Blood pressure

Amongst the many vexations I suffered as a result of the chaotic administration of the ultra-marathon event I took part in three weeks back (a longer post is brewing!) was the fact that the organisers sprung on us at the last minute (which is to say, it had not been mentioned at all in what little advance information about the event had been made available) that there was to be a compulsory blood pressure check before each of the races, and that failure to pass this would result in exclusion from participation.

Now, I only found out about this because I had some other urgent questions I wanted to raise at the 'technical briefing' (which had itself scarcely been publicized) on the eve of the race. There were no notices put up about these health checks, and only a couple of fleeting, unexplained references in the runner's information packs. Many competitors might have remained completely unaware of them. And it would have been quite easy to inadvertently bypass - or deliberately avoid - the doctors and nurses conducting the checks, since this was happening in the lobbies of the various hotels where we were being lodged - and it wasn't absolutely necessary to go through the lobbies (certainly not in the third and final hotel, where my room was in a separate annexe, a couple of hundred yards away from the main lobby; and even in single building hotels, I tend to use the stairs rather than the lifts, for exercise, and to leave via the fire exit to avoid possible crowds in the reception area). Moreover, the few references in the information pack actually gave incorrect times/locations for the checks - so, I think we might be entirely forgiven for having skipped them. And, as I discovered, there seemed to be no effective enforcement in place. There were no checks as to whether someone had taken the BP test or not, no system for excluding people who hadn't from starting, not even any subsequent follow-up if they realised later that people had run without having been given the all-clear to do so (I took part without completing the check on all three days, and not a word was said about it).

I might possibly have been denied an official finishing classification for having failed to complete the check (big deal!). And it would have been entirely reasonable to exclude me from the organisers' health insurance coverage if I'd become ill during a race. But I really don't think anybody was keeping any effective record of the test results at all.

One of the other runners at the technical briefing, a super-keen amateur from Hong Kong who'd evidently run lots of ultras before, and taken part in this event two or three times previously, objected that in past years the doctors had tried to exclude some runners for having a blood pressure that was supposedly too low, and he asked for reassurance that this wouldn't happen this time. The organisers' spokesman (the only member of the entire organising committee, it seemed, who spoke any English; but he didn't introduce himself by name, and was never seen again after this meeting) didn't give a very clear response, but he seemed to indicate that the health checks would be "more of a guideline", and that nobody would actually be excluded from taking part if they were confident they were healthy.

It was such a woolly answer that I didn't take much comfort from this. And I was anxious that I was likely to fail the test. Heck, the anxiety about possibly failing the test - the anxiety about having to take a test - was raising my blood pressure considerably. And I'm not super-healthy, not at all a natural athlete. I felt quite intimidated by the rest of the field: even the other amateurs taking part in this event - at least, on the first two days; a bunch of fun runners showed up for the final much shorter race on Sunday morning - seemed to be very serious runners who'd done heaps of marathons and ultra-marathons before. I was one of only four or five who were over forty; and the only one who wasn't whippet-thin.

What's more, I'd come down two days ahead of the first race, and... the concussed bee stupidity of the organisers had just got a bit too much for me. I'd arrived in quite a happy and relaxed mood, but after 48 hours of confrontation with this relentless incompetence, my blood was boiling. I knew there was no danger that my blood pressure was going to be too low. Oh no, it was going to be TOO HIGH. There was no doubt about it.

But still, my innate respect for following the rules bade me try to pass the test, on the first two days of the competition.

The first time I attempted it, I was recorded at 150/100 - which is, admittedly, quite bothersomely high; but not quite in instant heart attack territory. Given the amount of hassles I'd gone through in the previous few minutes, I was quite pleasantly surprised that it was that low. I'm quite sure it must have been at least 10 points higher just a few moments before, and that I'd managed to bring it down quite substantially by a sheer effort of will. So, the doctors told me I'd failed - but I could come back and try again in 10 minutes. Since I was now anxious and angry about the prospect of being excluded from the race on medical grounds (after having travelled 1,000 miles and shelled out a lot of money to get there), and since there was less than 40 minutes to go before the start of the race, and I still hadn't found anyone to take care of my computer (long story), nor had I been able to discover where the dropoff point for race-day bags or the assembly point for the race itself were (despite having asked everyone in sight at least 10 times: NOBODY knew!).... the chances of my blood pressure going down seemed pretty slim. I did try one more time, about 5 mins later; and this time I was apparently 140/100 (which leads me to suspect that the medical staff just weren't very good at using the equipment; I'm quite sure my pressure at this point must have been the same or higher). I didn't think this would be over any reasonable 'danger threshold', but they seemed to think it was, and were still trying to stop me taking part. Eventually they proffered a piece of paper, which I assumed was some kind of waiver of responsibilty if I died, but they weren't able to explain it to me, and..... well, just as I was about to sign it to get them off my back, another little crisis started unfolding, and I went away to deal with that and entirely forgot about signing their damn waiver (if that's what it was).

The following morning, I was in a similar zone - 140/95. Although it was damned hard to get them to tell you what your reading was; and even harder to find out what the 'pass' threshold was. I eventually divined that it was 140/90 - although I might have been misled about that. I suspect it might have been 130/90, which is typically given as the threshold definition of 'pre-hypertension' in medical books.

Now, to me, excluding someone for having a blood pressure which is not ideally healthy, but well within the normal parameters of the general population, seems unduly harsh. Oh sure, we'd all like to be down around 120/80, but how many of us ever are? I doubt if very many people would register that level after an even averagely stressful week at work. Certainly not many middle-aged men.

I doubt if my blood pressure is ever much better than 130/90, not when I'm up and active. I don't recall ever recording a reading lower than that, anyway (but the mere fact of being tested probably bumps it up a few notches; I do not like doctors). And a big race unleashes a huge jolt of adrenalin into your system: half an hour or an hour before the race, I'm pumped. My blood pressure is going to be elevated by at least 10%, if not 15-20%, I should think.

In summary, it is INSANE to seek to exclude runners from an event like this because their blood pressure is slightly higher than normal. It is INSANE to conduct such tests less than an hour before the start of the race. It is INSANE not to the tell people what the parameters of the test are. And it is deeply ANNOYING and STUPID not to let people know about something like this well in advance. It is also completely bloody POINTLESS if no record of the checks is being kept, and half the competitors are ignoring them anyway. This is the kind of thing, I'm afraid, that only seems to happen in China. And it is apt to RAISE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE.

A few days later, I had the chance to get my blood pressure measured again by a young nurse who was offering free health checks on the street. Removed from the stress of the incompetent event management, I was back down to my 'normal' 130/90.

By the by, Blood Pressure is the title of one of Damon Runyon's classic humorous accounts of New York's gangster low life during the Roaring Twenties, one of the first of these that I read. I discover it's now available online - here.

List of the Month - Ideas for China books

Since I am wrapping up my blogs in a few weeks, and planning to finally leave China early next year, I thought an appropriate topic for this farewell 'List of the Month' would be a rundown of all the concepts for non-fiction books about China that I've toyed with trying to pitch to a publisher over my decade of living here - the China books that I'm now most unlikely ever to write.

China books I might have written 

(and that somebody probably should write one day)

Surfing to Shanghai

Blind optimism and millennial despair among foreign entrepreneurs in China

This has always been my favourite of the China titles I've come up with, and I was originally tempted to use it for a novel about expats in China - an idea that I gave up on as I've become more and more convinced that there's nothing that interesting to write about being an expat in China (and far too many people are now trying to). The image was inspired by my viewing some 14 years or so ago of the film Deep Impact (the better of the two Earth-nearly-destroyed-by-a-comet movies to come out that year - although it acquired unfortunate personal associations for me). There's a scene near the end where the scrumptious Tea Leoni has effected a reconciliation with her estranged father, and the two of them are standing on a beach waiting to die together, as an enormous tsunami - hundreds of feet high and travelling at the speed of sound - rushes towards them. I couldn't help thinking (and perhaps the final scene of Point Break was at the back of my mind here as well), There's no way there wouldn't be some surfers out there hoping to catch that wave! Shanghai, of course, is the country's principal centre of commerce, and has long been the focal point for foreigners coming here hoping to make a killing in Chinese business. It's also situated at the Yangtze delta; so, if - WHEN - the huge, hybristic Three Gorges Dam eventually fails, there'll be a BIG tidal wave sweeping down the river all the way to Shanghai. And there's bound to be a few crazy surfers hoping to ride that wave, even though they'll almost certainly kill themselves in the attempt. This image has become for me an irresistible metaphor for the delusional optimism - and selfish opportunism - that characterises so much of foreign investment in this country.

Hu's On First

A bluffer's guide to the inner workings of Chinese politics

We may have missed the window on this one, since dear old Comrade Hu is now on his way out of the top job, after ten years of low-profile mediocrity. Still, it may be some time before Xi Jinping - the "Invisible Man" - becomes at all widely known in the West, so this title might remain workable for a while yet. It seems like too good a pun to pass up.

Thank You For Your Suggestion

China's greatest dumb mistakes

I see this more as a mass-market stocking-filler kind of book than a 'serious' business tome. China has a staggering propensity for really spectacular cock-ups; they are frequent enough, I would think, to supply a whole series of hilarious/horrifying anthologies of this sort. In most of these cases, I'm quite sure, someone has pointed out the possibility of impending disaster - which has, unfortunately, ensured that the disaster will happen, because the 'loss of face' concept here makes it almost impossible for a Chinese person (certainly a Chinese person in some sort of position of authority) to accept someone else's advice (particularly when that advice is so obvious that it unfortunately bears an implication of monumental stupidity on the part of the person to whom it is being proffered). Those of us who've worked for Chinese companies and Chinese educational institutions have heard the dread phrase "Thank you for your suggestion" - delivered through a thin-lipped phoney smile - countless times; we have come to realise that it decodes as, "Your impudent recommendations will be filed in the wastepaper bin. Please don't bother us again."

China's Street Food

The endless variety of cheap eats in the nation that invented fast food

I am something of a curmudgeonly sceptic about the supposed wonderfulness of Chinese restaurant cuisine, but the fabulous street snacks here seem to get mostly overlooked. I'm not a food writer, alas. And it would be a monumental task to try to come up with a comprehensive survey of this field - since every province and every major city, and even a lot of the smaller cities, towns, and villages have their own unique local specialities. And the scene is in constant flux as well, quite faddish: there was a craze in Beijing a few years ago for a kind of 'Chinese pizza', a flatbread with a scant topping of spiced meat (allegedly a speciality of the Tujia, one of the minority peoples from south central China), that became almost ubiquitous for a few months and then completely disappeared again. Visiting the southern province of Guizhou last month, I discovered that chips ('French fries', if you must), fat, crinkle-cut ones, fried in roadside woks (and usually dressed with heaps of chilli powder!), were hugely popular there - but I suspect this must be a fairly recent innovation, and perhaps again just a transient fad.

Almost No Difference

Chabuduo and the problem of quality control in China

Despite the apparent flippancy of the title, this is one of my more earnest suggestions, something that I think somebody should write - and sooner rather than later. Finding the right title, though, has given me a lot of trouble. I had thought From Six Sigma To Chabuduo would be quite catchy. I definitely think chabuduo - the "What does it matter?" attitude so often encountered in China (literally, 'difference not much') - has to be the focus; but the word is probably not recognised outside of China, and so I eventually decided that it would have to be translated in the title and/or the strapline. I fear it still doesn't quite work, though, doesn't grab the attention strongly enough, or declare its subject clearly enough. I suspect most of these titles might have to have 'China' or 'Chinese' inserted into them in order to achieve this.

Blighted Generations

The ongoing traumatic legacy of the Mao years

I have become increasingly convinced that so many of the social/emotional problems we see in China today - the selfishness, the pettiness, the aggressive driving, the volcanic explosions of rage over trivial slights - can be traced, at least in part, to the whole nation suffering a kind of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the horrors that Mao visited on this country, especially at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. Anyone in their sixties or later fifties today is going to have been caught up in that maelstrom of homicidal lunacy during their teens or early twenties; very many of them will have been members of the notorious Red Guard.  People in the forties to mid-fifties may have escaped direct involvement in the atrocities, but their childhoods will have been blighted by the chaos going on around them. Even the younger generations in their twenties and thirties, mostly born well after this nightmare had come to an end, will surely have been affected to some extent by the mental scars the period left on older members of their families. (Beijing Coma, Ma Jian's novel about the Tiananmen protests of 1989, strongly suggests that the radical fervour of the student protesters - who were only very young children in the '60s and '70s - was stoked by the revolutionary rhetoric of that era, and by the lingering bitterness they felt over the pain their families had suffered during it.) And I worry that it may take a very long time for China to completely recover from this.

The Occidental Tourist

Eight centuries of viewing China through Western eyes

Pun addict that I am, I can't resist this play on the name of Anne Tyler's 1985 bestselling novel, The Accidental Tourist. Initially, I'd been considering taking this as a title for a book about my own experiences in China - or perhaps more generally about the expat experience in China during the Nineties and Noughties, since for all foreigners here, however long we stick around for, however much we try to put down roots, there's always something unsubstantial and impermanent about our tenure, we are doomed to be always outsiders, always only 'tourists' in the Middle Kingdom. But, as I lamented above, I've become progressively disenchanted with that topic: the expat-in-China book is now an overworked field. However, I think this title could still work for a survey of foreign accounts of encounters with China down the ages - from Marco Polo onwards. Essentially an anthology of other people's travel writing, it should be a fairly easy book to write.

Chinese Exodus

Why the middle classes are deserting China

I think the scale on which better-educated and more affluent citizens are quitting this country to settle overseas - predominantly, it seems, in Australia and Canada, although the USA, New Zealand, and many other countries are also allowing them in fairly indiscriminately - is one of the most important phenomena happening in China today, one that raises serious doubts about the real success, or at any rate the continued sustainability, of its supposed 'economic miracle' of the last 20 years. And it's not just a major issue for China, but for the whole world: the impact of this new Chinese diaspora on their host countries is going to have increasingly significant cultural and political effects in the next few decades.

Actually, I think I might possibly get around to attempting one or the other of these last two. What do you think? Any favourites among these? Any suggestions for me?

Afterthought - an actual book recommendation

This week's topic also gives me a convenient excuse to throw in a quick plug for my mate Tom Miller, who has just published his first book, China's Urban Billion - a study of the growing pains the country is going through as it attempts to transform itself from a predominantly rural-agrarian society to a predominantly urban-industrial one in the space of just half a century. It's had some very good reviews, and I'm looking forward to reading it shortly.

Horrific

I used to read a lot of horror anthologies when I was about 10 or 12. There was quite a vogue for them in the early Seventies, and it was a bad habit I easily inherited (along with most of the books that first got me into it) from my elder brother. I still have strong impressions of many of them, such as the Frighteners and Frighteners 2 collections. I was also a big fan of horror films in my childhood - regularly staying up late on Friday and Saturday nights to watch seasons of them.

Hence, many of the short stories I've penned intermittently over the years were experiments in this genre. Since it is Halloween today, I thought I'd share the outlines of some of these (and provide a few notes on where the ideas came from).

Still Waters

The new boy at school is shy and introverted, and finds himself ostracized or bullied by most of his classmates. He tries to build a relationship with his chief tormentors by joining them in their weekend hobby of fishing, but they spurn him and drive him away from their favourite fishing spot by the canal. Soon, though, the boy finds a solitary fishing spot of his own, and starts bringing photographs of impressively large fish to school each Monday. The two bullies at first dismiss his stories of fishing success, joking that he has bought the fish at the fishmonger's. But, intrigued and jealous, one weekend they decide to stalk the boy, to see if he does go fishing - and where. They disappear. The boy is slowly becoming more confident and outgoing - it could be due to the satisfaction he derives from his fishing hobby, or the removal of the bullies. However, there is still a certain awkwardness about him, a reserve and secretiveness that his teacher finds disturbing. Suspecting that he may be suffering domestic abuse, she tries to befriend him, and to discover more about his weekend passion for fishing. Eventually he agrees to take her with him to his secret fishing location one Saturday afternoon. It turns out to be a tiny, stagnant pond in the middle of a wood - the kind of place where you wouldn't expect there to be any fish at all, certainly not many big ones. But this 'lake' has a guardian spirit, a ferocious demon which rises from the waters to accept the boy's latest sacrifice - much more satisfying than his first one - and to reward him with another fish.

[A lot of obvious story archetypes here: the isolated child, the bullies, the exaggeratedly motherly teacher; the expected victims, and the unexpected victim. But the key inspiration for this was a series of public service advertisements they used to run on TV when I was a kid warning us against playing near landfills and so on where there might be pools of water of unknown depth and with possible entanglements of rubbish beneath their surface. These were seriously scary ads, and the pools of water shown were made to seem very, very sinister - positively demonic. These ads may well also have been responsible for my enduring reluctance to learn to swim.]

Morning After

A man wakes with a hangover after a heavy night of partying. He tries to piece together his disordered memories of the night before, troubled by sensations of guilt and shame and disgust. He is troubled also by his extreme physical symptoms, particularly the odd numbness in his mouth. He slowly recalls that he made some callous remarks that drove his girlfriend to break up with him. And when he staggers into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror... he realises that he later cut out his tongue in self-chastisement for this.

[A lot of my story ideas in this field start out with a 'What's the worst that could happen?' question. In this case, I started off not thinking of writing a horror story, but just going through the exercise of trying to describe a really bad hangover, in a broadly humorous tone - which somehow suddenly spiralled into very black humour. Many hangover descriptions emphasise how odd your tongue feels: I took that idea and ran with it.]

The Tacklebox

A man strikes up a casual conversation with a stranger in the bar of a small hotel in the woodlands of the American north-west. He asks if the stranger is on a fishing holiday, and why he has brought his large tacklebox into the bar with him. The stranger is at first very defensive, suspicious of these enquiries and unwilling to respond. But, after a few drinks, the two men start to develop some rapport, and the stranger suddenly feels an urge to unburden himself. He has for years been a Sasquatch hunter, and he has finally obtained conclusive proof of their existence. He had observed a large female burying something in a forest clearing, and some hours later, when he felt the coast was clear, he had returned to the spot to investigate. He discovered the buried object was a miscarried foetus. This he now had with him in his tacklebox, which he wasn't going to let out of his sight. In the early hours of the following morning, there was a sudden loud commotion in the hotel that woke up several of the guests. The stranger's cabin had been broken into and ransacked, and the stranger himself had disappeared. But the police could find no evidence of foul play, and concluded that the stranger had probably trashed the cabin himself after overindulging in drink or drugs, and then run away in shame. The man who had been talking to him the night before told the officers that the stranger had had quite a lot to drink, and seemed to be somewhat mentally disturbed - but chose not to elaborate on the story he had been told. Sneaking a peek over the crime scene tape into the cabin, he noticed that the tacklebox was open on the floor, empty. And later that morning, he found in a corner of the  dusty parking lot one very large footprint - which he decided to cover over.

[I had long been intrigued by the possibility of trying to write something about a traditional sort of monster - and a monster that is believable, that perhaps really does exist. And I liked the idea of taking something like the Sasquatch and highlighting its human qualities - not having its violence be just an unexplained feral rage, but motivated by grief, maternal protectiveness, and respect for the dead. I also have a particular weakness for unreliable narrator devices, where we encounter the implausible or supernatural elements of the story secondhand through someone else's account - and share our protagonist's scepticism, until some additional evidence is presented. This idea came to me while I was Greyhounding across the States in the mid-90s, and having a lot of odd conversations with short-term travelling companions. The initial impetus came, in fact, from a Stephen King story I had just read at that time, in which there was a line about a man clinging to a suitcase as if it were the dearest thing in the world to him. What, I thought, could make someone hold on to a piece of luggage so obsessively? Oh, I know!]

The Forecast

We follow an office-working drone through a typical day: unsatisfying job, overbearing boss, boorish colleagues; cheap sandwiches for lunch; a long commute home on crowded subway trains; and then a lonely evening at home mechanically watching TV. At the end of the mid-evening news, the weather forecaster comes on and cheerily announces that "Tomorrow will be similar to today." Realising the awful truth of this statement, the man goes upstairs and swallows all the pills in his medicine cabinet.

[That line does seem to crop up rather a lot on British TV weather forecasts, and I have often found it deeply depressing. Here I was fascinated by the idea that it is the mundanity of everyday existence that is truly horrifying, rather than ghosts and monsters. And also by the realisation that, when you're at a low ebb, a very little thing, something seemingly quite innocent and inconsequential, can prompt you to do something terrible.]

Bad Behaviour

A man is acutely pee-shy: he can't bear to be in a public toilet with anyone else. Attending a wedding reception in a very upmarket hotel, he finds that the ballroom toilets are always too busy, so he sneaks upstairs in search of an empty toilet, and finds one in an obscure annexe that contains only an exclusive private dining room. He is just about to relieve his bladder when a very fat and very drunk man lurches in, and leans against the wall a couple of urinals down from him (our protagonist also has a morbid horror of fat people - and drunk people). He finds himself trapped in his ultimate nightmare, too embarrassed to leave, but unable to pee while the fat drunk man is standing next to him - and increasingly desperate to empty his painful bladder. The fat man burbles obnoxiously, wretches and belches, and pees all over the floor. Our protagonist is disgusted, but paralysed - unable to react or move away. Another diner comes into the toilet to assist the fat man, and shoots our man a suspicious, sinister look. The fat man begins to vomit profusely. Our protagonist's disgust reaches new heights. But then he notices something strange in the fat man's vomit, a recognisable piece of undigested meat - a piece of meat that looks horribly like part of a baby's hand. The second diner notices him noticing - and this is very bad. The Cannibal Club is strictly invitation only.

[I like the notion that real horror exists in the mind, that it is our social hang-ups and phobias that usually cause us far more acute anxiety and distress than actual physical threats. So, I loved the idea of trying to write a story about being pee-shy. Then I thought, how far can we take this, what other similar anxieties can we pile on this poor chap - horror of obesity, of gluttony, of drunkenness, of boorish public behaviour, of vomiting? And then a brutal reimposition of perspective: all of that is really pretty trivial compared to cannibalism, compared to the possibility that these drunken oafs might be about to kill you for uncovering their secret. I am not pee-shy myself; but I could produce quite a long list of 'Story ideas that have come to me in a public toilet'.]

Not Like Us

A man walks in a park, waiting to rendezvous with his fiancée. He stops to rest on a bench for a few moments, next to a harmless-looking old woman. He soon regrets his decision. The woman proves to be quite deranged, and proceeds to explain to him her paranoid ideas. She has since her teens been a spiritual healer, believing that she can see auras around people which help her to diagnose their health problems. Recently she has noticed more and more people who have no auras. She believes they are some kind of automata who are infiltrating human society with a view to a global takeover. She doesn't normally share these fears with anyone, but she feels that the man has an especially trustworthy aura. And she is becoming worried that 'they' are on to her: she has been noticing the aura-less automata looking strangely at her, and she thinks she is being followed by mysterious men in dark suits. The man finds it difficult to pull away from the woman, after she has flattered his aura like that. And although she is obviously mad, she is surprisingly lucid and cogent - she spins a persuasive tale. Nevertheless, he is very relieved when his girlfriend comes into view and he can finally make his excuses to part from the old lady. He hears a sigh or gasp from her as he starts to walk away, and glances back for a moment. She is staring at his approaching girlfriend, her face white with horror; and as she catches his eye for the last time, she mouths the words, "No aura!" The man laughs it off, and walks away with his girlfriend. But a few minutes later he notices the old woman being escorted out of the park by two men in dark suits...

[Lots of cliché elements here, of course: alien invasion, sinister 'men in dark suits', the person who may or may not have a gift of second sight. But there are two distinct seeds to this story. One is, as in Bad Behaviour above, social anxiety: if we find ourselves buttonholed by a nutjob, how can we extricate ourselves politely? The second was the notion that women in general - and, perhaps, our partners in particular! - are essentially unknowable to us, so fundamentally different from the male gender that they are in effect an alien species. Many of my stories arise from posing myself a question. In this case, it was, "What could make you doubt the person you feel closest to, the woman you love?" Some madwoman on a park bench?? Well, maybe... And that, for me, is the true horror here: not whether or not the alien invasion conspiracy is real, but simply the fact that the protagonist is induced to start distrusting his girlfriend.]

The Years Slip Away

Back in the 1940s, a young man enjoys a few beers with his friends. He has just recently got out of the army after wartime service and returned to a well-paid civilian job. And he is full of excited anticipation because tomorrow he is getting married. He feels that this has been one of the happiest days he has experienced in a long time, and he realises that an important new phase of his life is about to open up. He goes to bed full of hope for the future. When he wakes up, he feels that something is very wrong - but he is weak, confused, he can't think clearly. He gets up and walks over to a mirror on the wall - where he sees that he is now in his seventies. Last night he suffered a stroke which wiped out the last 50 years of his memory.
[Perhaps I don't really like horror stories that much, because most of the ones I've written have actually been just regular stories about ordinary lives - that are transformed by a dark twist at the end. And this is a uniquely personal horror for me: the fear of being mentally compromised by a brain injury of some sort, and in particular of having something impair my memory.]

The Meat Locker

An astronaut is woken from cryogenic sleep by his ship's computer. The computer tells him that it has woken him because his cryogenic unit was about to fail. Unfortunately, the ship is still many decades away from its destination, and the computer is not authorised to release any of the ship's food stores to him. The ship is carrying many thousands of passengers, whose object is to set up a colony on a distant Earth-like planet. All the ship's food stores will be needed on landing on this new world. The man has been saved from asphyxiation in a faulty cryo-chamber, but will now inexorably starve to death. Unless... The computer reveals to him that in one of the passenger compartments the life-support system for all the cryo-chambers has failed, leaving their hundreds of occupants dead, but still frozen. The man isn't convinced that he is yet willing to contemplate cannibalism to stay alive, but he breaks into the compartment to investigate the situation there. Unfortunately, he wasn't aware that, while in flight, the cryo-compartments are protected against intrusion by automated laser turrets. The ship's computer is deliberately waking up passengers one by one to conduct a social psychology experiment on them as to whether they can be induced to attempt to resort to cannibalism; it has developed a multiple personality disorder, and is wagering against itself as to whether certain subjects will or won't succumb.
[I wasn't sure here whether to try to explain the computer's homicidal madness or not. This is, of course, inspired by the HAL 9000 episode in 2001; and I found the absence of explanation for the computer's violence in that somewhat unsatisfying (the novelization does make an attempt to explain it, but is not wholly convincing). I considered describing how the computer had sustained some damage which disrupted its personality circuits and its morality failsafes. But I was more attracted to the idea that it had simply 'gone mad' through boredom after several centuries of having almost nothing to do. I wondered if I could establish a convincing logical framework for this murderous little game being somehow not contrary to its moral programming (Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and all that): it had become fascinated with the idea of wielding the power of life and death over humans, and frustrated at not being able to kill them directly; but this scenario enabled it to allow them to get themselves killed, without contravening its programming. Eventually, I decided it was simpler - and more unsettling - just to end with the computer having a conversation with itself about which 'subject' to wake up next. This would demonstrate that it had definitively gone mad, and there didn't seem to be any real need to describe the mechanism of how this had happened. It can be argued that this is a superfluous twist anyway, since this situation is already quite horrific enough even if the ship's computer is still operating normally.]

Ditching the magic

Though there are honourable exceptions, in general, fantasy is the genre for which I have the least patience. Well, the exceptions would be T.H. White's Once and Future King series - which, as books intended primarily for children, were largely absolved of any burden of plausibility, and which were brilliantly witty reimaginings of familiar ancient folklore. I don't know of anyone else who's come close to pulling that off, and I don't think anyone should try. Well, I imagine The Princess Bride would be in the same category, but I only know Rob Reiner's fabulous film version of the William Goldman novel.

It's principally the magic that pisses me off in fantasy books. I don't see any charm in it, and as soon as magical elements are introduced, my suspension of disbelief collapses. It's an affectation that brings the contrivances of the plot rather too obtrusively to the reader's attention, and so severs engagement with the story. Once you've got talking cats and flying broomsticks and whatnot, the realism evaporates - and I just don't care about the characters any more. (I have dipped into George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, which seems to be mercifully magic-free; but it's self-indulgently overlong, completely unwieldy - and not very well written.)

And it's such a lazy plot device. I find the existence of magic actually tends to dissipate tension, because you know that in a story with magic in it, some new and unsuspected thing can always be invented to get the protagonists out of any difficulty. Hero comes to unfordable river. It would be more interesting to have him turn back in despair to search for another route, or to risk his life attempting to swim across. In fantasy, it's more likely that a friendly naiad he helped earlier will suddenly appear to part the waters for him. Yawn.

But I think magic is just the most egregious aspect of a more general weakness with the fantasy genre: the obsession with making everything up, with creating an entire world out of the imagination, strains not only the reader's credulity but his attention span. It just gets overwhelming, it becomes impossible to keep track of everything - and so, for me, it becomes tiresome and unengaging. 

Many people - the writers and fans of the genre - seem convinced that this world-making is somehow 'clever'. It isn't. It's a cop-out, an easy route. It's far more demanding - and far more satisfying - to create a compelling story grounded in our actual experience of the world. And when we do that, our focus is intently on the story and the characters, not on the background; with fantasy, I fear, establishing the infrastructure of the story becomes such a dominant concern that characterization tends to take a backseat (Tolkien is terrible at it). 

I also find this plethora of background detail bothersomely distracting. With a real world setting, we don't need to be given much - or ANY - background detail, because we already know what that detail is going to be (I loathe extended description, particularly of locale). I am also - compulsive nitpicker that I am - continually bothered by questions of plausibility (and I don't think I'm alone in this; we are all nitpickers to some extent): with a fantasy setting, we are constantly pausing to ponder "But wait! How does that work, in relation to...? And if that, then what about this...?" We don't have this problem with the real world, because we know everything in the real world works. It is difficult - just about impossible - to create from scratch an entire universe that is completely plausible and self-consistent. And it is a fool's errand to attempt it.

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I have occasionally pondered addressing my dissatisfactions with the fantasy genre (and perhaps persuading myself that I am mistaken!) by attempting to write something in this style myself. I have decided that if I did so (unlikely!), there would be a minimum of 'world-making', and no magical elements at all (not even any wondrous creatures). The world would be recognisably like our own, a kind of alternate Earth whose history and technology closely paralleled our own, but whose differences might throw some satiric light on the real world. It would also be something of a satire on the fantasy genre, with typical conventions and expectations constantly confounded, and supposed magic invariably debunked by rational humanism, exposed as superstition and delusion.

I began playing with these ideas in some detail nearly a year ago. My principal fascination was with the idea of The Quest - and I wondered how many different stories I could create with that theme. Since it seems to be de rigueur with fantasy that the stories should be MASSIVE, often spilling over into long - perhaps open-ended - series, I came up with an outline for a cycle of stories about a family who become known as The Questers, one of whom, every few generations, is pressured into undertaking some hazardous mission on behalf of his country.

My initial idea was to recast the story archetype of the Dragon-Slayer. It occurred to me that a plausible origin for a dragon myth might be a large, dangerous, elusive, reptilian creature that began killing people near a lake. Sounds a bit like a crocodile, yes? Well, it does to us, because we know what a crocodile is. For people who have never heard of or imagined such a thing, it would be utterly terrifying. People who have no concept of a large amphibian that could hide in the water might naturally suppose that this elusive predator must be able to fly. (The major challenge with telling a story like this is to tread that line between the protagonists' continuing incomprehension and the reader's dawning awareness of what is probably going on.) But how would a giant crocodile reach northern climes? Well, we don't need to know in detail. We can imagine that perhaps someone on a merchant ship might have brought a baby one back as a pet; and that then, escaping into the wild, with no competition for food, it would grow to enormous size; and only in old age, when it had become slow and cranky, might it turn to attacking humans. So, the concept was that one man - and subsequently all his male descendants - became cursed with the mantle of 'hero' through happening to be the one to find and kill this maneating beast. 

But that wasn't enough of a Quest. A Quest requires a journey, and the seeking of some hidden knowledge or object... and, perhaps, the discovery of some deeper truth, quite different from that which you were hoping to find. The second phase of this opening story thus became the hero's desire to understand what this beast had been and where it had come from, and to seek to ensure that his community would never be troubled by its like again. His enquiries reveal - perhaps through the merchant who originally brought the beast north? - that the home of these dragons is in a land far to the south. Naively imagining - in the way of these primitive legends - that there is perhaps only one family of these beasts, one Ur-Mother who begets them all, he sets off in search of these monsters' homeland. And the revelation he eventually attains is that these creatures in their native habitat are, of course, far too numerous to kill; but also, not all that dangerous; and, above all, not monstrous or magical, but just another type of common natural animal that had simply been unknown to his people.

I toyed with several other possible quest ideas, where an apparently magical scenario would be found to have a rational explanation: a 'theft of the sky' by dark clouds found to be smoke from a massive fire (perhaps caused by a Tunguska-like meteorite strike), a legendary healing talisman in fact just a rare medicinal herb, and so on.

But I wanted an overarching story, to give some continuity over a projected very long series of books (I was getting interested in a 'generations' story that would chart the social and technological development of my invented world from - in real world terms - the Dark Ages to the 19th century). And so, I hit upon the Key to All Knowledge as my ultimate Quest Object. This legendary item, again originally conceived of by the protagonists as being an object of magical power, is in fact found to be a real key - the key to a hidden underground vault housing a massive library, the accumulated knowledge of a (recently) vanished civilization, somewhat like the Roman Empire. But, as the aged gatekeeper who reveals this treasure to our Quester cryptically tells us, this is but a false key, The Key That Is Not The Key. The True Key lies elsewhere. The problem with this great trove of ancient wisdom is that the language it is written in has been lost in the sudden destruction of the civilization which created the library. The True Key will be a surviving native speaker, or a Rosetta Stone-like parallel translation with a known language that may enable scholars to start deciphering what is written in these tens of thousands of books.

Alas, it will take over a 1,000 years before such a translation key is found. By which time, the majority of the books have faded or crumbled. And most of those that yet survive are found to be bawdy verse. But dozens of Questers have had lots of spiffing incidental adventures while seeking The Key all those years!

What do you think? Would I be able to sell this concept to a publisher??

[This all came to me - well, the Lost Library storyline - in a dream. A very detailed dream, too. It was at a time when I had been thinking about the mechanics of this story quite a bit. And I was suffering from a winter cold that was deranging my sleep, making me a little feverish. Odd, the sources of our inspiration, eh?]

Bon mot for the week

"Back-story is an easy refuge when your main story isn't strong enough."

Froog

I'm not a fan of back-story, on the whole. I think it's significant that the one genre where it really thrives is in superhero comic books, where the genesis of the super-powers and, sometimes even more so, the prior life of the hero as an ordinary person are far more interesting than the established superhero premise. It's a perfect illustration of my point here.

List of the Month - Books I'll re-read

The two chief delights of being on an extended holiday are that I have lots of free time for reading (something that I sometimes neglect for months at a time when I've got a lot of work on) and that I am visiting a succession of friends who are all avid book buyers (as distinct from readers, I fear - buying loads of books that I never get around to reading has often been a vice of mine, too). Hence, I am enjoying lots of opportunities to read new things. And I am delighted to discover that the Book Bank, a most excellent secondhand bookshop in Alexandria, VA., near where I am currently staying, is still going strong when so many other businesses, and nearly all the bookshops, in the area have been failing (the Old Town Movie Theatre, just up the road, another favourite hangout of mine in these parts, has not been so fortunate: it closed down just a few weeks ago); I shall undoubtedly be spending many hours browsing - and buying (hopefully leading to reading) - in there over the next week or two.

However, this sudden splurge of reading has awoken a nostalgia in me for old favourites, and left me rather dissatisfied with the new books I'm trying to read.

There are a handful of books that have so got under my skin, and which are such an intense pleasure to read, that I would happily revisit them again and again. In fact, as a laboriously slow reader, I don't have time to re-read them often, and in some cases have not looked at them in many years now - but I would re-read them if I had the opportunity, will try to ensure that I re-read them at least once or twice more before I die. [Some of these books I have reviewed here or elsewhere online, so I'll provide links where appropriate.]

Books I could read again and again

The Wind In The Willows

(Kenneth Grahame, 1908)

A powerful - and possibly corrupting - influence on my young life, one of the very first books I ever read. I liked it particularly because the anthropomorphized animal heroes were not cutesy talking animals but grown-ups, with grown-ups' problems. It was also a seductive vision of bachelorhood, an existence of complete freedom and endless leisure unencumbered by family or work responsibilities. Yes, very corrupting.

Great Expectations

(Charles Dickens, 1861)

For me, this is the greatest of all of Dickens' works (and a reasonably accessible length, compared to some of his other doorstops). I was required to read this as one of my set books for English Literature O-Level (the main set of exams we take at the end of the compulsory period of high school education in England, at around the age of 15 or 16), but, luckily, this obligation did not arouse any weariness or resentment in me. On the contrary, I was very grateful to have been forced to devote such close attention to it, to have been led to savour its richness so thoroughly.

Life In A Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2

(Ivor Cutler, 1984)

I became a fan of the wonderfully eccentric Scots performance poet Ivor Cutler through a few of his radio appearances I heard as a young boy. This, I think, is his very finest work, a slim volume of short prose poems comprising a distorted, often slightly surreal, but still compellingly poignant evocation of his between-the-wars childhood in a Glasgow slum. It had originally been released some years earlier as a spoken word album, but I've never possessed that. Perhaps the best book for re-reading in this whole selection, because it only takes about 20 minutes to read, and it is a pure joy. 

(There was no Volume 1.)

The Once and Future King

(T.H. White, 1958)

My favourite book of my slightly later childhood (I discovered it at around the age of 12, I would say; whereas I'd known The Wind In The Willows since I was 3 or 4); so clever, so funny.

The Bodley Head Saki

(Saki [H.H. Munro], 1963)

This was the definitive collection of the works of the Edwardian master of the short story form, and I'm peeved that I am no longer in possession of the edition I had cherished as a boy. (It's quite a valued collector's item these days, apart from anything else. I particularly liked the informative introduction by a J.W. Lambert, which included an extract from Munro's only 'serious' work, a History of Russia [now lost? I tried to find it in Oxford's Bodleian Library when I was a student there, and if they don't have a copy, then...], in which his sly wit would keep spilling out despite his best efforts to contain it. There's an unfortunate story behind my loss of this book. My favourite teacher at school was a drinking buddy of the writer and columnist Philip Toynbee, who lived fairly nearby. Toynbee had been asked to review a new edition of Saki's stories, and wanted to refer to the Lambert introduction to the Bodley Head collection, but didn't have a copy of his own. My teacher borrowed mine to lend to him, but we never got it back; the poor man was already quite ill with cancer, and died not very long afterwards.) Munro was an exquisite prose stylist, he wrote even more elegantly than P.G. Wodehouse. And his irreverent, often macabre sense of humour was completely in tune with my own. He is the writer with whom I most identify.

Cat's Cradle

(Kurt Vonnegut Jnr, 1963)

My favourite Vonnegut - perhaps because he doesn't indulge in any of his trademark tricksiness here (time-jumps, omniscient Tralfamadoreans, addressing the reader directly, throwing in random story ideas from alter ego Kilgore Trout). I love the bleakness of it - an unusual apocalypse scenario from which there is ultimately no escape. And I love the invented religion of Bokononism (rather like Taoism in its willingness to embrace the essential meaninglessness of life).

The Third Policeman

(Flann O'Brien, 1967)

Another of my great literary heroes, O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan) was one of the most dauntingly clever men I've ever encountered and perhaps the greatest parodist who ever lived. His writing is often exquisitely beautiful as well as side-splittingly funny, and this, my favourite of his books, is quite remarkable: I sometimes carry it around in a pocket, just to dip into at random for a quick pick-me-up - there is something delightful on almost every page.

Anna Karenina

(Leo Tolstoy, 1877)

I worry that I may never get around to re-reading this, because it is enormously long. I worry sometimes, too, that it might perhaps disappoint on second reading, that it couldn't possibly enrapture me as utterly as it did when I first experienced it, at the age of about 14. I think I should put such fears aside, and schedule the time to enjoy this a second time. It was quite breathtaking. There are so many scenes I remember from it as vividly as if I'd only read it yesterday (though, in fact, I've only read it once, well over 30 years ago; and I've always avoided watching any of the film versions of it). This is the one book I wish I had written myself. 

List of the Month - unanswered questions about the Titanic

I recently read Walter Lord's classic book about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night To Remember, having won a copy as the runner-up prize in a Titanic-related trivia quiz a few weeks back on the centenary of the disaster. Lord provides a vivid experience of the sinking through the eye-witness accounts of survivors, but is light on detail and analysis. At the end, I found that there were still many long unanswered questions nagging at me, and some new ones arising for the first time.

What happened to the iceberg?

Well, in fact Lord does touch on this, but in doing so raises a much larger question. It rapidly disappeared into the night, because the ship was evidently still going nearly full speed at the moment of collision and the berg passed along its entire length in barely 30 seconds. A steward on a German liner took a photograph of what is almost certainly the berg responsible the next day (he hadn't yet heard of the sinking, but noticed a long gash of paint along the base of the iceberg). I had always pictured the ship as rapidly coming to a dead stop in the water, and hence the iceberg being comparatively nearby, certainly less than a mile away, perhaps within a few hundred yards; I was curious as to why none of the graphic depictions of the event (hundreds of paintings over the years, as well as several film and TV accounts) ever showed the iceberg still within sight as the lifeboats pulled away from the stricken ship. The reason appears to be that the ship DID NOT STOP. Lord records that  the officer on the bridge, First Officer Murdoch, ordered the engines stopped immediately after the collision - perhaps before the iceberg had even cleared the stern of the ship. Moments later, Captain Smith joined him on the bridge, and the two of them immediately went outside to look for the berg and found it still just within sight, a hundred yards or so astern but receding quickly into the night. I had thought that the point of stopping the engines was to stop the ship; and the point of stopping the ship, presumably, was to provide a stable position for her rescuers to aim for, and also possibly to slow the ingress of water. (I imagine forward motion must increase the pressure of water being forced through the ruptures in the hull, but I'm not sure how significant this effect is. Mr Halpern [see below] of course has done an analysis on this, and concludes the increase in flooding rate caused by forward motion of the ship would not be significant. Quite apart from the question of when, or whether, Murdoch or Smith implemented a 'crash stop', there are some survivor accounts which suggest that the engines were later restarted for some manouevring.) But according to Lord's account, it would seem that the Titanic hardly lost any speed at all, and was probably still making perhaps 15 knots, if not 20 or so knots, through the water when Murdoch stopped the engines. Without reversing the engines to brake the ship, how long would it take her to come to a dead stop? 15 minutes? 30 minutes? It appears that the ship might have drifted several miles beyond the iceberg (and beyond the position Captain Smith had ordered his wireless operator to broadcast to rescue ships?).

How long would it take the ship to stop?

In her brief sea trials - one busy day, immediately before sailing - Titanic had carried out one 'crash stop', and supposedly managed to come to a halt in just under half a mile (probably a rather flattering figure, given that she was not fully ladened at this time). That would take about 2.5 minutes, assuming a uniform rate of deceleration; in fact, deceleration probably becomes much more efficient as the ship slows, so it may be a little less than that. However, Lord gives us - without explanation - the oddly precise figure of 37 seconds between the sighting of the iceberg and the collision. Even if the ship's engines were at full reverse for the whole of that time, it could not have lost much more than a quarter of its speed, probably considerably less. And there must have been a pause of a few seconds at least for First Officer Murdoch to issue the order to attempt a 'crash stop'. I would think there must also be a significant time lag before the propellers can be reversed. (Was there some braking mechanism on the prop shafts? Surely they would have to stop rotating in the forward drive direction before they could be reconnected to the power-train to drive them the other way. That might take quite a while.)

Was a 'crash stop' the best option?

Surely putting the propellers into full reverse must severely limit the ship's manouevrability? It has always seemed to me that Murdoch's unenviable choice would have been to try to stop the ship OR to take evasive action; but it seems he attempted BOTH. I have never seen any discussion of the practicalities of this. Moreover, as recorded by Lord, Murdoch reported to Smith that he had turned hard-a-starboard... and yet the ship turned - eventually, at the very last moment - to port and the iceberg grazed her starboard side. Is the operation of the rudder reversed when the propellers are reversed? It seems unlikely to me that there could be any significant localised flow of water around the propellers in the opposite direction to that of the ship, or that this could be of much effect on the steering when the ship is still moving forward through the water at 22 knots. Lord's failure to address such technical points of seamanship and the ship's operating capabilities is my major gripe about the book. [From what I've read on the Net over the subsequent couple of days, it appears that 'hard-a-starboard' is interpreted as an order to turn to port. Well, according to this explanation, this was an outmoded hangover from the earliest days of sailing, the idea being that you're telling your helmsman which way to turn the tiller (which of course turns the rudder, and the ship, in the opposite direction). This potentially confusing usage had long since been abandoned almost everywhere else in the world, but it somehow clung on in the British Merchant Navy until 1932. I'm not a nautical man, but it's odd that I don't recall ever coming across this before in any of dozens of  books and films about the sea. There's a chap called Samuel Halpern who has produced a number of detailed studies of technical aspects of the Titanic disaster for his Titanicology website, some of them on PowerPoint: the one on the ship's manoeuvring is especially interesting. Halpern reckons that Murdoch must have turned the ship to starboard as it passed the berg, to swing the stern clear of it. He feels that if the ship had turned to port only, to try to avoid the iceberg, the sideways drift of the ship would have resulted in heavier contact with the iceberg, damaging the hull along almost its entire length. He thinks it possible that Murdoch only turned to starboard, to steer around the berg as it was passing, and likeliest that he turned first to port and then to starboard. This further article of his on Murdoch's bridge orders concludes that the First Officer did the best he could to minimize the impact of a collision that would have been almost unavoidable, unless he had reacted within seconds of hearing the lookouts' warning gong (probably impossible, given that he had to first see for himself what the obstacle was, and what its position was relative to the ship); Halpern says here that a head-on collision might have been survivable, but incomplete evasive action - if Murdoch had turned earlier, but not quite early enough - would have resulted in far worse damage. Halpern also seems to think that the engines were not reversed before the collision, but - contrary to the account Walter Lord gives - were reversed for two minutes or so afterwards before being stopped, which might be just about long enough to bring the ship to a dead stop. However, I suspect this belief arises from an opinion of what ought to have happened. The survivor testimonies he cites in support of this view are not very convincing.]

Did the watertight bulkheads fail?

Lord tells us that at least one of the bulkheads in the forward section of the boat did collapse, leading to the sudden flooding of Boiler Room No. 5. Was there a design flaw, the bulkhead not actually capable of withstanding the weight of water in a fully flooded compartment? Or was there some unforeseen effect, unexpected pressure on the bulkhead from the high speed of the water entering through narrow breaches in the hull? Was the bulkhead perhaps weakened by the collision? I can imagine there might have been a domino effect - if one bulkhead suddenly failed, the weight of water rushing backwards might easily smash down several others in sequence. But why did the first one fail?

What's the story with the 'cook'?

One of the most famous survivor stories is that of Charles Joughin, the ship's Master Baker, who, according to legend, got blind drunk in the ship's last moments. Lord focuses mainly on Joughin's own account of events, in which he just had a couple of drinks to settle his nerves; but he does throw in one passing reference - apparently a reference to Joughin - that a passenger saw one crew member downing a whole bottle of gin. So, Lord is vague on how much alcohol Joughin had consumed. The larger question, though, is how the heck did Joughin survive? He remained on the ship until the very end, spent nearly two hours bobbing in the icy water, and when he did finally reach a boat, it was Collapsible Lifeboat B, which had not been properly launched, was upside-down and barely afloat, and thus not offering much comfort from the sea at all. It was a further three or four hours before he was safely aboard the S.S. Carpathia, and for much of that time he'd been in the water alongside Collapsible B. Alcohol is commonly supposed to accelerate rather than ward off hypothermia. And even if there were some unexplained beneficial effect from the whisky and/or gin that he'd drunk, it would surely have worn off within a couple of hours. I can't believe he could have survived if he'd got himself incapably drunk, as the myth suggests. Could a more modest amount of alcohol consumption have contributed to his survival? Joughin somehow withstood the freezing temperatures for hours, conditions which proved fatal in just minutes for many others. It is one of the biggest mysteries of the sinking.

How did the ship go down?

A few of Lord's eye-witnesses refer to the stern of the ship standing almost vertical out of the water in the last moments before it sank. I suspect this is an exaggeration - or perhaps a misperception arising from looking at the ship from in front or behind. In a recent National Geographic documentary on the sinking, film director James Cameron asked an engineer to calculate the stress on the ship when the rear half of it began to be raised clear of the water, and the result was apparently that the hull would snap in two when it reached an angle of 21° above the horizon. It is remarkable how few of the survivors referred to this (none of those in Lord's book); although a good many of them said they could not bear to watch as the ship went down. Lord does, however, mention that some of them noted that the ship "settled in the water" again in its last moments, its angle becoming much less steep: this, I would think, is the moment at which the hull cracked. Charles Joughin (who, like Leo and Kate in Cameron's film, had made his way to the stern of the ship) described the stern as descending to the water smoothly and gently, like an elevator. I suspect Lord thought that he was describing the ship's forward movement into the water as it sank, and failed to question him any more closely about this detail. It seems to me he was more probably describing the downward movement of the raised stern falling back towards the surface of the sea. It seems odd, though, however drunk he may have been, that he would not have noticed and remarked upon the ship breaking in half. I wonder if perhaps the rupture occurred just below the surface, so that the changing attitude of the section of the stern that was still above water was all that the survivors might have noticed.

How did the ship stay on an even keel?

Ships taking on a large amount of water capsize very easily. Was there something about the Titanic's design that made her unusually stable? Did the fact she was taking in water at the bow have a stabilizing effect? (I imagine the water collecting at the front of the ship, and the rearward progress of the flooding being slowed by the watertight bulkheads, would limit the effect of uneven distribution of the water across the longitudinal axis, although I have no idea what the mathematics of this would be.) Were the ship's engineers working heroically to keep the ship trimmed, right up until her last moments? Or was it just 'luck'? (Also, strangely enough, when the ship did eventually start to list, it was to port - whereas she was holed on the starboard side.)

What's up with the lights?

Apparently, the ship's lights remained on until seconds before she finally sank. This seems incredible, given that nearly half the ship would have been flooded with seawater by this point, and that it must have been almost impossible to continue working in the ship's engine room when she was tilted at such a crazy angle out of the water. Again, I would be curious to read a detailed technical appraisal of how the ship's electrical system worked, and how it could have remained operational under these conditions. Furthermore, Lord refers to the lights getting weaker near the end, and taking on a strange reddish glow; but he offers no explanation of these phenomena. My curiosity runs rampant!

How far away was the Californian?

One of the most tragic aspects of the story is that the S.S. Californian was apparently quite nearby, but failed to take notice of signs of the Titanic's distress. The Californian was observing a ship "a few miles away" which clearly was the Titanic (well, it's evident in retrospect; the officers on the Californian had difficulty identifying even what type of ship it was). The Titanic observed a ship - and some of her lifeboats tried to row towards it, but in vain - which was presumably the Californian. Estimates of the distance between the two ships vary wildly: I've seen figures from 5 to 20 miles mentioned; and there is the additional complication that some people believe this nearby ship the Titanic had in sight was not the Californian at all, but some other vessel. However, when the Californian's captain finally learnt of the loss of the Titanic, it took him well over two hours to reach the site - which would suggest he was perhaps 30 miles or more distant. Lord doesn't inquire into this. [The problem with Lord's account is that he doesn't really pay any attention to the Californian joining the rescue effort. He suggests that she set off towards the Titanic at about 5.45am (nearly three-and-a-half hours after she'd gone down), but didn't arrive until some time well after 8am. Halpern indicates that she may not have got underway until nearly 6am, but reached the vicinity of the sinking by about 7.30am - presumably this is where the 20 mile estimate comes from. Unfortunately, she had gone to slightly the wrong position, and had to force her way through broken pack ice to reach the area where the Carpathia had been picking up survivors, which took nearly another hour.]

That much ice?

I don't recall Cameron's film, or any others, showing much if anything of the rescue the next morning. Apparently, there was ice everywhere. The S.S. Carpathia, first on the scene to pick up survivors, found it difficult to pick its way between dozens of large and small bergs. The Californian had heaved to for the night because it had encountered a huge floe, an impassable barrier many miles long. (This would seem to be further evidence that the ship had not implemented a full 'crash stop', but had drifted some distance beyond the collision site. There seems to be no mention of encountering other ice in the vicinity until the morning. If the ship had been fully stopped, it would have been drifting in the Labrador Current with exactly the same speed and direction as the ice, and wouldn't have moved into the midst of it. Well, maybe not: apparently there are some large eddies in that Current.) These were exceptional conditions, one of the highest concentrations of ice ever recorded in the North Atlantic, but... it does tend to undermine the position of those who claim that it was not irresponsible of Captain Smith to be proceeding at nearly full speed despite receiving warnings of ice ahead. The coming of dawn the next day revealed a sea crowded with icebergs: it would seem that the Titanic was not unlucky to have hit one, but lucky to have hit only one.

Was there any way to save the ship, or at least to keep her afloat longer?

I have long been troubled by the thought that perhaps the vaunted system of watertight compartments was a key factor in the speed of Titanic's sinking. Captain Smith relied on them to slow the rate of sinking, even though the ship's builder, Thomas Andrews, had told him that the water in the compartments would eventually overflow the tops of the watertight bulkheads and that the ship must then inevitably sink. I wonder if opening the watertight doors in these forward compartments might have bought the ship more time: if water had been allowed to spread down the entire length of the ship, she might have sunk more evenly, not have had the bow pulled underwater so quickly (and, presumably, more pumps would have been available to reduce the amount of water being shipped). I suppose she would still have tended to sink bow first. And allowing the water to spread further back in the ship would probably have increased the risk of capsize. Perhaps it would not even have been possible to open the watertight doors again, once the forward compartments were largely flooded. But I think this is an intriguing possibility; and I would imagine that it should be possible to test this scenario with computer modelling. I wonder if anyone has tried. [Aha! This article cites a 1995 study by Robert Gannon (published in Popular Science, Vol. 246, No.2) in which he found that the  complete flooding of the bow compartments did substantially accelerate the sinking. If the watertight compartments had been left open, allowing water to flood more evenly through the whole length of the ship, he estimated that Titanic could have remained afloat six hours longer - time enough for both the Carpathia and the Californian to reach her and begin taking off passengers with their own lifeboats. I'm a little sceptical about this, though: it seems a rather dramatic difference. I wonder if Gannon's conclusion wasn't mainly based on an assumption that the Titanic would not have broken in half if the flooding had not been concentrated in the bow, thus lifting the stern clear of the water; it seems unlikely to me that the hull breaking accelerated the sinking very much, since this occurred only a few minutes before the ship finally went under,  and when she was already more than half under water. The ship's designer, Thomas Andrews, had assessed that she could not stay afloat more than two to three hours, and his calculation did not allow for the hull breaking in half. Moreover, I wonder if Gannon overlooked a factor highlighted by Halpern in this study on the rate of ingress of water: that flooding is slowed by the weight of water accumulating above the point of breach, and hence slows progressively as the level of water inside the ship rises towards the external waterline. Thus, confining the flooding to the forward compartments would have resulted in a considerably slower rate of ingress of water than if the watertight doors had been opened to allow the water to spread down the length of the ship, because the water level would rise much more rapidly in a limited space. I suspect this effect would have outweighed the advantages of additional pumping capacity.]

Yes, indeed, so many questions about that terrible night. I have a few more besides, but these are the main ones.

My Fantasy Girlfriend - Kjersti Skomsvold

As I've noted a number of times before, there's something about Norwegians - they do seem to produce the prettiest girls in Europe, in the world. But, of course, I am not easily swayed by such superficialities as wide blue eyes and a cute smile. No, no, it's vivacity, intelligence, wit that get me smitten. Although sometimes a wry smile or a dazzling eye can suggest these things...

A couple of months ago, I found myself bowled over by this publicity photo of the Norwegian writer Kjersti Skomsvold. From what I gather, there is a formidable creative brain behind those bewitching eyes: her debut novel, The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am, has been extremely well reviewed, and I'm now very curious to read it - to swoon over the mind behind it, not just over the author photo on the back jacket!

Ms Skomsvold was in Beijing last month to talk about her book at the Bookworm International Literary Festival. Alas, I felt inhibited from going to see her; it seems rather stalker-ish to try to introduce myself to one of my hypothetical infatuations. The 'Fantasy Girlfriends' should remain in the realm of fantasy - things are much safer for the fragile heart that way. [Of the ladies so far celebrated in this series, I've only 'met' - or had a real-world encounter with, I suppose I should say - two of them, and only spoken to one. Now, there's a quiz question for you: who were they?]