Ink - Flash Fiction

Ink had become a rare commodity. As precious in value as pearls. With e-readers, the market wouldn't sustain for continued ink manufacture, while trees were being preserved through the lack of demand for paper. As alternatives, squid and octopi proved a short-term fill-in, but we'd hunted and fished them to extinction, just as we had with oysters.

E-reader titles were produced by computer programmes, Linguistic algorithms and rapid speed digital analysis of word and plot patterns in best sellers churned out the next big thing. Human authors were nearing the endangered status of the humble biro pen. Yet they still resisted, still sought to publish their writing wares. Samizdat made a comeback, mainly written in charcoal from barbecue briquettes. which made its publication rather seasonal in the Northern Hemisphere. If you were caught asking for barbecue stuff in winter, you could be arrested. Some authors shortcut the whole process and composed in their own blood and other bodily fluids, despite the disreputable echoes with certain performance art of the previous century. They wrote on toilet paper which tore easily beneath even their blunted nibs.

In time even toilet paper disappeared from circulation. Authors took to writing on stones and pebbles. returning to the prehistoric dawn of art. They took to the forests where they could forge their own supply of charcoal by burning wood. They decided to further reach back and commune with their ancient brethren, and took to caves. They cast stencils of the alphabet and then holding them against the rock to spell the words they were compounding, they chewed charcoal and breathed its fine powder over the stencil to form the text. Their very breath giving life to and preserving their art. Their expression. Samizdat was eclipsed for artefact and unlike the memory capacity of e-readers which demanded periodic purges, these books remained permanently in print.

Two Food Groups - Flash Fiction

I sliced a segment from the onion and placed it into the frying pan to test the temperature of the oil. On contact, the oil spat at me like a cat with claws drawn and raked my exposed skin. The flesh instantly bubbled up and I went to the sink to mollify it. When I returned to the frying pan after my involuntary ablutions, the onion was turning from caramelised brown to charred black. I was sorrowful that my neglect had engendered its own contusion spectrum of burn. I extinguished the gas and tried to scrape the segment with the spatula. It took some considerable effort to detach its melted glutinous tendrils and I stared at the ghostly black impression of where it had lain on the anodised steel. A sooty shroud intaglio imprinted on the skillet. 

In time my skin repaired and renewed itself smooth and pink once again. In its incipient stages, the blister had filled with the fluid detritus of the damaged skin and I panicked at the uncanny recreation of the trapped water beneath the oil droplets that had precipitated this calamity in the first place. However, the onion, which out of guilt at the abortive ruination of one of its members, I had kept in the fridge, never did regrow and renew itself, but merely shrivelled and discoloured. Through a bruised yellow, to a caramelised brown. I threw it away before it reached the black obsidian hue of immolation. 

*

As the logging industry drives the local fauna into further and further shrinking acreages of forest, so governmental legislation herded smokers into ever smaller zones. And while we were relatively unassailed and unsullied by fuming fugs in our places of work and leisure, the transition between the two arenas was choked and befogged by the concentrated tobacco plumes bookending both termini of any journey. Huddled in the doorways of offices and public houses, where once they occupied snug bar and hunkered in basement bunker nicotine yellow smoking rooms. 

But a new plague had broken upon the city as the technology moved on apace. The streets themselves were now vaporous with exhalations from portable mini-chimneys or urbanised sylvan pipes. Now while it’s true these were only harmless steam droplets emanating from vaping, they were from ersatz infusions drawn from the fruit food group and thus far from benign. So one is blithely perambulating along an arcadian avenue devoted to the atelier and the artist studio, when one is artificially pitched headlong into a synthetic orchard through the unhappy coincidence of walking in the wake of one respiring the scent of apples or cherries. Perhaps instead you are determinedly tromping the concrete pavement of the thoroughfare, composing in your mind the pitch to put across at an imminent sales meeting, when you are thrust into the factitious citric or olive grove through the effluential pestilential emission mimicking the action of car exhausts, as they too profane the air you locomote through. So now one of my intended set of destinations, that of restaurants and other eating places, is now tainted by the fact that my nostrils have already tasted the desert course before I have even sat down to the hors-d’oeuvres. 

Brexit - The Limits Of Democracy & Free Speech?

There are (at least) two sides to every argument. And that means there will always be adherents of both sides. How do you decide which is right, or at least the correct path to follow? Well science is usually a good way to go, we don't have all that many flat earthers around these days, though they do still exist. Same as those who believe as per the Old Testament that the Earth was created just a few millennia ago and in just seven days. Science suggests that there is actually a higher level of 'truth' and 'fact' and empirical evidence that ought to be able to be employed to convince hearts and minds. But not all issues are able to be proven by scientific fact. Slavery was (eventually) felt to be a morally reprehensible institution, but it still took the carnage of a civil war to see it abolished in the US, rather than Congressional voting. So, unfortunately, might is also a way of prevailing in argument.

Democracies have been pretty good at avoiding outcomes whereby questions are settled by force, (at least where internal issues are concerned, not so good where the decision is to go bomb another country). The nature of representational democracy being, in the main, the two sides debate, take a vote, the majority wins and the defeated accept the decision honourably. However, you might interject that the notion of honour is a class-based one, as tends to be the make up of most parliamentary memberships. You might also reasonably aver that those interest groups with the money to influence or buy professional lobbyists, also distort this notion of honourable and fair debate. But perhaps the notion of honourable acceptance of decisions is breaking down anyway.

The trend was perhaps symbolised by the statement during the Brexit referendum campaign by Leave campaigner Michael Gove MP when he said that the public have had enough of experts. He was tapping into an emotional seam; there are so many people feeling disenfranchised and economically lagging behind others, who felt that the status quo and all the old, established arguments had delivered nothing to them. Gove just gave them a mandate to dispense with belief and trust in experts, because experts hadn't got it right in their case and made their lives better. So science, statistics, economic forecasts, none of this is going to wash with them. Hence when the referendum comes along, it gets (perfectly understandably) hijacked as a means to express the disenfranchisement and misery swathes of people feel, and very little to do with the EU itself. The EU is swept up as the villain, hosting many other grievances which actually it bears minimal responsibility for causing: migrants, sovereignty, detached political elites, are historical and cyclical targets for blame, only here they are all pinned to the mast of the EU for causing them. 

This is not a UK/Brexit only phenomena. Climate change science is denied, especially in the US, with powerful pre-existing economic interests in the oil industry funding lobbying and advertising to blur the scientific narrative by blowing enough (hydrocarbon) smoke. Currently they have the ear of the President, which means they also have the support of his electorate who probably don't care all that much about the fate of the planet's future, they have more pressing economic and identity issues. So science is taking a hit. And the role of force to settle arguments rather than debate is on the rise, witness the 'Gilets Jaunes' taking to the streets in Paris, again a cohort of the populace who feel utterly disenfranchised by the ruling class and damn well want to let them know. And not politely either (again, a class division over what is 'proper', polite behaviour.  

You can make an argument about anything and you will find supporters taking to social media to air their particular side. Compromise seems impossible, while these days an honourable acceptance of defeat in debate is far less tolerated; you have your view, it's perfectly legitimate to hold such a view, therefore it must be recognised and legislated for, is now the prevailing assumption. Because this is no longer a debate about ideas, but has become heavily invested with emotion, with identity, people will not simply admit that they lost the argument. To do so is perceived as denying their existence, their identity and their rights. Democracy may just have hit its limits, because our societies are so divided between the two or more sides of any argument you care to raise.