Santa? And where did you get this crazy idea?”
“It’s in this book.” Santa held up a copy of something called ‘The Great Reset’. “It says that people will be happy owning nothing. My new friend gave me a copy.”
“Okay.” Tiddles pursed his lips, rubbed his nose, scratched his backside, pursed his lips again and when he thought he had the words in order in his mind, he spoke.
“Let’s leave aside the little detail that you have just broken your own record for the most idiotic thing ever to come out of a human mouth, and consider where this idea will lead.”
“Well.” Santa waved the book. “It leads to universal happiness. Why is that a stupid idea?”
“Really?” Tiddles inclined his head. “So you actually think that children will wake up on Christmas morning and find no presents under the tree – or perhaps in a more cruel scenario, some nicely wrapped empty boxes – and they’ll be delighted? Is that what you actually believe?”
Santa’s face crinkled in his best attempt at thought. “Possessions aren’t real happiness,” he said. “That comes from within.”
“This is, of course, true.” Tiddles nodded in agreement. “but this is not how human minds work. Especially the undeveloped child mind. Look at all those billionaires, they think they are happy because they have money. It’s bollocks of course, but they believe it and so the accumulation of ‘things’ whether of real value or not, is what makes humans think they are happy. Take that away with nothing to replace it and what do you have?”
“Um…” Santa’s face crinkled so hard Tiddles feared it might implode.
Tiddles sighed. “You have a people with nothing left to lose. They will soon realise that, not only do they have nothing, but they will never have anything to call their own, ever again. Then you have a war, a big one. Bigger than any war ever seen before. They won’t care what happens to them because they have nothing at all anyway. You will have a global army of Berserkers who just don’t give a shit any more.”
“Hmm.” Santa’s brow furrowed. “Ah, but they will be guided by the new thing. Artificial Intelligence. It will explain everything to them.”
Tiddles’ face drooped. Artificial intelligence. If only this idiot had a mere trace of the real thing, it would make life so much easier.
“Right.” Tiddles got up to leave. “We have only a few days to Christmas and if you’re not going to deliver anything, we have to work out what to do. You are proposing a major change to our entire business model and we elves will have to discuss this.” He headed for the door.
“Ah, it’s not that big a deal.” Santa reached for the whisky bottle. “It’ll be relaxing, you’ll see. You won’t have to work so hard making toys and trying to predict what next big thing the kids will fixate on.” He poured a generous glass.
“You haven’t…” Tiddles left the sentence unfinished. He hasn’t thought this through. More likely he hasn’t thought at all. Tiddles shook his head and closed the door behind him.

Tiddles paused at the door to the workshop. The sounds of hammering, sawing, drilling and the occasional merry whistle filled the air. Tiddles blew a slow breath. Santa’s latest idiotic idea had to be stopped, and soon, or he would have to explain to these elves why they were suddenly out of a job, and stuck at the North Pole. Tiddles licked his lips. There was another matter, too, a very important one.
“George.” Tiddles tapped his friend’s shoulder. “I – what the Hell is that?” He pointed at the toy George was assembling.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” George held up a silver, tubular device with bits sticking out here and there. “It’s a light sabre. From those Star Wars films. Kids love these.” He pressed a button and a beam of red light appeared from one end of the thing. The beam extended roughly three feet into the air and stopped there.
“Is it safe?” Tiddles narrowed his eyes.
“Sure.” George swung the beam around. “As long as you don’t let the beam touch anything.”
Tiddles took a step back. “What happens if you do?”
“Oh, it’ll vapourize anything it touches.” George switched the thing off and placed it next to a row of similar tubes. “We should probably put a warning on the boxes.”
“Probably.” We should certainly put a warning on you. Still, it won’t be the first time I’ve had to remove George’s efforts from the sleigh. Tiddles composed himself. “George. Santa has a new lunatic idea and this is likely to be his worst idea yet. Come on, let’s get some tea and work out a way to stop it.”
“Tea sounds good.” George rose from his seat and followed Tiddles to the canteen.

Distracted by his thoughts, Tiddles did something entirely alien to his nature. He paid for the teas. George subtly replaced his wallet in his pocket and raised an eyebrow.
“I’m guessing this is something serious?” George took his tea and followed Tiddles to a table, well away from the few other elves who were there.
“It’s incredibly serious.” Tiddles stared into his tea. “Santa has a new friend, and that new friend has been putting some diabolical ideas into his head.”
“He’s not planning on appointing a new safety officer, is he? The last one really cramped my working style.”
“Yeah, until he tried your version of exploding candy.” Tiddles forced a half-smile. “It’s not supposed to have real explosives in it, you know.”
George took a sip of tea. “Well I didn’t know that at the time. So what’s Santa’s new idea?”
Tiddles swirled his cup. “He—or rather his new friend—thinks that people will be happy if they have nothing.”
George blinked a few times. This was a concept his mind had never considered. “What do you mean? Nothing at all?”
“Absolutely nothing. They are to rent what they need, and only what they need. They will own nothing at all.” Tiddles stared into George’s eyes. “Which, for us, means there will be no more Christmas presents to make or deliver.”
“What? But… that’s insane. It’s what we do here. It’s all we do. You mean we’ll all be unemployed? What on earth will we do all year?”
“Keep your voice down, George.” Tiddles glanced around. A few of the other elves were looking in their direction. “It’s worse than that. It will mean the end of our little, ah, side business.”
George considered this. “Well, not immediately. We hand them the bill for their presents when they turn thirty, so if we stop giving presents now, we still have twenty-nine more years of collections.”
“No. We don’t.” Tiddles steepled his fingers. “If the presents stop this year, what happens when we hand out bills on Boxing Day?”
“Well, they still owe us for their presents. Their Santa lists were a request for services, it’s all legal and valid.” George paused. “Well, maybe not entirely legal but they did sign the letters so it counts as a contract.”
“You’re missing the point.” Tiddles leaned closer. “What’s our final sales pitch to those who won’t pay?”
“We tell them their children won’t get any more presents until the bill is paid. It never fails…oh!”
Tiddles nodded. “Exactly. If their kids aren’t going to get any more presents anyway, our argument loses all its persuasive power.” He sat back in his chair. “If we don’t stop this lunacy right now, our profitable little sideline is dead in the water.”
“So we lose our side income as well as our jobs.” George shook his head. “What are we going to do?”
Tiddles thought for a moment. “We’re going to need help from the Dark Side.”
George’s jaw dropped. “You mean…?”
“Yes. We’re going to have to talk to Dodgy Pete.” He drank his tea and put the cup down. “Come on. There’s no time to waste.”

Dodgy Pete was nowhere to be seen in the workshop. Tiddles led George to the exit door. “He’ll be in his shack, I expect.”
The shack was near the sleigh barn, close enough for a couple of raids on certain categories of presents that Pete would later sell back to the elves. Mostly booze and chocolates. Tiddles and George trudged through the snow to the little shed. George knocked on the door. After a pause, it opened, just a crack, to reveal Pete’s narrowed eyes and tight-lipped expression.
“We have a deal, Tiddles. I keep quiet about your scams and you keep quiet about mine. So what do you want here?”
“It’s about our scams. They are going to hit a wall and end in a few days if we don’t do something.” Tiddles pushed the door. Pete let it open. Tiddles and George entered.
“What’s going on?” Pete turned on a light to reveal the shack’s interior. Just a few chairs, a table, a single bed and a stove for heat.
George looked around. “I was expecting piles of… you know… stuff.”
“Nah, of course not.” Pete nonchalantly moved a chair over what looked suspiciously like a trap door. “I wouldn’t be involved in anything dodgy.”
George snorted. “Your name is literally Dodgy Pete.”
“Shut up, George.” Tiddles could see this conversation was likely to result in unpleasantness. “Right. Pete. Here’s the problem.” He gave Pete a full explanation of Santa’s latest crazy idea.
Pete shrugged. “I know about his mad friend. He’s a daylight goblin and his ideas are totally insane. Even a dope like Santa can’t fall for them.”
“Apparently he has.” Tiddles said “And he wants the ridiculous nonsense implemented.”
Pete put his hands over his face. “Does he understand what it means? Apart from all our scams disappearing, it means he has an army of elves with no jobs. Nothing to do. No reason to stay here at the North Pole when we could all be back living in the forests.”
Tiddles snorted. “I don’t think this particular Santa understands the instructions for a toaster. We really need an IQ test for the next one. If there is one.” He put his hands on his hips. “We need ideas, and not standard nicey-nicey elf ideas. That’s why we are here.”
Pete took a seat and motioned for Tiddles and George to do the same. “Right,” he said. “This goes against all elfin oaths to serve Santa but I think we’re all far enough out of the mainstream to consider it.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Make the daft sod experience what he wants.”
“How do you mean?” George leaned forward. “What should we do?”
Pete shrugged. “Sack him. Send him home. He’s been here so long he won’t last a day back in the real world. He’ll be begging for his job back before the first snowflake hits him.”
Tiddles frowned. “How do we sack Santa? I mean, he’s effectively in charge of the whole operation. Or at least, he thinks he is.”
“Use his own logic.” Pete picked up three tin mugs and took them to the stove, where a kettle boiled. “If he’s not going to deliver presents any more, then he has no further purpose here and neither do we. Tell him we’re all going back to the forests and shutting down the entire present making shit. Make sure he understands that it was all his idea.” Pete took the kettle off the stove and laid it to one side, then picked up a bottle and poured a good slug of whisky into each mug. He passed two to Tiddles and George.
Tiddles took a sip. Ah, naturally he keeps the best ones for himself. “Pete, what you’re proposing is unethical and breaks all of our Elf Oath to the original Santa.” He paused and took another sip. “I like it though.”
Pete grinned. “We took an oath to the original Santa. This one is, what, number eight or nine? We took no oath to him.”
George shifted in his chair. “Well, technically, we took an oath to the office of Santa. So it holds, no matter who is in the fat boy seat.”
“Well.” Tiddles placed his mug carefully on the table. “If he’s not going to deliver presents any more, he’s no longer qualified as being Santa. He’s just some guy. So our oath of allegiance is void.”
“Quite so.” Pete drained his whisky and poured himself another. He offered the bottle to the others, who declined.
“So you’re saying we should just walk into Santa’s office and tell him he’s fired?” George wrinkled his nose. “What if he refuses?”
“No.” Pete smiled. “On Christmas Eve, the sleigh is outside time. It can travel the world in the blink of an eye. That’s when you ditch him and that’s when you pick his sorry arse back up.” He steepled his fingers. “Let him ride the sleigh, but one of you has to hide in the back. The first time he gets off, take the sleigh. Leave him behind. Deliver all the presents and then go back for him. Then you ask him if he wants to be Santa or just some homeless dope in a red suit. He’ll experience real time while the sleigh is away. It’ll feel like days to him.”
“Pete,” Tiddles raised his mug, drained it and held it up for a refill. Pete obliged. “Pete, that is absolutely diabolical and I love it. It might smack some sense into the madman’s head at last.”
George grunted.
Tiddles took another sip. “What is it, George?”
“I think we should just replace him.” George paused for a moment. “I mean, he’s given us trouble every Christmas since we brought him here. And now he doesn’t want to work for the only day of the year we expect him to work. We need a better Santa.”
“Sure.” Pete smiled. “The trouble is, every Santa we bring here is in the job for life. We can never send one back or we risk him talking, and blowing our entire operation wide open.”
“I wasn’t talking about sending him back. Just install a new one and let this one drink himself to death.” George took a deep drink, and spluttered. He regained his composure and wiped his eyes. “One of us could do the job.”
Tiddles sniffed. “We have less than forty hours before the sleigh takes off. If presents are delivered by an elf, the children, or at least the few little sods who stay awake, are going to notice. There will be questions. And letters. More complaints.”
“Well.” George swirled his cup. “We need one who can dress up as Santa. How about Chubby Roy? He’s shorter than Santa, sure, but almost as wide. He’d fill the suit enough that the kids won’t notice.”
Tiddles and Dodgy Pete roared with laughter. Pete slapped the table. “Have you ever had a conversation with Chubby Roy?”
“Indeed.” Tiddles held on to his mug with both hands to stop himself shaking. “Oh, I can see it now. Some wide-awake kid catches him putting presents under the tree and Chubby Roy gives it the whole ‘Ho ho ho. Merry bastard Christmas you snot nosed little twat.’ Oh, the letters we’d get.”
“Okay. Point taken.” George took a rather more careful sip of his whisky this time. “But Pete’s plan has the presents delivered by an elf anyway. We really do need one who can at least look something like Santa.”
Both Pete and Tiddles became serious in an instant. Tiddles puffed out his cheeks. “He’s right. Who do we have who could look enough like Santa to fool the world?”
Pete rubbed his chin. “The only one with enough width is Chubby Roy, but we’d have to tape his mouth shut. How about we fill the suit with padding and add a fake beard? That would widen our options.”
“At sleigh speeds, the padding might deform. We’d be sending out Shapeless Santa.” Tiddles stared into his whisky.
“The last resort then, is to fix this Santa and get rid of his current delusion.” George said.
“Yeah, well, that’s not an easy option.” Pete took a deep drink. “Remember how he acted last year with just some booze and a few films?”
Tiddles nodded. “Yes, but to be fair, Pete, that was mostly your fault.”
Pete held up his hands. “Well if we’re going to talk about blame…”
“Never mind. It’s in the past.” Tiddles finished his drink and motioned for George to do the same. “I have an idea. Might be a long shot but it’s really all we have – and if it doesn’t work, we’d better use the sleigh to get back to some decent woodland while it still has its Christmas magic. Otherwise we’ll be stuck here.”
“It had better work.” Pete rose from his seat. “If Santa gets his ‘own nothing and be happy’ lunacy in place, we’re all screwed.”
“Oh, I don’t think he will.” Tiddles winked. “I plan to give him a taste of it, as you suggested. Thanks for the ideas, Pete. Come on George. Let’s go.” He led the way out of Pete’s shack and headed for the workshop.
Once they were clear of Pete’s shack, George spoke. “So are you thinking of using one of Pete’s ideas?”
Tiddles grinned. “Not quite, although he did get my mind working. I’m thinking of using one of yours.” He led the way through the workshop, pausing briefly at George’s bench to pocket one of the shiny silver tubes. Then he hurried on towards Santa’s rooms.
“You’re not planning to vapourize him, I hope?” George struggled to keep up. “I mean, that might be against the rules, you know?”
“Oh no.” Tiddles’ grin widened. “I have something much worse than that in mind.”

At Santa’s door, they paused. Muffled voices came from inside, punctuated by Santa’s ‘Ho ho ho’. It sounded a little slurred. Tiddles knocked once and opened the door.
“Ho ho ho. Come on in.” Santa sat in his armchair with a large whisky in his hand. “We were just discussing the new arrangements for Christmas this year.”
Opposite Santa sat someone not much taller than the elves, wearing what looked like a science fiction jacket with massive lapels. Over the jacket hung a face like a wax mannequin that had been left in the sun too long. This newcomer raised his glass and nodded at the elves, but showed no indication of smiling.
Maybe he can’t smile because his jowls are too heavy. Tiddles turned his attention to Santa. “What new arrangements? I thought we were about to shut the whole Christmas present thing down.”
“Well, my friend Claws here—”
“It’s Klaus, Zanta.” The saggy face opened to admit a sip of whisky.
“Well I was ‘claws’ enough.” Santa shook with mirth to the point where he had to put his glass down. He harrumphed a few times to compose himself. “Anyway. As I was saying, Claws – sorry, Klaus – has come up with a way to get presents to the children without them owning anything. So they’ll own nothing but they’ll still be happy.”
“You’re about to break your own record for the most ridiculous statement ever, aren’t you? For the second time in a single day.” Tiddles picked up a glass and poured himself a large one. “How is this insanity going to work, then?”
“I don’t get it.” George wrinkled his nose. “So are you delivering presents this year or not?”
Tiddles nodded at Santa. “You know the sleigh will leave on time, and you know what happens if you’re not on it, right? You’ll have the mother and father of all migraines until it returns.”
Santa waved his hand. “I’ll be on it. I just won’t be delivering presents. I’ll be handing out rental agreements.”
“What?” Tiddles narrowed his eyes.
“You zee,” Klaus assumed a haughty expression. “Zey vill not own ze toys, but zey vill rent zem. Ven they outgrow ze toys, zey can send zem back and shtop paying.”
“Brilliant, isn’t it?” Santa raised his glass. “No more clutter of old toys filling up everyone’s attics and cupboards. They just rent them while they’re children and when they grow up, they can return them.”
“One little detail you might have overlooked.” Tiddles said quietly. “Children don’t actually have any money.”
“Ze parents vill pay,” Klaus said. “Ozzervise zeir children vill have no presents.”
George nudged Tiddles in the ribs. “This is going to put us out of business,” he whispered.
Tiddles waved him to silence. “It’s not going to work. If the parents have to pay rent on the children’s toys, why won’t they just go to the shops and buy them themselves? And what happens if the toy is broken? Do they have to pay for a replacement?”
“No problem. We can sell them insurance.” Santa smiled.
Tiddles let out a sigh. “So we are going to have to collect annual rent on an ever-increasing number of toys, deal with returns as well as run an insurance business. Have you considered the administrative nightmare you are proposing for us?”
Klaus inspected his fingernails. “Ze parents vill not buy toys in shops. Ve are in ze process of closing down ze retail industry and turning it all into a rental industry. Ve can undercut ze shop prices.”
“And admin will be computerised.” Santa added.
“We are elves,” George said. “We don’t work well with computers.”
“Ah, zen you vill learn, or you vill be replaced.” Klaus inclined his head.
“What?” Tiddles faced him. “Who the Hell put you in charge?”
“You can’t run this operation without elves.” George folded his arms. “All of it runs on elf magic. Without us, you have no toys and most importantly, no sleigh. Oh and you can’t travel the world outside time on Christmas Eve either.”
“That’s right.” Tiddles reached into his pocket and grasped the silver tube. “Without us, this whole game is over. No magic, no flying sleigh, no flying reindeer. And you—” he pointed at Santa, “—you end up homeless, jobless and stuck at the North Pole alone. Because we’ll all go back to the forests.”
Santa licked his lips. “Now wait, lads, let’s not get all worked up. I’m sure we can come to a compromise.”
“I’m afraid zere can be no compromise.” Klaus rose from his seat. “Ve have a plan, you zee, and zere can be no deviation from it.”
“Okay.” Tiddles withdrew the tube and held it up. “Fine. Let’s see how happy you are with nothing. We’ll be taking the sleigh and leaving, and you, Santa, can take the headaches. Best get used to them because when the sleigh doesn’t come back, they’ll be permanent.” He marched over to the drinks cabinet, placed a full bottle on top of it, activated George’s latest toy and vapourized the bottle. “You’re going to be really happy when you have no more whisky.” Tiddles took out another bottle. He held the light sabre over it and stared at Santa. “Well?”
“Oh come on.” Santa’s eyes grew wide. He turned to Klaus. “You have to give them something. There must be a compromise.”
“Nein.” Klaus folded his arms. “If you are shut down, zat vorks for me too. Zen my ozzer rental outlets have less competition.”
Santa ran his sleeve across his forehead. “You know, Klaus, I don’t think we have a deal. This whole Santa thing can’t work without the elves and they aren’t going to go along with it at all.”
Klaus drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t all that much, and pointed a finger at Santa. “You fail to grasp ze seriousness of zis situation. Ve, ze Day Goblins, are to become Masters of ze Vorld. Zose who resist us vill be eliminated.” He puffed out his chest like a pigeon on heat. “Ve are ze new Gods of zis vorld!”
Tiddles snorted. “If you’re a god, heal this.” With a deft movement, he swung the light sabre and vapourized Klaus’s pointing finger, simultaneously cauterising the wound.
George nodded his approval. Santa’s jaw dropped so far it risked dislocation. Klaus stared at his hand with its missing index finger.
“You… you can’t do that.” Santa stared, wide-eyed, at Tiddles. “You’re an elf. You’re all about magic and kindness and toys for children. You don’t go around mutilating people.”
Tiddles switched off the light sabre. “Day Goblins are not people.” He pocketed the device. “And if you knew anything about elves, you would know what we are capable of. The original Santa did, which is why he made us swear never to harm a human.” Tiddles inclined his head towards Klaus. “He’s not human so he’s fair game.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why the original Santa took us all here, to the North Pole?” Dodgy Pete spoke from the doorway. “There are so very many remote places, in lovely warm forests, but he chose this place. Didn’t you ever wonder why?”
“Well… it’s tradition. Always has been.” Santa shook his head.
Pete moved into the room. “Well, when we live in forests, we’re a highly territorial species. It’s a dangerous place to live. We don’t like strangers.” He narrowed his eyes at Klaus. “At all.”
“Zo?” Klaus bared his teeth. “Ve do not care about being liked. Ven ve haf total control, you vill all do as you are told.”
“Yeah, well,” George said, “we don’t really get along with doing as we are told. We agree to things if we like the idea, and frankly, we don’t like your idea at all.”
“You see,” Pete leaned forward and patted Santa on the head. “In the forests, most of us would be patrolling our borders and fighting off any potential invaders. Or warring with nearby elf colonies. Here, we have no need to do that. Santa’s proposal gave us all an easy life, playing around making toys and no concerns about borders or invaders. We see an occasional polar bear or arctic fox but they are no threat to us.” He smiled. “It’s actually quite a relaxing life.” His smile dropped. “If we have to give it up and go back to forest fighting, we are really not going to be happy that you caused it.”
Klaus snorted. “Zere vill be no forests. Ve are removing zem, and all who live in zem, using vindmill power as our excuse. Zere vill be nowhere to hide.”
Tiddles took out the light sabre and turned it on. He raised one eyebrow. “You know, Klaus, we are already very unhappy indeed with you. You are an invader in Elf territory, a most unwelcome one at that, and we have taken no oath to avoid harming Day Goblins.” He brushed the tip of the sabre against Klaus’s lapel, which fell to ash. “So if I were you, I’d be keeping very quiet at the moment.”
Santa took a deep drink and stared into his glass. “I’m seeing a side of you boys I’ve never seen before. I mean, I always knew you had some side scams going on, but I never saw you as a full-blown Mafia.”
“That’s because you’re not the original Santa.” Pete took the bottle Tiddles had left on the cabinet, opened it, and took a large swig. “And because you never bothered to read his notes on how this all started.”
“Nor considered how it might end.” George folded his arms. “We took an oath to the original Santa and we considered that it applied to the office of Santa, no matter who sat in the fat—I mean, who sat in the seat you occupy. But if you refuse to fulfil your side of the contract, our oath is null and void. All of it. It’s up to you now, Santa. The choice is yours.”
“Zere is no choice. Ve—” Klaus stopped and blinked at the bar of light that appeared across his eyes.
Santa put his head in his hands. “I don’t know what to do. I’m in charge here and I don’t know what to do.”
Pete laughed. “You have never been in charge here. We let you booze and amuse yourself all year and you have one night of work. The original Santa was in charge, he recruited us, but when he died and we found replacements, we recruited them. And you. We’ve been running the whole place since the original Santa passed away.”
“Vait.” Klaus backed away. Tiddles followed, holding the light sabre near his face. “Vait. You are not in charge, Zanta? Zen who should I have been instructing?”
Tiddles moved the sabre closer to Klaus’s nose. “Perhaps you should have considered asking those of us who would be most affected by your insane ideas.”
“Pah.” Klaus backed away until his legs hit a chair. He fell into the seat, harrumphed and looked up at Tiddles. “Does ze farmer discuss his plans viz ze cattle? Ve are ze superior race.”
“You are just failed goblins.” Pete said. “You were thrown out of the goblin caves, centuries ago, because you can’t see in the dark. Useless in their society. So you rebranded yourselves as Day Goblins and you’ve been making up idiotic schemes to prove your ‘superiority’ ever since. The truth is, you’re so useless your own people don’t want you around.”
Klaus slammed his hands onto the arms of the chair. “Zis is not so. Ve haf transcended ze dark vorld of ze goblins. Ve valk around in ze daylight. Zey cannot do zis.”
“They can, actually.” George sniffed. “There was a tribe of them in a mountain, near the forest we used to live in. They’d be out in daylight sometimes, but they didn’t like it much.”
“I remember that.” Tiddles switched off the light sabre. “The goblins thought that too much sunlight could drive them insane.” He looked pointedly at Klaus. “They seem to have been right.”
“Hm.” Pete said. “I have been hearing some conspiracy theories about blocking out the sun. Know anything about that, Klaus?”
“Vell…” Klaus examined his remaining fingernails.
“Wait, wait, wait.” Santa rose, a little unsteadily, from his chair. “I need to do some catching up here, before Tiddles uses his magic torch thing to vapourise any more of my fine single malts.”
“Vot about my finger?” Klaus waved his hand.
“Shut up, goblin. You know it’ll grow back.” Tiddles turned to Santa. “So what is it you don’t understand?” My bet is, pretty much everything.
“Pretty much everything.” Santa responded. “First of all, are you telling me goblins are real?”
Pete laughed. George groaned.
Tiddles ran his hand across his eyes. “You’ve been talking to one for the last few days. How can you say you didn’t know he was real?”
“Well… I just thought he was a particularly saggy-faced elf. He never told me he was a goblin. Do they all look like that?”
“Only the ones that have been left in the sun too long.” Pete managed to get the words out between laughs.
“You do realize I am zitting right here?” Klaus’s face had turned a rather fetching shade of purple. “You cannot speak of your masters in zis fashion. Zere vill be repercussions.”
George leaned over Klaus. “You know, you really should have listened to the goblins who threw you out. You caused them nothing but problems, but if you had stayed on friendly terms with them, instead of getting all caught up in human money and your stupid control ideas, they would have told you something important. Whatever you do, do not mess with the elves.” He stood straight. “If I were you, I’d shut the hell up before Tiddles uses the toy I made to cauterise your neck after your head comes off. And that won’t grow back.”
Santa’s bushy eyebrows almost covered his eyes. “All I’ve seen you lot do is make toys and run a few harmless scams. You’re hardly a terrorist organisation.”
Tiddles sighed. “If only you had spent the last few years studying the origins of this whole Santa thing instead of boozing, watching films and playing games, you might have developed a bit more respect for us, and for the office you currently hold.” He waved his hand at the dust-covered bookshelves. “It’s all been there, right in front of you, all these years. All of the original Santa’s notes and all our history. You never read a single bloody page.”
“But…” Santa sat back down. “I never saw any indication of any of this kind of attitude. You were just the jolly, and sometimes nagging miserable bugger, elves. You were never so… brutal… before.”
“Our way of life was never under threat before. Well, not in your lifetime.” Pete said. “What this Day Goblin proposes is likely to wreck not only our lives, but all of Elfkind, everywhere.”
“Humans too.” George added. “And we have sworn to bring no harm to humans. So we can’t just sit back and let him do it.”
“Again,” Tiddles pointed at Santa, “this is entirely up to you. It all hangs on what you decide, right now. If we shut down because you want to go with this nutsack-faced moron’s ideas, all our vows become void. We go back to fighting for ourselves and we don’t have to care about you or any other human. You’ll die of either migraine or cold, here, because we’re all going to leave and the sleigh won’t come back. The children get no more presents, whether gifted or leased, but it won’t matter because your walnut-faced friend plans to kill them all anyway.”
“What?” Santa stared at Klaus. “You never mentioned killing anyone. Is this true?”
Klaus shrugged. “Zere are far too many people in ze vorld. Imagine how much easier your job would be of most of zem simply veren’t zere any more.”
“No.” Santa held up both hands. “No, I cannot and will not be a part of this madness. The elves and I are going back to our usual routine. Giving away presents. For free.”
Tiddles and George exchanged a glance. George whispered “Well technically they are free when we give them…”
“Shush, George.” Tiddles turned to Santa. “So the deal is off? You’re kicking out this daft Goblin idea?”
“Absolutely. I’ll be riding the sleigh and delivering presents this year, as always.” He glared at Klaus. “So you can kick this… thing… back out into the snow.”
“You vill regret zis!” Klaus lurched from his seat. “You vill feel ze wrath of ze New Gods.” He pointed at Santa, realised he was pointing a stump, and then pointed with his other hand.
“Get this wrinkled monstrosity out of here.” Santa picked up his glass and took a swig.
“We can’t just throw him out,” Pete said. “He’s made credible threats, some of them directly against us. We don’t know how many friends he has out there either.”
“You’re right.” Tiddles switched his light sabre on. “Come on, goblin. We’re going to ask you some questions in our… oh what’s the word? Ah yes. Interrogation room.”
“Oh, is that the room with all the chains on the walls?” George said. “I’ve often wondered why we had that room. It’s probably going to need dusting, we haven’t used it before.”
“I think dust will be the least of his problems.” Tiddles grinned. “Right. Get moving, goblin. You’re about to find out why your ancestors never attacked us.”
Klaus, surrounded by Tiddles, George and Dodgy Pete, left the room.

Santa stared into his glass. What the hell just happened? It feels like the cat you had for years just turned into a rabid tiger. He realised he could see the bottom of the glass and reached for a refill. His hand paused when his eyes fell upon the shelf of dusty notebooks. His tongue ran across his lips.
Maybe I should read them. They might help me understand who and what the elves really are, and who and what I now am.
Santa snorted, grabbed the bottle and poured a good measure into his glass.
Maybe tomorrow.