Friday 25 March 2022

 Have we missed something? 

 

If there are as many planets in space as grains of sand on a beach, then what are the chances of some form of life existing on a number of them?  

Of course, every sci-fi writer knows the answer to that one. There are an infinite number of possible forms of life just waiting to be discovered, or to discover us.  So, the question is not is there another form of life out there in space, it is what the Hell will be our reaction to it when it appears? 

Given the propensity for humanity to closet itself in little groups called nations, and to selectively look back in history to justify arming itself against invasion or to ‘take back’ land it once controlled, what are the chances of extending a friendly hand to creatures who may have no hands? 

About zilch, I would guess. And if it happened now, this sudden appearance of unknown craft, what would be the chances of Putin and Biden becoming best buddies in the face of a possible exterior threat? Again, about zilch, because they would both declare that the aliens were an invention of the other side and try to blast them from the skies. 

Which could be a mistake, if the aliens had so much more advanced technology than humans, which had enabled them to find us, maybe they would have worked out that mankind had not yet reached that stage of civilisation where killing one another had died out. They could deflect, return or react aggressively to any attack. Whatever the response would not be good news for humans. Or they could just fly away and reflect on our backwardness, appointing a flypast in another hundred years to see if things had improved. 

Perhaps they have already. 

 

Colin Payn 

24/3/22 











Charlie & Chantelle

 

The End of the World –

has been?


He sat up and yawned.

‘That was a lovely sleep.’
‘You don’t know the half of it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you slept through it.’
‘What?’
The End of the World.’
‘What channel was it on, we can always get it on catch-up?’
‘No. I mean the End of the World. It finished last night.’
‘So how come we’re still here?’
‘We’re not. Here, I mean. We’re somewhere else.’
‘I’m still here, you’re still here, the beds still here.  I bet if I open the curtains the street is still here.’
‘It might all look the same, but “Here” is not “Here” anymore. It’s somewhere else.’
‘ Hold on, turn the telly on, let’s see the news.
‘See, all the same crap, football, famine and fanny. Nothing about the End of the World.’
‘That’s ‘cos they don’t know. Look at the date, 2018. When the Earth finished it somehow jumped six months and nobody noticed.’
‘You noticed. How come you noticed and nobody else did? Are you some sort of time traveller?  Don’t tell me I married a Time Lord?’
‘ I don’t know how I know. I went to the loo in the night, and when I came out I had to go and do it all again. It was weird.’
‘It was that kebab more like. Hold on, hold on! Does that mean that we skipped Christmas?’
‘We must have done.’
‘So, I didn’t get my iPhone 8?’
‘Doesn’t look like it.’
‘Oh, bugge🛌🛌🛌r that. I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when the iPhone 9 is due.’


Colin Payn  26/8/17
270 words



Thursday 7 December 2017

Changes


Prize winner in the Nancy Meggs' Writing Competition 2017

Changes

Recently I read a letter in a magazine where the writer was complaining about poor grammar in newspaper articles.  What caught my attention was her assertion that it was the fault of young reporters, ‘because all older people can touch type’.

Which set me thinking.  It was obviously nonsense, but how much nonsense?

Taking her ‘young people’ as being in their twenties and ‘older people’ in their seventies, I set about exploring what office life was like in the 1960’s, when the ‘older people’ were young.

Now I am a different world.  A world where the mothers of these ‘old people’ had been important workers in the war effort, only to be displaced back to being housewives when the men returned and wanted work. Most never had any paid work again, other than looking after other people’s houses or children.  In fact, the gender balance of the national workforce had changed little since the early years of the twentieth century, men expected jobs, women stayed at home or did less skilled jobs.  Such as typing.  Men simply did not type, so that was half the population discounted.

The early typewriters were advertised as having ‘keys made for dainty fingers’, and illustrated with groups of attractive young women happily typing. But, in those days it was regarded as unseemly for men to be working near women, ‘for fear of damage to their morals’, the men’s apparently. So typing pools had different entrances to buildings, different places and times for eating, and different times to start and finished work.

Bizarrely, the Post Office was among organisations that wouldn’t allow typists out of the building at lunchtime, right up until 1911. But it came as a surprise that, until the nineteen sixties, the Bank of England would not employ married women.  Any female employee getting married was immediately dismissed.

Figures for nineteen sixty-one show the UK population as almost fifty-three million, of which under two million women worked in offices.  Most of those would not have been typists; there were plenty of other jobs the men thought of as below their dignity. That could mean that the answer about how many touch typists there were, when the ‘old people’ were young, could be about 1.5% of the population.

But in the last fifty years this has changed dramatically, and this is how it happened.
In the sixties, the typing pool was a stepping stone for the ambitious girl who went to night school to learn shorthand, and landed that prized job of Secretary to a senior manager. The pinnacle of female success in the male-dominated office would be a PA, Personal Assistant to a director. The glass ceiling was about ankle level at this time.

Then came computers, those big mainframe grey boxes taking up whole air-conditioned rooms, with spools of tape winding first this way, then that. Fascinating flashing lights persuaded the male ego to accept the necessity of having to master a keyboard to control the beast. Surely, the job couldn’t be done by a woman? In fact, despite efforts of many pressure groups, it remained the case that most mainframe programmers and operators learned to type, and so protected a male domain throughout this period.

Meanwhile, the churning out of repetitive letters by individuals in the ubiquitous typing pool was under threat from the horrors that were Gestetner or Roneo stencils.

For the enlightenment of younger readers, these two machines could turn out ten to twenty identical copies of a document, just like a photocopier, except for the original. Instead of a word-processed A4 sheet, a much longer multi-part set of pages had to be reeled into the typewriter and typed on a ‘cutting' control which meant, instead of a neat letter on paper, the letter image cut through the first layer. Once loaded on the hand-cranked machine, the ink would be squeezed through this master to print the document.  The problem lay in making a spelling mistake. The whole paper set had to be wound slowly out of the typewriter until the offending letter or word appeared. It then had to be carefully dabbed with a nail polish brush dipped in a pink liquid that filled the cut image. When it dried the set had to be delicately wound back to the exact place where a correct letter could be overtyped. Even a good typist could end up with a sheet looking like it had smallpox.

Back to the plot.

The invention of electric typewriters, including the curse of the ‘golf-ball' and the ‘daisywheel', didn't make life any easier for typists. Managers took great delight in dictating a change of font every few paragraphs just to show off. Even basic word processors failed to change the routine that the male dictated, the female typed.

The real revolution came in 1981 with the invention of the IBM personal computer. A gadget of such wondrous mystery that every manager had to have one on their desk. A virility symbol and sign of prestige in the company hierarchy replacing their tooled leather desk diary. Of course, they couldn’t use them, so they did what they did best, they delegated. Secretaries were sent on courses to learn about clever word processing, databases and spreadsheets. Their bosses could then have pristine copies of their precious words ready for distribution in minutes, and the spreadsheet could generate coloured charts, things of beauty and awe at meetings.

Suddenly, the typing pool was no more. A computer could turn out any number of letters, correctly addressed and containing individual details.

Suddenly, the role of secretaries was questioned, except at top management level, why couldn’t managers type their own memos, reports, learn to do spreadsheets?

By 2017, typing, once thought of as the province of the lowest grade of office worker, and representing about 1.5% of the population in 1961, has become a skill used by around 80% of the population in their daily work.


That is some change.


Her finger slipped - the World changed

Her finger slipped – the World changed.


Darcie looked at the screen and saw, to her horror, that it was saying that she was at 15 Loader Road now. This could not be happening. It must not be happening, no one must have any idea that she had visited 15 Loader Road.

Too late she looked at the post appearing on her Facebook page with its innocuous message to friends – but showing it was sent from Callum’s house! Somehow she had hit the location button for where she was yesterday.  Many of her friends would know the address and wonder what she was doing there.   Her husband would do more than wonder!

Panic, that had started in her head, was spreading through her lungs making it difficult to breathe, through her fingers which refused to respond to the command to delete the post, to her legs that refused her any movement. The more she remained immobile the longer the post was available for all to see.

A ‘Like’ and a message, ‘Hi Dee, is it your day off? I thought it was yesterday, is Cal OK?  He seemed a bit down when I saw him last week, talking about going back to Canada.

‘Oh shit!’

It was already too late to delete, that would make it worse, there would be questions about why she tried to get rid of it. She grabbed the “Pay As You Go” mobile from the discrete pocket in her jacket, it only had one number in the contacts. There was no reply.  She redialled and let it ring three times before cancelling.  After about thirty seconds her phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘Sorry Cal, I’ve made a mistake which means we have to bring forward our plans to leave. We have to go today, I’ll organise the flights, get to Heathrow ASAP.  I’ll contact you there. Understand?’

‘OK, on my way.’

Darcie looked round. She would be sad to leave, she was fond of her husband, it wasn’t his fault. She’d made sure there weren’t any children, once she’d met Cal she knew that leaving was inevitable, she couldn’t trust herself to leave kids as well.

She would leave a note for her husband explaining that she was travelling to see a sick friend in Yorkshire so might be out of touch for a while on the train.  That would give them a few more hours before anyone started asking questions.

Packing was easy, just a cabin bag with a few underclothes and a lot of make up. She had agonised about her ring, couldn’t leave it where he might find it, but he deserved to know it was all over.  She had bought a small padded envelope especially for this eventuality, already addressed and second class stamped, she would drop it in the box at the end of the road.

She left the car keys where he would expect them to be and dropped the house keys in a thick hedge a few streets away, walking to the underground station rather than taking a traceable taxi.


By the time they met at the boarding gate neither was recognisable from the life they had led for so many years. They didn’t acknowledge one another or sit together. Their phone SIM’s had been broken and discarded in separate bins to the phones. Their passports had different names, their flight destination was Venice, their ultimate destination was Moscow.

Thursday 2 November 2017

It's FREE

Not much is free in this world, as in 'no strings attached', but this one really is.  Every so often Amazon gives authors the chance to go to a wider audience by giving their book away free as a download for a few days.

I have now taken advantage of this from today until Monday 6th November, which means that you, dear reader, and any of your enlightened friends, can download all 68,000 words absolutely FREE on to your Kindle or Kindle app.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dots-Legacy-Park-Stories-Colin-ebook/dp/B01M2B224E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509613487&sr=8-1&keywords=dots+legacy

Enjoy.
Colin

Friday 27 October 2017



Welcome to 2016!

Well, it is for our two hero’s of The Park Stories.  ‘Beyond the Park gates’ is the second book to celebrate the struggles of Rhys and Anne, as life throws brickbats and prizes wrapped up in the diverse, not to say downright strange, people who surround them.

Just published on Amazon, you can be amongst the first to find out what happened after the cliff-hanger that I left you with in ‘Dot’s Legacy’.

Not read ‘Dot’s Legacy’?  You can, FOR FREE,  From Thursday 2nd November to Monday 9th you can go to the Amazon website and download ‘Dot’s Legacy’ absolutely FREE.  (All the reviews are 5 Star, you won’t be disappointed). Because I know that afterwards you will want to read Beyond the Park Gates’.

Competition time
The first person to read ‘Beyond the Park Gates’ and write a review on Amazon, wins signed copies of both books. (Who knows what they might be worth should Rhys and Anne become the next Harry and Hermione?)

So please, share this news with your friends and relatives, at the very least they won’t blame you for giving them a FREE book.

Colin




Tuesday 26 September 2017

It's all a bit negative



These two pictures were taken from the same spot, minutes apart. The first would be deleted, the second cropped to produce a powerful image.


Thinking some more about lost skills, (see : Me and brass balls), I am in two minds about photography.
Watching a carnival recently, it was like a Mexican Wave, the hundreds of iPads sequencing a 'picture opportunity' as it passed.
They each, no doubt, took a well exposed, wide angle picture of the procession and provided memories for years to come. Dozens of 'snaps' that are as good as most cameras would produce on automatic.

Then there are the billions of mobile phone 'selfies' produced around the world each week.
I was here
I ate this
I drank this
I did this
I look like this
And this
And this
And this
Facebook fodder for friends and family, pictures that would not have been taken with a camera.

So what is my problem with all these photos?

Am I just being a camera snob who had to learn about Exposure, Stops, Speed, Differential focus, Rule of thirds, Composition, Lighting?
Did Cartier Bresson's 'decisive moment' mean every moment from every angle was equally valid?
Or are we building the best archive that any future historians could wish for?
Or could it all be wiped when cloud computing has to be de-cluttered sometime in the future?
The vast technical advances in digital photography and manipulation means most photos, whether taken by phones or cameras, will produce an acceptable image.

I suppose my real question is, does an 'acceptable image' become the end in itself, or does the vast proliferation of good quality cameras and phones lead to more people becoming dissatisfied with 'acceptable images' and strive to make pictures?

Colin Payn
12/9/2017