Part 4

It was his room and it now had a ceiling across which reflections chased.  He lay back down, watching his huge belly push the blankets up and down with each  breath.  Gradually his breathing slowed, which is more than could be said for his tumbling thoughts.   The time before.  That was something he had not thought much about in an age.  In fact he did not think about it at all, not on purpose.  Sometimes it was there, at the edge of his mind, but he pushed it away before it could take hold and interfere with memories and uncomfortable questions.  After all, what did it have to do with the way things are now?  

As he thought this, he felt its presence far too close, like a howling dark vacuum beyond the edge of his life, from which he had been moving away for as long as he could remember.  He was vaguely aware that somehow, sometime, he had mentally reset the Beginning to much later than it really had been.  But he’d had to, hadn’t he?  And things worked so well now: why go back and start fiddling with things?  As he pushed the disturbance away, he was  gratified to see the mound before him rising and falling more gently, more slowly, as his vital signs returned to normal.  Just in time for the clock to start striking twelve again...

His eyes snapped to the ceiling but the ceiling stayed exactly where it was.  He waited.  On the periphery of his hearing there was a sound: voices, distant, tinny, jumbling together, and lots of them.  Like a crowd of people stuck in a huge bucket at the bottom of a well.  But getting louder, nearer.  He sat up and looked around.  The sound seemed to be coming from the walk-in cupboard opposite the end of his bed, which had so recently been a forest floor.  At this moment it was reassuringly a vertical cupboard.

 He heaved himself out of bed again, took his coat from where it had replaced itself on the bedpost (no blood stains), in case there was more snow involved, and walked to the doors.  For a moment he leaned close and listened to the sounds from within; definitely voices, lots of people, echoing round.  Grasping the handles, he took a deep breath and swung the doors open.  Trees again.  In the cupboard.  And smoke, emerging in puffs from somewhere towards the back.  He touched the trees.

“ Plastic?  Plastic...Christmas trees, in my cupboard?” he asked  himself.

“This way!”  A man’s voice, definitely British of some sort this time.   It came from further in, roughly from where more puffs of smoke were emerging.  There was only one way to get this over with, so Nick pushed through the scratchy trees, following the ascending clouds which, as he walked through their remains, he recognised  as pipe-smoke.  There was light ahead and then he finally stepped out from the fringe of the ‘woods’.

It was a shopping centre, a big one.  The floor was polished honey-coloured stone tile, the ceiling arched above them to a glass roof dimly showing the onset of a dusky winter’s evening.  Some way ahead was a balcony overlooking the floors below, and receding into the distance down either side of this floor were the flattened conformity of commercial units. A large number of people wandered through the brightly lit hall, entering and leaving shops, brushing past vast and gaudy decorations, savouring the tinny music and responding with the tinny echoes of their myriad voices.  Over the sound-system, tinny Greg Lake sang that he believed in Father Christmas, with tinny cynicism.

“The present, I assume,” said Nick, having taken all this in.

“Oh yes”, said the voice,  “welcome to Christmas present.”  The tone of his voice suggested “and you can keep it,” with a hint of satisfaction, as though the mere sight of the Mall was the final point in a conclusive argument.

Nick turned back to see who his Guide was.  Standing against the rows of Christmas trees ranged before “Discount Christmas”, was someone who did not look much like he should be in Christmas Present at all. More like Christmas-Austerity-After-the-War.  He was dressed in a well-worn tweed jacket and unremarkable, formal trousers that had seen better days, with what looked like stout walking boots of the old kind, protruding from the bottoms.   A chunky tie bound the broad wings of his shirt collar.  All of this combined with his thinning hair and ruddy cheeks, made him look like a farmer out for a Sunday walk, and he certainly seemed out of place here.  He replaced the pipe for a moment and smoke swirled about his face, his twinkling, lively eyes shining through. Nick continued nervously,

“Right.  No sheep...or anything?”

“No, no, no.  No, Christmas here is nice and clean.  Clad in synthetic marble, treated with antiseptic, climate controlled, lights beautifully sequenced.  No.  You would never find blood or lambs here.”

“You sound disappointed. I can tell you it’s no bad thing after what I just saw.”

“No...”, said the Guide, the word laden with meaning though Nick was not sure of what.

They wandered towards the balcony, people weaving around them, even though they had no idea there were two extra figures crossing the walkway.

“Yes, no bad thing,” the Guide continued, “but do you ever think, especially with your many years of observing humanity, that people tend to swing the pendulum from one extreme to another?  Never seem to settle somewhere in the middle.”

“The pendulum can swing as far as it likes from killing cute farm animals in a wood, as far as I’m concerned.”

“A fair point.  But is this real?  Doesn’t it feel like a dose of ether?  Like one big anaesthetic?  To keep you from feeling...something?”

“Yes.  The wrong end of a big pointy knife somewhere painful.”

 They reached the balcony and leaned on the rail, the Guide replacing the pipe and puffing thoughtfully.  Presumably smoking was banned in here, but who would know?   

“And all that running about,” continued Nick, “trying to find something to keep back the darkness – that’s all gone.”

They watched the chaotic rush below:  the multicoloured frenzy of hundreds, possibly thousands,  of people heaving through the walkways; people clutching lists, tensely ticking off successes and underlining lamented failures; the hollow looks of disappointment because the last available one was sold an hour ago; the joyous pride and warmth of heart registering on the faces of those making their way to the car-park, arms overflowing with victory; the occasional elderly person, sat on one of the few, begrudgingly provided benches, watching sadly, alone, only here because it was warm and not their empty home where they knew, eventually, they must return.  Every one of the thronging mass desperate for that one bright thing to carry out into the darkness of the winter night.

“Maybe,” said the Guide and continued to puff, illegally.

“Oh look!” Nick’s heart warmed instantly. “It’s me!  I love it when they do that.”

The balcony formed a large oval, and framed the scene below where the Mall owners had sacrificed some shop-space to erect a large Christmas scene.  Plastic snow banks led up to Santa’s igloo. A large mechanical Polar Bear, swung its head back and forth, and here and there a penguin wearing a woolly hat moved its beak so as to sing a tinny rendition of “Winter Wonderland”.

“Gosh,” said the Guide bleakly, “singing penguins.”

“Yes...it can get annoying after a few years of that outside your window.  At least you can switch these off.  But look, you can’t beat that!”

The top of the igloo was missing so that watchers from above could see what the gaggles of queuing children could not:  Santa, in his igloo-grotto, sat upon his throne, smiling benignly at the child on-a-stool-not-on-Santa’s-knee-because-this-Complex-has-a-child-protection-policy.

“You can’t get much better than that!” sighed Nick.

“It doesn’t bother you that he’s pretending to be you?”

“No!  Goodness no!” and he gave a little jiggle to show how jolly he felt about it. “No, I’m only available one night a year while the kids are all unconscious.  This is a way for them to experience just a little of the uniqueness of the T-MOC.”

“Ah. And what would that be precisely?”

“Well, they meet their favourite person in the world, and receive a wonderful gift, and go away with joy in their hearts.”

“Yes, I suppose they do.  Except, it isn’t really you.  And the gift isn’t a gift,”  he pointed the stem of his pipe towards the ice-encrusted sign stuck jauntily in one of the snow banks.  It read Only £7.50. “And we both know they will have forgotten what the present is by the time they reach the window of Toys-R-Us.”

Nick turned in annoyance to the Guide, who remained passively observing the conveyor belt of children being helped, by elves, in at the front and out at the back of the Grotto.  Nick was used to this kind of fanatical criticism, but it had been a long night and on this night especially, he expected better treatment.

“Look, nothing is perfect in this world.  Why deny these kids a few minutes of happiness, a few minutes with someone who is like me, carrying me in his heart, bearing The T-MOC to these kids. It’ll wear off, I know that.  I’m not naive.  But out there is darkness and a real world they have to grow up in which is going to be hard, so they need something...more than life, ordinary life, offers them.”

“But that is precisely my point.  Do you not think they need something more?  And you are, if you will forgive me for saying so, a supernatural entity, someone who can be everywhere in a night, who has access to power of which mortals only dream.  Do you not think you could do something more than permit these children to settle for a fleeting moment of happiness? Something more for this world of tears?”

“No!  That’s not me!  I get out once a year, shed some happiness, and go home again.  It’s what I’m for.  Not global transformation.”

“I wasn’t necessarily thinking global, not initially anyway.  I was thinking more, one heart at a time.”

“I warm hearts for a few hours, I don’t change them.”

“No, but a man of your considerable ability, do you not think you could use your influence to point them somewhere they can?  Wouldn’t that be more significant than  two minutes in a plastic igloo with a fellow in a stick-on beard who’s desperate for the day to end so he can go home?”

“It’s Christmas Eve!  Why even say things like that!”

“Actually, it’s not Christmas Eve.  This is three weeks ago – there’s another twenty one days of this uniqueness, here under the constellations of  LEDs.  Three more weeks of fruitless searching for something.”

“What is your problem?!  So what if the uniqueness stretches into November, or October?”

“Ah, always Christmas but never winter.”

“And what’s wrong with a bloke in a stick-on beard bringing this uniqueness?”

“Nothing at all.  You misunderstand me if you think I’m against all of this.  I’m just suggesting that it may need something more.  And it all depends on what you mean by unique.”  He pointed again with his pipe to a shop front on their floor, just a few yards to their left.   A hastily written sign proclaimed He’s Here!  There in the window itself, surrounded by polystyrene snow, was another Santa.

It produced a slightly odd sensation to see two of himself at close quarters but Nick did not regard this as a big issue, not really. “He’s just helping to spread it a little more.”

“As is he,” the pipe waved in the opposite direction.  Another Santa had pushed a handcart of toys before another large store.  He fiddled somewhere in cart’s depths and started a tinny recording of ‘Winter Wonderland’.

In the lane snow is glistening sang Frank. A veil of tears for the virgin birth, sang Greg, whose turn on the loop-track had come round again

“And that one,” the Guide waved another trail of smoke. A major department store, whose first floor emerged a little way further down, had now positioned elves at the door that were pretending to play plastic trumpets as Santa emerged triumphantly from within.  His beard was somewhat better than the man with the handcart, who turned his music up in the hope no one would notice.

Later on we’ll conspire, as we dream by the fire , sang Frank.  “‘Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn, and I saw him and through his disguise,” intoned Greg.

Nick was starting to feel dizzy and the competing noises of canned music and kids shouting, and the startling increase in clones of himself was making his legs feel weak.  And then a voice cut through:

“Oi!! I don’t recognise you!  You’re not licensed!”  Another Santa had emerged from  ‘Discount Christmas’ behind him.  He looked very much like a Discount Santa and had the attitude to go with it.  In the process of shouting he had also attracted the attention of the other Santas who were now making their ways toward him.

“They can see me!” cried Nick.  He turned in desperation to the Guide, but he had vanished and nothing remained of him except one small puff of smoke that drifted slowly up towards the glass-encased night sky.  A hand came down heavily on his shoulder – Discount Santa had reached him, and the others soon arrived.  A new jumble of angry not very-jolly voices joined the Mall.
“You’re not approved...where’s your licence?  Come here, on our patches...”  

A small crowd gathered to view proceedings, unaware that they were watching the Genuine Article being attacked by doppelgangers.  It made a nice change from watching competing parents punching each other outside the toy-shop.

The militant Santas swarmed around Nick and all he could see was red cloth and white fur swirling before him, their voices jumbling with Greg’s, The Christmas you get you deserve.  They were on top of him and he could feel himself falling as he struggled against the crimson tide and then finally succeeded in throwing off his blankets onto the bedroom floor.

He was up and sat on the edge of his bed in a moment.  All he could hear was the sound of his own blood pumping at speed.  Nothing else stirred in the darkness.

Part 3

They walked to the front of the crowd forming at the foot of the mound.  Nick relaxed again, and looked up at the entrance of the stable, at the two joyful, grey-haired men in long robes who stood at the doorway.  The people around the mound were murmuring reverently, too quietly to pick up much of what they were saying, but one word he heard several times and he was pretty sure he knew what it was: Yule.  One of the robed men beckoned and, slowly, some of those with animals climbed the gentle rise to the entrance of the building using their staffs for support.  Ha!  Getting the shepherds into position.  Nick elbowed his guide gently in the ribs, which seemed rather physical for a ghost, “You had me going there!  Well I might as well enjoy it, nothing like the T-MOC! When do the dancing puddings come on?”


The first man and sheep reached the threshold where the robed men stood.  They both looked up and smiled and, as they raised their arms to the sky, the crowd knelt.


“Devout lot,” said Nick, impressed.


“Oh yes,” the Guide replied, though he did not look as pleased about this as Nick had expected.  Nick turned back o the Stable in time to see the festival begin.  What he did not see was where the priests had been concealing  their long, jagged knives, which they then used to simultaneously sweep along the sheep’s throat from each side.  Nick took a step back, eyes wide, “Whoa!  What kind of nativity is this?!”  Blood fountained from the struggling sheep, as the men made their best effort to catch the hot redness in a wooden bowl.


“I told you,” said the Guide, “this is not a nativity.”


“But you said this is Christmas past!  I never saw a Christmas like this!”

 Further comment was cut short as one of the men produced a small bunch of twigs, dipped them in the bowl of blood which was held over the twitching, prone form of the ex-sheep, and sprinkled it over the temple doorway, and then flicked large drops out across the crowd.  Nick was too shocked to react and some landed on him.  It barely showed on the red of his suit, but the white fur trimming was dashed now with crimson.  Nick looked down with horror, and started back through the crowd to the fringe of the woods.  His Guide followed looking at the ground, his expression unreadable.  In the safety of the tree, Nick turned on him.

“You are supposed to be the ghost – OK not-ghost,” he corrected himself as  he saw the Guide’s expression, “of Christmas past.  That’s not Christmas past.  That’s not Christmas ever!  What are you doing?”

“You know, for the man who is supposed to be the epitome of the Season, you seem to know as much about Christmas as a donkey knows about playing the harp.  Do you not remember this time?  How it was?  Have you forgotten, has it faded?  Have you hidden it?  As the new decades slide into your soul, do the old ones gradually fall out the back?”

The Guide walked into the woods, to a place where the light shone brightly through the branches creating a pool of white on the frosted ground.  It was clean and pure, and the sounds of thrashing animals became distant

Nick continued, “My memory isn’t what it was, but I know a Christmas tableau when I see one, and that wasn’t it!  Sheep and shepherds, yes;  ‘Away in a Manger’, yes;  but not hey-ho and blood all over the shop!”

The Guide seemed to wince at the mention of ‘Away in a Manger’, but this swiftly passed and he gave Nick the explanation he needed. “This is Christmas past, Christmas before Christmas.  Christmas hasn’t happened yet.  It is yet to come.  But here, in the forests and villages of so called ‘civilisation’ they have their own ideas.  This is Mid-winter, Yule, or whatever you want to call it.  This is how it was in so many places before.”

“Oh, oh..yes.  Well....each to his own.  I mean, they look happy enough...” He was staring at the ground, and was completely unable to square his desperate attempt at Ttolerance with the trauma of the bloody scene.”

“You have forgotten, “ the Guide was nodding with certainty. “Oh, they looked cheerful.  Around the edges.  If you didn’t look at their eyes.  This isn’t your twenty-first century cleaned-up minority alternative religion.  They looked like that because they are desperate – for victory, for the snow to recede, for good harvests, for the evil that lurks in the woods  to be held back, for the dead to leave them alone.  So they bring what little they have and give it to the gods (and you should see what they bring in some places when they run out of sheep). Oh they may have a drink and a feast today.  But when the sun sinks, and the great darkness descends, and they remember winter has yet three months to blow, they will hope that the voices and the eyes in the mist will leave them be.”

“Well, that’s not nice.  But why show me this?  This is millennia ago – Christmas has come!  This...fear of the darkness, this...running about trying to keep out the emptiness, it’s gone!  Christmas has come, I’ve come,” he said proudly, patting his belly and giving a little extra jiggle bonus.

“Oh yes, you’ve come.  But what have you done?  Even in my time, there was fear – fear of the dark, fear of the goblins and elves in the woods – “

“Hey, some of my best friends are elves!”

“Not your green confections.  These were the shadows that waited in the woods.  And Christmas came.  And we didn’t need to throw things at the darkness, because it was defeated.  We didn’t hide in our man-made light to make us think there was hope,  because the Light had come.  We did not build walls of material goods to keep out the voices and the eyes in the mist. The Light had come and filled everything.”

“Oh I see!  I see where this is going,” Nick’s ire was rising at this snub, “You had to pull Back-to-the-Future to get in the usual cheap shot?  There are people all over the world who will wake on Christmas morning with joy, because it’s the best day of the year, because everything is light and warmth, because they will have nice stuff, because for twelve hours it will be OK.  Is that so bad?  Do you really begrudge them that?”

“No.  No, I don’t.”  He took a step nearer and looked him squarely in the eyes, “But is that all? Was it really the lights and the red clothes and the pretty parcels that stopped all that?” He pointed again to the wooden building in the distance.  “Is that all you can do?  Is that really all you’re for?”

“All? All?!  I bust my gut travelling the entire world in twenty four hours, and you ask is that all?!”

Nick turned in order to march off in righteous indignation.  Sadly he had not noticed how he had backed up close to the tree.  There was an almighty thwack and he reeled backwards and hit the ground hard and sat up in bed.

He was panting.  He was sweating.

Quick Review: Technopoly

Not as brilliant as Amusing Ourselves to Death but still a provocative wake-up call for Western society.  Postman's contention is that our civilisation has moved through several stages: from being tool-users (where our technology assisted us in our purpose as humans) to technopoly, when we start being shaped by and submissive to it.  Technology here inevitably includes TV, computers, phones etc - but also, exam grades, time and motion studies, and statistics.

It's not hard to see his point (it's assumed these days that some homework will be done using the internet - but a recent piece of homework required a biography of a 'celebrity'.  Celebrity details being ephemeral and fleeting, this practically demanded use of the internet;  indeed left me wondering if it was 'celebrity', rather than someone who had done something useful, because it fits what children are generally prepared to do: use the internet.  In other words: was the homework chosen to facilitate the technology more than the child's education?).  The mobile phone (still a distant idea when this book was published) is a blindingly obvious example.

Postman's point, as always, is not to turn one's back on technology, but to evaluate it and return it to the status of tool.  The terrifying thought, that is manifestly true, is that technology has altered our worldview, our thought processes, what we deem to be important - and we never really noticed it happening.  His cry is to resist the trivialisation of the past that technopoly brings, regain context and analysis and resist the surrender.

Part 2

He looked at the door.  Nothing.  The window:  also nothing.  No noise.  For the umpteenth time that night, he restarted normal breathing, lay back and looked at the ceiling.  Which wasn’t there.  What was there was dawn, breaking over a forest of pine trees gently dusted with frost.  His world shifted ninety degrees, as his prone position became  vertical, and the bedroom wall, with its walk-in cupboard, became now the horizontal axis of the world. Mind you, wall and cupboard were no longer visible beneath him, but rather a lot of nature instead.  The bed covers were gone, and he found himself stepping, not into the cupboard, but onto frosty ground.  He turned, but was already pretty sure of what was behind him:  more trees, no bed.  He gave a sigh.  It wasn’t as though he were a stranger to strange things – anyone with a reindeer which can hit 25,000mph without combusting  has seen a thing or two.  But this was magic out of his control, not at his beck and call which was the way he preferred life.  Plus it was on this most inconvenient of nights.  Most disturbingly, if this followed the traditional route, he was about to be confronted with something from his-

“Past!  Correct!” said an accented and abrupt  voice.

Twenty paces away at the edge of the nearest rank of pines stood a man swathed in dark robes with a floppy black beret affair on his head.  He was a little on the plump side, with slightly hooded eyes and an unshaven and...well, a bit of a knobbly face really, if Nick were honest.

“Are you...” Nick began, took a deep breath to cover his unease, and started again. “Are you the, ahem, Ghost of Christmas Past?”

“I don’t do ghosts.” Abrupt and forceful seemed to be his style.  “But this is the past.  Come on.” He turned on his heal and walked into the woods.  His accent was middle Europe somewhere, Germanic perhaps.

“Where are we?  When are we?”

“I have no idea what it’s called now.  It was Saxony once. Or later, rather.  Things change.”

They were crunching through the woods at a good pace, over frosted needles, the light staying bright and crisp even through the layers of branches.

“It’s very...Chrismassy here,” said Nick, hopefully.

“This is Christmas past.  You’re here to see the True Meaning Of Christmas, what it is when all the fripperies are removed”.

“Oh! Like I haven’t heard that before.”  Cynicism and the weariness of the season got the better of any fear. “That’s all I ever hear, why bring me here to hear it again?”  Frosty fronds were poking his face and leaving sparkles in his beard, none of which helped his mood.  “Hang on, it’s not one of those confounded school nativities, is it?  Done outdoors for realism and atmosphere?”  He waved his hands and wriggled his fingers dramatically as he stomped along, warming to his theme. “Same thing every year – half an hour of Christmas-is-nearly-here, dancing snowflakes, crackers singing about presents and damn stupid reindeer falling down chimneys.  Then ‘Ooh, but what’s the T-MOC?’ And wham! Suddenly we’ve time-travelled to Bethlehem via some idiot magic fairy, and “Ooh a kid in a trough, now we know the T-MOC! It’s not about presents after all! Now we can gorge ourselves on cholesterol and empty the industrial output of the Far East into our loungeswith a clear conscience!” And then back as quick as a flash to the dancing puddings.”

The man stopped, turned and fixed Nick with piercing eyes.  “I like nativities.” This was delivered as a statement of fact universally to be accepted, not a preference. “And no we are not visiting a nativity”.  He turned and continued walking.  Nick followed, more subdued. He knew he could obliterate this man with one well-aimed belly-flop, but instinct warned this would be a Bad Idea.  

Soon his attention was distracted from his mixed feelings of righteous indignation and impending doom. Through the trees he caught sight of some kind of building.  As they drew nearer it became apparent that a clearing had been formed in the woods, and on a small rise, a wooden structure had been erected.  Rough hewn wood formed a building big enough to provide stabling for maybe six of his own reindeer.  As they neared the fringe of the clearing it became apparent no reindeer were involved, but there were animals.

A crowd of people were forming – ordinary peasants by the look, but here and there someone grander. That is to say their robes were not so ragged, and the glint of gold adornment could be seen.  Nick was unsure on specifics, but he knew this Past was a long way back; he couldn’t remember seeing people quite like this, although his memory was patchier these days.   None of the people seemed to be able to see Nick or the Guide, but this was hardly unexpected under the circumstances.  A handful were bringing animals with them, a few sheep and goats, a pig over there, and maybe that was a donkey coming through the trees.  A wooden building, people gathering with a look of happiness (well some of them), sheep?  Nick knew what this was;  apparently spectral Guides were not compelled to be entirely honest.

Dalrymple: bad reasoning for making it legal

It is of course true, but only trivially so, that the present illegality of drugs is the cause of he criminality surrounding their distribution.  Likewise, it is the illegality of stealing cars that creates car thieves.  In fact the ultimate cause of all criminality is law.  As far as I am aware, no one has ever suggested that the law should therefore be abandoned.  Moreover, the impossibility of winning the "war" against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should be abandoned.

Our Culture... p225

A Christmas Story, part 1

A year ago I wrote a short story in great haste, and really enjoyed the experience.  I've tidied it up a little bit since them, and will now inflict (in several episodes) it on the world (all 3 of you) for nostalgia's sake...


Nick's Carol

Nick sat on the edge of the bed, in the semi-darkness of his own special room.  The cushioning movement of the mattress was inviting but the creaking and sagging under his considerable weight was alarming, so he sat very still for a moment and just sighed.  This time of year he slept alone, and in all honesty on this particular night he was quite relieved at not having to talk.  He just wanted sleep, now and badly, and he could only afford a few hours before starting work again.

It was tricky pushing off first one boot and then the other using only his feet, but there was no way he was going to risk bending down, for both his sake and the bed’s.  He had hung his coat on the bedpost, but was there any point in taking anything else off?  Not really: he would hardly be asleep long enough, and he’d be wearing these trousers for the next forty eight hours anyway, so a few hours in bed would make little difference.  They’d be fine, he thought, as he pivoted round, raised his legs onto the bed and flopped backwards.  The bed made a sound suggesting that it had been holding its breath at the sight of the approaching mass but was now having its last breath squeezed out,  to the accompaniment of someone cutting taut piano wires.  Nick lay fearfully still for a moment, but the bed, the floor, gravity and Newton, all seemed to be holding a truce, so he relaxed, staring dreamily at the shifting shadows above him.  Outside, the moonlight was sparkling on the ice, and inside the ceiling looked like a monochrome reflection of a babbling stream.  He watched the shimmering light, moving his eyes across the ceiling and down the wall, until the strobing disappeared behind the dark hillock of his own belly.  He gave it a quick jiggle, just to make sure he could, and shut his eyes.  A thirty-six hour shift in the workshop had taken its toll and although his eyes ached with the strain, and the noise of the nightshift just reached the edges of his perception, he was soon asleep.

And then he was awake. Suddenly, and he didn’t know why.  A noise, somewhere, or a song or maybe a word.  Something...

There it was again!  But no song; instead a shuffling, a dragging, and with it a tinkling, a clanking, somewhere in the building.  It was drawing closer, along the corridor towards his door.  No one should be out there at this time of night, not on this night!  Nick’s sleepy mind was back online.  The proximity of the worrying sounds suggested that whatever produced them was now merely a few steps from his room. Where was security?  The Gate-Elves knew no one was allowed anywhere near this corridor, let alone his door.  But it transpired that the door was irrelevant, as first a hand, followed by its arm, a torso, and then the whole figure of a man passed through as though nothing physical stood in its way.  Given the relative transparency of the form now stood before him, eyes shining in the night, it appeared to be the man and not the door that had a loose relationship with physics.  Nick’s hand, which had been on its way towards the panic-button under his pillow (there had been time when ‘fans’ had come a little too close for comfort) slipped away as, at a subconscious level, he realised two things:

First, Security was probably useless in dealing with a man that can walk through walls.

Second, he recognised the figure before him.

By now, Nick was upright on the edge of his tortured bed, staring at the unnerving form before him – through whom he could still just make out the panelling of the door.  Although the details were necessarily hazy, he registered the long, brown, worn robe; the sandals protruding from its ragged hem; the balding dome, with incongruously well-kempt hair over the ears, flowing seamlessly into a long, grey, beard. Hanging low on his chest was a simple cross of grey metal, and in his left hand a small, bulging hessian sack, the source of the tinkling and clanking.

“Oh, really?” said Nick, fear momentarily suppressed by recognition and the long-practised habit of keeping the upper hand when dealing with trouble.  “The bag and everything?”

The spectre remained impassive, but his mouth opened and instead of the dry, dusty and distant voice Nick had been expecting (he’d read plenty of books, he knew how this ought to go) there came the same deep voice which Nick remembered and had comforted so many in years gone by.  Tonight, not so much.

“Are you really in any position to criticise the exploitation of the symbolism of legend?”

Uh oh, he could see which way this was going.

“Don’t start on me. We went through this over 1500 years ago.  It’s not going to change anything tonight.”

“It doesn’t even trouble you that I have returned from Beyond to visit you?”

“I live at the North Pole without freezing, in an invisible citadel, surrounded by magic elves and singing penguins.  Exactly how disoriented were you expecting me to be?”  This was all essentially true, but also masked a deep sense of unease that threatened to spill over into anxiety that something fundamental to his life was coming under threat.  “It’s hardly original, is it Nicholas?”, he continued in a tone that was meant to sound relaxed yet picky, “And where’s your bit of cloth to keep your jaw shut?  You missed it.”

“The trappings of death are unnecessary where I have come from.”  For a moment the gauzy shape held a rich glow, then faded.  This troubled Nick more than the previous few minutes.

Nicholas continued, “I know that the way things have developed were often beyond your control. But you have such resources, such power, such opportunity – and what do you do with it?  You’ve lost your way. You have hidden...you have forgotten.”

“Oh I see, we’re going to have some lessons in the T-MOC, like I haven’t heard them a thousand times before.”

“I’m not sure you would recognise the T-MOC anymore, not if it bit you.” Nicholas, paused and held Nick in his gaze, as if he were considering whether what he had to say next was too painful to verbalise.  “You will be visited tonight by three Guides...”

“You have got to be joking – “

“Three visitors, and they will deal with you.  Watch for the first at midnight.”

Nick opened his eyes.  He was lying in bed.  The ceiling was flickering as usual.  He looked at the door – no one there.   He realised he’d been holding his breath for some time, exhaled quietly, and started breathing regularly; the bed joined in on percussion.   Why tonight of all nights, on Eve’s Eve, would he dream of someone he hadn’t seen in centuries, dead and buried a hundred generations ago?  Well, when he said ‘dead’...technically anyway, to all intents and purposes.  He was part of the past, not the present, in more ways than one.  He had no right turning up in his dreams, not tonight.  Him, with his dogmatic commitment to ethereal hopes, to living forever, now fifteen hundred years six-feet under, dead, dead as a doorna-  no, don’t say that.  And the bag of gold, what was that about?   No academic believed the coins and chimney stuff.

Overwork and too much adrenalin.  Penguin coffee.  That was the problem.

A bell began to strike midnight.  Nick went rigid, eyes staring at the ceiling.  It was not simply that the dream gave the bell an ominous sound - he didn’t own a clock.  Clocks were a pretty vague concept in a place where the only regular event was annual;  the nearest was a quarter of a mile away, and it didn’t have a bell. It had a big flower (in the centre of a dial surrounded by animated carvings of gnomes) the petals of which unfolded once a month, when a clockwork fairy popped out and said “PoopPoop! It’s February!” or whatever.  There was no other clock.

But the bell of the clock that wasn’t there continued to toll.  Nine...ten...eleven...twelve...

Dalrymple: freedom

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act  upon one's whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexity of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved.  And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow.  No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive; a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behaviour are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticise received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

Our Culture... p224.

Dalrymple: art is more

"It has always been the job of artists," writes Norman Rosenthal in his grossly disingenuous essay...it would be difficult to formulate  a less truthful, more wilfully distorted summary of art history, of which a small part - and by no means the most glorious - is mistaken for the whole, that the unjustifiable may be justified.

"Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos," Rosenthal continues, in prescriptive mood.  He admits no other purpose of art: to break taboos is thus not a possible function of art but its only function.  Small wonder, then, that if all art is the breaking of taboos, all breaking of taboos soon comes to be regarded as art.

Of course he doesn't really mean what he says;  but then for intellectuals like him, words are to express propositions or truth but to distinguish the writer socially from the common heard, too artistically unenlightened and unsophisticated to advocate the abandonment of all restraint and standards...

...a taboo exists only if it is a taboo for everyone: and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.

...when respect, hatred, love, loathing, and contempt all call forth the same artistic product, then our sensibility, our power of discrimination, has been eroded out of existence.

Our Culture..., p146-8

Paul Tripp - repentance

...I have often been struck with the reality that the man sitting in front of me lacked accurate knowledge of himself. And you can't grieve what you don't see, you can't confess what you haven't grieved, and you can't repent of what you haven't confessed.

Paul Tripp