Lab Rats

We were of course worried when we heard that the bees were dying. That lasted a while and then, like the way of most things the worry was replaced by acceptance and then, more menacingly I suppose, indifference. So the bees died back, gradually. Brown areas opened up in gardens and parkland. Some fruit crops and orchards failed, prices rose, demand increased and then flagged. It was all a familiar cycle of warped supply and demand. People got used to not seeing or tasting apples, almonds, cherries and blueberries. It was of course a blow to the food industry and there was the hype of over-advice and trumped up alternatives. Not all of them went down well. Summers were rainy and the buzz and erratic flight of bees became a memory. Other, more successful insects filled in the gaps, flies and mosquitos, pests and nuisances that could replicate neither the charm nor the pollination skills of the bees.

Various attempts were made to replace the bees' pollenating action with synthetic alternatives. It was a chemical Holy Grail, like the cure for cancer or HIV. Billions of Dollars worth of business was at stake and the big boys took it seriously. We never really thought that our little lab, busy with test schedules and contracted forensic work could figure in such an industry until it all happened. I read the threads of the tests, the fails, the close but not close enough results. Apparently desperate measures, hoaxes and failures. The bees, no longer quite so busy, still dying, here and there and of course the ongoing alternative (and mostly madcap) attempts to save them or at least reverse the trends. The world is always hungry for something and conversely something is always hungry for the world.

As part of the research programme to seek out a synthetic pollen, batches of material were sent out for prescriptive testing by a wide range of randomly selected labs. It was a government initiative. They realised that, in this kind of science, there was an X factor of probability that suggested he answer was close but unseen. It was under our noses but the white noise of the corporate and the size of the problem might well be masking the obvious answer. There in the details. Rumours abounded of course, mostly around the research being carried out by the Chinese and the Brazilians. They were the hot teams, under pressure in the fields, up the Amazon, deep in africa. Big game hunting for a robot insect, a spray, and accident, a petri dish of answers, mould, DNA, fungus or just some identifiable magic scraped from the back end of a bee. Where it was a bumble, a honey or a killer hardly mattered. We just need an answer.

Our batch came in a Fed-Ex jiffy bag. Three 50cc plastic bottles of material each with a unique bar coded label. There was also a sheet of tests and website where the data was to be deposited once the programmed work was completed. It was Mark who carried out the work, I supervised and backed up the notes. We were both pretty meticulous on this and as a government cheque was always welcome I hoped for some repeat business in this lottery. The high price of food these days meant that every penny was counted and pinching. We did the tests and analysis and in the prescribed manner wrote up the notes and uploaded them into the the greater machine. We would be informed about our success score the website said once other corresponding data had been collected. The three plastic bottles and the residual material in them was to be Fed-Ex'd back to the centre for correlation and recheck. The process just seemed to be running on and on in some bureaucratic spiral. We took in more batches, did more tests and the cheques kept coming. After a few months I'd to take on an extra graduate to help with the work. Our little lab was scoring well and the repeat business was welcome.

Repetition can be good but it can also be dangerous. It breeds that awful familiarity and carelessness that comes with simplification and a regular dumbing down. I never thought that it would come to us or indeed happen to me but it did. It sneaked itself in, a rogue result, a bad figure. We were on our 99^th test, months down the line. Lots of data and results and submissions and we were running on auto pilot, cruise control, whatever. We got lazy, other things were going on, we lost focus and we'd forgotten what honey ever tasted like and how bees sounded. Numbers on a page, flickering data on a screen. In the slip a percentage test was compromised, unseen, we fudged the numbers, we assumed the quality matched, a batch was spoiled and we missed it, we missed the bastard. The jiffy bag was returned but the match was wrong and we went out on the weekend blissfully unaware. We drank beer, sat out in gardens, talked about sports and beefsteak, moaned about the weather, looked at the patches where certain flowers and foliage had been, got annoyed by the new strains of dominant buzzing non-bees whatever they were, didn't think about Monday.

On Monday I picked up the automated email, a “do not reply” one. It said that our data was compromised and that a follow up call would be made. Mark and I ran over the last test results and we found the rogue. There was a mild panic. “That's the fuckin' gravy train derailed”. They called about 1130. The robot voice said a new batch would be sent but we had to replicate our mistake, the data we'd submitted was described as “of interest”. When the batch arrived on Wednesday I followed the two processes, right and wrong, meticulously. If we'd fucked up then we'd do it consistently, we'd prove our integrity. Our systems might have a flaw but we could repeat and understand (and eradicate) error. That seemed a statistically important answer to be able to stand by. Good systems equal good science.

We uploaded the new and repeated data. I sighed and sat down. There was other work to do and I got on with it hoping that the previous incident would evaporate. It surely would.

To be continued...

Into the blue

Here is the world as it is. The world of unfair imperfection, troubles and inventions, questions and buzz word rhetoric. I am stranded in the aftermath of the accident. I fit myself in , here in the remains of my wrecked space craft, I sit and observe. The city is cranky and steaming. It’s foreign and far away and I am an interloper. I guess they know I’m here. They’ve  seen the crash on far away screens or monitoring devices, they’ve mobilised, they are on their way. The horizon is a dull distance away, over the head of the city. I’m in an area, maybe waste land, I’m aware of distant traffic and activity. Beads of light and flurry but I can’t understand the scale. Perhaps I’m injured, perhaps my brain has been affected. The trauma, the shock. Perhaps my straight thinking is not so straight. I feel I’m falling asleep.

Now I waken, on my back, lights and voices, the smell of … chemicals. I’m restrained, bolted down. Ready for inspection or repair. The slow terror begins to claw at me, here, on a table, lost and injured and under observation. I black out as the hands draw themselves around me, investigating, hopefully healing behind the terror I’m falling back into.

Next I’m roused, water on my face, or liquid or something. My eyes open. I’m in a wide dark space, starved of light. Movement and activity, small noises but no communication. Fear and terror bites into me again. There are no restrains, I’m free from pain, I move, slowly. The light is coming on. Figures approach, vague and cloaked, human like and expressionless. An arm is stretched out, a hand beckons and I rise and follow. No pain, just some hangover and apprehension and I step out as a light from somewhere, all around dawns.

I look across, through a vast open door, there is the city, steaming still and hot. Distant and by the direction I’m shepherded in clearly not where I’m going. I’m set in some vehicle, faces and controls are hidden, no words. I stutter a few things, clear my throat but I feel that talk is not expected or necessary. The vehicle is fast and smooth and there I am back at my space craft. The hatch prised open and, as far as I can see repairs have been done. I’m directed in and with that forgotten snap, last heard on  Earth some time ago, the hatches closes behind me I’m suddenly alone. I stagger and cry. I look around, everywhere all at once. I’m alone.

In the control room, the cockpit the lights and gauges shine. The meters show green, greener than ever. Timed and primed. A big hand has repaired thing.  Another technology has stretched out over the ship, cloaked and clothed and energised the dead carcass. I sit and consider the instrumental message. I seem to have no choice. All is primed, fuelled and ready to go. The system’s calculations done and expressed and ready for me to read. I wonder where I am in time. I look across and see the auto system kicking in. My journey is not mine, it’s theirs. They aim me, prime me and fire me. Out into the black cosmos and watery grey spiralling gas. Suns and planets circle in my head. New explorations and happy trails into the blue. I go without knowing anything. Lost and manipulated like a human cannonball , they crank up my flight , my hidden trajectory  and I’m gone. They are watching. Perhaps they always were.

What a drag it is getting old

He's a lot older now but the car remains  a classic.

The onset of age induced dyslexia. The older I get the less capable I seem to be of a) actually writing clearly and b) whatever the medium being able to spell. Now a) is simply down to skill fade (I hope) and an over reliance on typing and/or doing nothing. All I know is that if I have to write much more than my scrawny and indistinct signature I double up with wrist pain and cramp. I look at the fine collection of pens and pencils on my desk and think, “when was the last time one of these wore down and was used up?” For b) there is a strange paradox running; as I write less but type more my spelling gets worse but my vocabulary increases. Now the spelling failure is obviously brought by my reliance upon spell checkers and predictive text etc. It's laziness really so I deserve all I'm getting. There is also the phenomenon of bad typing where I seem to knowingly mis-type a word not just mis-spell it. The word comes out, beautiful typed with all the correct letters but they are in the wrong order. What's that all about? These acute symptoms and effects may well become a huge stumbling block in the way of me finishing the great Scottish/American/SteamPunk/Time Travel novel that I believe exists hidden inside my woolly head. On reflection and taking my mental condition into account it may be that the best writing technique to employ should have a chaos basis to it. I just type and type for 200 pages or so and then let the spell checker run riot and accept all the changes, it would be art and it could be brilliant. What are the chances? On reflection maybe that's all I've been doing for years.

Options for Change

Staying Alive: So I was going through a phase of drinking full cream milk. For some reason, a random magazine article read in the barbers perhaps, I thought that it would increase my sperm count. Of course there was no need to do that, my little swimmers had long since retired to the beach and were lounging about waiting on some happy hour and watching the Mediterranean sun go down. I'm sure I expected the milk to do other things for me, build bones, repair brain cells, that sort of thing. The fringe benefit is that if you do eat healthy things (?) and do a little exercise then you do feel a bit better and less susceptible to the unplanned attacks of some passing grim reaper.

Exercise: It was about this time I discovered that my only semi-smart phone contained a pedometer. I was called the Walk Mate Eco and it required of me, without me setting it up or entering into any formal agreement, to walk 10 kilometres a day, whatever the weather. I took this as something of a challenge, man v phone as it were. If I did this then a direct benefit would be, according to the App that I'd save 1000g of CO2. Now that sounds impressive until you think about it, then it quickly becomes meaningless. So I decided not to think about it. Unless you get the bus 10k from home, get off and walk back it turns out that 10k is a lot of daily walking, unless you are a postman or a professional walker of some sort. I did try valiantly and I got close but other things, seats, couches and cars got in the way. I did find that by sitting down and in a non exercising way bouncing the phone on my lap I could fool it into thinking I was walking. That was cheap and cheating so I just lowered my expectations for myself a little and let it all be.

Food: Back to food then, oily fish in particular (usually in another kind of oil) and a few olives as well and leaves and olive bread and that super anti-cancer fruit/vegetable the tomato. It's hard to get a good tomato these days, most are like red golf balls if they are the normal size. The smaller ones are like gob stoppers and they are too small to cut up and too big to stuff in your mouth but you do. Then you get that unpleasant kangaroo testicle sensation when you bite into the tomato and it explodes like a burst abscess inside your mouth. It's worse if, as is the custom with modern food, it's been trapped in a refrigerator for week. The tomato then becomes an icy hand grenade going pop against your inner cheek. Not good but good for you. That probably sums it up unless it's an avocado which is good and rare enough to be a treat and good for you in a Mexican kind of cool but Latin way. Lets get more avocados.

Dairy: Then the dairy cabinet opens up it's bountiful world of sanitised promise. Yogurt, so full of mysterious, helpful cultures and formulas that you understand why previous generations just curled up and died, they had none of this for their working class digestions. Just brown ale, potatoes and herring with the bones in and facing the wrong way. Times were tough. Now we can eat yogurt of all types, though they all taste the same. Some promise you the arse of a Greek horse, others a huge couch cuddling experience with the Spencer Davis Group, others find a swift route round your struggling innards like some white python, cleansing and purging and pulverising any non-yogurts that get in the way, then there's the thin ones you just drink like a shot of bovine voodoo placed in your fridge by the Dharma Foundation. It's brilliant what they've now done with all that underpriced sour milk and jam and they've put it all like a sci-fi elixir into aerodynamic containers that are smaller on the inside than they look on the outside, like a busted Tardis, but it's fresh, clean and it fits into any lunch box or designer handbag easily.

Eyesight: I can see most things but when I cant I apply a conveniently located pair of pound shop bought reading glasses to the situation. These are set at somewhere between +.5 and +3 whatever that means. Putting them on is like giving yourself an instant hangover. Nothing in the room makes sense except for the cooking instructions that you're trying to read on the upturned back of the M&S ready meal. The cooking, well heating or warming really, instructions are seldom given pride of place in the packaging and a deliberately small font is mischievously used to baffle the consumer. The information is there but masked by the various lists of ingredients and chemicals – as if we're bothered or believe any of that bollocks. Once you've got the time from the packet and ceremonially pierced the film (always film to pierce) with a sharp knife you can set the oven. Of course after going through this you realise that it's yet another homogenised product, they all need twenty minutes at 180 Degrees, it's then ready to burn your tongue on, whatever it is.

TV volume: You can never get it right. I'm sure there's a master volume somewhere in the broadcaster's box of tricks and they just fuck about with it behind the scenes. They turn it up at the beginning of a programme to shock you into attention with the sonic booms of music and title sequences and then, slowly, trickily they turn it down. You are struggling to hear and then you turn your remote up so you don't miss any of that vital dialogue. Then just when your volume is on the up they turn theirs up so that as the commercial break comes you're at hit with a Tsunami like blast of some heavy metal band grinding into gear to sell you...yogurt or Vauxhalls. Bah! The sponsors love it I'm sure, nobody sleeps round here when Sky Atlantic's on.

Fruit: Plums are ok but overrated and they've no silent d in them, just a pip.

Different Question

He's answering a different question than the one you asked. The one you asked was about power costs and the system's overall efficiency. He's describing something quite different, the inherent and inevitable waste that's in the generation cycle. It's one of those apples and oranges things, communication failure. We're talking about different things, it's all unintentional and well meant but it's common, a typical, a regular thing. Questions and answers that fail to produce clarity and understanding and so away we go again, in the wrong direction. 

What we wanted was a moon rocket and we got a Mars probe with an instamatic camera. We needed a time machine but we just ended up with a device that allowed me to explore parallel universes while cleaning the toilet. Then there was the great alchemy failure, we tried to make gold and ended up with platinum – edible platinum. We built a tower, taller and grander and housing all the collected artworks, knowledge and wisdom of the world. We were locked out when we lost the key. We tried to synthesise artificial intelligence and then found God. Then God, perversely but predictably confounded us all by denying his own existence. Who could argue? Science, theology and convoluted conversation, chat and mindless goals, tyranny and mutation.

Chrissy Amphlett

I love myself,

I want you to love me.

There was a certain soft sexual fantasy in there. The word risque was made for this. I remembered her as softer and blonder for some reason but she clearly wasn't. Not quite so rasping and husky. She was older too, the grainy video never lies it just gets more recurring hits. This version has four million hits or so. I suppose that's good going and inch for inch, groan for groan a lot of on screen sexual fantasy. I didn't ever buy the single, I probably hummed along to it myself. It was all about self really and in truth it was a tacky piece of embarrassment. Just about acceptable on Radio 2 in the afternoon and probably talked over by some inane self important DJ. Self rules again.

The guitar was nicely out of tune, thin and squeaky, a Les Paul Jnr. and she was writhing about and pouting, touching wispy hair and moving in and out of shot. The editing was deliberately annoying, never settling on anything long enough for it make sense and it was all interiors and a soft focus muddle. It look cheap and probably everybody was surprised when it became at hit. You can imagine the high times and the celebration meals, the hope of building on this foundation, world domination beckons. When I heard that she was dead I played it on You Tube, I got about three quarters way through it before I clicked back onto the BBC. That was enough. The Huffington Post had some link to her Facebook page, there were a few tributes there. She was older, a bit puffy, defiant with two illnesses, the pop career long gone and filed out only by the vague memories of some floating generation of innocent voyeurs like me. There was a Judy Garland episode, that's entertainment for you.

I guess that that kind of fame, short and burning then settling into a more conventional arc, bit parts and the possible creeping income that goes with it is better than most achieve, it's a living and a video archive existence. Art in suspended animation, a kind of media art anyway and everything is a kind of art. Innocent, angry and at it's peak full of dangerous, latent energy then gone, replaced by some other, younger piece of titillation.

A while ago I went into work and a dumb receptionist was singing along to it and giggling without irony. The radio again. It was proof of how blatant rock and roll innuendo misses so many listeners, lost in the ozone layer. All they hear is a glossy beat and a lah lah lah lyric. You feel sorry for the Dylans, Cohens, Mitchells and Waits with their blunt pencils, typewriter fingers and their researches into fine literature. All that work and depth recognised by the few but missed by the masses, that's the problem with entitlement, education and the black hole of erotica. “I don't want anybody else, when I think about you...” it does say a whole lot. That's culture and value and meaning all grasping their respective nettles when all you need to say is what it is you really mean. Direct messaging I suppose. I thought about her back story, somewhere in New York, seeing the downhill path, becoming sick, some medical expenses. Cancer and Multiple Sclerosis and five minutes of fame and a promising career on the stage, a curious set of gifts. That's too cruel an ending at fifty three. I hope she's still dancing and pouting some place else.

I forget myself,

I need you to remind me.

So in all this

"So in all this I remain, forever and a day, essentially unknowable."

I realised that I'm of a certain age and that, as it stands it is my sworn and solemn duty to remain alone and unknown in this life. The truth is I've never really been all that interested in other people, their lives or their ideas. I'm happy enough for them to be there, for them to be let be and for them to let me be. They can busy themselves with factories and farms and fighting pointless wars but as for me – I'll try to stay out of it. The goal being the vigorous anonymity of passing through.

Thinking about it, it's all down to friction, tone of voice and smell. Other people just make me uncomfortable, they produce those things and really I've no need to be overpowered or lambasted by their ideas, odours and their unconscious need to rub themselves against me. My space is vital to me and I would, if pushed possibly kill in order to maintain that space and restore a safe and some kind of untouchable distance.

So I'll remain in orbit around myself, self destructive but also self sustaining. Taking in those dim exterior shots like a lazy camera and occasionally, by slim gesture or a faint word broadcasting back into the void, that'll do for me. As I pass the tree a leaf may fall or a twig may snag. That will be the sum total effect of my presence in the world. I'll lend nature a little help, a whispered piece of aid as I drift pass like some ether ghost, here and there and nowhere. I'll suck up some oxygen and soak water and wine and bread but in the end the smoke and vapour will all be self consumed. The footprints I leave will not be mine even though I made them. I've bequeathed them to the desolation of the nation, the space and vacuum in the modern consciousness that I almost but not quite might occupy.

There is no proper answer in patience or humour either, I've tried these things, they get you nowhere. Sucking in a received word or idea and sparing the enemy the return death blow, holding back and waiting. Some clever retort that will only be misunderstood. Patience is like so many other pointless things a virtue, as far as the self styled virtuous are concerned. I tried that and I didn't enjoy the space and the trace or anticipation...it just made me nervous and as for humour. We laugh for a time, we laugh like rocking horse headed idiots. Great stadiums rolling in a perverse agony at the bidding of some comedian peddling irony and common experiences, rolling in the aisles. Then once back on the street the memory is erased, blinking in the street lights, sober again, like a blank pub conversation that was all about something but you've no idea what. Maybe a bland happy memory is enough, some dumb good experience but one that has no staying power. I marvel at the evaporation of thought and memory. I marvel but I refuse to participate.

So I remain religiously alone, my own defender and saviour; finding comfort in a rare book, an article or a vulgar screed on a website that somehow rises above the back lit screen and, as if written or printed on a quality paper actually has some meaning and substance. One thing's for sure, I've no intention of going out and really looking for any of that stuff...it can find me and I wont break sweat. I'm sure that's the essence of some universal truth. If there is truth, if it exists at all then it will find you, there is no need to seek it out.

My head is a mess of thoughts and clouds

So here's the lens cap open

A thousand images distortion free

Trapped in a billion pixels

It's just the tear in the fabric of me.

He stood outside the imagined house and observed the scene. For him what made it all really interesting was the knowledge that at any moment everything, all he was, all he stood for and had built could just come crashing down. He imagined that crash, what it might look like if it happened. The first cracks, the slow motion collapse, the sounds of things breaking, the creaks and the splintering. All those elaborate constructions reaching a critical point of loading and that point being overtaken by consequence and action. Pings and wisps of dust fly out milliseconds before the bursting point is reach. Structural failure. Then it happens, a cacophony, an explosive chaos, like a orchestra being hit by a tidal wave, an earth quake in a clogged up city centre, a thousand punches in a thousand faces. Recoil and tremor, explosive criss crossing fragments and great slouching balustrades and buttresses falling in the sick syncopation of destruction. That would be his life, come the day, the hour and the comprehensive doom.

He thought about the opera “Carmen” by Bizet. The stupid Don Jose, run down and grounded by the tempestuous Carmen, an exotic gypsy girl who leads him away from his military career and family with disastrous consequences. She loves the toreador Escamillo, a sin too far for Don Jose who overcome by jealousy and passion stabs Carmen whilst in the background Escamillo receives the applause of the bull fighting crowds. The thought of normal and extravagant human behaviour, the extremes and the unreasonable. How they might be like puppets, more puppet than people sometimes. Willing participants in the fatal collapse, bringing it all on, sowing the seeds of destruction whilst building some solid illusion. Songs and dancing and lights and costume, the contrived drama of all relationship and humanity. You will pay dearly for your passions if you allow them their full vocal range. Never getting better or easier just getting...

Then he was back at his own situation, still turning himself inside out to be the strange sum total of some kind for his appetite of sexual perfection. Like an operatic performance, pomp and drama and song carrying archaic language in which to frame all that useless feeling, bloated and pretentious as if it was incapable of standing on it's own. He thought more, he considered himself and the worth and merit of gaining knowledge and holding opinion. How useful is any of and what difference does it really make? You can have knowledge and informed views but all the effort and turmoil of sustaining such a position is pointless if they are not shared or exercised. There in your own head striving only to be placed in an intellectual bubble, alone and aloof and impotent. It makes your position no better than that of a dumb ignoramus, contributing nothing. It was an unfortunate debate, a one way street of conjecture, a spiral. He realised this for the thousandth time he was stuck in a loop of an unresolved perpetual and perplexing issue. The ultimate worth and value of knowledge and the point of study.

His head was sore with it all and he moved to the lounge. There on the far wall there was a large drinks cabinet. He poured four fingers of malt whisky into a crystal glass and sat down into a battered arm chair and began to sup on the drink. Outside, through the glass he saw a robin in the garden. It hopped from branch to branch in the hedge. It cocked it's head back and forwards jumped a little higher and sat on the window briefly making eye contact with him. He took and deep draft of the warm liquor. It seemed at that same second as the warm alcohol hit the back of his throat the little bird winked and twisted it's beak into a cheeky little smirk. He heard a voice in the back of his head, “you'll be ok, trust me.”

How I got here

I do house clearances, I pick up all sorts of things, odd things. Some goes to auction, some goes to charity, the rest of it, the smaller stuff I stick on Gumtree or maybe EBay if I'm not so sure of the possible value. That was how I came across the guitar. It was in a old biddy's flat in Stirling, she'd been dead and gone for a while. To be honest there wasn't really much of any great value in the place. Some china, some prints but the guitar was there, left behind I guess and putting two and two together I thought it unlikely it had belonged to her. It was my simple assessment anyway. The guitar was a three quarter sized acoustic, six string and sunburst. Now I didn't really know much about guitars but I knew that by the age of the wood and the weight that it was a decent piece. There was no name of the headstock and only a very faded label in the body hidden down beyond the sound hole. The print on looked indistinct and had faded so it wasn't much help. It was a bit dusty and worn looking but I considered it to be interesting. I had a friend who knew about these things though so I put the guitar into the back of the van, wrapped up in a blanket just in case.

That was a few weeks ago and the guitar had just been lying in the office, I hadn't really got around to doing anything with. It was collecting more dust. So this girl comes in, she's got a bill to pay for a removal job we did the other day. A proper job with an invoice and so she hands me £250 cash for the day's work and I scribble on the receipt. “I need this for the insurance,” she says. Then she looks around and spots the guitar. “That for sale?” As I'm not sure the value I hesitate and look at the guitar and then back at the girl before responding. “Well I picked it up a few days ago, I've not had the chance to value it properly, it looks old enough to be worth a few pounds. Did you have a figure in mind?” “Well not real money but I'd give you this lottery ticket.” My jaws clearly drops as she produces a worn looking lottery ticket. She sees that I'm puzzled and says, “it's winner and I'll trade it for the guitar.” “Let's see the ticket.” There's nothing special about it, it's about a month old. “Ok but before it's a deal let me check those numbers.” At this point I expect her to drop the charade and offer me fifty quid for the guitar but she just looks straight at me and says, “Yeah, you go check those numbers, when you do you'll hand me the guitar.”

I nipped into the back office and flipped up the lottery results page on my phone. April. There were the winning numbers; 16 23 26 28 42 49. I looked at the ticket, the numbers matched. It looked like a genuine ticket and not a forgery. I was trembling, this was crazy. I stopped and thought for a minute. This made no sense, it was too good to be true and I knew too well what that meant. There has to be a scam in this and why bother for an old guitar even if it's worth a bit more than I might have thought? Then I thought about the ticket and saying nothing and just handing over the guitar. I also thought I needed a witness to at least corroborate whatever the facts were from now on in but there was no one else around. I counted to ten and looked at the ticket. Through the office glass I could see the girl, she was staring at the guitar and chewing gum.

I took a deep breath, “Hi, ok I'll take the ticket, you can have the guitar, that'll be fine if that's what you want.” She seemed to be looking right through me. “Thanks, you'll not regret this.” She walked over and picked up the instrument, casual pinged a few untuned strings and a dull chord rang out. She giggled at that and without turning around walked away and dropped the guitar into the back of her car. I watched her as she drove off, my thumb and index finger squeezing the lottery ticket between them as I held it in my pocket. I waited a long time, I counted the traffic lights and junction times before I moved. I wanted to count her out and away. The time seemed stuck in single figure minutes but I moved eventually. I went to the office door and locked it. I took the ticket out of my pocket and put it on the desk. I fired up the laptop and checked another lottery results website. I looked at each number on the ticket, I held it up to the light. Everything was checking out, everything was the way it should be except for the fact that I'd just swapped a jackpot winning lottery ticket for an old, battered guitar. That didn't check out but sometimes life's like that and you just have to go with the flow.

All that was eighteen months ago. I'm now settled down on the Cote d'Azur. I cashed in the ticket and bought a tidy villa up in the hills above Nice. I'm here with my girlfriend. We've a nice pool and some statues in the garden. I treated the family and my pals, bought a couple of nice cars and now I'm holed up here, happy and there's enough sitting in a Monaco bank to pay the bills well into the future. But I still think about that day when she came into the office, I wonder if it was all real. I wonder was there ever a girl or a guitar? I tried to trace her from the invoice address, no luck. I looked around for the guitar in salerooms and on EBay but got nothing. Looking back on that day in the office it was all over in a tiny sliver of a moment. Was it just my ticket, lost in my pocket all the time and my subconscious played a recovery trick? Did I have a breakdown? Am I in a parallel universe? Was she an angel? There certainly was a ticket. I framed the photocopy. I'll never forget that sequence of numbers either. Sometimes life, even when it adds up doesn't add up.

The last battle

You know you've driven too long, too far when you vision blurs, the roadside markers wobble and that dammed white line seems to be a revolving ball that you're running around to chase the horizon. I had to stop and when the Bar and Grill sign flickered up at me in the twilight I made the choice. The hot tyres crackled on the gravel in the failing light as I parked up and stopped dead. The sensation of just sitting and not moving was a deep physical pleasure. My hands slumped down from the wheel and my head tipped into the top of the it and I allowed myself just to feel woozy. I could've slept there, there and then. I was short on strength and normal sensation but I was also thirsty and hungry. The five minutes of zoning out in the parking lot was good but I knew I had to get out, stretch, breath some other air and eat. Then, once those common drugs had started to work on me I'd get back on the road.

The diner was run down and friendless. There would be no food hygiene prizes or fine cuisine here. It was chow and beer and that hard wooded utilitarian nothingness you get when you're off the beaten track. This was there. There was a warmth about it, some evidence of TLC in the paintwork and the pot plants but any investment or enthusiasm had been sucked right out of the business a long time ago. The sign said “OPEN” but there were no other cars parked up. At the side there was a red VW and a while panel, too far back to be customers I thought. I'd be No1, maybe first of the day or even the week. I swung open the door, no creak, no squeak, it was an unexpected welcome of sorts. Then came a female voice, rising like syrup from beyond the counter and filling the space where empty tables and chair and sauce bottle decorations were lined up in anticipation.

“You want a sweet hot coffee or an ice cold beer before I tell you everything that's on the menu?”

“I'll take that cold beer, any kind you got and I'll take steak and eggs and fries, any kind you got!”

“Well we've only got one kind of any of that so you're a very lucky man, just one that's not spoiled for choice.”

“Choice is the great curse of the modern world, give a man too much to choose from and he won't know what he wants, he'll also know what it is he can't have. All that tends to lead to bad situations and fisticuffs. I'm happy with you're four things.”

“Oh, we do have others but I'm not going to bother you with them, find a seat you like and I'll be out there with you in a moment.”

“I will do that, don't you rush and hurt yourself!”

I sat down at a table facing the window and the road, my back to the kitchen. As I leaned back in the chair I thought about my drive and my flight, my earnest flight to get away, get away from biggest cyber attack in history (so they said) and the business, my business that it had been unceremoniously destroyed before my eyes. I was fleeing the scene of somebody else's crime but in there I had a share of that crime. I was a third party and my trader site was wiped, wiped as I'd just handled my biggest transaction ever. It had all gone my way, the money was there in my account, over, down and out, I had the money and I also had the merchandise. Then when the hammer fell, when the Koreans or whoever it was attacked I had a double blessing; cash and goods. It took me about five minutes to think it through, to cement the final number, hide then away and then run as all the other numbers tumbled. Who would ever follow my tracks or trail. All the blank screens and flickering lights, all the news and propaganda, all a cover for guys like me to up and run and wait it out and cash in. Some I'm hiding in this cafe in the wilderness at the end of the universe, beyond signals and fibre optics ordering a medium steak. I'm running and I'm hiding and I'm rich...somewhere.

She appeared from the kitchen gloom with my brown bottle and a shiny glass. She put down the paper napkin, screwed the glass onto it and poured the beer. “It'll do you more good to look at that than it will to drink it but I know you're gonna drink it.” “I surely am.”

Her name badge said “Rosa” in a scripted font, she was about thirty five, still pretty, still slim, still in the wrong place I guessed. She smiled a dark smile as the bottle emptied. “You're food's gonna take a little time, fire up the burners you know.” “Business bad?” “Hell no! Business is business, we do what we can, we feed the hungry and water the thirsty, there's always that kind here, all the runners come here. Who you runnin' from?”

I smiled and deliberately supped on the beer, I wanted to gulp by she was holding me in a tractor gaze. She'd either read me like a book or she was a keen fisher of men. I tried in some way to look like I wasn't running and tried to purge my thoughts just in case they were running across my eyeballs like a telecaster and she was reading every word. “No time for me to run, I'm just exploring my business opportunities, here, there and everywhere. This place is in the right place but I'm sure you know that.” “Everything is in the right place.” She looked at me hard and then looked away. “I'll fix your meal.”

Now that the motoring part of my world had stopped moving I was suddenly swept by tired thoughts that grew and distorted. Her I was, on the run, looking for cover and somehow sitting on a fortune. One part in the Cayman Islands, whirring in a green lit bank server far from the Korean's grasp and a warehouse full of high quality prescription drugs. Locked, bolted and anonymous on some tired industrial estate in some tired Mid-Western town. I had seen neither thing, neither asset but somehow, thanks to a criminal glitch they were both mine and all I had to do was lay low until the dust settled, the machines healed themselves and the markets returned to whatever normal is. That was a lot of hungry thinking but it felt like I'd sorted it. It was the hundredth time maybe that I'd been through this, tried to imagine the numbers, the sheds and the eventual outcome. I had to stop, get control and just quietly much through the steak that should arrive at any moment.

Rosa brought me the steak. It looked good, it was big, that's always important when you're hungry. “Whatever you're trying to get away from...you won't.” Rosa's pretty face delivered the line completely straight and without expression. I looked down from looking up at her and then back. “Rosa, you and I do not need to have this kind of conversation. I'm hungry and you've brought me a steak, I'm happy, please don't complicate things with some lines of crazy talk.” She stooped down and whispered, “they are in a the back of the shop, they're watching, they're in the shop.” I shuddered but somehow kept it together. “Who are they?” “The guys you're running from, they're here.” She quickly turned and headed back to the dim beyond.

The steak in my mouth was not so tasty. I was trembling and sweaty. I couldn't quite cut the meat, I couldn't quite hold the fork. I gulped some beer this time and stood up from the table. All hell broke loose. Four back Ninja type guys leapt out from behind the counter, hit me, downed me and pinned me to the floor. “We follow you Jack with our many satellite and phones, we see your deals and read your minds. Today we declare a war on all the dealers and the brokers. We take back your cash and your hot stuff. Write your access codes on this paper!” He grabbed my right hand and tugged it over to the paper. “And speak into my device!” He held up a Samsung phone to my face. “You don't and we chop you up, good!” I did as I was told.

When I woke they were gone, my car was gone and my codes and my short lived fortune was gone. Rosa was standing over me. She didn't look to friendly to me. “You're the third one today,” she said. “The other two are out back. For fifty bucks my brother will get you all into town and drop you at the bus station, he's out there in his truck.”

Every little universe

“Help ma Boab!” “If it's not one thing then it's something else, that's what life is all about, one crazy thing after another in no logical or reasoned order and without thought or due consideration for anything that gets in the way. How then does anything ever actually get done? When the left and the right cannot recognise each other or work in any kind of harmony or agree any kind of common ground then what is the point. Every little universe is thrown into a complete state of constant chaos that is both unending and insufferable and then regularly revisited and stirred as we bring our plans, schemes and children into it so tipping it further into an arc of imminent destruction.”

If that is how you view life, your own life in particular and how you fit into the bigger picture then I truly feel very sorry for you. You, my friend are missing out on so much, so much creativity and positivity because life can be different. Life can be as upbeat as a Cliff Richard film or a Spice Girls

song or a heartwarming Broadway musical number, (though it doesn’t have to be totally gay). It does not have to be the bleak way it is portrayed from the minds and pens of our dark lords, you can be uplifted and fulfilled, that is your natural state and cosmic inheritance for all – believe it.

Common Problems

“So now I'm kind of wondering where all this will go next. It's like I've been through some big event, like a festival, a big show or a huge banquet; I'm stuffed and tired, a little over stimulated and I'm thinking I am satisfied. Satisfied is an odd kind of word, I know what it should mean but I feel I'm just stretching it a little to cover the application here. I suppose I'm satisfied but I know fine well that there is always going to be something else, pushing it's way in just to steal that feeling. Unexpected, maybe a bit unwelcome, jostling with other things and struggling for impact and success and starting the whole thing of again. Perhaps I'm played out, perhaps it's steak and eggs and heavy duty protein drinks and build up time. Glasses of milky stout and beetroot and wholesome stuffing and ruthless exercising, is that what you do? Still part of me wants to lie back and just float, float in a sunny careless haze, down streams of low expectations, anonymity, invisibility, following tiny shadows in the sun. Here today and drifted another hundred yards tomorrow. Catch me if you can? You certainly will because I'll be going nowhere and there you go, you've caught me.”

Sheila slapped my face. I almost fell from the porch bench, I was aware of the warm timber and flies and bees and insect noises, I stopped the procrastination. “I'm fed up with your self searching bullshit, get a job, get some money, sort yourself out. You last job's done, ok, maybe it was satisfying but that's all history. Go and start something new.”

The playful slap hurt, the words were all I expected, in this business the jobs come, the jobs go and whatever money there is just disappears in some spiral event that usual centres around the things that Sheila wants to do. I reached down and clicked open a beer and smiled at her. She was staring away into the distance, avoiding my eyes and doing her passive aggressive thing, trying to turn me back around.

“You know Sheila, you're damn well right, I'm going to finish this cold beer and head right out and see what the opportunities are downtown.” She laughed and slapped me again, a little beer spilled and we play wrestled on the bench. We were both giggling and tickling and then we stopped and just lay still and held each other close saying nothing. Over in the field I heard a big diesel engine running, in the trees crows were angry at something and the insects stayed busy avoiding being eaten. Sheila was hot and sticky in her work jeans and cheesecloth. Her breathing was low and pretty and I liked that. I settled to stay still and she did too, on the warm bench. So I just stared up into the afternoon sun and dreamt away a little more. I still wasn't feeling satisfied, I wasn't feeling anything I could describe. Maybe that's the trouble with my trouble, my chronic common trouble, I just don't have the right words to describe it but still I know it's really there.