Otherworlds

Alma Deutscher is now fourteen years old. She’s already been somewhat of a sensation for her musical talents and they show no signs of abating. In this new piece she takes inspiration from the discordant sounds of city life, including traffic noises, sirens and general cacophony and creates a series of waltzes. In the opening segment she takes a cheeky poke at the critics who have accused her previous work (as a twelve year old…) of lacking the currently fashionable dissonance and being too melodic. It’s an amazing piece, and the way she has written the orchestral piece to mimic, initially, the sounds of city life is incredible Finn’s first novel A Step Beyond Context is available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and a few others as well. It’s a punchy genre-busting mystery with a heroine who is a Regency lady, a high tech mercenary and much more.

The tree on the hillside grows straight and so true And it is a fine place as so many folk knew And many a yeoman who yearned to be free Came and danced in the shade of the old dancing tree Oh the borders are hard and a fierce place to live And the people there take and there’s nothing to give But if you will take back what’s yours then you’ll see The sun rise and shine on the old dancing tree The hungry and homeless, well what is their life But struggle, starvation and hardship and strife But don’t raise your voice, or you’ll hear the decree That will send you one day to the old dancing tree The tax men will take every coin that you make And spare you no crumb, not for dear mercy’s sake If they see you hold back just a penny or three They will make you a date at the old dancing tree With thieves and with killers, with outlaws and all There’s many an honest man answered the call To give up his labour and there will he be To dance his last jig at the old dancing tre

We all know about lightning.   That sudden searing flash of light and heat, an instant release of energy that thrills the onlooker in its immediate and glorious destructive display, so quickly over with it needs an accompaniment of drum-roll thunder to keep the audience alert for its reappearance.  It’s magnificent at a distance, terrifying when closer.     The mechanism of lightning is the sudden equalisation of differently charged points.  Once the difference is sufficient enough to be unbearable for nature to maintain, the lightning appears drawing an incandescent equals sign vertically in the air. The storm we lived through was lightning of a kind, but the differential was not electrical, it was a differential in states of reality itself.   We didn’t know it at the time but a critical charge was building up in the ideosphere, a conceptual space far more remote and yet far more intimate than the atmospheric zones where simple climate forms.     The charge had begun building in th

This is probably going to be a pretty unfocussed post.  I apologise in advance for that, but it’s a subject that annoys me so much that I get distracted by shield-biting rage every time I try to think my way through it.   I’ll just jump in and swim to the far shore. I am fed up with the blatant lies being told by the people in power.   They always have, I’m sure, but recently with the rise of social media the lies are becoming more targeted, more outrageous and less nuanced.   It is as if the powers that be (and the powers that want to be) can’t even be bothered to hide their nonsense anymore, displaying an utter contempt for the people they are manipulating.   In this world of tribal politics the various factions know that their adherents will parrot the lies told by the witch-doctor regardless of their validity. Here in the UK we have the parties smearing each other in the run up to a General Election, blatantly spinning the facts about the policies that their rivals hold, and appa