Books: why I like them, why I'd miss them

The smell of old books is one of the most evocative I know. I'd miss that. I'd miss second hand book shops with vertiginously steep staircases and mysterious damp patches, where the shelves stretch up into the darkness and the only way to reach them is to use the ricketty old step ladder with a sign saying 'not for customer use' which makes you ache to know what they're hiding up there. Shops where it is acceptable to browse for hours, purchase huge quantities and feel virtuous. And, at the till, over the owner's shoulder you can see rooms, inaccessible to the public, which contain as many books again or more.

Deepak Chopra

I am greatly enjoying Deepak Chopra's daily words of wisdom. He has quite a talent. He doesn't just talk bollocks: listening to him actually feels as if he is gently, but insistently, trying to push a bollock into your ear.

That is all.

Dark Room

There are moments in Steve Mosby's "Dark Room" where the tension becomes almost unbearable, but even in its quieter passages - in some cases quietly beautiful and beautifully touching - you feel uneasy. Something just beneath the surface, just out of sight, something locked away in the dark room is restless and turning in the blood warm darkness.

Someone like you

"I heard that your settled down that you found a girl and you're married now"

So begins the song that has seared itself into my mind. A dark drama without resolution. That opening line promises darkness and beauty. That voice! It speaks of planning and waiting, a-biding of time in tear stained isolation, that there would be more later to destroy, that the crime would be greater, the revenge sweeter, the prize dearer.

She has pictured this scene in her head a thousand times, slowly breaking down all the sane defenses a person would set up against themselves acting in this way. She is there on the door step, perhaps unsteady on her feet, drunk, beyond drunk in the eerie soberness the other side. She has rehearsed this moment in her head a thousand times. The words that come out are slurred and vicious, but not in her head. In her head the voice is perfect.

It is perfect, wrenched from the depths of her soul, edged with sorrow. A barely constrained howl. She wants to accuse him, convict him with his own happiness, sentence him to the same infinite sorrow. In the next line she nearly loses it, the reality bubbles to the surface, almost breaks through

"I heard that your dreams came true."

The sing-song "woo" of true, the eyes roll, she can't resist the epic bitchy suggestiveness of:

"I guess she gave you things I didn't give to you"

But she's over that, soaring in some airy space free from all baggage. She sees as clearly as the far-sighted hawk. And what we see clearly we are duty bound to report. Dragging up unfathomable energy she shows that she's past that, she has risen above it. They're just old friends now, she chides:

"Old friend why are you so shy. Ain't like you to hold back, or hide from the light."

This situation is utterly normal. The neighbours lights are coming on, curtains are twitching.

"I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited, but I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it"

Social nicety slides in one line back into the sickening lurching darkness underneath. The undertow that sucks the unwary summer swimmer far out to sea where the storms have broken the sky. Then...

"I'd hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over."

As if anything else could be true. As if this could be over. You see, he made a promise and promises are old magic.

"Never mind how I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you two
Don't forget me I begged. I'll remember, you said
Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead x2"

That final couplet, resonates. It is almost Shakespearean in its ambition, but there is a threat there too. It hurts. It hurt me and now I am here, in the night, when the innocents sleep and dream untroubled dreams. Before one can digest that though, another mood change from cold airless heights to honey-soaked nostalgia.

"You know how the time flies only yesterday was the time of our lives.
We were born and raised in a summer haze bound by the surprise of our glory days."

How they glowed, burned, blazed in the sun of that long summer. Those brief hours and weeks. The pollen heavy air, heady with young love, when eternity can start in an afternoon and bear it out even to the edge of doom.

Doom, where we find ourselves now.

"I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited but I couldn't stay away, I couldn't fight it
I had hoped you'd see my face and that you'd be reminded that for me, it isn't over."

"Never mind how I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you two
Dont forget me I begged, I'll remember you said.
Sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead x2"

The second time it is like a mantra, the force is unstoppable. The voice at full bore like the ocean boiling annihilating light of a supernova. Then deftly brought back to earth and earthly concerns, taste.

"Nothing compares, no worries or cares
Regrets or mistakes they're memories made
Who would have known how bitter sweet this would taste"

How has she found sweetness in this? Why is the voice doubled up on that line? We are coming back to reality. In this moment she truly is magnificent.

She's nearly done, the masterpiece is nearly complete. The wild magic at an end. We are left with a reprise of the chorus, but there's one crucial change. One minute detail, that would surely chill the bones of any man who heard it.

"I wish nothing but the best for you-ooo"

Before it was "you two" but this time, this last crucial time there is no two. There's just him, alone in the dark on the doorstep. The silence in the house behind him is too complete.

The sirens in the distance sound.

Silence.

It is written

You had to pay for days like these. The clear air, the quiet and the pure summer sun didn't come cheap. Doug had a lot of money. So much in fact that he could afford the luxury of growing his own strawberries. Only the birdsong wasn't real, but there are some things that money can't buy.

The trap

Once upon a time there was a hunter who made his living hunting animals and selling their skins. He had a coat, which he was very proud of that was made from the furs of all the animals he had hunted. The great coat kept him warm in the winter when the snow covered the forest.

One year, the winter was particularly cruel and, at the start of spring, snow still overlaid the country like a shroud. The hunter’s traps were always empty and he found that he had to venture further and further out into the old forest where the trees tangled overhead and it was always as dark as night beneath them.

The cost

The car clung to the road like the desperation of love. On the corners it went as close as you could. Straights pulled it forwards with a hungry come on. On a night like this I could see every head lamp for a hundred miles. It was just the road and me and the night.

We ducked down into a hollow where a stream overran the road after summer storms. I braked hard in the corner at the bottom and my back tyres kicked up puffs of stream-bed dust as I screamed away. Bugs danced in the head lights like stars swarming out of infinity. I was moving at warp speed. From time to time I had to squirt the windshield and let the wipers swipe away the mashed bodies of insects.

Down a long straight the gradient let me reach an even ton. I saw the bug zoom out of the night like a tossed stone. It’s arc smashed it against the window - a juicy crack and its juices quivered in pulsing veins as the slipstream dragged it up the windscreen.

Grasp

My fist closes on the eye’s horizon
And comes back empty
What we see is always out of reach
A blink capturing no more
Than a moment’s darkness

24 – You’re at confession, so confess the unspeakable.

What does it mean to confess? Is a confession to tell that which no other knows? If so, then for those who live alone, to tell of most things is a confession. The lonely live their quiet private lives behind the windows and walls, separated from the rest of the world. Untold hours can pass in the hissing silences, alone with their actions and thoughts. They walk the streets like ghosts, peering into the public lives of others as into the warmth of a family home from the dark infinify of night. Unseen, seeing, separate and separated.

So the unspeakable is that feeling that cannot be shared because it is destroyed by the act of sharing. To articulate loneliness is to have faith that you are not alone.

Why Tetris is like climbing and the Zen art of playing Modern Warfare 3

Years ago I had an argument with my brother about whether climbing was like playing Tetris. I argued that it was: he that it wasn't. Obviously it's not exactly like climbing, but as in climbing the slow accumulation of errors, of less effective choices means that you either have enough energy to make it to the top or you don't. In most other respects they are utterly different, but I would never have made that connection if I hadn't at times previous done a lot of climbing and played a lot of Tetris.

Free Will

The notion of free will sits right at the centre of everything we consider civilized and human, but it probably doesn't exist in the sense that it is commonly understood.

It's a wonderful life

Snow filtered down from the black sky. Four out of the six street lamps on the bridge were broken, but under the light of the fifth a stooped figure stared down into the dark water. A rush of wind blasted along the road and wrapped the raincoat tight around the figure, staggered him. Beneath, the dark waters shifted, the swift cold currents rolling over each other like so many tonnes of muscle turning. The wind snatched up his words, turned them on themselves in brisk eddies. Nights like this made a nonesense of all things human. From a distance all that could be heard from constant repitition was this


"If only I had never been."

I think I read something once

The smiling salesman with his empty briefcase came knocking at my door. Said, "I'm not selling anything, won't you just listen to me for a while." I said, "Why not and while you're at it, could you save my soul." He looked sceptical, but he came in anyway, stepped over the pile of unopened mail that made the door so hard to open and installed himself in the living room.

Bestselling author

"There's something wrong with him," said Janine. From where they were sitting, the sound of the typewriter could be faintly heard. There was a pile of paperbacks on the table between them, and on each one in letters larger than the title was the name "Colin Pendergast".

The wolf and the woman

ONCE UPON A TIME there was an old woman who lived in the forest all alone. One day a wolf came knocking at the door.

The tower and the telescope

ONCE UPON A TIME the king and queen had a daughter. The king was a jealous old fool and he kept his daughter in highest tower of the castle, far away above the world.

The bent penny

ONCE UPON A TIME there lived a man and woman who were as poor as the animals of the forest. They had fifteen children and there was never quite enought food to go around even though they spent all their time planting and tending and reaping and searching for food.

Two Kisses

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a beautiful princess who had everything she wanted but for one thing: love. Princes from neighbouring kingdoms and far off lands came to offer themselves for her hand in marriage, but not one of them pleased her. They saw only that she was the sole heir to the richest kingdom in all the known world. And some, true enough, saw that she was beautiful, but what she wanted was a man who would truly love her. She wanted a man who would love her if the world turned upside down and they woke one morning to find that they had become pig farmers.

Happily ever after

"Who is he talking to." said the nurse.

Nomad sands

The wind drives the sand northwards. Each year the desert moves a little further north, the shifting sea of dunes covering the fertile lands, killing it, choking it. But the sand that covers also reveals. What it shrouds there to lie in death it later unseals and the dry wind stirs again in dusty tombs.

The sand keeps no secrets forever, for if one knows how to listen one can hear then whispering in the night.

My adoptive parents found me in the desert half-choked by the sand, half buried. I have no idea from where I came; the sand holds all my secrets.

Annuity

The diner was dusty in the late afternoon light. The way the sun caught the mirrors you could see every grease spot and streak. Hank was behind the counter same as he had been for thirty years, give or take. The honey coloured light cut across him, bisecting his face into light and dark, etching each line deep. It made him look older and younger.

For a split second a shadow cut off the light then the bell above the door sounded and there was the squeal of wood on wood as the door eased back in its frame. Hank looked over. Even in sillhouette he could tell this fella was a stranger. The suit, the sleek leather case: no one round about dressed that way.

The Questionnaire

Steve Mosby, author and generally wonderful human being, put up his replies to a questionnaire here. The English version comes from the weird fiction review but it was originally written in French as a weird (apparently this word is doing more work than I ever expected from its slothful appearance) version of a much older questionnaire made famous by Proust's piquant replies. The first 60 or so entries in this blog are my replies to those questions. Each reply took exactly one minute as per the rules.

60 – Look at your watch. What time is it?

4pm

59 – Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

4pm

58 – Write the last line of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.

The lattice of words glowed briefly blue as the paper charred to nothing behind them - THE EVERGREENS - but it meant nothing to him.

58 – Do you like walking in graveyards or the woods by night?

I don't mind, but it isn't anything special.

For a few months, my walk home passed through one of the cities larger graveyards. It's a peaceful place, but then graveyards often are. During winter, it was usually dark when I came home. I can't say I liked those walks more than any others.

57 – Without cheating: where is that famous line from?

No idea and I don't even feel moved to find out.

56 – What does this famous line inspire in you: “And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.”?

Puzzlement - it ain't famous to me - followed by slight paranoia - what if it's famous for everyone else?

55 – What do you look at when you look away from this questionnaire?

Pretty much what I was looking at before I started it.

54 – What goes on in tunnels?

A story my brother told me. He was travelling around France in a beat up old estate car with his girlfriend. They came to an old bridge that crossed a deep valley. It was a big wide ancient looking thing that spanned a river. The narrow path that ran along the river had its own tunnel that ran through the great stone wall. There wasn't anything particular about it - maybe it was being out of the sun in the cold air - but his girlfriend wouldn't go through the tunnel. He said she was being silly, there wasn't anything to worry about. She said she'd meet him on the other side. There weren't more than fifty feet between the one door and the other, but the space inside opened up, more like a large room than a tunnel and pitch black after the brightness of the day. I doubt he walked any faster than normal, and he cheerily 'hulloed' the darkness. The walk didn't take more than thirty seconds. At the other end of the tunnel, just at the edge of the shadows and lined up in a neat row, were four dirty old pairs of shoes: a pair of men's boots and besides them, much smaller, three pairs of children's shoes.

I don't know what goes on in tunnels, but I don't like them.

I remember when we were kids on holiday in France, we stopped at a small town on the Loire. There wasn't much there for kids to see or do. The hotel backed onto a railway line criss-crossed with tangled wires. Trains clacked desultorily along the line from god knows where to god knows where. The corridors of the hotel were lit by bulbs on timer switches that would drop you into near perfect darkness without notice. The rooms were small and dull, filled with oppressive dark antique furniture. Only the river was interesting.

We watched the dark water of the river swirling hungrily round the pillar supports of the bridges. It flowed faster than I'd ever seen water flow. I was hypnotised by the thin slice of light that slithered across the surface like a skin, stopping me from seeing in. There was a line drawn on the bridge, with gradations marked off in metres suggesting that the river could crawl out of its bed, rising swiftly and without warning in the night.

Near the hotel, there was a pebble beach of sorts. The rocks were the size of easter eggs, worn smooth and trimmed with dried weed. Complex concrete breakwaters crumbled into scummy pools of stagnant water and rusting ironwork poked out of the surface like the legs of prehistoric insects capture in amber. A pipe wide enough for me walk down without crouching jutted from the river bank. We gazed down it to where it disappeared in the darkness. We shouted into it and threw pebbles to hear the steely reverberating skittering sound they made as they bounced off the walls. It swallowed everything we fed it. The pipe dribbled a thin slaver of water into its mossy beard and nothing would have compelled me to climb up into it and walk even a little way into that darkness.

Where I grew up, just over the cobbled ironwork bridge, between the river and canal was an abandoned factory. It was long overgrown when we first went there, the beneficiaries of the knowledge that passes from one generation of school children to the next more surely than any other mechanism yet devised by man. We dragged our BMX bikes over the token fence, past the warning signs, and cycled through the thin woodland that had come up between the empty buildings. There were two giant silos each the size of a modest terraced house. A tree had grown up next to one and you could step easily from the natural pliant solidity of one to the solid precariousness of the other. Standing on that exposed concrete expanse of roof that tilted gently one way was something I never got used to. From the roof you could peer down into the silo hoppers. Iron rungs sunk into the concrete formed a ladder that led down into the small circle of light at its base. The floor was littered with old torn clothes, cushions, a stained mattress, rubble, broken bottles. We told each other stories of what lived and breathed down there, quietly keeping just inside the shadows.

When you're a kid, you don't believe those things specifically - the tramp, the starving dog were never there - but I think you believe in the darkness from which they all come, that wasteland of folk psyche where children are baked in ovens, where the long haired man with the scissors waits to chop off the thumbs of naughty boys. Tunnels, I think are bridges to that place. Even if they are open at both ends, they pass through it.

And there were tunnels there at the abandoned factory, their entrances grown over with weeds. Sumps of stagnant water, low ceilinged, neither dark, nor long. But why else would they be there, if they didn't pass through another place? What would happen to the child foolish enough to try and make it through to the other side? We never found out. We'd stand at one end and look at the mottled sunlight pooling at the far side and shiver, pushing each other forward in the half hearted way of people joshing on the edge of a cliff.

53 – Do you like walking in the rain?

Sometimes yes, mostly no and I never know which until it happens.

I've walked many miles coccooned, warm and dry in my waterproofs while the rain came down ceaselessly. There's a joy in that.

I've walked miles soaked to the skin, wading across swollen rivers, searching for a particular outcrop of rock on a Scottish island. That was fun.

I've been caught out in summer downpours, miles from home, soaked to the bone, laughing uncontrollably.

I've stood under an American thunderstorm, where the air itself was like water, where purple lightning crawled across the sky and slammed into the ground close enough for me to feel the shockwave. And then the clouds started slowly to rotate.

52 – Do you like taxidermied animals?

Not as much as live ones.

I prefer them though, to the empty skins. Exeter museum had a collection of empty skins. They're worse somehow than the over-stuffed slightly endearing surprised look worn by so many taxidermied animals.

51 – What, in all likelihood, lies in the depths of Loch Ness?

Silt, rusting Irn-Bru cans, empty bottles, clag, detritus, fish. Small change. Fish hooks, lead weights, animal bones, shoes, a few boats. It's amazing what ends up at the bottom of a lake. Sufficient mystery to animate the idea of a monster.

50 – Which do you like better, antique magnifying glasses or bladed weapons?

Well, that's not a fair comparison. There are all sorts of different bladed weapons, but antique magnifying glasses are all the same.

49 – Which do you like better, globes or hourglasses?

Globes.

We had an inflatable globe at work. It was inflated by a gentleman who died very shortly afterwards. We said it was full of dead man's air. Then it disappeared, and no one knew where it had gone. I like to think that someone pinched it and took it home. I imagine it sitting there looking slightly deflated, so they pop open the little valve and start puffing into it. It's like the premise for a substandard Asian horror film.

48 – What is the weirdest book you’ve ever read?

The village with three corners.

47 – Would you liked to have lived in a vicarage?

It sounds cozy and pleasant. Would I have had to have been a vicar? I'm not sure I could do that. A certain amount of hopefulness and an ability to provide religious comfort is implied by the word vicar, and I'm not sure I was ever so constituted as to provide that in a way that was either hopeful or comforting. The tea and cake bits I could handle though. I'd beast that.

"Ah yes. Do come in. The kettles on, we were just talking about the possibility that a supernova might go off nearby and strip the biosphere down to bedrock."

"We've just taken a nice sponge cake out of the oven. Why don't you come in and join our fun discussion about the eventual heat death of the universe and the consequent irrelevance of all human endeavour. On the plus side it does put a quick handjob at a bus stop on a par with the greatest stories of romantic love."

"Welcome everyone. So, today's topic is squashing kittens with hammers: not objectively wrong."

"I'm so terribly sorry for your loss. It might help you to reflect on the quite literal meaninglessness of your husband's existence."

46 – What is the weirdest film you’ve ever owned?

See 40

45 – Why?

See 44

44 – Where?

Anywhere with a stable democracy. Preferably somewhere where I can speak the language, where my wife and I can find gainful employment and which has a decent healthcare system.

That actually narrows it down quite a bit: to zero countries.

43 – Have you considered living abroad?

Yes

42 – Can you see the future?

We all can, in a limited way. It's what helps us to navigate around the world, to achieve things, to keep on going. Everyone makes short term predictions all the time, but they seem unexceptional because everyone does it. Anyone who has caught a ball, or a frisbee has made a surprisingly complex and accurate prediction of its future course.

There's a species of spider with a brain the size of a pin head. It spots its prey, among the tanlged undergrowth, then it sits there and thinks. It memorises a path from itself, to its prey. Once it's done that, it sets off. It can wander round corkscrew plant stems, lose sight of its prey and still keep on going. It knows when it has chosen a bad path and can replan. It has a brain the size of a pin head. It sees the future.

41 – Would you like to live in an abandoned train station?

Not really. Train stations aren't designed to live in. They are machines for processing passengers. Big draughty spaces, seating that is designed to be uncomfortable. Combination locks on the doors.

It's the kind of place where we'd end up living squalidly in one room, like an animal's nest.

40 – What is the weirdest film you’ve ever seen?

Gozu. Akira. Tetsuo the body hammer. Stalker. Aphex Twin videos.

There's lots of them, all weird in their own ways. All weird things are unique and therefore incomparable. That is their joy.

39 – Have you seen something weird today?

An old lady walking her dog happened to pass through the spot that lay in a direct line projected from my eye through a defect in the window. It swallowed her right up.

38 – Would you like to live in a castle?

That might be fun, but it would be a bugger to clean and heat.

37 – What was the last weird book you read?

Sheesh, what is this obsession with weirdness?

If a book isn't extraordinary, singular and surprising, why read it? Bizarre, I can take or leave. Bizarreness for its own sake leaves me cold.

36 – Do you believe in the existence of secret societies?

Yes. It would be silly not to. People like being in secret societies. But only so they can tell people about it.

35 – Are you mad?

No, I'm a bit pissed off at the clanging and shouting going on outside my window, but that's all.

The linguistic imprecision surrounding the definitions and taxonomy of human behaviour particularly when it is judged abnormal is astonishing. Further astonishment can be gained by reflecting on the medieval toolbox we have been handed (and which many wield with glee) to help us talk about the orders and disorders of the mind.

34 – What is a madman?

Colloquially, someone who inhabits the behaviour spectrum somewhere between a bit silly and utterly reckless. Heedless of his own safety. Usually used to indicate someone more foolhardy than the speaker believes himself to be.

33 – If you became a magician, what would be the first thing you’d do?

That would depend on the scope of my powers.

32 – What do you see on the walls of the room where you are?

Paint, paintings, pictures. Kitshcy old adverts, antique post cards, a calendar. The ceilings are high, so the walls are large. If it wasn't for the pictures, and the furniture pushed up against them, gazing at one of these walls would be like looking at infinity.

31 – Do you believe in animals that don’t exist?

I believe in dinosaurs and sabre-tooth tigers. In giant anteaters and archaeopteryx. I believe in wooly mammoths and the dodo. In passenger pigeons and the tasmanian tiger.

30 – What does fog make you think of?

Here's a tricky question. When I think of an answer, am I really thinking about what fog makes me think of, or am I really thinking about what this question makes me think of?

Fog makes me think of lots of things. I like to trigger all the spooky reminiscences of those stories that feature fog - The Fog, The Mist, The Others, Springheel Jack, Poe and Lovecraft stories, of saucy Jack and Victorian London - as well as the stranger than fiction (amazing real tales of mystery) stories that I used to read when I was a kid.

I remember the time we drove up to the Royalty on the Chevin for bonfire night and the fog was so thick we had to lean out of the car window to yell out where the sides of the road were. Even the bonfire was swallowed up in it, an orange glow diffusely directionless, the muffled thump of fireworks.

I think of the time our car suddenly filled up with fog as it neared a pass in the Corsican mountains.

I think of seeing the ground hundreds of feet beneath me as the fog shifted while we climbed the ridge from Tryfan to Glyder Fach.

I think of the knee-deep mist on my first walk out to the H1 particle detector in Hamburg. I think of the slight stirring of wind that drew back the curtain like a magician to reveal a fieldful of rabbits.

I think of the sea smoke on the Baltic as warm air slipped over cold clear waters, of the seaweed that swayed in the shallows like the hair of the drowned. Of the glacial stillness of that morning and the uneven dragging tracks of some creature that had pulled itself heavily, laboriously from the waters to the woods.

Of Lakeland valleys full of fog, with peaks like islands.

Of the black forest where the fog flowed downhill between the trees like water.

Of the red Devon cliffs disappearing in a fog that rolled in off the sea, when the temperature dropped 10 degrees in a minute. Of the way it snaked up the rivers and burned off the land.

Of peasoup and pollution and cloud microphysics, of condensation nucleii and aerosol loading, of radiation fogs and boundary layers. Of bokken spectres and sun haloes.

Of the muffled step, the strange intimacy of it, the scattering of distances, of what it hides, of being hidden, of the weird singularity of objects in the fog, of the feeling that you are walking off the Earth

29 – What was your last dream?

I probably dreamed during the night, but I don't remember.

The last dream I remember having was deeply disordered and exhausting.

28 – Do you remember your dreams?

Some of them. There are dreams and dreams though aren't there. There are I have a dream dreams and I don't remember having any of those. There are my dream is dreams and although I remember having had those I no longer remember what they were. There are sleepy dream rapid eye movement dreams and I remember some of those. More at weekends and during the holidays when I can drowse in bed. And there are butterflies dreaming they are humans dreaming they are butterflies dreams and we really none of us know about those.

27 – Have you dreamed tonight?

This question is fucking with my mind. It seems somewhat ambivalent about which way the arrow of time is pointing. It seems to be spinning like a bum compass in a magnet factory.

People dream most nights. They don't always remember their dreams.

The answer is probably yes, I will have dreamed yesterday.

26 –Do you believe in redemption?

Of coupons.

25 –Without cheating: what is a “cabinet of curiosities”?

How would you cheat at making a cabinet of curiosities (that's not salt, it's flakes of crystal shaved from the Buddah's egg)?

We have coffee table books these days. And T-shirts with funny slogans on.

24 – You’re at confession, so confess the unspeakable.

After silence, the thing that comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Please hold while we connect your call.

Dum-dah-dah-dah-dada-dah-dah-dah-dada-dah-dah-dah-dada-dum

I once pushed Michael Fish into a stream. He got a foot and an inch of trouser wet.

23 – Have you ever been to confession?

No.

22 – Have you done something weird today or in the last few days?

Weird: bizarre, extraordinary, singular, surprising.

I poured boiling water onto myself, which was surprising. I guess that in this context, mundane domestic accidents don't count as weird.

I did wander round the Calais town halls, which had been closed up for New Year. The chap who let us in took pity on us because we'd turned up to see the sights of Calais on the one afternoon of the year when everything was closed.

With the lights off the place had a charmingly gothic gloom.

21 – What is the most terrifying sound you’ve ever heard – for example, “the night was like the cry of a wolf”?

I had a religious experience, a holy terror.

Let me explain.

I had been playing multiplayer Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for 15 straight hours. When you are immersed in the game, the constraints in the game become the laws of physics of the world you inhabit. They are inviolable. You come to know the sounds of each gun, the sonic boom of the barrett 50 cal, the purr of the UMP, the patter of footsteps, the click of a claymore trigger, the bass rumble of ordnance and air support. You build up certain expectations, the scream of the predator missiles early on in each game, the rhythmic chug of the chopper gunners and the hellish scream of the AC-130 require many more kills to unlock so they only appear late in the game. As you become more immersed in the world, you become acutely attuned to every aspect of this other world. The slightest thing can give you the edge over your opponents.

We were playing the Rundown map, which is set in a village in the countryside. One team starts up by a villa on a hill, the other by an abandoned petrol station. It always starts the same way. Both teams know roughly where the other team is. It always starts with snipers trading shots across the creek that splits the map. If you're not a sniper, you keep in cover and move to engage at close quarters looking to make it to the exposed B flag on the bridge before the other team. All familiar, almost preordained, like the opening moves of a chess game.

But not this time. This time, I'd barely made the bridge when I heard the scream of the AC130 105mm cannon. That was wrong, badly wrong. I checked the scoreboard - no one had anywhere near enough kills for an AC-130. Then it came again. It sent my mind into an unreasoning panic. Nothing could explain it. The laws of physics hadn't just been broken they'd been shattered. I died time and time again, in a rag doll splay of limbs as the unholy fire rained down from above accompanied by that unholy scream. Then the chug of the chopper gunner started up and that was terror.

Overwrought, I know.

And obviously 15 hours without a break is not good for you.

But, it gave me an inkling of what it might be like to actually witness a miracle, a divine intervention against the laws of physics, a violation of all expectations. Here is something you don't understand, something that you can't anticipate. You have no idea what will happen, because you no longer know what can happen. It pushes down past all rationalisations, gouges the veneer of civilization, bypasses the delicate convolutions of the forebrain and grabs hold of the reptile hindbrain with clawed hands. The most basic survival instincts are jammed full on. Blind panic, holy terror.

If god exists, I hope never to meet it.

20 – At this very moment, what sound(s) can you hear, apart from the computer?

The drone of traffic. I hear a car coming down the road from my left. It passes the window and then drives almost directly away from me. Over and over and over again. I can also hear builders putting up scaffolding, running a generator, the pump on the fridge. I'm also humming to myself. An Adele song I can't get out of my head.

There's a certain zen joy to attending very carefully to your senses. It's a good discipline, every now and then to really listen, or to really look at things. Back when I was drawing and painting a lot, I found that the longer I looked at a thing the more I saw. It didn't work if I just stared at a thing, I had to be drawing it. The act of drawing, of making a faithful representation of what the eye recorded - rather than what the brain saw - forced my mind out of its usual habits. Areas of light and shade on the paper, where more graphite, or less has been deposited, either was what I saw, or wasn't. If it wasn't the task was to make further marks, or erase them to bring reality and reproduction into closer harmony.

This is not an easy thing to begin doing. At first there is nothing on the paper, so the task is to make marks. This is not easy. There are a thousand things that suddenly you want to do. Pencils need sharpening, rubbers need cleaning, the light is not quite angled right, the seat is too hard.

Eventually, though, the excuses run out and there's nothing left to do but put down an outline, fill it in. The eye starts to flick back and fore, comparing, criticising. Sometimes the hand moves, sometimes it waits. The waiting is important. Sometimes it lasts whole minutes as the eye assesses and the blockades between eye and hand are slowly dismantled.

What mark should be made next?

Is this line too heavy, or too straight?

Hours pass. The body barely moves. The eye flicks back and fore. The marks you made hours before start to take on meaning. You put them down because that is what you saw. This pale area becomes the diffuse reflection of a white cup on the surface of another. A darker area of shading becomes the shadow of a leaf. The subtle relationships between objects, the faintest of echoes that all things have with one another are revealed.

Eventually, you come to a natural end. What you have is imperfect but can't be improved. The first marks you made were in error and couldn't later be fixed. Next time, maybe, you will attend more closely at the start, but you never do.

19 – What is a ghost?

Depends on the ghost. Sometimes memories can seem more real than the present world. Sometimes the mind projects on disparate stimuli a coherent interpretation that appears to be human, or some other intelligent agent. One can raise here, and for other questions in this list, all sorts of interesting psychological ruts that predispose the mind to see 'ghosts'.

We see faces everywhere (:0) because seeing and interpreting faces is really quite an important skill. We project patterns onto randomness, infer causes from consequences and are apt to attribute them to the actions of free-willed agents. We have a predisposition to infer malicious intent in the actions of others, particularly strangers. When left alone for lengthy periods most people, at some point get the feeling that they are not alone. At times of stress, even mild stress, the mind retreats to a more defensive, one might say primitive, position

The list goes on and on and one can dream up evolutionary explanations for all of these things. My guess is that ghosts are the false positives if primitive survival mechanisms trying to make sense of the world.

18 – Do you believe in ghosts?

I believe that people believe they have seen ghosts, but I think the existence of ghosts unlikely.

When I was at secondary school our English teacher disappeared shortly after the start of the school year. From the few lessons she managed to dole out to us it was clear that she intended to fill our heads with grammar so our tongues and pens didn't err into something that only looked or sounded like english. It was therefore a relief to see her replaced by a string of eccentric supply teachers. From Mrs P (who was widely believed - for reasons connected to her disconcertingly confessional style of teaching - to have had carnal knowledge of Sting and who cried on the day she left us) to the teacher whose name escapes me and who would, like the rest, have vanished into the memory hole were it not for two things: her uncanny American-accent rendition of Tom Sawyer, and second for the day that ghosts died.

I'm not sure even now that it was wholly proper for an English teacher to take it upon herself to crush in every member of her class the nascent belief in some of the superstitious yet picturesque adornments of life. And yet she did, with a gusto entirely appropriate to the occasion.

"Who here has seen a ghost?"

Hands went up.

"No you haven't" she said "They don't exist. Who thinks they've seen a ghost?" I note now, from my more mature and less forgiving perspective, that the hands that remained up belonged to those members of the class of a particular and fragile disposition: the hysterics. She pointed out one girl whose raised hand vibrated with the desperate need to tell her story.

"I was in the living room and I heard a baby crying, but there wasn't a baby in the house."

"It was a cat, miaowing. That can sound like a baby crying or a person talking. You." She trained the howitzer of rationality on the next gullible naif. Even then I could see that psychologically speaking this might not have been a good tactic. The cat/baby girl sat there with the religious look of someone who intends to continue believing something no matter what. You know the look: the person goes very still, the lips purse slightly as if dedicated to an absorbing task like balancing a large wicker basket on their head, which is, metaphorically, what they are doing . Balancing a whole hundredweight of belief on the tiny fulcrum of this one instance.

17 – Have you ever been lost?

Literally: I can't remember ever having been lost.
Metaphorically: I can't remember ever having been lost.

16 – Whom are you afraid of?

Kim Jong-Il. He's not dead is he. He's hunting. Me.

15 – What is the last weird film you’ve seen?

All films are weird really. One is presented with a series of still images, one after the other, so fast that the brain thinks they are moving. Take that Zeno.

The last two films I saw both count as weird with the caveat that weird is a little in the eye of the beholder: Breaking Dawn and Beowulf.

Breaking Dawn, which starts off as soporific teen-vamp romance - memorably summarised as one girl's hormonal choice between necrophilia and beastiality - morphs halfway through, hallucinating scenes from a much darker place. Kristen Stewart visibly and convincingly wastes away as an undead baby grows within her. She is temporarily revived by quarts of blood served up in a fast food soda carton and her complicated labour is simplified by her husband who injects vampire venom into her heart and then carves the baby out of her womb with a carving knife killing her in the process.

Beowulf offers us a Geat warrior who sounds like an east-end thug. Naked, obviously, he makes a monster shrink by punching it in the ear, shags its mother, thereby fathering a dragon who he then kills.

14 – What of?

Presumably this is a follow on from the previous question. But I shall treat it otherwise. As is my want.

What of?

Only this of, sir.

13 – Are you afraid?

Should I be?

12 – What would you want to see if you were blind?

What a curious question - what if we could select certain things to see and selectively edit out the things we dislike.

I want it all.

11 – What would you have “seen” had you been blind?

The same world, differently.

This is one of those feats of imagination questions. Personally, I prefer to try and think my way - with little reward or insight - into the sensory arena of a sheep, or bat, or whelk (imagine, for a moment, having a penis 50 times your body length).

The only thing I know for sure is that the world is out there, an objective thing from which we glean information, mostly confusing, mostly by getting things wrong, from our senses.

In one of our first electromagnetics lectures at university the lecturer drew out the whole electromagnetic spectrum. The aim was one of those consciousness raising things because the sliver of the spectrum to which are eyes is sensitive is really that - a sliver. On either side there are whole octaves of harmonics - to get all synaesthesiastic about it - to which we have no sense at all. Infra-red, microwaves, radiowaves, the terahertz waves they use to peek at your undergarments in airports. On the other side the ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays.

What they didn't tell us was the way that our senses lie to us. The world we perceive seems so obviously real and complete, so solid and vibrant and present that it came as an enormous and claustrophobic shock to read Kant and find that we are permanently swaddled in a cloying syrupy coccoon of our senses, forever insulated from the universe as it actually is. A constant rain of neutrinos sluices through our bodies as if they weren't there, thousands of them every second. The behaviour of the world at quantum scales is lethal to common sense. Nothing in a billion years of evolution has prepared us for it, whilst all the time making clever use of it weirdnesses. At high speeds, or in intense gravitational fields space itself is stretched and warped. Our most complete theories suggest 11, 15 or 120 dimensions of space, most furled tightly and quivering. Even our own consciousness when probed closely starts to decohere, falls to tatters like a pointellist painting seen up close, just another jerry-rigged evolutionary contraption to keep apes alive.

10 – What do cathedrals, churches, mosques, shrines, synagogues, and other religious monuments inspire in you?

Ted Hughes used to berate street preachers, telling them he didn't want religion, he wanted god. A mainline to the wellspring of the universe.

I feel that churches and shrines are misguided attempts to capture part of this energy, god-traps, always empty. Like trying to catch the sun with a mirror. The vast volumes of cathedrals, inspire nothing different than the vast volumes of aircraft hangers, or the strange giant-large corridors of the colossal American convention centres whose halls can swallow thousands. Whatever else was there in the cathedrals, if anything ever was, has fled, faded, been forgotten.

I've been in the halls of evangelical christians, seen the people enthused, infused (confused) by the holy spirit. But emptied, the halls are just halls. A place cannot hold on to that feeling.

Shrines are different.

And I'm not talking about the catholic roadside tat that spots the French roadside. I'm talking about the weird personal shrines that reflect a single person's attempt to come to terms with the world and the shocks of unhinging experience, the peeks behind the flapping curtain of the sky, the totems that anchor direct and often terrifying personal experience of god to a place and time on earth.

That almost sounds positive, but I find them deeply unsettling. The distinctive oddness of so many of them - a characteristic they share with outsider art - highlights the contingency of every single aspect of our society. People like to imagine that if we could run time through again what we'd get in the way of society and custom would be pretty much what we currently have, just a different roll of the dice. What these show is that when you roll the dice the dice turn into screaming inchoate tentacle and tooth monstrosities that eat your eyes.

It also makes me feel strangely happy that we have organised religion to channel these impulses in most people who experience them. A state of divinely inspired anarchy is scarcely worth contemplating and probably wouldn't last too long.

I also find more temporary expressions unnerving. One summer while bouldering in the fontainbleau forest we came across an... offering, I guess, of fruit in a clear, flat space between the rocks. There was something about it that unsettled me. The overripe, flyblown fruit was obviously unwholesome. The careful arrangement, the remote location, all seemed to radiate meaning like a lode of uranium, twisting the world around it.

9 – What were you looking at before starting this questionnaire?

A lot of different things. I'm multi-threading right now, maintaining a host of conflicting, usually argumentative personalities on a host of different internet forums, blogs and newsgroups. Current topics include: martial arts, empathy, Bear Grylls, energy legislation, ways to cook a tuna steak and, well, this. I was also reading Generation A and trying to work out whether Dougals Coupland's characters actually have characters, or simply alphabeticized lists of defects. They all sound the same. They all sound like Douglas Coupland. Betwixt these things I was changing the dressing on a beautiful set of burns.

8 – What do you think of the sky and stars by night?

See 7.

7 – Do you gaze at the sky and stars by night?

When else?

But yes! Yes, I do. Only, there's no sky at night. It's just a direction: up, outwards, away, towards everything that isn't the earth. What we see during the day is an illusion - light blue light scattered again and again till it falls into the eye.

Gazing out into the vast black emptiness of the universe, I find it hard to grasp the feeling. The familiar constellations are there zig-zagging hapazardly across the sky, accidents of perspective or hallucinations of mythologies long dead. By these the eye orients itself, finds it's dwelling a little too close to home. Like the camera that auto-focuses on the grimy bus window rather than the shimmering vista beyond it. Projecting the minds homely patterns onto chaos rather than allowing the raw stuff in, the surf on the breaking edge of the universe.

Refocus, unfocus, let eye and consciousness fade out to infinity, relax and take the long perspective.

Stars swim in and out of seeing as individual photons that have travelled unimaginably lonely distances collide with a scrap of retina the size of a postage stamp and there trigger the chemical cascades that turn the tiniest quanta of energy into the raw electric movements of thought.

Let them in, but let the mind touch gently on what we know. Not the myths and monsters, not the science fiction menageries and space opera fantasies, but what we know for sure when all the stories have been stripped away. All that we have learned just by looking outwards, by trusting to knowledge rather than surrendering to ignorance, by laying aside the stories that our grandparents told us, though we remember them fondly and taking up new stories that seem at first to have no place for us.

Every second, millions of invisible particles surge through your body, pass through the bulk of the earth, through molten core and crust as if it wasn't there. The pitch darkness is ateem, aswarm with fugitives from the solar furnaces, almost unconnected with the universe we see, but inseperable from it. Barely there by any measure, but real, present, ghostly.

Contemplate the awful distances between the stars, the almost emptiness that at the same time contains more than we can imagine. The giant stars far greater than our sun, that burn so much brighter and end their lives as supernovae. Bloated red giants, cool white dwarves. Stars that have consumed their nuclear fuels ages hence. Neutron stars that orbit one another at a hundred thousand miles an hour, so dense and spacetime-warping that a clock on the surface would run at half speed if it wouldn't be instantly crushed molecule-flat. Black holes so massive that they rip a hole in our understanding of the universe -  a million times the mass of our sun - so vast that you could cross their event horizon irrevocably without ever realising it. The titanic earth-boiling energies, the vasts of time that make pointed jokes of the cartoon abstraction of eternity, distances measured in billions of years, scales at which even the fabric of the universe is stretched from true.

I can get lost for hours gazing up and out, away, away.

6 – Do you believe in astrological predictions?

I believe that people make them and that they exist.

Some of them, I would go so far as to say, are trustworthy, offering that long sought peek into the future. Others are not. By what wisdom ought we to tell them apart. Might one be wise in finding solace in a pleasing fiction.

I believe in them because others do. Sometimes beliefs create something in the world that wasn't there before. Beliefs change the world so we ought to take them seriously. The less serious they seem to the outsider, the more dangerous they can be.

5 – Do you believe in meteorological predictions?

I believe that people make them and that they exist.

Some of them, I would go so far as to say, are trustworthy, offering that long sought peek into the future. Others are not. By what wisdom ought we to tell them apart. Might one be wise in finding solace in a pleasing fiction that Christmases will all be white, that summer holidays will be cloudless, still, dry. That crops will thrive beneath the benevolent sun and generous rains. That lightning and thunder will visit only those whom it delights, nor giant hail shatter anything but records. That floods, tornadoes, tempests will happen far away robbing us only of copper change in charity shop boxes or, if near, confined within the safe borders of the screen. That a warmer world will be universally a better one, if it ever happens.

4 – How do you explain this — or these — discrepancy(ies) in time?

Precise time keeping is not evolutionarily advantageous. Precise time keeping was dreamed up to guide ships loaded with goods, soldiers and small pox across the vast and trackless oceans to their precise and unexpecting targets. It carries off feats of extraordinary coincidence bringing men of common business together by cosmic chance in the office where their business can be concluded. It is by this that GPS satellites coordinate their intricate lattice dance and track your movements with forensic, obsessive care, steer cars, find the lost, disperse the mysterious fog of imprecision.

Other things are more important than being on time. We cannot appoint the time at which we meet with the horsemen of mundane existence: love, loss, boredom, pain, birth, death, disease. We can be neither late nor early giving to chance the habits of a plan.

3 – Look at your watch. What time is it?

I'm not wearing a watch. Right now I can't. I poured boiling water onto my own arm. The skin beneath where my watch would be is an angry welted red. I forgot how much it hurts to be burned. I can only remember what it felt like the last time, when it happens this time.

What does that say about us?

2 – Without looking at your watch: what time is it?

I can hear the church bells ringing with the midday persistence, that seems to insist a bit too strongly that churches still matter. That it is midday comes as a surprise to me - I thought vaguely in a far-off way that it was still mid-morning. Such are the joys of holidays and rising late.

As time goes on and a greater portion of my life by gradual accumulation has been turned over to work I find in moments like these, when the rest of the world is working and I am not, that I can gain a mysteriously deep satisfaction from reflecting on my own inactivity.

Deep it is, but alas also fleeting. The runaway feeling of wasted hours pulls me further from it. The vast cold relentless ebb of time. The unstoppable tsunami surge of it that mixes everything up, extinguishes all brief candle flames of satisfaction that gave not warmth, but the sustaining idea of warmth. Forced to cling to what we can for as long as we can before it is torn from us. Where every pause and moment of respite is some dark sucking eddy swirled with debris as the rest of the world tears past in a silent meaningless procession, headed by a telegraph pole, a car, a sign, empty boxes, a shoal of fruit, a jacket.

Without looking at my watch I know that it is too late, too early, too soon, gone already, the unalterable past, the unavoidable future, the mesmerising distracting glitter and panic of the present.

1 – Write the first sentence of a novel, short story, or book of the weird yet to be written.

When the three-minute warning sounds, when the sleek missiles are in the air connecting point A with point B in graceful looping arcs specified to quite unnecessary precision, when lovers cling together so that future lovers might marvel at their charcoal outline outliving them on some otherwise uninteresting wall, when all purposes and meanings have been terminated, my job - the job I have trained for years to enact with the calm and absolute authority appropriate to my rank - is to make sure that it all happens according to a plan and to make sure - in an annex to the plan not entirely official - that just one of those missiles lands with bullseye precision on the rotting remnants of a log cabin in the Scottish highlands.