The Mirror Men

Book stuff is still keeping me busy. I have yet to complete adding all the new athology authors to the website (it’s not easy to do, and I’ve never had so many to add before), I owe a couple of authors payments for most of the year (I intend to deal with that just before Christmas) and I am still trying to get three novels published before Christmas. I might well be working Christmas day but then the entire country is closed for days anyway. Looks like I might not quite make the Christmas deadline, this damn Christmas thing keeps interrupting my work. There have been several more submissions but sorry guys, nothing is going to happen with any new stuff before New Year.

There was a song by Captain Beefheart called ‘Mirror Man’, which inspired me to start a children’s story on that theme years ago. I thought it was going well but since three characters were dead by the end of Chapter One, I was advised that nah, it’s not going to fly as a kiddie story. I still don’t see why not, I’m sure my grandkids would love it and enjoy the vivid dreams it would give them. Still, I shelved it. Might revive it one day.

What I had envisaged in that story was a creature created to absorb and store all knowledge, and which could not be killed. At all. Ever. By any means. You can’t kill this thing by melting a ring in a volcano. It’s a living library, a repository of knowledge, a creature that does not need to be taught, it can suck out everything your brain contains and leave nothing behind. It was meant to be kept in captivity but it escaped and it’s still doing its job… But I digress. Although only a little.

Science has decided to create ‘mirror life’. While this is an interesting concept, it’s a very very bad idea to actually do it.

Life, basically, is made of DNA and proteins. Okay, that’s overly simplistic but I’m trying to get this idea across to people with no grounding in science, much less biology. I’m trying to avoid lecturing to people who have not already learned the basics of this specific subject. So if you are a biologist, this is going to sound overly simplified to you.

There is a thing called ‘chirality’ in certain molecules. It’s like your hands. Your left and right hands are mirror images of each other, they are not the same. If you were to lose your right hand and the only graft available was a left hand, you’d find that graft didn’t work as you expected. Your thumb would be on the outside of the hand instead of the inside.

It’s like that with amino acids, the molecules that make up proteins. It’s also like that with DNA. The way the molecules are constructed means they can either be left handed (laevo. L) or right handed (dextro. D) arranged and one cannot fit in a place where the other belongs.

All life on this planet uses D- arranged DNA and L-arranged amino acids. Put the wrong one in there and it stops working. A protein made with a D-amino acid in place of an L-amino acid won’t fold correctly and won’t do what it’s supposed to do. It might do nothing or it might do something entirely different to its intended purpose.

DNA codes for proteins. That’s all it codes for. Most of those proteins are enzymes that then go on to catalyse reactions that are going to produce energy or structures within the cell. Screw with that and the cell will die. This applies to all cells, animal, plant, insect, bacteria… all of life.

Your cells won’t see much D-amino acids or L-DNA because, while both are chemically identical and equally likely to arise, none of the food you eat will contain much, if any, of either. Whether you live on meat or vegetables or both, all of that life is based on L-amino acids and D-DNA. There might be a bit of the stray mirror images in there but not enough to cause any significant interference in your metabolism. One dud copy of an enzyme won’t be a big issue, the cell will simply make another.

Even if you have an infection, and your immune system or medication deals with it and breaks it into pieces, the pieces left are D-DNA fragments and protein fragments made of L-amino acids.

However, if you were infected with a mirror image bacterium, made of L-DNA and D-amino acids, when your immune system smashes it up you suddenly have a lot of the wrong amino acids and DNA fragments in your body. The chances of your protein construction system making a mistake just went into the stratosphere.

Mistaken protein construction, or worse, mirror image DNA ensuring the wrong construction is encoded in the cell forever, means a total breakdown of the system. And it’s not just you.

All your food sources, be they plant or animal based, will experience the same thing. So what you eat might go from negliible D-amino acids and L-DNA to pretty significant intake of both. Which will of course just make the problem worse.

Although… when I say ‘encoded forever’, I really mean ‘encoded for the lifetime of that altered cell’ which really isn’t likely to be very long.

The mirror bacteria, if they can be brought into existence, will have metabolism based entirely on D-amino acids and L-DNA. There is a problem there which I’ll get back to, but they would have purely D-amino and L-DNA structures.

When they get into a normal organism, and the organism’s immune system or digestive enzymes break them apart, that organism is going to suddenly experience a huge input of the wrong kinds of DNA bases and protein amino-acids. Errors will be many, and that organism’s cells will end up inserting D-amino acids into proteins and L-DNA bases into DNA on replication. Basically, it will be a bloody mess. It would be like trying to build a Lego model when some of the pieces are Meccano, but you slot them in somehow anyway.

The cell will be making proteins that don’t work and if it manages to replicate it will contain DNA that codes for proteins that can’t possibly work. That cell is doomed. The mirror bacteria would destroy every living cell in every organism and they won’t really even need to be pathogenic. The mere presence of that much mirror-protein and mirror-DNA will be a massive and unstoppable spanner in the works. All of life on this planet would be terminated and it would start again with the mirror bacteria.

However. There is a problem with this idea, a possible way to avoid utter destruction.

As the mirror bacteria multiply and kill the normal cells, they will also experience an influx of the opposite chirality of DNA and amino acids. Their metabolism will suffer the same fate of hybridisation leading to inactive proteins and dud DNA. Then it comes down to which of us dies out first. Not great odds but a chance.

Further, enzymes work by physically fitting to the structure they are intended to break or create. A mirror-image enzyme might not be able to do what it’s supposed to do. It might do something entirely different. To sustain these mirror bacteria it might be necessary to supply them with mirrored substrates to live on. Those won’t be likely to be found in nature so the mirror bacteria won’t survive.

(It’s taken a few days to put this post together. I had to edit out the parts where I went into detail you’d need to be in the third year of a microbiology degree to follow. I tried to keep it non-scientist friendly. Hopefully I managed that and yet kept it understandable.)

So these mirror bacteria – will scientists try to create them? Of course they will. Tampering with the very fabric of life is all part of the mad scientist’s manifesto, along with unleashing mighty forces they will not be able to control. Mirror bacteria covers both of those points.

Will they succeed? That’s a ‘maybe’, along with a resounding ‘I hope not’. Although knowing scientists as I do, they are not going to stop trying now that they have the idea.

If they do succeed, will they be able to keep it confined in the lab? That should be possible as long as they don’t keep the monstrosity alive for too long. Once they’ve proved the concept, the sensible course of action would be to write it up and then put the whole lot in an autoclave and steam it to death. However, scientists, especially mad ones, are not known for taking the sensible course of action.

If it gets out, what then? A lot depends on which species they mirrored. My bet would be Escherichia coli because that’s really easy to work with and to grow. It’s also well adapted to growing in every animal’s intestines. In there, it can pick out all the mirrored amino acids and DNA bases from everything that animal (including you) eat. It’ll be slim pickings at first but as they grow and concentrate those mirrored molecules, they’ll pass from one animal to another and eventually become a big enough population to be a problem.

It would take decades, I think, before the effects of an escaped mirror-E. coli caused noticeable issues, but once set in motion there would be no way to stop it. Antibiotics? Will they work on a mirrored bacterium? I don’t know and it’s pretty likely they won’t. Anyway, the only way to get E. coli out of an animal’s gut would be to totally destroy that animal’s gut microflora and that involves treatment so drastic it’s likely to kill the animal anyway.

A further complication – some bacteria can make any, or sometimes all, of the amino acids they need from simpler compounds. If the mirror bacteria can do that then they’ll make massive amounts of D-amino acids and the disaster they’ll cause will strike much sooner. If they have to hunt out the few mirror image amino acids in food, they’ll only be able to grow very slowly but if they can make their own, well that’s a rapid onset of disaster for life on this planet.

Too many variables to say whether this will really be a major apocalypse but the potential risk, I’d say, is far too great to continue along this line of research.

I think they’ll do it anyway.

The Fart of Doom

Okay. First of all, I don’t believe the Arla dairy company is involved in the whole ‘population reduction’ game. I don’t see any reason why a big company would want to kill off most of their customers. It makes no sense.

However, the Billy Gates Gruff is most certainly heavily involved in it. He has stated it himself, repeatedly. He has the opposite goal of a big commercial company: he wants to kill us all and take all our money. He doesn’t plan to do it by selling us stuff, he plans to do it by getting our governments to tax us to death and then claim that tax money as funding for his insane and murderous schemes.

So, why is the Arla company getting their farm suppliers to feed some noxious chemical to their cows? This stuff, incidentally, is so noxious that those handling the pure form have to wear full hazmat gear. It’s really nasty. Here’s one report on its nastiness, from Japan. There are more.

https://twitter.com/realpetesanford/status/1862122482599149659

Again, I do not believe the Arla company has a population reduction agenda. That really does not make sense – and if they were intending to sterilise or kill a load of their customers, they’d hardly be bragging about it. No, Arla are not the bad guys here. I still won’t touch their products because of the crap that’s going into it, but I don’t believe they are guilty here.

I think Arla have been sold this stuff on the basis of ‘methane reduction’ and they thought it would be a great virtue signal. The adage ‘go woke, go broke’ doesn’t seem to have reached their boardrooms. I suspect it will, soon.

I should say that I researched and wrote a PhD on ruminant digestive microbiology so I do have some idea what I’m talking about in this post. You can still argue, of course, since that’s how science works (or used to) but you are up against someone who spent three years of his life doing nothing but research the subject and the rest of his working life researching intestinal microbiology in general. I’ve also seen many attempts to reduce methane production in cattle since the beginning of the 1990s, none of which have ever worked.

The ‘cow farts’ story is, I’m afraid, bollocks. Sure, there’s some methane in the farts but most of it is produced by methanogenic bacteria in the rumen. Most of it comes out of the mouth via belching and rumination. As one of my very early influences, Julian Czerkawski (the man who invented the rumen simulation device RUSITEC and his technician showed me how to use it) once remarked, ‘To get a real dragon you just need a ruminant with a spark plug up its nose’. Sure, if you had a ruminant that produced both methane and phosgene, it could indeed belch flames. Fortunately, no such beast exists. It’s not an impossibility though.

So I think Arla have been told they will gain much kudos from this methane reduction nonsense. I wonder if any of their research team thought to mention that ruminant digestion has evolved over many thousands of years, probably longer, to the point where a cow can actually survive on urine soaked newspaper. They just need a carbohydrate source and a nitrogen source. The microflora of the rumen will produce every amino acid, every vitamin they need. Oh they do need a salt lick for minerals but that’s all. You mess with that well developed system at your peril.

Cows can feed on grass but they don’t live on it. Mammals cannot digest cellulose and there’s really not much else in grass. The cow eats the grass to feed the massive fermentation that’s going on in the rumen. The bacteria and protozoa (and the only anaerobic fungi so far known) in there will break down the grass and the resulting mush, along with the microbes, then goes to the omasum and abomasum, the actual gastric stomach, where it’s digested and gets the cow every amino acid it needs. The fermentation also produces short chain fatty acids which the cow absorbs and converts to sugar in its liver. The cow gets no direct sugars from its diet, the rumen microflora get those first.

By the time it gets to the lower intestine there’s not much more than residual fibre left. So there is some methanogenic activity there but it’s nothing compared to the rumen. It’s not cow farts. It’s cow burps that produce the methane. Something that has never caused any problems in the past, and really doesn’t now.

It’s not just cows. It’s also sheep and goats (which Billy Boy will come for soon) and a host of wild ruminants that have been producing methane for many, many thousands of years. There’s also the matter of swamplands and mud flats that have been pumping it out since those things first came into existence, which was very likely much earlier than any eukaryotic life (that’s cells with actual nuclei like the ones you and I and all animals are made of) came into existence. Bacteria are prokaryotes, they don’t have a defined nucleus. Methanogenic bacteria are archaebacteria. They are very. very old indeed. Older than eubacteria like Salmonella or Escherichia (E. coli to those not familiar with the subject). It’s all to do with the cell wall… but I’m not in a lecture hall now so I’ll let it go.

You can look up all those terms if you care to. I apologise for the jargon but it’s just the words I have used for most of my life.

So why hasn’t Deadly Bill gone for sheep and goats yet? Well, there is some sheep and goat milk and cheese around but it’s a niche market. Lamb is available but expensive, goat meat really hasn’t caught on in the UK, mutton is pretty tough and not very popular except in Scotland where mutton pies are a big thing. If you want to hit a big part of the population, beef and cow milk is the main target.

This Billy Gates Gruff feed additive isn’t untested. It’s been tested and been shown to be dangerous. They are feeding it to cows anyway. It makes beef and milk unsafe. Why? Well, Billy Boy is heavily invested in meat alternatives like insects and lab grown Frankensteaks so he doesn’t want you eating the real thing. Making it unsafe will result in people getting sick from the real stuff but slightly less sick from his fake stuff. You get sick either way, but if he can make you scared of the real thing he can make a fortune selling the fake thing.

It causes infertility in males. That is now demonstrated. So, when bull calves are suckling they will get dosed with this even before they get it in feed. Dairy cows, cows in general, are going to decline. Humans who drink this milk will also go into decline. It’s a more subtle way of getting rid of a food source than the bird flu nonsense that is currently wiping out poultry.

Basically, the ruminant digestive system is a marvel. It can subsist on minimal nutritional input and produce all it needs internally using the rumen microflora to ferment the crap they eat into useful protein which it then digests. This can turn grass into a prize winning bull with enough strength to overtun a car. From nothing but grass.

Billy the demon thinks he can mess with this with impunity. The toxic chemicals he’s persuaded (more likely paid) farmers to add to the feed are going to fuck up more than just the methanogens. There is a massively complex ecosystem in the rumen and he’s just thrown a chemical spanner in the works.

Arla, and others who fell for the money boy’s lies, are really going to regret this virtue signal. if it doesn’t kill their cows, it will very likely kill their business.

Triple layer tinfoil

I haven’t been keeping up with the news too well, what with all the book stuff, but a hell of a lot has happened. Including the imminent start of WWIII. Looks like Google Maps might have to start all over again.

Image from here: https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/1858238229792653382

In the UK we have the Starmer government which includes the utterly deranged Eddie Moribund, assisted by Rachel Thieves. She’s going to kill family farms so that Moribund’s mob can pick up the land at bargain prices and cover them with solar panels. We don’t see a lot of sun in the UK, especially in winter. So they won’t work, and food production will be wiped out. Guess I’m ploughing that big lawn next spring and probably going pheasant hunting.

The funny part is, it’ll wipe out beef and lamb/mutton production but most piggeries are under cover already and cover very little land area by comparison. No use for the solar farms. So the only meat available in the future will be pork. I’m okay with that but a lot of Labour’s vote base might not be.

Also, with the entire West seemingly hell bent on wiping out farming, where will they import food from? Russia? China? They might not be feeling too inclined to help. Especially if we just sent Ukraine missiles to fire at them.

Oh I know, we aren’t firing missiles at China yet. But you bring in a war with Russia and guess who’s on their side?

This is the most ill thought out tactic since the Polish sent cavalry against German tanks. We shut down our own food supply and then go to war with our starving and energy-depleted soldiers against a well fed and energy-rich opponent. We no longer even have a steel industry thanks to Starmer’s lunatic government. So we can’t even make guns, we have to import steel to make them from… China. Oops.

Basically, Western civilisation ends when China says ‘no more’. They don’t have to invade. They don’t need a war. They let us, through the likes of Starmer and Moribund, shut ourselves down and become dependent on them and then close the taps. It’s working.

I know, it’s all tinhat foilery and conspiracy theory but it’s actually happening if you pay any attention at all. We have the idiots in charge shutting everything down while China builds more coal fired power stations. Farms are being destroyed because they cause climate change, something farming hasn’t caused in the last few thousand years but suddenly it does.

Idiot people actually believe food comes from supermarkets and cannot even conceive where the supermarkets get it from. They think farmers are all millionaires living in mansions. Most are living in decaying 15th century houses they can barely afford to keep going. Okay, their land might be valued in the millions but that is not the money they get every year. Lefties can’t seem to grasp the difference between turnover and profit so they can’t possibly understand the difference betweeen land and money.

It does feel like the horseman Famine is next up, and soon. War is still busy, Pestilence isn’t doing so well so Famine is coming.

There’s only one horseman left, and he has a nuclear solution.

In Remembrance

The Monster is Out

Well, it’s been a busy time. The Halloween Anthology is finally available but it wasn’t easy.

I’d set the deadline for submissions at September 30th. On the basis that there’d normally be ten or fewer stories in the book and it can all be wrapped up and published in a couple of weeks. Well, this time it really took off. There were so many submissions that it was close to impossible to finish in time (we nearly did anyway) and the book contains 39 stories from 37 authors.

So it was a few days late, but I loaded it onto Amazon and waited.

Then I had an email from Amazon. They were convinced that the book was plagiarised. How the hell they managed to find a book with all those authors that matched this one was beyond me. I responded, asking if there were particular stories that were causing a problem.

Their reply insisted that they did not believe I had the rights to the stories, they thought it was some kind of public-domain/stolen thing and they wanted the dates of death of all the authors among other things. Well, so far I have not received any submissions from beyond the grave so again, I asked them what the specific problem was.

Their reply then said that they wanted proof, in the form of signed contracts, that all the authors had agreed to the publication.

Okay. I put all the agreements to the contracts into one file, aside from those who responded with their contracts in PDF format, and sent them the whole lot. 6.6 megabytes of files.

By this time I was getting really quite miffed. Getting the book put together within a month had taken quite a toll and I was worn out. To then be faced with an accusation of plagiarism… well it’s a good thing Amazon’s head office is a very long way away.

Finally, earlier tonight, I had a standard email telling me the book was now available on Amazon. No apology for accusing me of plagiarism, but I didn’t really expect one, and no information on what caused them to flag the book up as some kind of fake. If they hadn’t let it through this time I was ready to forward every single email correspondence with every author, and between Roo B. Doo and myself as editors.

I have never had this problem with any of the previous 23 anthologies. After getting this monster completed, it felt like a real kick in the head to have it messed around like this. As a result, it’s not on Smashwords yet because if I put it on there, Amazon’s bots would find it and flag it up.

Besides, Smashwords is going to be a problem. I have to create a ‘ghost’ account for every new author and they want all the author names on the cover so the Smashwords version’s cover is just going to be a list. That’s going to take a while and since sales from there are pitiful at best, I might not bother – at least not until I have those novels in the backlog done.

I am also looking into Barnes and Noble as a second outlet. As long as I don’t undercut hte prices on Amazon, they could be a good backup outlet for all the books. If Amazon find out you are selling cheaper elsewhere they will boot you off their site.

I couldn’t send out author payments in case the book didn’t happen. This is going to involve a substantial outlay and I really couldn’t afford to pay out for a book that failed to materialise. Now it’s out I can start sending out payments.

I have ordered a copy which I should receive in a couple of days. I’ll check it’s all okay and then send out copies to those who wanted to be paid in books. The slightly bad news is that because of the humongous size of this thing, nearly an inch thick at 400+ pages, you’re only going to get one per story. It’s nearly three times the size of previous books and so it’s also nearly three times the price. Almost all of which goes to Amazon in printing and shipping costs. I expect the eBook version is going to far outstrip any print book sales.

Still, it’s finally done. I can now get back to working on those novels and maybe – just maybe – get some time to write some of my own.

Finally, here it is. So far only available on Amazon but it’ll be on other outlets in the coming weeks.

Running late

The Halloween anthology is late. I thought this might happen. I still need to hear back from a (very) few authors before it can go to print but hopefully that won’t take long.

Editing is done, cover image is done, all authors have approved any edits that were made, it’s just a few ‘about the author’ sections to paste in and it’s good to go.

It’s not the fault of the authors. It’s entirely my fault. Well, not entirely. I had set a deadline for submissions at the end of September, expecting to end up with a book of ten or fewer stories. That’s normal for these books – sometimes I’ve had to reprint an old story of mine to get past the page count threshold for text on the spine!

Normally that can all be done, including the cover, in two weeks or less. What I didn’t expect was to be inundated with so many excellent stories that the book now contains thirty-nine stories from thirty-seven authors and is very close to hitting four hundred pages! Most of the authors are entirely new to Leg Iron Books. It seems this tiny publisher has been noticed and it only took twenty-three anthologies to do it.

Two things I’m very glad I did – commision an actual artist for this book’s cover image and cancel the Christmas anthology. I have to get at least three of the backlog novels out by Christmas and there’s no way I could run another anthology at the same time. Novels are a lot bigger than short stories, of course, but I only need to deal with one author per book. Dealing with so many authors in one book is, well, I think the term ‘herding cats’ fits very well here.

I can start getting payments out to those who opted for money, but those waiting for books – well, I hope they’ll be ready in less than a week.

Next year I’ll be setting much earlier deadlines for anthologies.

The Story Explosion

The long silence is likely to continue for a while. I have three novels I want finished and in print in time for Christmas, and it’s a damn good thing I cancelled the Christmas anthology this year. So far, 27 authors have submitted stories for the Halloween anthology, most of whom I have not met before. Most of them are previously published too, so the stories (so far) are all pretty good.

If they all get in, it’ll be quite a tome. I won’t be able to make it as cheap as the previous anthologies but I’ll still make it as cheap as I can.

So Roobee and I are editing those stories while simultaneously working on the novels. Incidentally, those 27 authors don’t include Roobee and myself, and submissions are still open until the 30th, so the number could still increase. If I can find time to write a story! This could well be the first one that doesn’t have me in it!

I used to be pleased to see at least one new author in each anthology. I had, of course, hoped the anthologies would expand but I didn’t expect this sudden explosion. It’s quite a dramatic turn.

Well, best get back to work. The rain keeps me out of the garden so I can devote pretty much all my time to editing.

And, perhaps, writing a few words…

Expanding family…

Another distraction from work but I think anyone can understand this one. My daughter is currently in hospital undergoing a long (so far) labour in the production of her (and her husband’s, of course) first child – and my third grandchild.

So I might be unresponsive (yeah, like that’s a new thing) for a couple of days more.

UPDATE: After 30 hours of labour and an emergency caesarian at 4 am, a new grandson has arrived in the world. Mother and baby are doing well and should be home in a couple of days.

Taxed by the mile

(Writing stuff – author payments for novel sales are due, a couple have sales but as usual, I’m not one of them. There have been a few submissions for the Halloween anthology already, editing won’t start until mid September because I’m still slogging through that backlog. This means the Christmas anthology won’t happen this year.)

Okay, so the new government has decided to replace fuel duty with a pay per mile tax. I don’t know if that’s instead of, or as well as, the existing annual shakedown of every car owner through vehicle excise duty. Also, I have absolutely no confidence that the price of fuel will go down when the fuel duty is removed.

This is an insane idea, which is going to be an absolute disaster. Much like everything else this government has done so far.

Don’t feel smug if you have an electric car. It’s ‘pay per mile’, it’s not linked to fuel type. You’ll be paying it too.

So how will it work? Presumably it’ll be based on the mileage reported between last year’s and this year’s MOT test. New cars don’t need an MOT test for three years so if you’re lucky enough to afford a brand new car… three years after you buy it you can expect a massive tax bill. Unless they have another means of assessing your annual mileage.

This would mean that you could potentially buy a brand new car, sell it after two and a half years and let some other sucker get the bill. I wouldn’t buy a car that hasn’t been through an MOT test, not that I’m in a position to buy something that recent anyway, in case that loophole is real.

And what if you change your car six months after it has its MOT test, then buy another that’s also six months out? Are the buyers both going to be liable for the seller’s previous mileage? How will that be handled?

Then there are the knock-on effects. Local village here has quite a few new builds. Another village some distance away has new builds that look very expensive indeed. Almost mansions. Lovely houses with a lot of garden – but that must mean their owners have really good jobs, and that, in turn, likely means that they commute to a main hub, probably Aberdeen. A daily commute of around 50-60 miles. Every day.

Sure, if they can afford those houses they should be able to afford the pay per mile tax, but what about when they want to move? Who will buy their houses? Both the villages have scant, if any, buses passing through and there’s not a whiff of a railway station for miles around. The value of those houses will instantly plummet because the pool of potential buyers has reduced to only those who have enough spare cash to afford that mileage tax. Which you can be sure will increase in every budget.

If you have a house with a regular bus or train service nearby, you’ll see the value go up. Probably by a lot. Those properties are going to be in demand. Also, the cost of housing in cities – already horrifying – is going to go through the roof. They want me to move into a 15 minute city? I can’t afford to move there now, before this insane idea is implemented. There’s no way I can afford to go there after. Well, I don’t want to anyway so there’s my silver lining.

Taxis? The nearest taxi rank to me is 15 miles away. For many in this part of Scotland, it’s even further. Taxis are really expensive under those circumstances. If I call a taxi they have to drive 15 miles before they pick me up and they won’t be doing that for free. Especially since they’ll be paying the tax too.

Not just taxis. You need to call out a plumber or a builder? Their vans will be subject to the same tax and they’ll be adding it to their bill, if they decide to come at all. Otherwise they’ll go bust and then what? No more mobile services, unless you’re rich.

Here, there are no buses and no trains. If I don’t drive I don’t go anywhere. Walk to Local Shop? Possible, but it’s two miles along an unlit twisty road with no pavement and in many places, nowhere to dive into if some maniac in an Audi decides it’s race time. It will take around 40 minutes each way (I have done it a couple of times) so there’d be no buying of frozen foods and I’d be limited by how much I could carry. So it would be a pretty frequent trip.

Yes, supermarkets deliver. We’ve used that a lot since I found out their delivery charge was a lot less than the cost of petrol to get there (the nearest one is also 15 miles away). Well, they’ll be charged per mile too so their delivery charge will have to increase to cover that.

I suspect that the only way to dodge paying this tax will be to become an MP or a councillor. You just know the taxpayer will be covering that cost for them.

There used to be quite a lot of activity in turning back odometers. Seems to have been quiet for a long time since modern cars can now rack up a fair amount of miles before having mechanical problems. I suspect some elderly mileage-adjusters will be dusting off their long-unused skills and cashing in. In some older cars, the odometer was driven by a physically rotating cable from the gearbox (I had to replace one on my first car, a Cortina, twice, because I wasn’t told you had to fill the cable sleeve with grease when I replaced the first one. Hey, I was about 19 when it happened). Get an old car, disconnect that cable for a while and you won’t record all your mileage. It’s illegal, but so is pretty much everything else anyway. If Herr Starmer gets his way it’ll soon be illegal to smoke outside pubs and even a shisha bar, to ‘Save the NHS’. I don’t think he realises what happens inside…

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Well let’s not end on a gloom note. I’ve been slowly catching up on two years of garden jobs as well as catching up on books. The garden stuff only happens when it’s not raining and there haven’t been many days like that this summer. I could do pretty much nothing last year after having a hole drilled in me to deal with a kidney stone, and this year I spent most of July with the flu. So I missed the blackcurrants and the raspberries, the birds got there first. Still in with a chance on the apples and the blackberries though.

The flu in July meant the big lawn got away from me and became something of a jungle. I have now tamed it back to where the ordinary mower can deal with it (after I rake up the cut long grass) and I did it in two evenings… like this.

I should have got CStM to film it happening because I doubt anyone will believe I did that.

But I did.

Recovering…

It’s around 30 years since I last experienced the flu. I had forgotten what an utter bastard it was. I’ve spent the last few weeks barely eating, sleeping 18 hours a day and feeling like every ounce of energy was drained out of me. CStM had it too, we’ve been lolling around like plague victims and coughing like a seal on 80 fags a day. And the mucus, oh the mucus, it was almost enough to make Noah start on his boat again.

The flu has gone now, but I still feel like my lungs have been used as practice footballs for some hobnail booted skinheads. At least my head is clearer again.

How ill was I? Well I had two litre bottles of whisky sitting here that I didn’t touch for over a week. Yes, that ill.

The coughing and the general fatigue is still with us both. It’s getting better slowly.

This has probably been the shittiest year of my life. This time last year, the whole kidney stone madness began and when I recovered from that, the flu hit. And hit hard.

It can’t get worse. Can it?