Future Shock (by sarah)

A cold frosty morning with delineated skies of faded ice cream colours, we look out over Gloucester with it's historical buildings as they puncture and frame the ancient landscape around them. The air is misty cool and I feel sick at the sight of a frost covered sleeping bag hidden in a corner, the occupant is alive and I sigh in relief, the air tastes of ozone and fumes and rotting food until it is all over lain by the sugar-fat smell of the doughnut van cooking their first batch of the day.

The progress of time marches on, we seem to have been stuck for a long time, at least ten years we failed to roll with the waves of advancement, we barely noticed them.

Before that we thought we'd march singing and triumphant into a future of virtual reality and medical advancement and the healing of our societies and nature. We are 80's childs though Alaric was born in the 70's - just.

When the mysterious x-box was sent to us for Christmas a couple of years ago and we found we could do physical games with it, we knew the future had arrived and we had somehow missed it.

We think on these things, we park our car... we plug it in.

We have FUTURE SHOCK.

When we drive we can plug in and charge our books, my friend charges her cigs. My mum is in hospital but she is alive, alive because of amazing medical advancements made in the last twenty years, made in my lifetime. My dad is the same, a hundred years ago he would have died in his early 30's, he turns 70 this year. I am alive, one of my children is a c-section babe, we walk paste the homeless on the way to dance classes and I swollow the bile that rises. The future is being good to us but it is rather too threaded through with cyber-punk dystopian chords than I would like. Our eldest complains that people live in apartments with all they could want and swimming pools on balconies that over look slums.... how could they?

I frown how different from that are we?

But we do stuff she insists. Yes we do, we don't know what others do or do not do. The Future is full of mental and moral pit falls I never saw coming, like Brexit... like finding myself on the side of the haves and seeing what it would do to the have nots and despairing as I knew which way they would vote and why and neither side would listen, dipolling themselves further.

The divide is growing. But uneven.

Sometimes it overwhelms me, all the thinks to think about, all the interconnect facets of our time and world and society. The environment, housing conditions, health, respect for others, not becoming an oppressor when you have been repressed but not slipping in the victim mentality, stopping cruelty, allowing freedom. Sometimes I can't process it all and I have to ignore it to function and do anything and that maybe selfish but if I don't then we can't do anything. When overwhelmed we can not organise fundraises or gather supplies for food banks or try and remember to shop ethically when we can afford to do so.

Adaption is key and not being judged for buying primarny when there is no time or money but looking nice is an imperative and the way our society works yes you do need to sometimes look nice... like job interviews etc... I am not saying that is right, but it is a reality.

We are lucky, having had times of not being lucky we are acutely aware of the contrast and how fragile that can be. Yes we've safe guarded ourselves this time - as much as we can - because we can. But we are more determined than ever to make a good future - the future maybe here but that doesn't mean we can't improve it and more importantly it is not here for everybody.

So we change what we can where we can, sometimes the difference is so minute we can not even appreciate it and sometimes it is for many and sometimes it is just a packet of sani pads sent to the food bank or a conversations with someone.

Sometimes it is saving up money to try and pay for surgery privately for a parent and not getting there before the nhs sorts them out and then having a deposit and luck to get a new car on lease, a car that will help the environment and our long term spending as it is cheaper to run. Sometimes it is then giving the other car, the old polluting the air car, to your parents because they no longer have a mobility car because... austerity and the damage it causes especially to older folk who drastically go down hill if they can't get out and about, ending up in hospital costing the tax payers more money than their mobility allowance ever cost.

To miss-quote Terry Pratchett - we can't make everything better but we will make the little bit we can see and touch as bettererererrrrr as we can. Granny Weatherwax says it better in The Shepherd's Crown.

It took us ages to work out how to unplug the damn car so you know the future is never going to be plain sailing.

Coming up Trumps. (by sarah)

An inauguration of an argument nation
Security guards are stationed
Protecting Towers of Guilt
How long before first blood is spilt?
Highlighting Golden hair
A lapdog caught in it's very own snare
Showered and showered and gleam
But never clean
Because underage sluts are keen
To be queen with key to the plantation
Or so they say
They girls say...
No one cares what they say
No one cares
Everyone ware the new wares
The fashion accessories, dress and bow You can never bow too low
Sow the seeds of trepidation skies
Bombs flying high
Impact zones
Tweeting inanities from unsecured phones
Furry moth with micro dick
Is sick at it's new name
Humans? Are they all insane?
This ones... an orange ball bouncing
Flouncing to some anthem
But which Super Power is singing?
Who's conducting?
Who's leading?
Blonde fluff, golden stuff...
The tribble aint the trouble
No no that is piggy eyes
'Cos money buys
Apocalypse rise
And divides with fear and hate
Such bait awaits
Social media waits
Workers in the grave
Again, again
Broken dreams, smashed, who bleeds?
The people of no consequence
Shuffled off their coils
For not being faux Royals
Sitting up high
In thrones of...
An inauguration to split a nation
Remember the klu klux klan Think - His the MAN

Places I Forget Exist (by sarah)

Yesterday as we went to take Mary to a friends birthday, we pulled up to part in Gloucester but the bits around were we normally park where full so he tried to pull down to the bit that always has parking. I feel a slick in my mind, it is an unpleasant sensation - I do not want to go there. It is a silly feeling so I am quiet we are only parking.

Mary on the other hand starts wailing, "I don't like it here!!!!"

Without thinking I say, "yeah Mary I don't like it here either." Al turns around and drives the little way up where a space is now avaliable where we'd originonally looked - lit a on the same street.

As he is turning he mutters, "yes I know why that is."

I go, "er?"

"For many it was the last place they saw."

And then I remember... there was a house there once, but it is gone because a couple where enticing kids/young people in and killing them and hiding the bodies.

Now I knew this because it came up last year when a similar thing happened but I had blocked it out. I kind of forget this bit of Gloucester exists.

So I never looked up where the family lived but I knew about them and when we were buying our house I told Al to make sure that we didn't buy somewhere they had been. That was pretty much my only proviso with buying a house.

Where the house was is a short cut, I spent almost a decade here not knowing that that was where the house had been. But I had somehow also spent most of a decade not using the short cut or venturing anywhere near there. If I think about it, it is just a shadow there in my mind, not a place, a thick greasy shadow.

Not long after the head injury Al also tried to park there but I got really distressed, it was just us, he asked what was wrong and I told him it felt wrong. A sense of immense danger loomed at me from that bit. That was when I found out where it was.

It is a silly thing I feel and I tried to ignore it. So there was another time we parked there - this was the point at which Mary freaked us both out. She did not get upset and cry like this time, she was younger... instead she pointed and said, "I remember this place! This is where I died! Before when I had a brother."

Now at the time she was always saying such things but always in uncanny situations so like she'd point to a building site we'd walk past to go to the Climbing Wall and she'd say, "My dad and brother are buried there, they died a loooooooooong time ago." This was the same dad and brother she insisted where on the fresco thing on the same streety bit. It shows Romans fighting. Turns out that whilst they were building they found about 200 Roman bodies.

Friends who have taken Mary out have commented on the fact she says these things and she says them in away that makes your stomach drop, she is so sincere and it sounds true.

No I am not saying we a psycic, we are scientists but being scientists I also what to get to the bottom of the miraide of ghost stories and unexplainables we have.

So I posit that local people all know what happened there, and I knew it was somewhere in Gloucester, peoples body language would tell me that something was wrong. My brain rejestered it as a "bad" place and we are social animals, we learn from each other. I then passed this on to Mary who is incredibly sensitive to how tense I am. I forget that that bit of Gloucester exists because lets face it as a teen it was one of the worst nightmares because it could happen to you and as a parent it is a worst nightmare because you have to let your kids grow up and that means it might happen to them... and though it is low probability that area of Gloucester proves that it can and did happen and it is horrible.

However, it is also not the strongest (nor the weakest) of these sorts of reactions I have to places. I don't normally tell people because... well I went to Imperial College and discovered in my first year that people laugh at you when you tell them about your near death experiences. So you don't mention the road you don't take because it just never occurred to you and that when you followed everybody else it seemed wrong and slow, like the air and shadows where pulling at you. When trying to push yourself through the stupidness coming home late from the Student Union in your second first year you see a Woman in big heavy dress, you see a woman but she has no colour and she is sad, just so sad and scared and you run... around the block to get to the door that was just the other side of the woman looking at you.

Panting you cave and tell a fellow housemate who is like, "yeah the victorian lady, my mum's a medium don't tell anyone. I researched it and I think she's a Ripper victim." Then another house mate appeared, he didn't like being in his room alone, he was worried... turns out he kept seeing a woman in some sort of filly old formal nightgown in the garden from his window. When we looked it was the other side to where I'd been so if a real person had been standing there we would have both seen them.

I'm blaming mass hysteria for this one, because we used to sit and talk about ghosts and magik and all the taboo things in the science world late into the night.

Then there was the way back to Alaric's flat in Ealing, it was like hitting a wall of dense air, (in Kenya I found there was a name for such things and they were thought to fire/sand demons? because yes me and another girl had a terrifying experience which I think was actually a natural phenominia of a warm air vortex causing air pressure changes resulting in us being trapped in different rooms, a scary noise and the doors refusing to open - this would also fit with the locals description of what the demons where). It was a short piece of path, but to me it felt like something jumped on my back and was weighing me down, like the shadows were pawing and dragging at me.

In the end I caved and asked if we walk the other longer way, through the scary alley way. That was when I found he didn't like the same bit of road, that he always felt watched there and that it somehow seemed to take forever to walk that one small bit.

Then I saw an Elephant, a white elephant but I am not sure now if it was late night or a dream, I told Al, "when ever we get to this road and look at that tree I can't help but imagine an elephant here!"

Turns out there is an actual elephant buried there - WTF??! No seriously in London there is an elephant buried. I must have over heard something about it in a pub or something. Still no idea what was going on with that stretch of road.

I could go on, I feel I should write them down, they make good stories but I think they are also important for understanding how the human mind works, how we pick up ideas for each other and also - as a good scientist I have an open mind, I think it unlikely that I've been seeing ghosts but I don't think it's impossible, but even if it is impossible I and many others are seeing, hearing and feeling things so what is actually going on? If we don't share our accounts for fear of being seen as nutters then we as a species will never get to the bottom of what is going on.

And so I am going to share with you the most powerful experience of this kind I've had as a grown up, dubbed The Marble Arch Incident.

I went off to university with plans to see all the landmarks and museums I could... I found money and time where a barrier but I still motored my way through a fair few. One which was right there, one which everyone else went to and I somehow had just avoided including taking longer to get to places was... Marble Arch. I did not do this knowingly but I managed it.

As some of you know Alaric had an uncoventional upbringing with this sort of stuff, his dad is Chaos Magician and his mother was heavily into the Occult. Issue I had at the time was trying to be a good scientist but having come from a Christian background that believes in mediums and ghosts and fortune telling as well I was very edgy about occult things. But people I met at parties would come up to me and just announce I was psycic or a seer and so on.

Alaric observed this. Alaric is a scientist (though his degrees engineering). Alaric decides to run an experiment on his new girlfriend. Alaric is a git.

From conversations with his friends he decided Marble Arch would be a good test. I knew nothing about this but wonder if I picked it up via his body language.

Anyway, we are out on one of our little explores - Marble Arch. I didn't like the area but didn't want to ruin things, we went through a tunnel, I got sick, he had to help me walk. I was being crushed, like the pressure above me and increased drastically, despair, so much despair and cruelty, it seemed to stretch up and up and up and all of it was pouring onto me and it made me ill, Al thought I passing out. Maybe this was just my first migraine because yeah I have migraines now.

But the key factor for his experiment was that the point this happened was where the Tyburn Gallows had been. It was the point at which many many people had died, executed and jeered, I've never been back.

So not particullarly impressive ghost stories because it's not really about ghosts - what's frustrating me is that I kind of loose places. Like that bit of Gloucester, like marble arch and so on. My mind edits them out as if I am a sat nav with a very specific setting.

The Hackspace Grand Opening (by sarah)

Those of you who follow me on various social media will have seen the photos of Cheltenham Hackspace new premises being spruced up and that is because tomorrow (well today now!) is the grand opening 😀

Sunday 4th of December - if you are local then please pop along - hackspaces or createspaces are made by and for the community and we'd love to meet you 🙂

I'll be taking along steam punk and textile stuff to be working on and have plenty of spare so others can have a go! There is plenty to see and people to talk to and skill share with 🙂

Also I have been making craft videos for Advent as it turns out it is the tenth Christmas of Salaric Crafts How To Blog!!!

Of course I only have 2 vids up and it is now technically day 4 - annoyingly obsolete laptop is obsolete and is being a pain in the backside but I shall continue limping along with it and hopefully get the other two vids to you some time tomorrow!

I also have a craft fayre Monday at the Costa Coffee on Metz Way in Gloucester 🙂 Mainly taking Wiggly Pet Press stuff with a bit of Steam Punk etc...

On This Night (by sarah)

Like with Brexit I kept saying it was going to happen and people said it couldn't but it did and it's pretty scary - there is a smarmy rapey, racist homophobe who lies and cheats and looses billions of dollars and bales himself out from charities he's supposed to run and HE got into the White House. A man who throws tantrums is in charge of what I think (but maybe wrong) is the larges arsenal of nukes in the world.

This is scary and heart breaking and obviously anyone who who's looked at history can not help but see the similarities as we go round the cycle of violence once more. Of course this is playing havoc with my near near future dystopia series - the Punk's Universe I have been working on for getting on for a decade and some of which actually dates back to when I was like 14!!! ie the 90's!

The current books are near future but it is supposed to be an alternative history thing... this is the Facebook post I whacked out on it last night:

SO when I was planning my zombie quintette based in the Punk Universe I researched various things - one of the stories follows an apocalyptic cult (I made up) they consider themselves to be a direct line via mothers back to Fatima Mohammed's daughter - they are awaiting zombies and the falling dead of the faithful brought about by a pink/orange devil who gets mistaken for the 2nd coming (I think it was 2nd anyway) main issue is the description of the saviour is also of someone with skin and hair of fire... so in my story I chose a Trump faximial and a red headed half celt half arab who takes after his father in looks and has the red blush face is a muslim and one of the heros though the lesbian mother of his child is the main protag. Considering events that I had pre-empting the Z-times were Britain leaving the EU, Trump becoming president, food banks etc.... getting hit by dirty russian radio isoptopes and a targeted terror attack that wipes out the police et al ready for security corp take over - then there is a 5 way zomb-apoc with disease, drugs, mind control and rocks from space.... resulting in humans mainly living on sea steds. I'm kind of a little concerned that perhaps I should stop writing as it's getting all fooo and wooo and did I mention Essex gets flooded due the ice caps melting and the barrier failing... (and yes I did nick alot of it straight out of the dreams I had whilst sparked out from head injury but the main story line events have been in place for almost a decade now I just did not know the details!)

I also wrote a poem because as the news poured in and people started looking at the date and a) it is the mirror date for the terror attacks on the US 9/11 in the US date writing system verses the 11/9 - of course in the UK it was a 9/11... for numerologists and others who do fortune telling this would seem very important and not a good sign. Then the date analysis began to poor in, coincidence and serendipity reigned - 27 years since the Berlin Wall came down - a symbol of oppression, division and what we thought of as the last echo of the consequences of the second world war.

Then it turned out to be the anniversary of Kristallnacht - of the Night of Broken Glass when the Germans raided, vandalised and murdered focusing on the jewish population in their midst. For me this is one of the scarier and more profound dates and marked a turning of events, it marked the beginning of the escalations that lead directly to the death camps and the horrors of war.

Of course as the day progressed more and more dates where thrown into the mix - many Nazi related and though any given date can offer up the same sort of profound relatedness it does set an uneasiness in the heart.

I watched my social media fed in fascinated horror as my side - the "good side" began to undo themselves with shouts of breaking democracy and calls for assassination - and yes most where in jest and if I had a crystal ball or sure way of divining the future then perhaps we could say... yes this is the thing to be done - but we don't so it is just murder and vigilantism and a whole new pandoras box. It also marks a deepening of the divide, as our societies globally become more and more dipoled and that skism is far more dangerous than the buffoonery of politics. They only have the power we give them...

And the apathetic grow - "BORED" of politics - mainly because most people of my gen have never seen anything they've voted for happen. Out numbered and powerless feeling there are two options for the stability of mind - switch it off - politics like the weather is something you can not change if you are working or middle class or become an activist. This too grooves the trenches of the divide wider - interestingly people are not dividing along traditional lines which will need further analysis.

Me and Alaric got heavily grilled by confused 11 yr old girls puzzled as to how someone like Trump could even be considered for leader. I fear for the kids future but have to hope that the US have fail safes in their system (how long before he's impeached?).

What really really sickened me though was a report that our government is considering alining with the US and Russia!!! My god just no... are they looking at the same world I am?

US is playing the Germany of the 30's, we're the Italy and Russia gets to play itself - I wonder who's going to play the part of Japan. And I hope I'm wrong, I hope I'm over reacting. As I said with the Brexit stuff I want to be wrong... for all our sakes :/

Anyway - me being me I wrote a poem:

On The Night

In between wired breaths my lungs choke and spume
Thoughts of ire lost within as I await the gloom
The nights are rolling in once more
This night is a special one for sure
For there an egg of hope was laid
For there an egg of chance was bade

Shell fragments rained in a cascade
As the dreams of life began to fade a
Delirium of life’s serum a sugary syrup coat
Scattered as fine powder residue with one large fragment
Upside down an opalescent boat
Toppled and teetering it was drawn and consumed within
Glittering in the palp and puss of the albumin

Revealing sticky and congealed
A sickly man who’s heart with the heat of hate has filled
He sits enthroned in eagles glory
Adjusting and changing and faking the story
Too tell of things how he sees fit
And the knives and glass shards stick
In the coagulated mess of a hashed meal
Half assed, half done, half baked
And smashed for an omelette for some body builders sake

Shackles move about my wrists and the memories I was spared
Spear me through the heart from generational despair
When faith was used to justify the means
When the mean broke the night with shattered screams
When blood pooled in shallow graves
In those days
In those ways
And people laughed at those who dared to cry
When people win their freedom or when people die
And the cycle spins and on this night on this night

A breaking down of a wall a breaking of a wall
A wall... he with his crown of arian hue
Marks him proud and true, as if his blood is cleaner than mine
As if he is divine
He would build a wall
Build a wall of hate and I fear the mortar and the foundations
For we have been this way before
We know what’s in store as buildings on bone footings rise
In death stained apocalypse skies

They say these are dangerous times
Or interesting depending on where you fall
but the danger is for one and all
Fall out - is fall out - where ever it falls
And the nukes are nestled waiting and staid
Waiting and waiting there are dues to be paid
And Jews or muslims or... who ever to raid
because they are designated “bad guy”.... they...
They look different... they speak different... they wear differences... they...
Monster... other
Smother and crack down
In the pound
Out the pound
Loose the pound
Gold teeth are melted down
Shhhhh the hiss of gas is the only sound

And when midnight comes there is no reprieve
But amnesties day is coming...
Holocaust memorials strengthened against crumbling
Remembrance of the suffering
Marked and marked and marked
Show the long shadow for this is it
trying to solidify on the fears
To grow strong on the tears
To be multi headed python a hydra that sets it scores
Dividing us by our flaws

But remember they are people like us,
With hopes and memories shared by us,
A part of us, Who are us
Remember the battles fought and don’t sink the stone
Of blood letting and pain
The tide has turned but that does not mean it can not turn it back again
With love, with hope
With each little gesture we make

They are coming from the recesses of collective nightmares
Militia, curfews and a heady clown
One show to rule them
Entertain and bind
Humanity is only skin deep for most
Peer to peer to peer they are kept in check
The harsh the barbarous and savage lurks
In all
And to that nature he has called
Prepare yourself for in the end
The greatest enemy of all is self
Selfish self absorbed self
Do not leave your compassion on a shelf
The need grows

Love and love and love is how it should always go
For assassinations call makes you mirror him
Strengthening that which you hate with underpins
Creating idols, myths and martyrs,
Figure heads of examples to follow for starters
Beliefs to bellow and entrench yourself in
In the tomb
Hoping heaven has enough room
Something you’ll fight to the death fore
Something that gives people their core

In between wired breaths my lungs choke and spume
Thoughts of ire lost within as I await the doom
The nights are rolling in once more
This night’s a special one for sure
For an egg of hope is laid
For an egg of chance is bade

Remember second chances are rare
Of third chances....
Please take a care.