'Penguin Island' by Anatole France

A partially sighted priest baptizes a bunch of penguins, because he thinks they are short pagans who need to be saved through Jesus Christ. This causes a commotion in Heaven, resulting in God transforming the penguins into humanoids and giving them souls. End of part 1 of 8. The rest of the book describes the history of the Penguin People's civilization, which is a satire of real human history.

When I first heard about this book - I'm not sure when or where - I thought it sounded so mad that I had to get round to reading it eventually. Re-read that premise above. It's brilliant.

I was disappointed: I did not enjoy the majority of the book.

I liked the opening. I do enjoy it when authors play around with mythology. God gets some great lines, include this circumlocution when reconciling human free will and divine determinism:

"My foreknowledge must not encroach upon their free will. In order not to impair human liberty, I will be ignorant of what I know, I will thicken upon my eyes the veils I have pierced, and in my blind clearsightedness I will let myself be surprised by what I have foreseen."

I enjoyed the ending: a commercialized Penguin dystopia being attacked by disillusioned terrorists. I do enjoy dystopian SF.

'The great Penguin people had no longer either traditions, intellectual culture, or arts. The progress of civilization manifested itself among them by murderous industry, infamous speculation, and hideous luxury. Its capital assumed, as did all the great cities of the time, a cosmopolitan and financial character. An immense and regular ugliness reigned within it. The country enjoyed perfect tranquility. It had reached its zenith.

The houses were never high enough to satisfy them; they kept on making them still higher and built them of thirty or forty storeys: with offices, shops, banks, societies one above another; they dug cellars and tunnels ever deeper downwards.'

I would recommend reading parts 1 and 8, 'The Beginnings' and 'Future Times', but I can't bring myself to recommend the rest of the novel. It had its moments, but there are far better things to read. Maybe if I was more aware of French history I would have enjoyed it more. I found it a hard chore to slog through, waiting for the good bits to crop up and then vanish pages behind me.

Brexit Thoughts

Attempting to organise my thoughts on Brexit.

When I checked the news on Friday morning I was angry, upset, disappointed, and embarrassed.

Angry, because the country had sided with the xenophobic isolationists. Even if the majority of Leave voters didn't vote on the basis of reducing immigration, it has given the racists the impression that the public is on their side, that their views are legitimate. There are reports that racism and hate crime have already increased in the wake of the vote. I hope this does not continue.

Upset, because it felt like a range of possible better futures had disintegrated. As the Brexit fallout stories started breaking, as the pound dropped and trillions were wiped from the world economy, it felt like Remain's Project Fear was becoming Project I-Told-You-So. There has been a lot on social media about the average ages of Leave (older) and Remain (younger) voters. Voter turnout among older people is estimated considerably higher than among the young: successive governments have alienated young people, because they have not been a major decisive factor in elections (Blair introduced tuition fees; Cameron scrapped EMA, tripled tuition fees, and excluded under-25s from the Living Wage): we need more young people to be politically engaged.

(I caught some of the 'Victoria Derbyshire' program this morning: it featured an interview with an elderly chap who explained that he and his wife have been having very strong arguments with their son, who accused them of voting in favour of him losing his job: his company is already looking at relocating.)

Disappointed, because the blatant lies of Vote Leave had won the day. The dishonesty of both campaigns gave me the impression that our elected officials treat politics as a game over who is better at lying to the public. Major Leave figures have already backtracked on many of the campaigns promises, with Farage saying 'lol ofc we're not gonna spend the money on the NHS', and Hannon saying 'y u think immigration wil go down? rofl wut gave u that idea?' (I have paraphrased). And then there's Johnson: read his execrable piece in the Telegraph, titled 'I cannot stress too much that Britain is part of Europe – and always will be'. It is worrying that none of them seem bothered by the sheer scale of their campaign's dishonesty, even after admitting it so quickly.

Embarrassed, because it was easy to see the rest of the world (excluding Donald Trump) looking at the UK and wondering 'what the fuck you doing, dickheads?'

Hopefully David Cameron will go down in history as one of Britain's worst Prime Ministers, having broken nearly all of his election pledges, the big one that he decides to keep leads to his resignation (at least he was honest about not staying for a third term). He was a weak Prime Minister, who only scraped a majority in 2015 by pandering to UKIP (Farage told his supporters to vote Conservative) and formenting division (Fear the SNP! Scotland will destroy us!), by telling porkies and (allegedly) committing electoral fraud, and he had the majority of the media on his side.

(Did you notice how Cameron and Osborne both seemed to have become aware that nobody trusted them anymore, so one of their favourite arguments was to list some of the people and institutes who happened to agree with them this time?)

Despite all this he believed he could comfortably win the referendum without a media majority, after giving the Leave group a free pass to promise whatever they liked (no official exit strategy was put forward) and present themselves as outsiders fighting the establishment. Fighting a 'Status Quo' vs 'Mystery Change' campaign wasn't a wise strategic move when you've just spent six years impoverishing people and not giving a shit about it.

(Imagine Cameron on Friday morning, looking back to the good old days when the worst he had to deal with was being accused of facefucking a dead pig.)

Now that Cameron is gone, we get to look forward to a new Conservative leader. It might be a contest between Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and I don't know which of those prospects is more terrifying. The posh British Trump or 'Iron Lady 2: Revenge of the Rich'? If May wins, we might get to live under a full-on dictatorship. Interesting times either way.

It didn't take long for a Corbyn shitstorm to ensue: mass resignations and a vote of no confidence. I liked Corbyn: he was refreshingly gentle and genuine, but my opinion of him is dropping. His EU campaigning was disappointing and lacklustre, and late. I don't think fighting 'Vote Leave, Take Control' with 'Don't Vote Leave, It Will Give Our Nasty Elected Government More Power' was a well thought out move. He could have done a lot more, but now is the wrong time for a coup, for the Labour party to be imploding. They could have stayed together, pointed to the warring panicking Tories, and said as one: "Look at what those bellends have done."

It looks like we will be going for the Norway option, which means we will still be paying into the EU budget, still have to abide by EU regulations, and still have free movement of people, but with no input on any EU decisions. Hopefully all the Leave people won't be too disappointed, especially if they voted on the basis of immigration, EU regulations, or payments to the EU...

'The Man Who Fell To Earth' by Walter Tevis

I started this book while waiting for a bus, read while on the bus, then continued reading when walking through town, eyes focused on the pages as though the text guided me to my destination. I can't remember the last time I read a fiction book while walking around.

Having a lot of work the last few days, I've only just got round to finishing the last few chapters. I've never seen the film adaptation, and didn't know anything about the story beyond the titular man falls to earth, and was pleasantly surprised by this elegant little SF classic (first published 1963). I was gripped by the story of Thomas Jerome Newton going native on Earth: Thomas and I panicked together during a particularly distressing scene, and I shared in his melancholy.

I don't know where I'm was going to go with this. There's a nice new edition out if you want to read it yourself, and don't want a old movie tie-in edition from the days before they could print photographs on book covers.

What is this?

Look at this terrible book cover. I hate terrible book covers.

I read this book recently, a collection of Roger Zelazny's short stories, and hated the cover every time I picked it up. It makes it look like throwaway sci-fi trash. A volcanic eruption; a flying saucer; a human male protagonist with a rifle; a female alien sidekick with an alien gun. Ugh.

And you know what makes this book cover even worse? It doesn't illustrate any of the stories! None of them feature a volcanic eruption, or a flying saucer, or a human male protagonist with a rifle, or a female alien sidekick with an alien gun. Or a single gun: there are no guns in any of the stories! Why was this cover chosen? I don't understand!

There's an SF retelling of Moby-Dick; a bleak story about terraforming; an SF Western with rogue AI cars as bandits; 'A Rose for Ecclesiastes', about a poet translating the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes into Martian; a talking stone; an almost mystical ascent up a forty-mile tall mountain; etc. I liked almost all of them, and they are far more interesting than the cover, or my list here, would have you believe.

I don't understand why this cover was chosen! It's worse than the 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' covers with Tyrannosaurs on, or the 'Around the World in Eighty Days' covers with hot-air balloons on. At least they illustrate the movie adaptations. Grumble. Grumble.

[This is my fourth Zelazny book, after 'Lord of Light' (about the Hindu pantheon being recreated on a distant colony planet), which I liked; 'Creatures of Light and Darkness' (a far future story which is simultaneously a re-imagining of both Judeo-Christian and Egyptian mythologies - hard to explain in a sentence), which I liked; and 'Nine Princes in Amber' (the first in his long fantasy series), which I didn't like. I bought this one, despite the terrible cover, because it was recommended by reviewers who liked 'Lord of...' and 'Creatures of...', but didn't like 'Nine Princes...']

Reflections on Dementia Care

I now have a Level 2 Certificate in Dementia Care to add to my collection of qualifications. Achievement Unlocked.

Since August last year I have worked as a carer for the elderly in the countryside town of Easingwold. This job seemed to follow naturally on from my full-time volunteering in York and my childcare volunteering in Cambodia, forming a 'Care Trilogy' of life experiences.

Some reflections from the last eight months:

Carers are not paid enough for what the job entails. We are paid for every 15 minutes work, and if we break down the hourly rate to each call time, it starts to seem a bit silly, as though our employer is saying: "I'll give you £1.90 if you go to Mrs Alpha and make sure she takes the right tablets; then go to Mr Beta to help him shower, shave, dress, get his breakfast ready and give him his tablets, and I'll give you £3.78; then go to Mrs Gamma with Colleague A, and together hoist her onto the toilet, then help her shower and dress, etc, and I'll give you another fiver." Etc. I expect the issue of low-pay-considering-what-is-involved extends throughout the healthcare sector.

I am young. I now know many people who have been retired for longer than I have been alive. I look back at the time I have been alive: 24 years in total, only 6 years of being an adult. I look ahead at an estimated natural lifespan, and realize that I have at least twice my total lifetime to date still to live. I have 8 times my time as an adult still to go. I am young.

Many of our clients suffer from extreme boredom and loneliness. They struggle to find things to do; their friends and family have moved away or died; they're frail or disabled. Watching TV is often the default activity. One client sits in their flat all day, TV off, radio off, just sitting there, occasionally sipping their drink or napping, waiting for the next carer to visit. It is a shame that they are not open to technology; I expect that when we are older we will have ample apps, games and internet things to keep us more occupied and entertained during our senescence. I have lent my Kindle to one client who - their right arm is their only functioning limb - had been unable to read paper books. I've been trying to convince them to buy their own, but that is proving quite a challenge: they are extremely fiscally austere.

I don't know whether it's a generational thing or a countryside thing, or a bit of both, but most of our clients have had very few jobs in their lives. I haven't had many jobs, but I've already had more than a lot of our clients, who got a job straight after school and stayed in it until retirement. This doesn't seem either possible or desirable nowadays.

I have become increasingly sympathetic towards euthanasia over the past 8 months, encountering people who say they want to die but cannot.

Living in the countryside has shown me that I am very much not a countryside person. After the initial novelty wore off, it became very apparent that living in the countryside is extremely dull. An island in a sea of farms, Easingwold is a countryside town with a population of about 5000 people, most of whom are either retired or have lived here all their lives. Your personal universe shrinks in the countryside: everything beyond the farmy horizon may as well not exist, so little it seems to matter to your life. I am reminded of Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy, which gets its name from a species of plant in the Amazon, inside which small frogs can live out their entire lives. This is used as a metaphor throughout the books. It is easy to imagine Easingwold as a bromeliad, whose inhabitants - in the absence of modern communication technology - would spend their entire lives here, barely cognizant of the rest of the world, or the rest of the UK, or the rest of England.

The sheer dullness of the place seems to be accepted as a fact of life by those who have lived their entire lives here. (Thoreau's line, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', rings in my ears.) In Dante's Inferno, the first circle of Hell, Limbo, contains the souls of righteous non-Christians who are unable to go to Heaven because they happened to live too early in human history: they lived in the centuries before Jesus sacrificed himself to wash away humanity's innate sinfulness, so were unable to accept him as their saviour. The souls of Limbo are not actively punished or rewarded, they wait around, bored, with no connection to God: it is a Godforsaken place. Distancing myself slightly from religious language, I would say that Easingwold is:

(a) fun-forsaken, in that there is fuck all to do. Easingwold has a disproportionate number of alcoholics and drug-addicts, because there's fuck all to do. The smell of weed in the air seems out of place, almost anachronistic, in a quaint countryside setting, but it frequently forms around the loitering youth, because there's fuck all to do.

(b) spirit-forsaken, in that it is hard here to cultivate a sense of the numinous, the transcendent, etc. It is hard to get a feeling of the interconnectedness of all things when you feel like your personal universe is being forcibly shrunk by the Island in the Sea of Farms. (The pelagic metaphor is enhanced by the bus journey from Easingwold to York: a ricketty old bus on bumpy country roads feels like an, admittedly short in nautical terms, oceanic voyage.) The sky does not feel like a window looking on to an incomprehensibly vast and complicated cosmos; it feels like a dome trapping you in, the sky-firmament of ancient cosmologies.

(I am perhaps being a tad harsh: there are benefits to rural isolation. The myriad political, economic and humanitarian crises and atrocities around the globe might as well be on another planet, so far away they feel. I suppose this might contribute to why the fear of immigrants is rather strong in rural areas: aliens coming over here, interrupting our isolation, making us realize that the Earth has more in it than we thought.)

I do not like this isolation. I am a city person. I intend to move to a city by the end of the year. I also feel like I am done with care work now, and so intend to go into something completely different next, whatever that may be.