why digital natives don't care about hard drive sizes

My first computer was an Apple laptop, a powerbook 165c. However it was better known as a 4x80, that is it had four megabytes of ram and eighty megabytes of hard drive. Obviously those figures now seem ridiculous, a mobile phone is probably better specified. I am typing this on another Apple laptop (my third) with 8 gigabytes of ram and 250 gigabytes of hard drive.

Accordingly I belong the that generation that tends to classify a computer by the ram and the hard drive. The maxim being that you cannot have too much of either. However I suspect that for those who have grown up digital, used to a perpetual ever accessible wifi signal, constant internet, instant twitter, instagram etc etc, these old metrics are of little interest.

The tendency now is to have each device as a mere portal to your online identity, so you can access the same apps and data on whatever you are sitting at, or happen to have in your hand. In the Mac world apps will run on iOS and Mac OS, there might be some data on the device, but the parent data, the true data, that is all in the cloud, available for download.

The idea of taking a load of photos with a camera and storing them on your hard drive is just alien to such digital natives. The idea of having documents on your hard drive is likewise odd, by and large the digital natives barely understand where data is held, because it is all held for them in the cloud. Because if it is not there on the cloud, visible, shared, open to comment, then it does not really truly exist. The digital nomads have moved into a world where everything is online, any device just lets you plug into the online identity that you have created for yourself.

There are downsides to this, what happens when nostalgia hits and you want to see those old photos, what happens when you have invested all that time and effort in an online service that is no longer there, what happens when someone makes a botch and irreplaceable data is corrupted. But that is the world that we are in already, to some extent or another we are all dependent on the cloud and the ever accessible internet.

We have all thrown out the atlas and now just have to trust to googlemaps.

[the prompt for writing this was backing up my daughter’s laptop and finding that the thing is practically empty!]

What is China doing devaluing the yuan?

What is China doing devaluing the yuan?

China as a nation is certainly inscrutable, but they are no fool. So why on earth would they want to devalue the yuan. The traditional answer was that by devaluing your currency you boosted exports (your own exports were now cheaper for others to buy) and you deterred imports (any imports you made were now more expensive for your residents to buy).

While this might once have made sense for some economies it hardly makes sense now, especially for China. Their exports are already a fair chunk of the world industrial production, there is no plausible competitor for them, the amount of the devaluation is trivial, and would in any event just be swallowed up elsewhere in the supply chain as extra profit for someone else. The Chinese people really don’t import much, although there is a luxury goods market in China, by and large the problem with the Chinese economy is that there is no real consumer economy. The Chinese people save, they don’t spend.

So I am assuming that there is a reason why the Chinese are devaluing, but if it is not one of the traditional reasons then what is it?

Overseas loans - Massive amounts of capital flow out of China, but my assumption is that any such loans would be denominated in the debtor country’s currency, so the American debt to China would remain in dollars, so yuan devaluation makes no difference.

Positioning themselves for a future free floating currency - possible but is it really worth the trouble.

In the absence of anything better, my guess is that there is an air of panic in China. No economy is stable in and of itself, but there can be few economies more dependent on others than China’s. It is a country that produces vast amounts of goods for export, then does not spend the resulting income, having to also export capital, hoovering up investments and encouraging debt across the world. The Chinese economy is so out of balance, with a ridiculously small internal consumer market, that it depends on other countries to buy its goods, and also to receive its loans and investments. When the economic pace starts to falter in the rest of the world, China has nothing to fall back on.

Has China become the cuckoo that outgrew its little surrogate parents.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/13/china-2015-is-not-china-2010/?_r=0 Paul Krugman piece that I saw after I wrote this]

the land between the cities

I would like to offer a few personal observations about the state of the British countryside and reflect on what these might mean for the future of the land between our cities.

I can remember stories of farmers on the Islands simply abandoning their sheep, as it would cost them more to take the sheep to slaughter at an abattoir on the mainland than the carcass was actually worth. Commuting along the same route over decades, I have seen the once damp corner of a field, turning into an abandoned corner, and finally a whole forgotten field, at last under no pretence of cultivation whatsoever. From fences to drainage, the state of the farmland is deteriorating before our eyes. The knee high Ragwort is everywhere at this time of year, its bright yellow flowers predicting a bumper crop of further airborne seeds. But Ragwort is a notifiable weed, toxic to livestock and you can be prosecuted for having it on your land.

Even worse, the Daily Mail is full of stories about Japanese Knotweed, an invasive species with roots that will tear through concrete, or Giant Hogweed, with a sap that is not exactly toxic, but will remove your skin’s natural ability to defend itself against sunlight, resulting in horrendous blisters for the unwary. Clearing a patch of these species can cost £3,000 and even then it is not certain.

Elsewhere the BBC reports on dairy farmers buying up milk from supermarkets and giving it away, in protest at their inability to get a decent price for their product.

Nowadays we just take it for granted that we do not build ships in this country, that is just not something that we do here anymore. What if farming were to go the same way. What if the land between the cities just ended up like the urban brownfield sites and unused petrol stations that no one wanted. Too expensive to remediate, not worth the trouble, in the wrong place.

Will the countryside end up like Pripyat, the abandoned city outside Chernobyl, all feral dogs and forgotten classrooms.

Will our countryside end up as a post apocalyptic landscape, with the irony that there was no apocalypse.

Perhaps now is the time to start to ask ourselves what do we want the countryside to be there for, and how do we get to there?

the post consumerist society

I have been reading some fairly heavy books on urbanism, which touch on modern society and the modern economy. They talk about the Ford-ist economy of mass production, and how on the ground this was followed by the consumer economy. That is, if you go round a modern western city, they are no longer based around heavy industry or indeed manufacturing things. The reek of the local brewery, tannery or linoleum works are no longer a feature of British cities.

The modern city seems to be built around satisfying the needs of a consumer society, a society that is much more about providing services and consuming goods, than it is about making old fashioned widgets that could the be distributed unchanged across the entire world.

However, on thinking about it, I think that there is now a stage beyond a society and economy based on consumer goods, to a society and economy based on consumer experience. I was watching the Made in Chelsea Come Dine with Me special, in fairness there was not a lot else on. Although the rich Chelsea residents were clearly very rich, they actually lived in quite spartan houses. Basically the houses we saw seemed to have been conventional traditional city terraced houses, where all the interior walls had been ripped out to create rooms for entertaining than stretched across the breadth and length of the entire floor of the flat. The rooms were however still fairly spartan, the basics for entertaining were all there, dining tables, chairs, large sofas, generic artwork and photos that was tasteful in an unremarkable way, but not much else.

One woman, was it Toff, or Binky, served champagne from blue china cups, all her champagne flutes had been broken at a previous party. Another, or was it the same, had guests smashing lobsters with hammers on plates.

For entertainment one person had some can-can dancers, supposedly flown in form the Moulin Rouge, while another had some elderly man in a cod Napoleonic costume demonstrating how to open a bottle of champagne with a sabre. They seemed to open a lot of bottles of champagne.

While these people were clearly very rich, their houses were relatively small, they seemed to have relatively few possessions, unless they rented mountains of storage which seemed unlikely, but they were spending a lot of money on their lifestyle. Even a low key dinner party was vastly expensive.

These people may not be exactly typical, but I think that they are an extreme example of where Western society is at at the moment. Many people are living in a post scarcity society. There is no point in buying any more physical goods, our houses are full, we don’t have the time to read ,or watch, or wear, or whatever, what we do have.

What we do want, is to subcontract out the elements of our lives that we cannot be bothered with. So we will willingly pay people to cook for us, or make coffee for us, or entertain us, or clean for us, or style our kitchens, or invest our money.

The modern economy is increasingly based on a Disney style attempt to attract and amuse, while we become disengaged tourists in our own lives.

Why the Usual Suspects annoys me, and the author's implicit contract with their audience

I have never really cared for the ending of The Usual Suspects, although I know that a lot of folk do like it. For me it undermined what went before, and I felt rather cheated and annoyed as a result. 

I suppose that the audience is making an investment in any work of linear narrative work of art that they are participating in. If you sit down to watch a film or play or read a book, then you are forced to follow the linear narrative, and even if it is enjoyable enough going, then you do feel that you are making a certain sacrifice. That there is a certain implicit contract, that you expect things to resolve themselves in the expected manner, or in a satisfyingly novel manner. That is why not many people will embark on reading a book that they know to be unfinished, for example the Mystery of Edwin Drood, and no one would expect to publish a half written book. 

There are certain writerly conventions, for example

with a Philip K Dick book with various nested narratives, you might expect this nesting to continue. In a more conventional piece of romantic fiction then you might not;

by and large something will stick to the genre it started as, there are relatively few popular exceptions, such as Dusk Till Dawn;

the level of descriptive detail will generally be sustained throughout, though some modernist works will mention major events almost in passing, the end of The Magic Mountain, or Proust do this;

you are expected to read the entire work from beginning to end, though some authors deliberately insert random text to force you to skim, for example Douglas Coupland;

improbable aspects are introduced at the start of the work, rather than the end; 

The reader not only invests time, they also invest belief in the characters and situations, so while there might be some scope to play with the ‘reality’ of what is being relayed, too much undermining of the credibility of the story will just annoy the reader, unless there was never really any reality in the first place. With certain authors you know that you are in slippery territory when you start, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, George Perec, some science fiction. While the author might be clever inserting themselves as a character, or lyrics from popular songs, or jokey names for characters, or even parallels to historical events, for the reader these can strain the credibility of the piece and undermine it. The reader wants to be entertained, but they want to be laughing at the joke, rather than being the butt of the joke. For me, this also means avoiding any overt use of imagery, so no obvious allusions to Shakespearian plots, or classic literature, instead plausibility should be the benchmark of what is being described. 

In terms of plausibility there is either a sort of psychological plausibility, that is how you feel the world is, or a physical plausibility, that is how you see that the world is. So Kafka might be psychologically plausible, while lacking physical plausibility. 

the hollowing out of the nation state

Something strange is happening in national politics. On the outer fringes of Britain affairs at Westminster are starting to seem increasingly irrelevant. You have candidates such as Sinn Fein who are elected as MPs but never actually attend Westminster. You have active and popular parties in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland that regularly put large numbers of MPs to Westminster but clearly have no potential of ever forming a majority, and from the panicked reaction of the traditional parties, would appear to have little immediate prospect of forming an alliance with the traditional parties, Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat. 

The argument from Labour and the Conservatives seems to be, that those of us in the devolved administrations, their quaint term for Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, should just vote for a proper party like them, or we are wasting a vote on some MP for some noddy party. In fact the Conservatives seem to be going even further, and arguing that having had a bit of devolution, it really does not matter who Scots vote for, their MPs will just be some strange neutered creature of little real purpose. 

In part this is petulance, the national parties just want everyone to vote for proper national parties for Westminster MPs, in part this is short term self interest, the Conservatives only have one Scottish MP, neutering the remaining MPs does them no harm at all. 

But the national parties are playing a dangerous game, they misjudge the people of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. For many people in Scotland, the UK general election has the interest of a rather over serious reality tv show, where they all shout over each other all the time. The people of Scotland know that they have a vanishingly small voice in the election, and the Scottish voice is getting fainter and fainter. None on the UK parties are remotely appealing for most people, most people have little idea who their MP is, what they do, or why we should care. In these circumstances Scots will vote for whoever they want, but like the people electing Nigel Farage as an MEP, it is not because we expect them to say or do anything at Westminster, but because like what they are saying. 

Devolution is a slippery slope, not because it is dangerous, or leads anywhere bad, but because once you are on it, you are committed to a direction of travel, down the slope, and you really had better think though where you are going very carefully. Unfortunately the only politicians who seem to be saying anything sensible on the subject are those arguing for full independence. Independence might not be the best answer, but politicians really do need to do some serious thinking about what the other answers might be, and start promoting them, rather than the current stale blend of opportunism and indifference. 

Photos now available on Mac

 

Apple seem to ration their major announcements to their keynote speeches and the last one majored on the iWatch. Despite having a house full of apple hardware I am an abstainer from the iPhone, I spend so little of my time not in front of a keyboard that having a portable version of the internet seems expensive and pointless. Accordingly a Dick Tracy style iWatch holds little appeal.

Less prominent was the roll out of Photos, the new photo management software for Apple devices, that was touted in an earlier keynote speech. 

This offers a simpler quicker interface for interacting with your photos, and unifies the software available on OS devices, laptops and desktops and IOS devices such as iPads and iPhones. It also signals the end of iPhoto, if you install Photos, it replaces iPhoto. Aperture the higher end photo management software has now vanished from the AppStore, but will presumably remain useable for a while. Both iPhoto and Aperture would routinely use the same database, and it is this database that Photos now take ownership of. 

Where things really get interesting is the ability to store photos seamlessly in the cloud. There are plenty of cloud solutions out there, I already seem to subscribe to a chunk of them. Some are very content specific, such as iTunes Match which will store your music in the cloud, or Evernote which is restricted to various document formats. Others are less restrictive, Dropbox, or Wuala will duplicate a folder full of stuff in the cloud. Some of these will allow you to save stuff to the cloud and delete safely from your hard drive, such as iTunes Match. Dropbox will let you use it for uploading some stuff to the cloud and deleting from your own hard drive, but not photos. If you want to save your photos to the cloud with Dropbox then you still have to retain a copy on your computer. 

My laptop is getting a bit old and with only 250 gig of hard drive space it is starting to run out of space. I have built up a fair few photos, and recently bought a DSLR which allows me to take a mountain of photos, and a lot of gigabytes of data, very quickly. Accordingly I have long been interested in some means to save my photos to the cloud. 

Flickr will allow you to upload any volume of stuff, but it is not really a backup means, and although you can treat photos as private, it is a fair amount of work and there is always the risk that you have inadvertently uploaded something to the public site that you did not want to. 

Accordingly something integrated straight into my usual photo management application that provides cloud storage is definitely something that I am interested in. 

When Photos came out, I did check for reviews, apart from Walt Mossberg, who had a problem with uploading because of a corrupted database, there was little objective opinion out there. However the monthly cost for what I was needing was less than a pound so rather than wait for the next issue of MacFormat or whatever I just jumped in. The support pages reported a lot of problems, as they invariably do, with minimal comment from Apple, also fairly standard. There were also some ingenious ‘solutions’ involving Terminal scripts. 

From long experience I generally avoid hacking about with my computer, and for anything involving an irreplaceable database or the cloud, I find it best to just leave it running, overnight if needs be, and let it sort itself out. It did take a few days of uploading, but eventually the upload completed. My iPad is too aged to access the photos on the cloud, but I presume that they are there. 

There are various issues with backing up photos, 

1  you are probably backing up a database rather than a collection of individual photos, and a corrupted database means you lose everything. Backing up to the cloud is all very well, but you need to be confident that any corruption is contained at source, and a corrupted database on your laptop does not upload to corrupt the cloud back up too

2  it s not going to be quick, you could be uploading gigabytes of data, upload speeds are a lot less than download speeds, expect to run things overnight 

3  increasingly, if it is on your computer, it is a kick in the pants away from being in the cloud, and it is not inconceivable that it could be made public at some point 

4 you will end up renting access to your photos, 

Despite some investigating I really could not find a practical means of backing up my photos to the cloud, so I thoroughly welcome the option within Photos. It does seem reasonably straightforward but it is certainly not instant, and it would be easy to mess about and corrupt your database of photos. In a few years everyone could be using it. Just how reliable is it? Only time will tell, other back up options remain advisable but Photos cloud storage does seem like a useful and timely solution for most folk. 

 

A guide to the 21st century - the multi-generational house

One of the key innovations in housing within the twenty first century was the widespread adoption of the multi-generational house. These took various forms, for example in Japan, with the adoption of mortgages that would be paid off over successive generations, high land prices, and the tradition of relatively small land prices, the actual house might not look all that unusual to western eyes.

Similarly within America, and amongst the very rich, where there was already a preparedness to live in houses with a very large aggregate area, with regular guests and perhaps live in servants, the multi-generational home might not appear so distinctive to their eyes.

However as a major building type, and method of living it became relatively common in Europe over the century proving more palatable and robust, for many, than the cohousing model, which was to remain relatively niche.

There is a degree of commonality around the multi-generational home. At the core tends to be a single level area that is available to the oldest residents. This has fixed services, the kitchen and bathroom facilities, but also has adaptable stud walls to create rooms. As these are stud walls they can be altered, however the walls themselves, and any doors or other building fabric, are built and finished to a good standard to provide effective sound insulation. In general access to this space is all on the level and amply sufficient to allow wheelchair access. However the fixed building still affords flexibility so that further alterations could be made to further improve accessibility. The ability to alter to suit changing needs is key to this whole ground floor area. It is relatively straightforward to increase space to improve accessibility, or to partition the area to create additional rooms, but the essential core of the building can remain familiar, as will its surroundings, allowing the degree of continuity that is invaluable for the elderly.

Although the ground floor is the apparent core of the building, in practice, from within, it tends to resemble a traditional bungalow, though those fonder of more open plan living can end up with a more loft style appearance. Additional habitation is available, at least two, perhaps more, separate dwellings are provided. These will tend to both be contained within the overall floor space of the ground floor, and form the first floor. These are each independently accessed, in the main they are separated by a structural load bearing wall, but there are stud work gaps within this that would allow for doorways. The kitchen and other living spaces are smaller than those on the ground floor, however as those on the ground floor are on the large size, those on the second floor are still of an acceptable size. For the first floor dwellings flexibility is less of a priority and the rooms tend to be fairly fixed. Where possible a central atrium or courtyard is maintained at the centre of the house and even where a lift is not in place, space sufficient to install one is left available.

In addition to the flexibility over installing a lift, the second floor is not necessarily envisaged as the top floor. From the street the houses all have the appearance of a three storey building even where they only have two, because the exterior walls continue above the second floor to provide the walls of a possible third floor. Where there is no requirement for a third floor the space forms a roof garden, or an awning can be used to create semi sheltered workspace or storage space. Where additional rooms are required the space can be readily converted, as elsewhere the walls are a mix of structural and temporary, with the temporary being easily removed to create windows. By retaining these apparently surplus exterior walls, the buildings are not only easily expandable but are generally robust to any changes in planning policy, as the can be expanded without any alteration to the building footprint or outward appearance.

In general the multi-generational home appears to be no different from the local vernacular, although it may appear to be slightly larger than some houses. They are generally set on reasonable sized building plots, but this size is there to provide flexibility, for example car parking, bin storage, the ability to provide a vegetable plot or children’s play area, rather than to provide extensive grounds that require maintenance. Therefore depending on the preferences of the occupants the outdoor space might provide an attractive but high maintenance garden, or be mono blocked to provide ample parking or house a skip and outdoor storage for building supplies for a tradesman that works from home.

A multi-generational house will generally be set somewhere that is not unduly remote, with ready access to local services, both those for the young and for the old. They can therefore be expensive and that is why flexibility and a modular approach are key. They are never particularly high specification buildings, instead they are robust and built to last. They are often built by a working couple as they approach retirement, with the ground floor being envisaged as their forever home. It is possible to simply finish the ground floor, and leave the remaining elements unbuilt until required. The independent houses above can be occupied by grown up children, other relatives, or indeed let out to form a source of income. There is adequate space for a communal approach, for example large meals can easily be accommodated, alternatively separate living rooms are provided, so that residents can easily entertain themselves and others in the context of their larger setting or independently.

 

 

talent is superfluous

Nowadays a rare talent really is not all that uncommon. When there is a whole interconnected world out there, the most statistically unusual of talents is common enough to occur a few times. The genuine rarity is someone that we might care about. A story only really works if it has characters that we might in some way care about. Be they good, bad or indifferent, we have to care to some extent. So the news and media need to have players cavorting on the stage, it does not care who they are or what they do, as long as the viewing public cares about them to some extent. So we care about Madonna falling off a stage because her cape did not come off, we care about minor celebrities appearing with Kevin Bacon in an advert. Out of that great soup of anonymity we see and recognise faces, and we can see the story that is told about them. 

There are only ever going to be a finite number of people that are widely recognised, for the media there is no more valuable commodity than fame, however thin the claim to fame, if the public care, then that is enough. 

celebrity

In the past most musicians would make more from their tours than their albums, and probably made more money out of tee shirts and programmes than selling tickets. The distance between what someone appears to do, and where they earn their money has now stretched out even further. There seem to be plenty of modern ‘stars’ for whom any music is at best an incidental part of what they are providing. The papers are filled with photos of Rita Ora and Nicky Minaj, out of all proportion to their significance as musicians. I don’t think we should view this as a negative, if they are smart enough to supply something that the media want, and will pay for, then good luck to them. They do at least seem to provide something in exchange for their celebrity, there are a phalanx of other celebrities who have only the most spurious of claims to notability, perhaps once being the girlfriend of a footballer, or being married to someone famous. 

 

what do writers do all day?

Many writers will mention a daily limit that they set themselves for writing, in interview JG Ballard suggests that he always wrote one thousand words a day, twice as many as Hemingway, but feeble in comparison to the six thousand that Trollope would write. On that basis Ballard could have written six novels a year which he did not, so presumably not every day was a writing day. Similarly pop / rock musicians now seem to go into the studio to write an album, when presumably they could pick up a pencil any time and write a song. 

Contrary to expectations then, most of what a professional writer probably does is not writing, it is proofing, editing, negotiating, marketing and promoting. Similarly even for a famous singer songwriter, most of what they actually do is probably promoting, touring and performing. 

 

Chapter one of The Garbageman

herewith, chapter one, of The Garbageman, a novel I wrote in the 1990’s. I will give it a read over, and if I think it is upto scratch, will look to publish on Kindle. 

 

1.1

The killer had awoken early that morning. Although he had already prepared thoroughly, he cleaned and checked his revolver one last time before loading it. He left the revolver in his sleeping bag and went to shave. The air was still cold on the skin, and the nearby trees were faint in the morning mist. With luck the mist would not lift until much later in the day. He would have liked his normal holster but with his battered Barbour jacket and pullover it would have been impractical and conspicuous.

 

The black Range Rover was the second car in the convoy. At the head of the convoy was the Land Rover driven by the head beater, and containing the beaters for the day. The Land Rover had no radio, and the beaters were being bounced about on the wooden benches in the back. They were all cold and uncomfortable, their clothes still damp and clinging from the day before. The Land Rover kangarooed through a particularly large gully in the road. The tallest of the beaters crashed his head against one of the struts for the canvas awning. He cursed loudly, the other beaters smiled through their hangovers.

The Range Rover was driven by an officer from the security service, the passenger seat was empty, and in the back were Vincent Forsyth and his guest for the day, Sir David from the Cabinet Office. The Range Rover swooped and rose, passing the gully.

 

“Easy Gavin, I had a heavy night last night.” Vincent Forsyth turned to face Sir David again, and carried on talking sotto voce.

 

The final car was a Japanese Daihatsu, a poor man’s Range Rover. There were four men in it. One was a minder for Sir David, and the other three were there for Vincent Forsyth. The car effortlessly climbed out of the gully. They watched the surrounding woods, half expecting one of the looming shapes to turn and take a pot shot at them. None of them liked this trip. Even with the four men in the team, it would be impossible to provide adequate cover.

 

The trees were mostly birch, and a few conifers, it was light relatively open woodland. In the mist it felt like a white walled room. The noise of the cars seemed suddenly very close, and in a few minutes the convoy reached the destination. The Land Rover drove to the far side of the clearing and parked close to the trees. The Range Rover parked in the middle of the clearing. The driver got out of the car, and went round to the back, opening the hatch, and unwrapping the shot guns.

 

The final car parked askew blocking off the entrance to the clearing. The security men quickly got out and ran over to the Range Rover, it was only then that the passengers got out. It was perhaps their training that made the security men feel that the open space was more dangerous than the woods themselves. In the mist the clearing was probably a less threatening environment.

 

Twenty minutes later the shoot was ready to start. The beaters had fanned out across the far side of the woods, and Sir David and Forsyth were in position. Occasionally the air was punctuated by the stutter of walkie talkies, or the crackle of twigs broken under foot. Although the ground was normally sodden and marshy, the frost was severe enough to leave it crisp and hard.

 

“Okay Sir David, they should be setting off now.” Vincent Forsyth stopped looking at his watch and loaded his Purdey. He left the Purdey broken. There was unlikely to be much to aim at for a while. “You take the left flank Sir David, and I’ll take the right, and will you bloody security men keep quiet. You’ll put the wind up all the bloody game this side of London.”

 

“I hope that the shooting is as good as you promised.” Sir David looked towards Forsyth to see the direction in which he was heading.

 

“The keeper raised nearly a hundred pheasant this year, I think we should be in for a few.”

 

Vincent Forsyth had served a long time in the army, after Sandhurst he had risen fairly effortlessly through the ranks. At the appropriate time he had moved sideways into covert operations, when they were rapidly becoming anything but covert. He had dropped his military title in the firm expectation that he would soon be gaining a mention in the Honours list. For services to the Crown, and Home Office. He had served in Northern Ireland, on various operations, but it was his membership of the R23 Committee that had merited the security personnel, and the potential gong.

 

For Sir David the whole expedition was a bloody pantomime, the shooting in this glorified swamp was indifferent at the best of times, and with half the security service here, a herd of elephants would have been spooked by now. It promised to be a long day. There was doubtless an ulterior motive for this invitation. He would be buttered up all day, before some words to slip in the right ear for the gong committee, or some other such nonsense came up over the port, purely coincidentally. If Vincent Forsyth thought that the goons from the security service were impressing anyone, he was sadly mistaken.

 

Back at the cars, Sir David’s guard sat listening to the Archers on Radio Four. The other security service officer was wandering the perimeter of the clearing. The day was gradually warming, Sir David might not even catch the cold, that he had told his wife would be the only prize for the day. The Archers eventually came to a close, as the beaters were trying their second traverse of the woods.

 

Vincent Forsyth had got ahead of the others in his search for game. He had just shot his first pheasant of the day, and was hoping for some more. His gun was empty and broken. Apart from the single pheasant, he had seen nothing else apart from the crows, which he had left for now. A twig snapped. He started and turned. One of the beaters was standing behind him. A broken twig in his hands.

 

“What the hell are you doing here, ...” Forsyth was more angry than anything.

 

“Don’t you recognise me after what you did ?”

 

“You’re not bloody Teague are you ?” Recognition dawned slowly on Forsyth. “You must be mad to come here. There are men all around us.”

 

Teague had his hands in his pockets, he lifted the remote control device clear, and pressed the button.

Forsyth could recognise the sound of distant gunfire, in the mist it was difficult to tell the direction. Almost instantly they were surrounded by the cackle of walkie talkies and shouted commands.

 

“You know what you did to me, I just came to get an explanation or an apology.” Teague threw the remote control device away, his hands were empty and clear of his body.

 

Forsyth had a cartridge in his hand, in almost a single move, he loaded the cartridge, and with the Purdey still in his left hand, snapped it shut. The barrel was pointing at Teague, as he changed his grip. “You know what happens to one of your sort when they go rogue, we just have to put you down, like the animal you are. What was it they called you Teague, the garbageman. I’ve got better things to do than waste my bloody time on trash like you.”

 

The Purdey fired once, the noise was suddenly deafening, then gone, except for the echoes caught hanging in the mist. Teague was caught by the force of the blast, and punched back, like a string puppet prodded with an iron finger. Hisempty hands were still outstretched.

Forsyth broke the Purdey open, and ejected the spent cartridge. The securitymen would be there within sixty seconds. He looked up from the Purdey, Teague was on his feet again. The Barbour and tatty jersey were pitted and torn, and he was bleeding, in his hand was the revolver. As Vincent’s crows circled round their heads, Teague spoke. “I’ve got something to say to you and you better listen ...”

 

The revolver fired three times, only the final shot missed Vincent’s head, he was already dead and falling. Teague dropped the revolver, and stripped off the Barbour jacket and what was left of the jersey. He took off the kevlar body shield, and put the Barbour back on. He would bruise all over his torso, and he was bleeding from some peripheral pellets. He turned and vanished into the mist.

 

Ten seconds later the settling crows were startled again by the security men reaching the corpse that was Vincent Forsyth.

101 Quiet Cities -> Coming Soon to Kindle

101 Quiet Cities has now been proofed, and uploaded to Amazon, it is currently awaiting publication to Kindle. 

I am sure that there are still typos in there, and happy to take out any that anyone points out. Amazon Kindle let you update your books whenever you feel the need. 

I am expecting it to appear on the Amazon Store for purchase within the next couple of days. 

It is perhaps early days to be saying too much about the process, but although it took more than a few minutes it was reasonably straightforward to upload the collection from Scrivener onto the Amazon website. There is plenty of guidance available. The trickiest aspect seemed to be getting reference numbers for my bank account, but they are provided as part of the online banking service. Amazon kindly provided a graph indicating what level of pricing attracts what level of sales and author earnings. It suggested a price of over $2, which although it generated less sales, generated more author earnings because the 70% royalty rate kicked in, whereas you are limited to a 35% royalty rate below that. For the time being I have set the price as low as possible, I think that means that I will earn less that 30p per title sold, which seems pretty poor, but compared to traditional publishing is not that unreasonable. I might review pricing in future, but for the time being just shifting some copies  and letting people read it seems for the best. 

If you do like the book, then I am totally delighted, and you might also like John Sladek, JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty by Frank Kuppner, Mervyn Peake, and just mountains of science fiction stuff.

In terms of reading about cities I would heartily recommend, 

• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 
• Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 
• Geoff Manaugh, the BldgBlog Book 
• Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, The Endless City
• Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, 
• V Gordon Childe, not terribly accessible these days, but if you can find it the Method and Theory of V Gordon Childe by Barbara McNairn it is highly recommended, 
• the art of Lebbeus Woods is also worth investigating. 

Now that I have finished 101 Quiet Cities, I will either return to another collection of short stories, Losing Definition, or set about published to Kindle an earlier short thriller I wrote years ago. The collection called Losing Definition is a lot longer than 101 Quiet Cities, probably around fifty thousand words in total, rather than the rather jewel like seventeen thousand of 101 Quiet Cities. Losing Definition is a lot looser in theme and format, with a mix of stories, some longer, some shorter, with some themes across sets of stories, but no overall overarching structure. I have really loved the format of a five hundred word story on an imaginary city, it is such a great format that I am surprised that everyone doesn’t use it all the time. I might do a few more imaginary cities one of these days. I was wondering if you could use the same format for stories about imaginary buildings but I really cannot think of any for now.

Having been tightly constrained by one format, it will nice to be able to do something completely different next time. 

If you liked the short city stories published here, then check out 101 Quiet Cities, when it does appear. If you like it, tell your friends, tell everyone, if you don’t, well it cost less than a cup of coffee. 

 

 

101 Quiet Cities

 

I have published a few short stories about imaginary cities here. Pretty early on I realised that I liked the format, and would just press on to prepare a whole collection on imaginary cities. The format is basically around five hundred words on an imaginary city, ideally with some sort of twist or observation included. On writing them some themes have emerged, a few modern composers are named, a few real cities are alluded to, representation and reality feature. Quite a few are basically dreams that I have written out in story form. 

I suppose the basic inspiration was Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but equally the spoof academic tone of the early Peter Greenaway shorts, like A Walk Through H, has been an influence. 

I have also provided some framing stories and incorporated some lines and ideas that I have been kicking about forever. 

The collection is now largely complete, so I am at the final proofing stage. I have written the stories on Scrivener (for Mac), and that allows me to format for Kindle, but it is a bit tricky. Having said that, it is like doing a web page, have a go, check it on a few devices, have another go, and carry on till you arrive at something you are reasonably happy with. Scrivener will let me prepare a version for Kindle and then the Amazon Send to Kindle App lets me send it to my own Kindle. It is amazing to read your own work on a Kindle, with Scrivener you can add a cover and contents, etc, so it does have the potential to all look very professional. 

There is also the usual proofing for typos and the like, not sure whether I will just print it all off and proof that, or proof on my Kindle, or a mixture of both. The whole collection comes in at under twenty thousand words, so it should not take too long.

Things are pretty busy at work, so it might be a wee while before I finally have it all uploaded to the Amazon store, but not far off now.