Epistle to the Sotonians, May 16th 1999
(Last update March 1st 2004)
I've often been confused by epistles, quite unable to distinguish them from Apostles. While not exactly life-threatening, it's inconvenient at times. Did St Paul send Epistles to the Corinthians, or was it Apostles to the Carpathians? I suspect that, under the circumstances, the last thing he would have done would be to send people vampire hunting in Transylvania, but I can't be sure. I need a mnemonic. Just like the ones you get taught at school, to remember that the sinus equals the apposite over the hippopotamus. I've forgotten how that particular mnemonic goes of course, but two others are memorable. To recall which way up or down are stalactites and stalagmites, just remember that tights come down. I tried remembering that mites go up, but it didn't seem to work too well.
The really impressive one is for recalling the first 20 elements in the Periodic Table. H HeLi BeBCNOF NeNa MgAlSiPS ClArKCa - pronounced H Helly Bebcanoff Nina Magalsips Clarker. What could be simpler, and can anyone think of one for Apostles and Epistles?
We are, without doubt, as a race, in the grip of some kind of millennial blues, a dreadful ennui, an extended Sunday-afternoon-4pm feeling with a thousand-year cycle of highs and lows. Just maybe there's a way out of it. Firstly, ditch all this Millennium crap. It's not big and it's not clever. Secondly, get rid of the "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. "We're a virus with shoes", as Bill Hicks crisply observed. (See footnote.) Embrace your pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, just get over it. Proceed on that basis and all will be fine. Thirdly, we need a whole load of things that haven't been invented yet.
I don't speak of the goods available in those catalogues that slither temptingly out of the Sunday newspapers; full of adverts for musical socks, vibrating ballpens (yes, it's true!) and the latest advance in excess nasal hair removal. I'm talking true cutting-edge stuff here. Not only has it not been invented yet, we haven't yet evolved to the point where we'll need it. That's progress.
Gone are the days when scientists (or "Boffins" as they are known now) invented things without caring whether they might eventually have a use or a purpose. The reverse is true now. We have a need (often, to blast the shit out of some little tribe of people who've offended us in some way) - invent something to achieve the desired result. Usually when it's far too late. This really is a problem, and it's held back the development of Mankind immeasurably.
Evidently, the public won't get what they want a. until they know what they want, and b. they learn to speak up for themselves. "Enough of this atom splitting and genetic modification", shall be their battle cry, "we need magnetic lemons and photobiodegradable politicians". Gradually, scientists will get back to saying "Wouldn't it be fun to invent something just for the hell of it today, let's get cracking", and the world will be on its way to being a better place.
Power stations are ugly things, of that there is no doubt. I've worked in quite a few of them; trust me on this one. They dominate the skyline, giving off smoke and steam, use up fossil fuels, contribute to global warming, and in extreme cases leave piles of radioactivity just lying around. They are ugly with a capital U, no mistake. But just try explaining that to someone who needs to boil some water for a Pot Noodle, and see where it gets you.
Alternative energy is generally pretty ugly too, one way or another. Solar power is great when the sun shines - in England that's one weekend at the end of May, and four days distributed randomly through August. Wind farms are visible for miles, allegedly noisy, and have the unenviable reputation of dicing the occasional bird. It could of course be that disaffected juvenile delinquent swans, bored of swanning around, have taken up playing Russian Roulette around wind farms, but my feeling is that only human teenagers are that stupid. Another argument against wind power is that, in order to equal the output of one modest nuclear station, one would have to cover an area the size of Oxfordshire entirely with windmills. Oxfordshire is always the county quoted, strangely, which further augments my conviction that a class war of some kind is ongoing, whatever Tony Blair might say. Substitute Essex, Islington, or maybe Greater Manchester and I'd have no probem at all with the idea. Seems like a fair swap to me. Sometimes you have to lose a finger to save an arm.
Anyway, our efforts with hydroelectric power are naturally limited by our lack of mountains, and wave power on any decent scale would look so horrible not even a power company could get away with it. (The Millennium Dome company probably could, but I don't think they're in a position to do anything). Alternative energy may well be greener, but there's no getting away from this ugliness thing. Unless.........
I've spent a fair bit of time crawling around in the innards of many of our larger and uglier power stations. The problem, you see, is that power stations use huge amounts of water for cooling. In procuring the astronomical quantities of water, quite a lot of fish get sucked in (we call it "impinged", rather than "fucked" in our trade - sounds nicer), along with various unwholesome bits of plastic, and consistently massive amounts of seaweed.
Seaweed. It's funny old stuff, really. Fish hide in it. Crabs scuttle around under it. It gets tangled up round your legs when you go swimming. So I've been told, anyway.
My father used it as fertiliser in his garden. Japanese people eat it raw, while Irish people boil it mercilessly for hours, until it's black, and then they call it laver. But what is it actually for? What part does it play in God's great soap opera? Trillions of tons of it wallow around the world's coastlines, yet the most useful purpose it serves is for fish to hide in. What a pitiful waste.
"I have seen the future, and it works". So said someone whose name eludes me, returning to the West from a visit to the USSR (remember that?) many years ago. "I have a dream", said Martin Luther King. "You ain't seen nothin' yet", said Bachman-Turner Overdrive in 1974, and latterly President Ronald Reagan. Amateurs, all of them. The future, my friends, is in seaweed-fired power stations.
Where all conventional energy sources (including "alternative") go wrong is firstly that they're on land, and secondly, they're static. Bit of a give-away, great big edifice, solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, immovable, sprouting chimneys all over the place. Not much chance of that blending into the background, unless the background is very unorthodox indeed. Antwerp, maybe. I digress.
Seaweed-fired power stations. I envisage fleets of them, cruising around our coasts, browsing upon the bountiful supply of weed. A 24-hour seaweed watch would need to be maintained, in case of a particularly heavy build-up of weed, that might threaten people's enjoyment of their afternoon on the sand. "Reports of a large seaweed slick moving in on Bournemouth seafront, send in the 3rd Royal Highland Power Station Regiment to fend it off". And so on. Ideally they would be amphibious, so that if they got clogged up, with crabs or something, or needed routine maintenance, they could haul themselves ashore, Loch Ness Monster-like, and trundle off down the road looking for the nearest depot, to be repaired.
You wouldn't have them looking like power stations, of course. Oh no. Far too obvious. They would be disguised as nice things. Thames barges, the Cutty Sark. The Isle of Wight. Passing whales, or indeed Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Any form of advertising or other unnecessary embellishment on them would be punishable by death, of course. And they would beam the electricity back to the sub-stations and houses on the shore, to be collected using satellite TV dishes. (By then, my Taste Militia will have eradicated Rupert Murdoch and the entire concept of satellite TV, so the dishes will serve no other function).
Once we've cracked seaweed power, then we'll move on to the magnetic lemon question. Heavy drinkers who previously couldn't find their way home from the pub will need only to smuggle a glass of gin'n tonic out under their coat, and they'll be able to navigate using the slice of lemon as a compass. Given the worldwide availability of lemons, no-one need get lost again, anywhere. Even Mark Thatcher could have found his way out of the Sahara.
And photobiodegradable politicians? Well, they're all biodegradable aren't they, as are the rest of us, but the timescale is rather too long. So, like those clever plastic bags you get now, we need leaders that, if they get too much exposure to the sun (or indeed in The Sun) will just disappear into nothing.
Heaven.
If you're not familiar with the work of the sadly late and very great Bill Hicks, I suggest a you visit www.billhicks.com/darktimes/ and b, you hassle your nearest CD supplier, or Amazon, to get his CDs for you: "Dangerous", "Arizona Bay", "Relentless", "Rant In E-Minor", "Flying Saucer Tour, vol. 1", and "Shock and Awe". Lock yourself into a room one night with a good supply of alcohol. Play them, repeatedly, in that order, until the sun comes up again. Then you'll know.
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