Catmachine

A solution in search of a problem

2026-02-26T11:58:00.003+00:00

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.” – Terry Pratchett

Back when I worked in the IT department of a higher education institution, many was the time a member of the university executive or administration would come into the IT offices with a brilliant new idea.

This was usually something like “We need a blog!” or “We need a wiki!” back in the old Web 2.0 days when blogs and wikis were still cutting edge web technologies. When asked what we needed them for, the answer was more often than not along the lines of “Well, Warwick have got one!”

In other words it was just a case of keeping up with the institutional Joneses. One of the IT management team had a very astute response to this kind of request which I’ll repeat here.

“What do you need to do? Don’t come to me with a solution. Come to me with a problem.”

It’s a piece of advice that I’ve started to think of recently as software houses and companies scramble to add AI to their products and services, chiefly because other people are doing it.

In many ways AI – or at least GenAI – is a solution in search of a problem.

AI technology itself is a very powerful and useful tool. It has any number of applications where it could advance human knowledge, for example in medical science (where it could help save lives) or planetary astronomy (where it could help discover life). There are doubtless many more.

It also has the potential for streamlining repetitive and monotonous administrative tasks like analysing large datasets or archive entry labelling, leaving people time for more challenging work that requires thought and analysis. This more challenging work includes writing.

Yes, even writing emails.

Writing emails is not tedious admin. It helps marshal your thoughts. As a developer, more than once I have started an email to someone asking a technical question only to come up with the answer myself as a result of having to shape my query into something I’m sure the other person will understand.

Writing trains your brain and develops analytical and critical thinking skills. Using GenAI to replace this is counter-productive. GenAI text is all surface and no substance, because the process of writing is everything.

A useful analogy would be weightlifting. Sure, you could invent a machine to move the dumbbells up and down for you but it wouldn’t do your muscles any good.

Promoting GenAI for writing is encouraging mental idleness. What is worrying is how much effort is being put into this, rather than – for example – encouraging maximum accessibility in software and online. If people can spend time writing a prompt for GenAI then they could certainly spend time writing alt text for an online image or thinking about how an experience could be made universal for everyone no matter how they're accessing the content.

Unfortunately, more often than not, accessibility testing is an afterthought whilst incorporating GenAI is front and centre.

Steve Krug’s famous quote “Don’t make me think” referred to the end users of systems, not the people designing the software or writing the documentation. We should all be thinking.

The way that companies keep replacing human copywriters with GenAI is stating to feel like the quest for the perpetual motion machine. The creativity has got to come from somewhere. No matter how many springs and wheels you add, without external input it's ultimately doomed to mediocrity and inanity.

Neurodiversity in the Workplace

2025-05-09T11:10:00.003+01:00

Most people would agree that supporting neurodiversity in the workplace is good practice from both DEI and accessibility viewpoints. An organisation with awareness and acceptance of neurodiversity – let alone policies in place – will undoubtedly be a positive nurturing environment for all employees; an example of the Curb Cut Effect in action.

Image by MissLunaRose12 via Wikimedia Commons

In addition, neurodiverse people bring unique viewpoints and talent to the table. Many individuals have superb attention to detail and excel at both being able to see the big picture – which leads to unseen pattern recognition and problem identification – as well as being able to drill down into the minutiae of an issue, diagnosing and solving it.

As an autistic person and neurodiversity advocate I’ve always been keen to highlight both the advantages and the challenges of maintaining a supportive environment for all employees whatever their neurotype.

The flow and communication paradigms

Some neurodivergents (NDs) – and this applies to both ADHD and autistic people as well as AuDHD – are capable of hyperfocus or “flow”, the ability to intensely concentrate on an activity or task, which in the right situation can often result in complex work being completed meticulously, accurately and often swiftly.

However, one disadvantage of this skill is that if the flow is interrupted it can be very difficult to re-engage. This does not necessarily mean that the individual in question cannot do anything else at all while flowing – efficient flow often involves obtaining information from others as well as more complex back and forth interactions.

Flow usually breaks when the communication paradigm is abruptly changed without warning.

“I thought I’d call as it’s easier.”

For an ND person, suddenly having to switch paradigm from written (chat, email etc) to spoken is incredibly disruptive and almost guaranteed to break the flow. On the other hand the neurotypical (NT) person wouldn’t have called if they weren’t experiencing problems with the written paradigm.

If you’re an NT person who needs to change the communication paradigm from written to spoken to get a point across I’d suggest sending a short message first, something like:

“Ok to call?”

If you’re an ND person who receives one of these requests for a call, I’d suggest replying with a yes – even if you have to specify a time:

“Sure, just give me 5 minutes to finish what I’m on.”

A lot of the time it’s the unexpectedness of the paradigm shift that's the problem, not the shift itself.

Routine and consistency

The concept of hotdesking was seen as a game-changer when it was introduced, allowing for far greater flexibility and space saving in office environments. It is a practice that has undoubtedly retained its value, especially since the pandemic when hybrid working became far more common with different employees being in the office on different days.

However, many neurodivergent individuals rely on routine and consistency to marshal their thoughts and assist with focus. This mean that sitting in their own assigned space – and if possible being able to personalise that space to add elements of familiarity – is often essential for their productivity and efficiency.

Even without personalisation, the benefit of always sitting in the same space when working should not be underestimated. The fewer surprises and unexpected elements an environment hold, the more effective a neurodivergent individual’s hyperfocus and performance is likely to be.

In a work environment designed primarily for hotdesking it may be to everyone’s advantage to set aside an area where workspaces can be assigned to individuals and if possible personalised.

Sensory considerations

Neurodiverse people tend to have a different way of processing sensory information and this can lead to what’s known as “sensory overload” if an environment is too overstimulating.

This can cause the person affected to be unable to focus on the “right” information: for example in a crowded restaurant they will likely be unable to process what the people on their own table are saying due to the chatter from other tables.

In a work environment – especially an open plan office – this is most often triggered by noise or the bright, flickering light from a fluorescent bulb. This overstimulation can negatively affect a neurodiverse person’s concentration and flow and subsequently their productivity, and can in severe instances lead to difficulty speaking or performing regular tasks for a while.

The simplest solution to the issue is to provide quiet workstations at which people affected by sensory overload can work. If this isn’t practical, noise-reducing headphones and fluorescent light blocking glasses can help reduce the triggers. Setting aside a quite relaxing space for people to unwind or decompress when they need to can also make a big difference.

Timetables and waiting

Autistic and other ND people are often very planning focussed – co-ordination and preparation can be one of our greatest strengths. A well organised timetable for the day can result in a workload that is managed highly efficiently which can be a massive productivity boost.

However, the presence of milestones throughout a timetabled process can cause problems if they are delayed due to problems with an earlier part of the process and are therefore unavailable to be actioned. Having planned their day around a timetable, something dropping out of the calendar or taking longer to reach them in the flow of production can unsettle an ND person and leave them frozen into inertia.

This is known as ‘waiting mode’, an executive dysfunction which can cause anxiety when a solitary appointment is looming or when one is cancelled at the last minute.

One way to cope with this is to encourage more granular timetabling or milestones in the planning process so no single item appears overwhelming, instead being simply one part of a process. This has the additional benefit of disrupting the process far less if one of these items drops out or is unavailable when expected.

Scheduling in extension or side tasks (“would be nice” items) is also useful as they're definitely "part of the plan" so can be actioned in any time that unexpectedly becomes available due to a main task cancellation.

In addition avoiding such cancellations in the first place would benefit everyone. Encouraging colleagues to give themselves wiggle room when estimating how long something’s going to take them - to err on the side of caution - would put less pressure on them. That way a more realistic and achievable timetable can be plotted out from the start in which each individual entry is far less likely to slip, which will benefit the whole team.

Continental Drift

2025-05-06T12:40:00.002+01:00

As a child I was obsessed with many things. Continental Drift was one of them.

I suppose it stemmed from my love of maps, especially maps of imaginary worlds such as those found in the front of fantasy novels like A Wizard of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings or some of the Narnia books. I always thought it was a shame that no map of the Great Eastern Ocean was included in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but in retrospect that makes sense—it would have been mostly blank.

I would spend hours drawing my own maps even though I don't think at any point I was planning to write an epic fantasy. I just liked drawing the maps. Some of them had peculiar features (probably inspired by The Isle of the Ear and The Hands from the Earthsea map) and all of them spanned continents, although I don't recall ever drawing a map of a complete planet.

This was an odd omission given how obsessed with space I was. I can only surmise that for some reason I didn't like mixing these particular manias. Mixing others was fine—the Fantasy Maps and London Underground enthusiasms were mashed up many times as I drew transit system maps for imaginary cities. Years later I was enthralled to read about New Crobuzon in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and thought it was a shame that there wasn't a transit map included in the book.

I originally toyed with the idea of drawing a map for my debut novel Comeback—some kind of take on Dante's Inferno, consisting of concentric circles—but never quite got around to it. The protagonist Genie's journey was linear enough for it not to be required. However, oddly enough I came closer to drawing a small scale map for Ghostdance, the follow up to Comeback - even though that novel is more or less set in the real world. But in the end that wasn't necessary either.

Back to Continental Drift. I think what captured my imagination was the fact that these maps looked like fantasy maps and yet contained hauntingly familiar elements which would pop up every now and then. I was fascinated by the way South America and Africa fitted together neatly—so much so that I clearly remember tracing them from the atlas, cutting out the tracings and sellotaping them together.

What was almost as good was the way that these outlandish continents had names. Pangaea, Gondwanaland, Laurasia, Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia. Separated by seas called Iapetus and Khanty or surrounded by the great Panthalassa Ocean.

What I particularly liked was the way you could see the evolution of the world over time as the continents slid into the positions so familiar from the BBC One continuity globe. But there was always something missing. In the pre-internet age of course I had to rely on books and even amongst my own collection of books about prehistory—plus whatever I could find in the library—there was no depiction of where the continents would go next. True there were some descriptions in the text but that wasn't quite the same thing.

Then one day—I am sure I was almost a teenager by this point—a glossy book turned up in the school library which did depict the Earth some thirty million years hence. It was all riveting but what particularly stood out for me was the way that Africa had pivoted around the Middle East towards Europe, giving rise to the Mediterranean Mountains and the Red Ocean.

Even today with the vast resources of the internet available to me, there aren't quite enough illustrations of the future Earth around, or at least of the right kind. A quick google for Future Earth Map does reveal thousands of images, but few of them agree with each other and half of them are simply based on today's continents with changing international boundaries or rising sea levels drawn in. But I think the real reason they don't satisfy is that none of them comes close to Future Earth Map that I had in my head when none were available and I had to draw my own. These self drawn maps were closer to the fantasy maps of imaginary worlds I also drew - and included arrays of names mashing up the present day global gazetteer.

The real challenge of course would be to write a novel set in this future world. But that can wait for another time.

Top of the Cheats

2025-01-25T11:58:00.008+00:00

It's surprising what can catch your attention and become of special interest – especially during childhood – when you've got the kind of brain that thrives on that stuff.

In 1981 I narrowed my focus in on the bands appearing on Top of the Pops not least because I wanted to know when and how often Toyah would be appearing. So I became very familiar with the rules surrounding how often an artist could appear.

The only way a song would be played two weeks on the trot was if it was number one. In order to get two plays (including the viewers' holy grail of both the video and a mimed studio performance) the song would have to be going up the chart three weeks in a row and ideally by leaps and bounds.

To get three plays it would have to have been at least five weeks in the chart and probably be heading into the top 10 at least. I used to write down the lineups in my diary despite parental scorn.

This meant I was watching when someone cheated.

The Jets' song "Yes Tonight Josephine" was featured on 5 November 1981 when it was outside the top 40 at number 44. Then on 19 November it was featured again, despite only having climbed to 31 (still not even top 30). Then it was featured the very next week on 26 November having now reached 25 which was as high as it ever got.

I seem to recall the band appearing on Jim'll Fix It (or another kids' show) at around the same time though can't track down the date so may be conflating this memory with something else.

All I remember thinking was that this was breaking the rules and that someone, somewhere must have really wanted it to be a hit and been able to force these illegal moves through somehow. And despite this campaign it never entered the top 20.

It just wasn't fair, I thought. It was breaking the rules. Why didn't Toyah appear more often?

Here's mud in your AI

2024-12-25T11:34:00.004+00:00

Sometimes a craze is just a craze.

In the 1950s they were pushing the Atomic Age and added radioactivity and atoms to branding for everything. You could even buy a toy atomic energy lab with real uranium.

I am strongly reminded of the way they're adding AI to everything now whether it's useful or not. I hope that in a few years this mAInia will have died down and we can just carry on creating as we did before.

In fact more than that; I'm hoping that before long we'll arrive at a point where "AI-free" becomes a badge of quality so the market will HAVE to sit up and take notice, rather than telling us we’re doing Being Consumers all wrong.

However, I do like to think I'm not being New Technology Baffles Pissed Old Hack here. AI definitely has a place. For example, analysing large scientific datasets, archive entry labelling. You know the incredibly tedious stuff that humans would find mindnumbing or actually impossible to do.

I don't think it has a place replacing creative people like writers and artists. Or copywriters. Even writing the blurb for the back of a cereal packet has some enjoyment in it and requires skill.

Skill is something an AI will never have. Ditto originality.

Besides it's not really AI is it? Calling these systems Artificial Intelligence is as ridiculous as SpaceX calling their orbital heavy lift launch vehicle Starship.

A term coined by SF fanboys who missed the satire and commentary in most good SF because they were too busy looking at the cool rockets and robots.

Don't get me wrong; I like a good robot or spaceship as much as the rest of us. But in SF these are usually window dressing, not the whole point. Likewise I found generative AI images and text amusing to play with for a short while – but only when it was a bit shonky and silly.

While AI may eventually be of use as an additional tool in a creative's kit, it’s not a replacement for real effort or talent, and never will be. The only reason it’s being treated like that is because the money heads at the top see it as a way of dispensing with those pesky creatives who have always been thorns in their sides when it comes to profit.

You can get my AI-free / No-AI stickers on Redbubble.

You will be visited by three spirits...

2024-12-24T10:29:00.002+00:00

I like to think I’m a rational person, but nevertheless I love a good ghost story. However I have noticed a tendency for some people to seize on rationalism as Something To Believe In which seems to miss the entire point of the mindset.

I think of this viewpoint as Born Again Scepticism because it most often afflicts people who were really into Weird Shit when they were younger but became disillusioned by Weird Shit’s constant failure to deliver. Born Again Scepticism espouses a kind of knee jerk “because it doesn’t exist!” holier than thou attitude to anything that isn’t scientific canon and is evangelical about deploying it.

Born Again Sceptics are usually not actual scientists. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Carl Sagan – who most definitely was a scientist – said:

“No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas.”

To illustrate this point, he went on to refer to a very silly idea indeed, Velikovsky's Worlds In Collision theory which postulates that part of the history of the solar system played out very much like a trick shot in snooker with Venus as the cue ball. The point was that no matter how absurd the idea, dismissing it by default wasn't on. Examining it with evidence and reasoned argument before disregarding it was the way to go.

I like to think I’m not a credulous person. However ghost stories have existed as long as human beings have, and dismissing them out of hand with a glib “because it doesn’t exist!” strikes me as replacing one rigid viewpoint with another. I’m not saying that ghosts are the spirits of the dead returning, but the longevity of the phenomenon’s reported existence in human culture means that clearly they’re the manifestation of SOME kind of process; whether it’s a psychological one, a side effect of brain function and perception under certain circumstances or even something to do with the hard problem of consciousness (an issue that neither psychology, biology nor philosophy has been able to solve so far).

“Because it doesn’t exist!” doesn't quite cut it. It’s almost a conspiracy theory for those who consider themselves above conspiracy theories.

"The spirits have done it all in one night!"

Mind the gap

2024-12-24T10:25:00.000+00:00

Language evolves we are told so there’s no point in complaining about misuse of a word or phrase. If enough people use and understand it in a certain way then that way becomes correct no matter what some old dictionary might say. It may be frustrating to those of us who like things to be neat and make sense, but you know what? Fair play to language for moving with the times and being flexible.

The details of jokes and idioms also change meaning. For example, there’s a common expression that Londoners consider everything “North of Watford” to be the actual north. Most people think this is funny because Watford is actually on the edge of London, pretty much where the M1 makes a serious attempt to reach escape velocity and climb out of London’s gravity well.

However I remember the expression being “North of Watford Gap” in the 1980s and 1990s which made a bit more sense as that’s a service station 65 miles further up the M1 which feels more like the gateway between the North and South.

The service station is named after a valley between two hills near the village of Watford through which roads, railways and canals all pass.

However (according to Wikipedia) people who believe this refers to the Watford near London which used to have a Bakerloo line terminus (and still has one on the Metropolitan line) are making a bid to claim the expression back. Apparently the saying used to be “north of Watford Junction”. Not something I ever heard, but fair enough. Watford Gap makes more logical sense as where the North begins, but I guess Watford inside the M25 is better for comic effect.

The Friend Illusion

2024-11-21T12:12:00.000+00:00

There were many odd experiences and thoughts I had over the years which I either assumed everyone felt — or if I was feeling low that it was just me. I’d usually try and discount the latter because as one of eight billion people I was fully aware I was statistically insignificant and nothing special. Either positively or negatively.

Of course since my diagnosis a third and more obvious explanation presented itself. If it wasn’t a common experience (which I could usually tell if I got odd looks when trying to talk about it) then it was probably an autistic thing. Some of these were textbook, things that might even be used as diagnostic criteria; others were not on any official list of indicators but nevertheless hauntingly familiar to almost everyone in the room when I was meeting up with other autistics.

I’ve just thought of another one; something which has been bothering me for years. It’s only now that I realise that they were doing a neurotypical thing all along and that I’ve only just got it.

This is going back a few years, back to the Before Times when we all used to sit in offices; often open plan ones. Sometimes there would be a reorganisation and we’d all have to move rooms or even buildings. Often as a result we’d end up sitting next to someone we didn’t really know.

It was quite a simple thing really. The person I ended up next to would offer to make me cups of tea, and I’d reciprocate and start to think “ooh maybe this is a new friend!” Then there’d be another reorganisation so we weren’t sitting next to each other any more and they’d suddenly not be remotely interested in me any more, barely even saying hello.

“What did I do?” I’d think.

Then years later it struck me. This was clearly a neurotypical thing. It wasn’t a sudden lack of interest after another round of musical chairs after all — the lack of interest had been there all along — but what I interpreted as “pretending to be friendly”.

Of course from their perspective they actually were being friendly. The problem lay in the differences between what they thought of as friendly and what I interpreted friendly to mean. I have been told I come across as aloof or antisocial. But it’s not that really. Having to consciously navigate social interactions makes me more sparing with amiability. I’m not good at the social glue side of it.

This is partly because if I’m at all unsure abiout a situation I err on the side of caution as there’s nothing quite as irritating as the constant attention of someone you don’t like (or even are indifferent to). I don’t want to become That Person. Unfortunately this means I inadvertently become That Other Person (the unfriendly one).

It’s a minefield I tell you.

The Weird Case of Weirdcase

2024-11-01T15:38:00.001+00:00

This may well end up being one of the oddest and perhaps most anal-retentive blog posts I've ever written, but it's an anomaly I noticed early in life and have never been able to find a satisfactory answer for.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it involves the London Underground tube map.

As I've discussed elsewhere the iconic tube map captured my imagination at an early age and it was at this early age that the anomaly itself was in full swing.

It was all to do with the way the stations were labelled.

Up until the end of H C Beck's reign as tube map designer the station names on the map were all written in uppercase. Presumably all the better to read you with – although not if you have dyslexia. Unfortunately at that time accessibility wasn't high on the list of London Transport's priorities, as can be seen from the fact no stations had step free access – despite the fact that so many of them had been originally been built with lifts.

Nevertheless, the all uppercase paradigm worked and was consistent even though it did give the impression that the map was SHOUTING at you.

As has been documented in many places elsewhere, in 1960 Harold Hutchinson at London Transport dispensed with Mr Beck's services and decided to redesign the tube map himself. After all he (probably) reasoned how hard could it be?

Probably harder than he'd thought at least to come up with a simple and aesthetically pleasing design.

Hutchinson's map is all sharp corners and jagged lines. The kind of thing that makes your eyes wince just to look at it. Given the mental health and safety hazard of its design it's easy to overlook that it's here that Weirdcase has been introduced. Some stations are SHOUTING STREET and other just Talking Reasonably Road.

Hutchinson's map must have been unpopular because it was soon replaced by one designed by Paul E Garbutt which removed some of Hutchinson's more egregious errors and returned more to the spirit of the H C Beck design.

One element of Hutchinson's map he did retain was Weirdcase, so surely there's some kind of rationale behind this right?

Let's see.

The most obvious element that is always true is that End Of The Line stations are always uppercase. Or are they? Edgware Road is an End Of The Line for a District Line branch and it's in title case. Ditto Shoreditch on the Metropolitan Line.

Unfortunately none of the other potential criteria for upgrading a station to uppercase hold water either.

Interchange stations seem to be in uppercase except where they're not. Oxford Circus gets the honour, but oddly South Kensington doesn't, despite having more lines passing through it.

Kennington and Camden Town both get uppercase status even though the only thing the Northern Line is interchanging with at these stations is itself.

Stratford (no lines other than the Central pass through it at this point in history) gets the uppercase treatment merely by virtue of being an interchange with British Rail. However, Balham and South Ruislip (for example) are in title case despite also being interchange stations with British Rail only.

Bank and Monument despite being effectively the same station have the former in uppercase and the latter in title case.

You get the distinct impression that there's a point being made here about some stations being more important than others. Who was making these decisions?

It wasn't just the main map that had the station names in Weirdcase. The in carriage maps were often just as baffling during this period. Not only did they proudly sport Weirdcase but they played fast and loose with which interchanges they decide to show you, a practice which continues to this day. On the Piccadilly Line, Gloucester Road and South Kensington stations are identical from an interchange point of view and yet they try to pretend Gloucester Road is a lonely station:

Weirdcase however didn't last forever. In 1973 they switched the map back to to all uppercase before switching again to all title case in 1985 and staying that way.

Why was Weirdcase? I guess we'll never know.

Discomfort zone

2024-10-01T12:15:00.003+01:00

Any regular readers of this blog (even typing that sentence makes me cringe - as if there could possibly be such a thing as a "regular reader" what arrogance on my part etc) will have noticed that I occasionally blog about autism.

This actually started before my diagnosis when I merely suspected that I was autistic, but naturally accelerated once I had the validation of the letter from a psychology professional which meant that the nagging little voice of impostor syndrome in my head had to shut the fuck up just this once. I should have it framed like a degree certificate so I can look at it every time I'm plagued by self doubt.

My posts on this subject so far have been about the experience from my perspective. What it's like from the inside. How little things that I thought were just me – or which I thought were common experiences – turned out to be autistic things.

There are many aspects to neurodiversity in general and autism in particular. In general I'd say it's a good thing that there's far more awareness of this these days – just think how much better I might have coped with school if it had been more of a thing back then. However this does lead to a number of common misconceptions. Some of these are caused by people simply misunderstanding what autism is, others by people who for reasons known only to themselves take the existence of neurodiversity as a personal insult. Yes, strange as it may seem I have seen "Neurotypical is a slur!" in the wild.

So I thought I'd write something addressing some of these misconceptions. It's wise for me to preface it with the disclaimer:

"When you meet one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism" - Dr Stephen Shore

This is just my experience. Other people may find it hauntingly familiar but if they don't, it doesn't mean that they (or I) am incorrect. It's not as simple as that. The so called Spectrum that has become part of modern parlance is more of a Continuum. A 24-track mixing desk rather than a dimmer switch.

Disorder?

One common misconception is that autism is something "wrong" with us, something that in an ideal world wouldn't exist. However my own diagnosis was ASC (Autism Spectrum Condition) rather than ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) as the consensus amongst psychiatric professionals has been moving towards the viewpoint that autism is a difference not a disorder.

This doesn't mean that it can't be considered a disability. Disability is very often caused or exacerbated by society at large being optimised for the average person, and that adaptations of the working or living environment are seen as too expensive (or often not even thought about). Autistic people are disabled by a society that's skewed towards accommodating neurotypical people.

Person first?

There has been a neurotypical trend towards using "person-first language". This is intended as a positive attitude ("See the person, not the disability!"). However many autistic people find it patronising if not downright offensive.

I am an autistic person. It's part of my identity and part of who I am. "Person with autism" sounds like this key part of me is something I could accidentally leave on the bus like a handbag or shave off like a beard.

In addition, person-first language has an implicit meaning – that the condition you're separating from the person is a negative thing. After all, you wouldn't dream of describing a gay person as a "person with homosexuality".

Personally, my diagnosis was a cause for celebration. It made me realise that I was not terrible at being a person, it was just that the behaviours I imagined I was required to emulate were alien to me, they weren't instinctive and had to be learned.

Quite a common reverie in my childhood was that I was from another world and had been left behind on this neurotypical planet to observe and report back but never interfere! The alien observer fantasy is something I've written about before although when I did I'm not sure I knew where it came from. I do now.

But you don't look autistic!

This is a common reaction I get when outing myself as autistic. And yes, it does still feel like "outing" myself as I never quite know what the reaction is going to be. I suspect what's usually meant by this is that the speaker is surprised that I’m not like other autistic people they’ve come across in the past and is trying to be complementary.

However it’s all to do with context.

A very common public perception of an autistic person is that of a child behaving in a certain way – yes some kind of tantrum – a way which often means that the autistic person is in distress. When we’re feeling fine and have got the energy we’re capable of fitting in, of passing un-noticed and not conforming to the stereotype.

Plus another reason I don't seem like your autistic child is that I'm not 5 any more and I've trained myself out of lying on the pavement screaming because the sweetshop is closed. (Yes, that is something that I once did.)

There are all sorts of rules around society, many of which come instinctively to neurotypical people. However, as autistics we have to learn and apply them consciously on a constant basis. Naturally adults are going to be better at this than children. An adult autistic person – especially one who's been unaware of their condition for most of their life – will have had years of practice performing eye contact, small talk or any of the other components of the social glue that hold the neurotypical world together. (It can be exhausting though and we usually need more time to recharge than most people.)

Well, you must be high-functioning then...

Another common one which is often paired with the previous entry. Again this is usually meant as some kind of complement, although the history behind this concept might make the person saying it consider a rethink.

Remember "Asperger's Syndrome"? That was quite a common expression bandied about ten years ago when discussing neurodiversity. This was latched onto because it allowed society to think that there was such a thing as "mild autism" — people who were eccentric but could function in society.

This was indeed why the Asperger’s diagnosis as distinct from autism itself was defined in the first place, although the historical background of Hans Asperger's work should be examined and taken into account.

In simple terms he co-operated with the Nazi regime's eugenics programme in the 1930s and 40s and came up with the separate diagnosis of "Asperger's" specifically to distinguish "useful" autistics from the rest so they could skip being referred to the Kinder-Euthanasie programme as their skills could be made use of by the Reich.

The dodgy idea of useful vs non-useful autistics survives to this day in the terms "high-functioning" and "low-functioning". This model imagines the autism spectrum as a one dimensional slider with low at the infra red end and high at the ultra violet. This model is flawed.

As I mentioned above, the mind of an autistic person is more like the mixing desk of 24 track recording studio. There are a limitless number of configurations the desk can be in and these can change over time. Some people have strengths in some places and weaknesses in others.

When using these terms to describe people, low-functioning ignores their strengths and high-functioning ignores their struggles.

Basically low- and high-functioning do not describe how the person experiences their autism.

They describe how the world experiences the autistic person.

We're all a bit autistic...

I'm not sure if this one is intended as a compliment, although it may be an attempt to show empathy. However, one subtext here is "...so you're nothing special. Stop fussing and make an effort like the rest of us."

It may be subconscious, but I get the impression that at best this point of view is trying to make the differences go away so the speaker doesn't have to think about them. At worst it's that the speaker feels I'm somehow cheating and using this as an excuse for not conforming to societal norms.

This point of view is often paired with pop-psychology aphorisms about stepping outside the comfort zone. What they don't realise is that as an autistic person I live outside my comfort zone. The tricky part is unlearning decades of people-pleasing done in order to fit in and learning to be comfortable enough in myself to say no to something I don't want to do.

Accepting my "no" without a fuss is one of the best accommodations anyone could make!

PS: You might have seen a puzzle piece used as the symbol for autism. In general autistic people are not keen on this branding — we're not a problem to be solved.

A far better logo is the rainbow hued infinity symbol, representing our vast array of potential and the almost limitless possibilities open to us when offered acceptance rather than just awareness.

Image by Rebecca Wilson on Flickr via Wikimedia Commons

Linear time as a revolutionary act

2023-12-30T12:39:00.002+00:00

These days if something changes for the worse it's usually because the people behind it are cutting costs and corners. The feature that has been retired or removed simply cost too much and is now being eliminated in order to shave off a minuscule amount of expense in order to increase the profit margin by a tiny increment.

Any pretence of providing good customer service and better products has disappeared from many businesses as they wring out the last few droplets of money from their business model as the pyramid scheme of "buy low sell high" collapses.

However there's one kind of business where they're constantly scrambling to implement a feature which it would be far easier and cheaper to just leave out. Social media companies appear to be desperate to scramble the chronology of people's timelines despite the fact that leaving it chronological would almost certainly be cheaper from a programming point of view.

Linear time is the default - it comes free with the universe - so to expend effort (and therefore spend money) trying to mess with that must mean that there's something even more important than profit at stake.

Could it be control?

When the internet first came in it was the province of academics, eccentrics and geeks, people who were enthusiastic about what could be achieved with this new technology; how people could be come more connected than ever before.

A lot of this research and experimentation was ignored by the mainstream finance-focussed world as an irrelevant hobbyist distraction that would probably disappear like CB radio had, so by the time it became clear that it wasn't going away it was too late - the internet protocols had been designed in such a way as to maximise the speed and ease of connection, automatically finding ways around if parts of the infrastructure were unavailable.

Ever since this realisation business has been trying to find a way of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

When they realised they couldn't actually stop the internet, businesses tried their best to come up with a supernormal stimulus that would scratch the same itch and they eventually discovered that offering people a free social media service with easy sign up meant that if you set the defaults to tip the odds in favour of the house the majority of your subscribers wouldn't bother to change anything.

Randomising of chronology is one way of maintaining control. The alleged connectedness of social media ends up being an illusion if you're not seeing other people's posts in real time, and if the service itself algorithmically curates what you do and what you don't end up actually seeing.

We are all being isolated by fake interconnectedness. And when we're isolated, we're easier to control.

As the last resource that capitalism is able to exploit in its runaway quest for profit, our minds have become the final battlefield - and if we're able to talk to each other across the globe in real time that will give us an advantage. There's still a chance social media is one solution as long as we stay ahead of those who want to turn it into part of the problem.

Photo by Hasan Albari

Theft prevention code: bA9xB9rl9k11670908m5

Which Universe Are We In Again?

2023-10-15T10:44:00.002+01:00

When considering the many worlds of the multiverse the picture that probably springs to mind, born of a thousand popular physics documentaries, YouTube videos or books, is of the universes like a sheaf of A4 paper or the pages of a book, all stacked neatly on top of one another, running in parallel, minding their own business until the science communicator sticks a sharp pencil through the stack for some reason.

It's not that though.

Another common mental model is of a constant bifurcation and splitting so that whenever a decision is made a new universe is created (which seems a bit of a waste if the decision is just about which pair of socks you're going to wear that day).

It's not quite that either though.

The multiverse is much more like a dark smoke-filled room, a continuum of possibility, probability and particles that simultaneous contains all conceivable universes and sock choices. What you decide doesn't create a universe, it just moves you into that part of the continuum.

Human consciousness can be thought of as the beam of a laser pointer in that dark smoke filled room, illuminating one set of possibilities, one path. This explains the curious counterintuitive nature of quantum physics. The double slit experiment shows that when left to its own devices a photon will pass through two slits at once and interfere with itself at the detector. And yet when someone tries to observe it passing through both slits it suddenly stops doing this. How can an act of observation affect the universe?

Well it doesn't really.

By observing in this way the observer is merely confirming which part of the smoke filled room they are in by shining their laser on it - they're not affecting the universe they're affecting themselves. The illumination defines them; out of all the myriad possibilities in the smoke filled room, they have decided to be this one.

Schrödinger's cat remains both alive and dead after the box is opened; it's just that by observing it Schrödinger traps himself in a room with either a dead cat or a pissed off alive one.

So if each of us is a beam of light does that mean that each of our universes are probably all slightly different? Maybe. But perhaps as individuals our consciousnesses are just part of a larger beam and together we make up a colossal coherent whole, a consensus of consciousness as to which direction our laser is pointing and the world we expect to see even though there may be a better one at a very slight angle from the one at which we're currently looking.

The more people there are who buy into the same world view the more coherent the beam of light is and the harder it becomes to see an alternative. But there always is one and it's always already there.

We just need to challenge the consensus.

The Invisible Sign

2023-07-02T10:30:00.001+01:00

For a long time I was conviced that I was simply rubbish at life.

Throw me into a social situation with a whole bunch of humans and I didn't have the first idea how to even begin to attempt to join in. People would seem to collapse into these stable little groups of two or three leaving me floating around like a stray electron.

Against my best instincts I often tried attaching myself to these groups but joining in with the conversation was impossible. Besides, I really felt like I was interrupting. It was rude. Even if I did dare to say something I'd get odd looks.

I still consider my crowning achievement in this Biggest Outsider Challenge to be when I ended up spending time standing around on my own at the very bash being held for me leaving a job I'd been in for 16 years...

Now that was impressive.

Of course well-intentioned people kept telling me to try harder, giving me tips and tricks, but nothing really seemed to work.

I'd hear variations of "We all feel awkward and uncomfortable some times, you just need to make an effort!" many times. Believe me I was trying very hard indeed but it seemed I had to consciously think about everything that was coming naturally to most people.

Of course a lot of this was explained when I received my autism diagnosis. This didn't necessarily solve the problem but the very knowledge that it wasn't because I was rubbish, just diversely wired, made a huge difference to my confidence. If I ended up standing on my own that was fine – and if I wanted to try to join in that was also fine as if it didn't work it wasn't a failure. My masking (camouflaging my natural personality and behaviour by imitating an imagined average social performance) got better.

However.

It still didn't quite work. The clumping together of people into stable molecules with a valency of two or three continued and it would often feel like these little groups were snapping shut as I walked through the room.

No social vacancies.

Before my diagnosis I'd often mused about the existence of an invisible sign above my head which read "Don't talk to them, they're hard work!" but had dismissed this as far fetched and paranoid.

But now I began to wonder.

People are very good at picking up subconscious signals, recognising patterns and spotting anomalies – it's part of what the human brain is all about. It's what has helped us survive and thrive over the past million years or so. However it means that when someone isn't giving out neurotypical signals – from the tilt of the head and the set of the shoulders to the small talk tidbits thrown into a conversation – subconsciously they're flagged as an inconsistency. Possibly a threatening one.

Danger, keep clear.

All of this happening below the threshold of consciousness. The invisible sign was real and being observed with invisible eyes, the outcome of which was all too visible behaviour. And this would have a cumulative effect - people further away would see others avoiding the person with the invisible sign, they'd tune into this signal and it would sweep through the room in a chain reaction.

I'm not sure what the solution to this is or if there even is one. I've spoken to other autistic people and they've noticed it too so it's not just my own overactive imagination. One obvious fix would be to get even better at masking, but that stuff's exhausting; even more so as I've got older.

Maybe a fix just isn't needed Ultimately I know that I just prefer spending time with people in groups of two or three with no masking required, and that's fine.

I can simply be me and there's no need for any invisible signage.

Don't Peel Off the Hype

2023-04-09T10:52:00.002+01:00

As somebody who has amassed a large number of CDs and records over the years, one of the minor problems I've come across is what to do about Hype Stickers.

No, I didn't know that was what they were called until now. These are little – often very nicely printed and designed – sticky labels attached to the exterior of the CD or record. Sometimes (more often in the old days) they'd read something like: "Contains the hit single : Hitty McHitface!" but more often these days they give the name of the album and artist (and sometimes catalogue number) as the album cover design is a work of art in itself which doesn't want to be sullied by text.

All well and good. However, the problem arises when said record or CD is sealed in cellophane and then the sticker is put over the top of that. You need to remove the cellophane to get at the album but that means disposing of the sticker. Which some people are fine with and all power to them. However as a collector there is definitely an urge to keep all the bits...

What you really want to be able to do is peel the sticker off verrrrry slowly and then reattach it to the now naked sleeve. However that's far easier said than done. True, sometimes you get lucky and it'll come off neatly in one uncreased piece with all of the adhesive intact. However, more often no matter how carefully you attempt this there'll be a moment when a minute tear appears and you see part of the sticker has hung back on the cellophane.

STOP. If you go any further you'll rip it irreparably.

Some people advocate warming the cellophane with a hairdryer before sticker removal but I've never quite been able to manage that successfully.

Others say that you should just slit the cellophane at the vinyl sleeve's opening and leave both it and the intact sticker in place as an outer skin for the record. However cellophane has a tendency to shrink and wrinkle over time and damage what's inside it which is the last thing you want.

These days I most often seem to resort to removing the cellophane and then cutting the cellophane backed sticker out with a scalpel and dropping it inside the sleeve. It's not very satisfactory but is often the only option available to me these days should the slow peel (hairdryer assisted or not) start heading for catastrophic failure.

I wonder if we could train the record industry out of using cellophane? When I used to work in a record shop back in the day (my first job) most of the records came as they were rather than wrapped in plastic...

Image by rawpixel.com

Please Your Soul

2023-03-05T10:30:00.000+00:00

Earlier this week I went to the launch of a book: Conform to Deform: The Weird and Wonderful World of Some Bizzare a history of the notorious indie record label that sprung out of the mind of the teenage Stephen Pearce at the beginning of the eighties. While there I realised that Some Bizzare had been a huge influence on my musical taste and personal aesthetic, ultimately contributing the mental DNA of whatever it is that makes me me.

Quite fittingly this happened by stealth.

It all started when I got into Soft Cell in 1981. For some reason (well I was on holiday – a school trip to the USSR) I completely missed out on the summer of Tainted Love and my introduction to them was their far more subversive follow up single Bedsitter. Before long I'd become an obsessive as was so often the way with me and the completist in me led me to seek out the Some Bizzare album, a compilation LP (which I seem to recall may have had a "Pay no more than £2.99" or similar sticker on it?) which had an otherwise unavailable Soft Cell track on it, as well as eleven other tracks by new bands such as Depeche Mode, The The and Blancmange.

All bands on both sides of the LP (Fish Side and Lamp Side, not Side 1 and Side 2) appealed to me and stimulated my musical taste in interesting new electronic directions, and to this day electronica is a genre that still speaks to me.

The fact that Marc Almond was a prolific artist also helped - his darker and less commercial project – Marc and the Mambas – that ran alongside Soft Cell and was also released on Some Bizarre introduced me to other artists such as Matt Johnson (The The), Anni Hogan and Jim Thirlwell (Foetus), and through them I discovered even more in a kind of runaway nuclear fission reaction, each artist leading me to discover two or three further ones and on and on. It was through Anni Hogan's debut 1985 album Kickabye that I first became aware of Nick Cave who wrote and sung on one of the tracks. Through Foetus I discovered Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth.

The music also affected my attitude to life. I was never that comfortable with conforming or fitting in or trying to be like everyone else and many of the bands featured here - despite the involvement of major labels in release and distribution - put the music first and foremost, even going so far as to almost sabotage the commercial success. This subversive attitude is something that also stuck with me and while nowadays I accept that, yes, you do need money to survive in the increasingly dystopian future into which we've washed up, I absolute do not respect money and have never been tight fisted or miserly. Sure I've been through times when I've had to tighten my belt but if anything that only increased my disdain for the capitalist ideal. I'd like my books to sell not to get rich but so that more people read my stories.

And lastly anyone who's ever met me will have clocked my eccentric appearance, queer hair and a dress sense rooted in gothic but evolved into its own thing over the years. While there's a large portion of Toyah in there I think many of the darker eye lined and nail painted aspects of my look stem from using my pocket money to buy that LP back in the early eighties.

And probably for no more than £2.99.

The Persistence of Hope

2022-12-18T11:13:00.002+00:00

There's a bus stop near the top of my road. Like many bus stops set near a junction I can't see when there's a bus coming until it appears around the corner, mere moments before I can get on.

Before that and while I'm still standing there I'm left in a state of perpetual hope - my wait might be over at any second (this is one of the few stops in Brighton and Hove without a dot matrix arrivals indicator). I may have been standing there shivering in the cold or rain for what seems like forever but my delivery from that uncomfortable state is at hand and could be with me in an instant.

It is after all something completely beyond my control so I'm not interested in second guessing it and am happy enough to just wait it out and let it happen.

What I don't understand is those people who walk up to the corner and stare off down the main street where they can see for a least a kilometre that the bus isn't coming. They're basically dousing the fires of hope in their mind in exchange for the illusion of some control.

Fair enough if that's what makes them happy – increasingly these days my motto is "An it harm none, you do you" to mix modern parlance and Wiccan Rede – but of course it's never that simple. By going and staring down the road like that they're removing my freedom to remain in blissful ignorance about how much longer I'll have to wait. If they suddenly stop and start rummaging round in their pockets and walking back towards the stop I'll know there's one coming and more importantly the longer they DON'T do that the more my "deliverance is at hand any second now" hope is extinguished.

The only solution I've been able to come up with is to stop using that bus stop.

This applies to many other areas of my life as well (aside from such obvious exceptions as train and plane departures). For instance I don't plan my movements around weather forecasts longer that 24 hours in advance, never check local bus times when setting off and generally assume I'll be able to get where I want to go as long as I leave enough time. I always do arrive early – to counter my reliance on chance I factor in the possibility that things might go wrong and set off with so much time to spare that some people get really irritated.

But things do go wrong with increasing frequency these days so what can you do aside from you do you?

The Sun and Me

2022-12-09T07:54:00.001+00:00

At this time of year there's less sun that usual in the northern hemisphere especially at such high latitudes as the UK. We're higher than you realise here - if you draw a line due west across from Land's End you don't hit New York as the sign there might have you believe. You hit the northern half of Newfoundland in Canada. New York is more in line with Madrid.

But I digress.

There are less sunlit hours here in December but sometimes the sun is more in evidence. Walking along the seafront as I do in the morning on the way to work, I often get to witness sunrise itself. Sunset is often too early for me – I'm usually still working. Maybe I'll try and catch it this weekend.

Of course I don't look directly at the sun, and that's not just because I'm being well behaved. This is one of those warnings that you don't actually need like "don't set fire to your hand" or "don't bang your head against a brick wall". Any attempt to look at the sun and you look away in discomfort.

Weirdly this didn't used to be the case for me.

I clearly remember looking at the sun as a young child (probably less than five years old), staring up at the bright close star in the vast empty blue sky above the primary school playground. I was fairly sure I knew what the sun looked like. It was a disc of white fire that you weren't intended to see being permanently eclipsed by a rotating disc of sky blue of almost but not quite the same size that occasionally let slip little slivers of the brightness as it spun wonkily. There was something both thrilling and scary about the sight, something not intended for human eyes. I was slightly frightened.

I now realise that the sky blue disc was the after image, the photosensitive parts of my retina temporarily overwhelmed by the brightness of what I was looking at. The wonky spinning was caused by the saccades as my eye moved imperceptibly, movements normally edited out by the brain.

So I knew what the sun looked like.

As I got a little older and started getting encyclopaedias and astronomy books as presents I realised what the sun “really” looked like and stopped seeing the rotating occluded sun. In fact I stopped looking directly at the sun all together. It was as if I had learned that I shouldn't and so it had now become physically unbearable to do so.

At that age I used to notice all sorts of patterns and make odd connections. That round bit in the centre of a slice of carrot (which I only now learn is called the xylem - the other part being the phloem) was something that always stood out to me. It reminded me of the sun. The connection was there and therefore I was slightly frightened by the interior of sliced carrots.

At this time of year the lack of sun makes me SAD. However, as it turns out though too much sun (in fact any direct sun at all) is bad for me. Even though I tan quite easily (due to traces of Spanish blood from a few generations back) I should avoid the sunlight and always wear hats when it's hot. This is because I have discoid lupus (DLE) and sunlight exacerbates it causing red patches on my scalp which in turn lead to scars which make it difficult for hair to grow.

For some reason it's the scalp that's the most affected by this condition, perhaps due to its nature as the thinnest section of the human corpus, stretched tightly as it is over the dome of the skull and thus more prone to inflicted injury (the lupus is an autoimmune condition whereby the body's own defences start attacking not just any invading bacteria or viruses in a wound, but the flesh of the wound itself. In the case of sunlight, any dead skin cells caused by the UV of the sun's light hang around and are misidentified by the immune system as hostile invaders causing a pitched battle and even more dead skin cells.

Despite this physical danger, I do always feel mentally more healthy when there's more sunlight to go around. Without it I lose energy and would rather do nothing and hide under the duvet all day.

Unfortunately modern society isn't set up this way.

Broken

2022-10-30T09:44:00.001+00:00

Wernigerode, European Tour 1995

Wendi fought her way free of the dream.

It had been one of those nightmares, the irrational ones that could upset her for hours after waking up. She'd had none since the band had spent a month in Devon the previous spring and she had been hoping that they'd been banished forever by her strange experiences back then.

But no. As familiar as the face of a school bully after the summer holidays, the dark red despair froze her brainstem as she struggled to open her eyes, move her limbs or do anything to escape its grip. There was shape to one side of her and she fancied it was Peter. He was speaking to her but none of the words made any sense. He shook her by the shoulder.

"Hey, wake up. We're here."

She ripped her eyes open. The dream's logic hung about her head in a cloud and a whimpering sound emerged from the back of her throat. Where the fuck was she? None of this made any sense. Shapes moved in front of a blinding white darkness and it was oh so cold. Very cold.

She was sitting in the back of the tour van. The side-door was open, revealing a snow covered car park. Peter leaned in towards her.

"You were spark out! OK now?"

"Hmm." Wendi didn't trust herself to speak, not yet. She unbuckled the seatbelt and jumped out. The snow crunched under her boots and the atmosphere of the dream began to leave her, impotent against the force of such a wintry new experience. The handle of the van bit at her bare fingers as she slid the door shut again. She caught her reflection in the curved glass; under the bright arc lights her purple hair stood out like a flare. Behind her the other members of the band stood, plumes of breath blooming from their nostrils, bundled up like arctic explorers.

This would make a good album cover, thought Wendi, zipping up her leather jacket.

"Sure you don't want your gloves?"

Wendi shook her head and stuck her hands in the pockets of her black jeans. She hated gloves. They made her clumsy, they were a layer between her and the world and she didn't need that. She jogged across to the middle of the car park shedding the last few fragments of nightmare. The still falling snow added an extra layer of silence to the experience. She spun around and looked back at the small group of men standing around the van.

It was coming back to her now. Bass player Sean was a railway enthusiast and when told that their German tour would take in both Hanover and Leipzig had insisted that they stop off between the two at somewhere called Wernigerode where they still had steam trains. As the gigs were on consecutive nights this had meant a very early start. Wendi looked at her watch. 5am. She could still taste the beer from last night. She trudged back to the boys and looked up at them.

"Well?"

Timothy the Tour Manager was fumbling with a map that folded out from the back of an old 80s Michelin Guide to West Germany. Sean turned to her.

"It's just over there, see?"

A low building squatted at one end of the car park. All of its windows were dark.

"No problem, should be OK!" Hans the driver set off towards it and they followed in his wake. Timothy had yet to successfully fold the map back up into the cover of the guide and in the end just rolled the whole thing up like newspaper and shoved the messy bundle inside his coat.

They rounded the corner station building and were confronted with an expanse of railway tracks separated by low platforms. Red lights glared down at them through the fog, accentuating the blackness of the sky above. One train squatted at the farther track, a handful of people standing on the platform beside it. Sean's eyes lit up and he began walking a bit faster, overtaking Hans.

Wendi stepped over the tracks. There were no other trains about and the silence was still overwhelming but she didn't like it. It was wrong. You didn't just walk across the tracks like that.

Clouds of steam rose from the engine at the front of the train. This was what Sean was excited about. It was a steam train, the archetype that always came to mind whenever Wendi thought of trains, despite the fact that she'd never seen one before. The Science Museum in London didn't count, despite how impressive they'd been close up and how small and vulnerable they made her feel, they'd been carcasses, gleaming and polished, mounted as trophies in the hall of the museum. Whereas here...

The engine was dirty and smelly. Dangerous. Sean stopped to admire it but Wendi dodged past him and continued to follow Hans closely. The sooner they had this sorted out the sooner she could sit down again and possibly get back to sleep. Now that the nightmare had evaporated she was keen to resume unconsciousness.

Ten minutes later Wendi climbed up into the carriage and dropped into the window seat in the compartment. The sky was still pitch black. Their destination was the top of the mountain which loomed over the town and yet despite its close proximity the train would take over an hour and a half to get up there winding its way through the foothills and looping around the summit before arrival. Wendi closed her eyes. The others bundled into the compartment and slammed the door. Someone sat next to her, the nylon of their coat hissing against the seat. She didn't care who it was. Her head lolled to one side the cold glass of the window pressing against her forehead. She didn't mind. Now that sleep had been cleared of the infestation it was an alluring prospect.

The carriage shook and jerked as the train pulled off, the sound of the steam engine so familiar to her despite the fact that she'd never heard it in real life before.

The rocking motion and the repetitive sounds became increasingly soporific and even the cold itself was a numbing blanket, wrapping her in anaesthesia. It was always like this on tour, trying to sleep on the move, never truly rested, never unexcited, always looking ahead to the next night and the next, never wanting to go home, wanting more, wanting more, wanting more...

★★★

The reddish brown clay was back but was less suffocating than normal, seen though ice. Wendi could feel it behind her, dragging at the back of her mind but the pure white of the mist in front also had its tendrils about her brain. She shook her head, preventing the old madness from getting a proper grip. She was hanging in the centre of a crystal made from pure light; she spun forever burning her thoughts on the light. The creatures back in the clay were mirrored in the bright mist, anti-shadows that danced before her and tore at her sense. This was a different flavour of fear, as irrational as the recurring nightmares but thrown into sharp relief by the illumination all around.

Come to us, retreat, you don't really want that, give in...

It was the first time Wendi had ever heard any of the nightmare figures speak, but she knew that this was what they had been always telling her, sly lies slipping from their invisible tongues straight into the lobes of her brain that controlled addiction. It would be so easy to give in to the encroaching madness and that is why it was so frightening. Give in and she would be lost forever, the self and persona she had built up over the past quarter of a century swamped by the chaos of the infant mind. That was what these creatures wanted. To succumb to the chaos would be to grant them victory, another mind conquered in their campaign to... what? Wendi didn't know but she did know she wasn't going to give in no matter how wrong reality had become, how upside down and eternal, how she was looking down at a map and the map was her and the idea of borders that had been there forever but had only just appeared, things ancient and old waiting for her not after death but before birth.

Come to us, let us in, so easy to give up give in give up...

She screamed silently at them, kicking out with her boots as she discovered that her arms weren't working. She was going to fall; she was going to fall...

There was a thud and her forehead banged against the glass. She forced her eyes open as the strange interior of the train carriage came back to her, its unfamiliarity banishing the bad dream.

The others were asleep. Nigel was snoring. The window was thick with frosty condensation. Wendi wiped at it with her left hand, the bite of the chill waking her still further. She scratched at the more stubborn of the delicate crystalline shapes which melted under her fingertips.

Outside the horizon was a pitch-black jagged line set against a deep blue.

There was a distant hissing but aside from that and Nigel's snoring she couldn't hear a thing. She clambered up onto the seat and slid the top of the window open, sticking her face out into the wintry gap and breathing in the scent of ice and pine.

The outside world stubbornly refused to reveal any more of itself to her. If anything the outlines of the mountains were even darker. The sky was not so uncooperative. The cloud cover must have cleared since they'd set off as a frighteningly large amount of stars were visible in the deep blue firmament, a sight that sent a wave of goose bumps across her neck and the backs of her arms. The universe. She'd been there before.

Since last spring any otherworldly insights provided by her corvine half had been few and far between. The merging had made her more energetic, more irresponsible and more herself but as a result she'd seen less weird shit than she'd been expecting. She'd tied the persona to the real world rather than it dragging her into the unreal one. Sometimes it felt like one of those false childhood memories that couldn’t possibly be true.

She didn't know how she felt about that. It had been a relief to be free of frightening experiences for a while but as tonight's dreams had shown, they knew where she was. Perhaps the corvine wanted something of her? It didn't feel like them though.

"What is it? What d'you want?" she shouted into the night.

As if in response the hissing increased in volume and the steam engine began moving. Banging her chin on the metal window frame, she pulled her head back in and dropped back into her seat.

The others murmured in their sleep and Nigel stopped snoring. Outside the window the deep blue of the sky lightened almost imperceptibly as tendrils of mist flickered past. Banks of fog clung to the mountainside, dark pools of emptiness that reflected nothing.

★★★

Wendi could have sworn that she wouldn't fall asleep again, but nevertheless was gently rocked back into consciousness by the motion of the train. It was now definitely daylight outside and the train’s motion was less frantic.

Wendi attempted to wipe the window clear with her hand but the condensation had refrozen, the tiny ice crystals now hard enough to scratch the soft skin of her palm. She pulled her shades from her jacket pocket donned them and stood up on her seat again.

The outside was just as cold as it had been the last time she’d stuck her head out of the window but that was the only thing this new experience had in common with it.

It was so fucking bright.

The white blanket of the ground sloped away from her, covered with conical snow covered trees, a Seasons Greetings card brought to life. Above the sky was a pale blue, streaked with thin twists of delicate cirrus.

The train slowed even further; Wendi turned her head. They were about to come to a standstill at the terminus, a chunky grey stone building with a low snow covered platform.

She jumped down from her perch, landing on the wooden floor of the compartment with a thud just as the carriage jerked to a halt.

The engine was hissing with relief at having finally made it to the summit.

The others stirred as Wendi grappled with the handle. The door swung open into the white and she leapt out.

There were only a handful of other passengers on the train and they stayed in their huddles, their little groups; the voices of a couple of tour guides issuing instructions in different languages.

The band hadn’t bothered with a guide although Hans was taking charge. This didn’t bother Timothy; if anything he appeared a little relieved not to have to do anything.

Sean was at the end of the platform examining the engine again while the rest of them trudged through the doors of the visitors’ centre behind the other groups.

Wendi wasn’t in the mood for engines, tourism or gift shops. There was something about the isolation of this place that appealed to her and she was determined to find out what that was and where to find more of it. She carried on walking beyond Sean and found a road that ran past the railhead, up towards the summit where a large TV antenna stood sentinel over the scene.

As her boots creaked through the thick snow she could hear the faint deadened voices of the others drifting across the white expanse of the mountain’s summit; aside from them and the hiss of the exhausted engine she could sense the silence creeping up on her, the wind murmuring secrets in her ear about the expanse of nothing.

The rising sun was at her back as she passed the buildings clustered around the base of the antenna. She was at the peak and the ground began to fall off again; gently at first but increasingly steep just a little way in front of her.

Once there was no one in sight, she stopped, staring ahead at the distant hills, strands of misty clouds above and below her blurring the boundary between earth and sky.

Hold on what was that?

A giant shadowy shape was hovering in the air somewhere between her and the horizon, a figure limned in soft rainbows. The hairs rose on the back of Wendi’s neck - it was human in form. She raised a hand to shield her eyes and the figure mimicked her movements.

The enormous ghost at the end of this tunnel of air and light was her. The nightmarish atmosphere of the dream she’d had earlier began to return.

Wendi stood stock still, but the figure now moved of its own volition, beckoning to her.

Come to us, come to us, come in, give up…

Wendi took a few steps forward and then a few more. The still dark cloud filled valley yawned before her as she approached the edge.

★★★

She was so cold and her arms and legs ached. What had happened? There was a half memory of a slip and a tumble into icy whiteness, of the relentless soft violence of brawling with snowmen, of the world turning over and over and over. Had she slipped and banged her head?

And had there been something else?

“There she is!” A voice muffled by the cold clean air. Wendi opened her eyes onto blinding blue and white glare. She squinted; a couple of silhouettes moved up there, the contrast against the bright sky reminding her of something on the tip of her mind; of something missing. Something that had happened to her between falling and waking up. Something to do with those dream figures that had appeared before her on the mountain’s edge.

She sat up. That was a very good point. How far had she fallen? She was at the bottom of a short incline; the marks of her descent clear in the fresh snow. She looked the other way. It was just as well she’d stopped sliding when she had as less than a meter further on the ground dropped away. She turned onto her front, crawled to the edge and looked down.

A hundred metres of vertical broken rock eventually disappeared behind a tightly crowded forest of pine trees; the snow on their branches turning them into Christmas cake decorations.

Even though she was lying down, Wendi's head spun. She screwed her eyes shut as the snow covered ground on which she was lying seemed to upend itself over the edge. In her mind's eye she could see herself and a portion of snow sliding neatly off the shard of rock as easily as sugar off a knife.

She'd never have said – never have admitted – that she suffered from vertigo. She'd always been a thrill seeker. But this was too much. There was something about this place, something about the cold that was gnawing into her core. It was more than just cold it was blue and blinding, an oxyacetylene flame of ice that roared at her mental defences. Even as she called on the unhuman part of her mind for help, her consciousness began to fracture. The last thing she heard was the crunch of snow as someone else slithered down the incline to join her.

★★★

The rhythm was back. The rhythm, from earlier in the day. Wendi opened her eyes. She was back in the train with the boys. In one corner of the compartment Timothy struggled with his map. There was a crackling noise as she moved. She was wrapped in a sheet of silver foil, a space blanket. Peter looked over at her.

"How are you feeling now?"

How was she feeling? Wendi couldn't tell. She wasn't cold anymore and the curious blue-white panic had gone.

"OK I think?"

"Not woozy any more? The doctor at the transmitter station said there was no sign you'd banged your head."

"Not woozy." Wendi didn't even remember being woozy. Didn't remember anything about a doctor or a transmitter station. "Don't worry. I'm just tired I think. Late night, no bed, early start, and hangover. I'll be fine!" She'd had the occasional blackout in the past due to drugs and drink. On more than one occasion she'd surrendered control of her body to the unhuman side of herself.

But this wasn't either. It was just missing time. She closed her eyes and thought, the sun – now quite high in the sky – warming her pale face.

Something had happened back there. Before that first awakening on the mountainside, after she'd seen the rainbow edged ghost reaching out to her from the fog. It was eluding her recall, the shape of the memories slipping from her fingers like a handful of ice cubes.

One thing she was sure of. It knew about her now and was after her.

Communal Reality Goggles

2022-10-23T13:26:00.000+01:00

The world around us largely consists of what we expect to see in it.When presented with something brand new, our brains first have to decode the signal that they get from the eyes. The picture passes through the first level filters where edges, shapes and colours are detected and assigned. After that the filters applied rely on our knowledge, memories and experience. It's only after that processing that an identity is assigned to the object.

I am looking at a clock.

When we're children a lot of what we see is still new to us so our sensitivity at detecting the unusual and never previously encountered is very high - a child walking into a familiar room where just one thing has been changed will spot that change almost immediately. However, as we get older we take a lot of the world as read. In particular we know our homes extremely well and it's unlikely we actually look at anything in them properly very often.

This is where my glasses come into it.

I wear glasses or contact lenses for short sight - I'm fine working close up and reading. As a result most of the time - aside from watching television - I am able to go about my domestic business without wearing either. Furthermore it really doesn't feel as if I'm living in a blurred flat either. My brain knows the environment well enough for me to take it all as read. If I actually concentrate on something then of course I can see the blur, but on the whole I feel as if I'm walking about in a non-myopic environment.

One result of this is that it's not unknown for me to leave the house having forgotten my glasses. Given how much time I've spent indoors over the past two and a half years due to The Circumstances there are often times that I've completely forgotten I even need sight correction - but when I reach the bottom of the steps down onto the pavement it suddenly dawns upon me that the world is far more out of focus than it should be at which point it occurs that I've forgotten my specs again.

Extrapolating from this model of my flat in my head it's fair to say that it's likely that we all have a similar model of the world itself embedded in our heads - and this time not only what it should look like but what it should be like. A consensus, a lowest common denominator. The intersection of all sets on the Venn diagram of humanity's beliefs. The way that the world works. Collapsing the waveform of the world into something we can all agree on. Communal Reality: CR.

There are so many of us now that it's no surprise that this CR world is so mundane. A few centuries ago when human beings were rarer, magic and monsters had far more space in which to potentially exist.

Then as now it was outside the universally accepted world that the interesting stuff takes place. So why not take off our CR googles and see what's out there?

Photo by Michelangelo Buonarroti from Pexels

NOT all a dream

2022-10-09T11:17:00.000+01:00

I've always had trouble coming up with the titles for stories, especially novels. I never thought of a satisfactory title for the first novel I wrote in around 1990 (near future science fiction, the dates of some of the events in which we've now passed) and for a long time my debut novel Comeback (an urban fantasy) was known only by the working title of Genie in Underland.

This is an obvious reference to Alice in Wonderland, a book that at first glance does have some similarities to Comeback and was very probably an influence (subconscious or otherwise) - as a child the Alice books were amongst my favourites.

Both have a female protagonist who enters a mysterious subterranean realm in pursuit of their goal. Both journeys start with a memorable descent – Alice's rabbit hole and Genie's escalator – into a world where the normal rules of logic have been waived.

And I'd say the central characters do have some traits in common. Not that Alice is the equivalent of a coked up pop star – but both are considerate people who react with calm surprise rather than panic when faced with the alarming and ridiculous (though Genie does have the odd wobble when things get too much for her). Neither of them suffers fools gladly and they are both quick to point out the flaws in the arguments of the beings they encounter – and they're not afraid to be rude.

I put only one actual Alice reference into the text of Comeback and unexpectedly it occurs in the real world during a flashback rather than in the Underworld.

There is one major difference between Alice in Wonderland and Comeback. The former turns out to have all been a dream, whereas it's not a spoiler to say that Genie's experiences are all very real and have consequences.

Alice in Wonderland is perhaps the ur-text of "it was all a dream" and as such I have no problem with it; however in general I am not best pleased when it happens in a story I have hitherto been enjoying. As a child I was devastated (I actually burst into tears) at the end of Jennie by Paul Gallico when it is implied that not only were Peter's experiences when transformed into a cat for the bulk of the book very probably a dream, but a dream he does not even remember by the end of the last chapter.

However I'd say that the Alice books can be forgiven for inventing this sin because their narratives use dream logic so extraordinarily well. Long before the awakening at the end of the book it's clear we're in a dream state - absurd things are happening without question, people and places change identity without so much as a by your leave and irrational arguments make perfect sense. The baby becoming a pig; the encounter with the White Queen who becomes a shop-keeping sheep, the shop itself then becoming a rowing boat; the crowd of invisible voices that all speak (and think) in chorus when Alice is on a train... I could go on.

The most impressive part is the way that Alice's thought processes themselves are often surreal and ludicrous and yet make a kind of sense in context.

However, the Alice books aside, I feel generally feel cheated when either everything turns out to have been a dream or when everything returns to normal and everyone goes home after a series of outlandish adventures. It's as if the author is saying that these things couldn't really happen - or that if they did, then they really shouldn't have.

One of the many things I really enjoyed about the end of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere was the way it subverts the second of these tropes. SPOILER ALERT: at the end, Richard Mayhew has returned to his everyday life and gets both his flat and his job back. But then he realises that leaving London Below was possibly the biggest mistake he's ever made - so he finds a way back. Now that's an ending I can get behind.

I hope readers find the ending of Comeback equally satisfying.

Comeback can be bought online from a variety of outlets here or ordered from your local bookshop.

Dream orbits

2022-10-02T17:08:00.004+01:00

Firstly the disclaimer: yes, I know what dreams are likely to be in reality. No need for any "well actually" here as this is not a psychological treatise, it's a flight of fancy. A stream of consciousness. So please indulge me.

There's nothing quite as frustrating as having an involving and fascinating dream only for the details to evaporate rapidly on awakening. The emotions linger around the head affecting the mood like the perfume of someone fascinating who's just left the room before you got to properly talk to them at a party. Your only chance if if they return - you can't follow them because you might get lost. Besides, what if they're busy? They're bound to be talking to someone else. And you don't want to bother them.

Although to be honest I can't remember the last time I went to a party.

When this happens with dreams you simply have to comfort yourself with the effect they've had on your mental state. If you're lucky it's been a good dream which sets you up for the day. Perhaps you spent some time with someone interesting in there, someone with whom you just clicked. Of course there's always an element of melancholy on awakening when you realise that this soulmate doesn't even exist in the real world, but nevertheless they've had a positive influence on you which isn't bad for someone imaginary.

Unfortunately the good ones are more often than not the ones you forget. The bad dreams are memorable and stick in the mind. There are evolutionary reasons for remembering bad stuff and nightmares are no exception.

Where do dreams go when we're not having them? Most would say nowhere - they just disintegrate. However given that some recur on a regular basis they'd either have to reassemble themselves within the head in time for their next performance or actually be stored.

But where are they stored? More than once I've come across other people that have had the same recurring dreams as me. Does this mean that they've got their own copy of the dream or do they just download it from the cloud when they need it? If the latter, where exactly is the cloud?

Perhaps recurring dreams are like meteor showers and we're the planets. Every so often our orbit will carry us through the cloud of debris left behind by a psychological comet and if we're looking in the right direction we'll have the dream again. Someone sharing your orbit will also pass through the cloud and have the same dream. Of course we will leave our mark on them as we pass through them which might explain how when you meet someone for the first time and yet both of you are convinced you've met before can happen. Perhaps it's because you've both had the same dream at some point, a recurring dream for both in which you've been picking up traces of each other. A feedback loop that links you in your sleep for a short while.

Some of these dream debris clouds must be absolutely enormous as so many people have them - I bet the "teeth falling out" dream cloud is half the size of the asteroid belt in relative terms.

Some people claim never to dream. But they probably do; it's just that they have very thick atmospheres (like Venus) so from the surface they have absolutely no idea that the display is going on up above them every night.

People as planets, we orbit each other and move about like balls on a pool table. Like elementary particles in a cloud chamber we leave trails of bubbles and pass through those left by others. If we're in a particularly perceptive frame of mind - say asleep and dreaming - perhaps we can leave messages for each other. Next time you're asleep find a stick of chalk and write "hello" (or something else) on the pavement. Perhaps I'll see it the next time I'm passing.

Verisimilitude

2022-10-01T17:41:00.003+01:00

Worldbuilding can be tricky if you're writing science fiction or fantasy. There's so much to do—the readers are unfamiliar with the background, social mores and customs of the novel's environment and as such are at a disadvantage when it comes to working out what's going on.

The characters themselves are no help. They know all this stuff anyway, so there's no way they are going to be able to remind each other of what they've known for years without sounding unrealistic. One solution is to use an omniscient narrator but then if you're not careful there's a temptation to fall into the "telling not showing" trap...

Convincing worldbuilding is a skill that it can take years to master. However there is a way around this if you're in a hurry. If you set the novel in the real world you can take the background as read—everyone knows all this stuff right?—and concentrate on the actual story. Interestingly there is an added bonus of using this method. Given that you aren't describing the world, just the characters' reactions to and interactions with it, you may end up inadvertently showing not telling. The story immediately becomes more convincing.

Of course the problem is that science fiction and fantasy are by definition unusual and otherworldly. Can they convincingly be set in the real world?

I'd say it's a distinct advantage when they are. More often than not in such books the protagonist is an inhabitant of the real world and so in an ideal position to act as reader analogue—they don't understand all these strange things happening to them either and so their fumbling discoveries can stand in for ours as we travel together into the uncharted chapters ahead.

This is all very fine and splendid, but there is another matter to be considered. Depending on the stature of the central protagonists, tweaks to the novel's real world are sometimes required.

In my debut novel Comeback, Genie has just won the 2007 BRIT Award for Best British Female - but a quick check of Wikipedia reveals that in actual fact that award was won by Amy Winehouse.

This is unavoidable and for similar reasons Genie's record label Mallard doesn't actually exist. These kind of changes to the real world the reader can accept—they're necessary in order for the story to work. One other change I made—a kind of halfway house between the real and the imaginary—was mentioning Pirates of the Carribean 3 having a premiere in London. In actual fact there was no red carpet UK premiere of this film in 2007 but I reasoned that in the alternate reality where Genie won that year's BRIT there had been.

I think it's important to make as few of these changes as possible. If you make too many there's a danger of people being drawn out of the story. For example early on in the book Genie appears on TV in Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. When I was writing this sequence as part of a creative writing course, a couple of my fellow students suggested that it should be a fictional TV show with a fictional host. I could have done that quite easily—Friday Night With Ross Johnson has a similar ring—but it didn't sit well with me. It ate away at the verisimilitude of the piece. OK so Genie didn't really exist in our world but if she did it would be a real chat show she appeared on.

When first writing it I was unsure quite what the position of including real people in (non dialogue) cameo roles in a novel was. I even sent an enquiry to Jonathan Ross's agent to ask if his cameo was OK but never received a reply. In the end the legal people at the publishers had a look at it and decided it was fine. Which was good. I'd have hated to have had to hurriedly invent a flimsy fictional host for the chat show.

As written, all speaking characters in Comeback are fictional, as are any organisations they may be affiliated with. But locations, background and tangential figures—they're all real. It's possible to visit the Roundhouse, the BBC Television Centre (or at least what's left of it), the Pelirocco Hotel in Brighton and Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

It's not possible to visit Genie's penthouse flat in Soho or Mallard Music in Chelsea.

And it's not possible to visit the Underworld. Not if you want to come back, anyway.

You can buy Comeback on ebook or paperback here.

Unfinished Biscuit

2022-09-25T18:30:00.001+01:00

We’ve all been there. You're halfway through a biscuit, perhaps as part of a tea break. Then someone knocks at the door or the phone rings and you put the biscuit down somewhere so you can deal with this new crisis. You get distracted. By the time you've got back to your routine you've forgotten where you put the biscuit. It was a spur of the moment abandonment—stored only in the Very Short Term Memory. You retrace your steps. No sign. It's not anywhere near where you were sitting nor is it next to your cup of tea.

Part of you is trying to insist that it doesn't matter. It's only (half a) biscuit. You've got a whole packet of the things in the kitchen. But that's not the point. You are not concerned with the material loss of a few grams of pastry and sugar. You are concerned because there is an unfinished process in your brain. Whatever part of you that tracks progress is in an uncompleted state, taking up memory space it can only free up by completing. Eating another biscuit isn't going to help.

This is why when you eventually find the biscuit—two days later on top of the pile of books in the hall that you were planning to sort through before taking to the charity shop—there is a massive sense of relief. The semi-biscuit has gone stale and all you're going to do now is throw it away, but at least you've freed up the resources in your brain's central processor. On some level the tension that has been there the whole time has now been released. You can force quit the process.

It doesn't just happen with biscuits. The same phenomenon can be observed with a half finished cup of tea.

One of the worst case scenarios for this event—as there's no way it can ever be resolved—is when an overzealous member of bar staff breezes through the pub and takes your almost but not quite finished pint out from under your nose. OK, so the process was nearly complete—perhaps as much as ninety five per cent—but it wasn't actually complete and as such the counter in your head is still active. You can't complain because that would seem petty. Making all that fuss over half a centimetre of beer. But of course it's not the beer. It's the peace of mind. The peace of mind you're never going to get back now without a complete brain reset. This is what Magnus Magnusson was going on about all this time.

I've started, so I'll finish.

Not Parallel, Not Universes

2022-09-19T11:12:00.001+01:00

"The first thing to realize about parallel universes is that they are not parallel. It is also important to realize that they are not, strictly speaking, universes either."

— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

I have been reading about The Mandela Effect. This is a name for collective false memory whereby a significant amount of people will swear blind that something in the past was one way whereas in actual fact it was another and furthermore there's written, photographic and filmed proof.

The most likely explanation for this is that misconceptions which lead to a false memory of something are common misconceptions and that people susceptible will develop similar false memories, which they can then reminisce with each other about thereby strengthening them.

A more outlandish theory—and much more interesting from a fantasy point of view—is that the people remembering things differently are now living in a different parallel universe from the one in which the memory was first formed. Sounds rather far fetched, especially in the online articles about this phenomenon that shriek, "We are living in an alternate universe!" For a start that's not what the theory says. It says that those experiencing it are now in a different universe, not all of us.

Other online pieces attempt to "debunk" Mandela Effect examples by presenting proof. Well, duh. If this really is an alternate universe then of course there will be proof you can compile into a listicle. That's like more extreme version a citizen of Airstrip One in George Orwell's 1984 using the official back issues of The Times to prove something happened a certain way—only in this case it's not The Party but the entire multiverse that is conspiring to change the facts to fit the narrative.

I am not suggesting that all this is true and that people are retaining memories of the parallel universes where they lived earlier in their lives, but it is a fascinating idea worthy of exploration from a science fictional or fantasy point of view.

For a start it's highly unlikely that people who swear blind that Bruce Springsteen used to be called Bruce Springstein are actually physically jumping from universe to universe. However given that the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics implies a blurring of reality down on the quantum level then it's possible that the human mind—constructed as it is from nerve impulses the mechanisms of which rely on microscopic events and quantum effects in order to function—is in some way in contact with the versions of itself in nearby neighbouring realities. Perhaps information leaks through. Perhaps the locus of self leaks through. But even so the body of such a person is the body that has always lived in this world.

So will a Bruce Springsteen fan who had a tattoo of his name on their arm find that the tattoo has changed? That's the thing—someone that invested in Bruce Springsteen will always have known the correct spelling and therefore won't have developed the false memory in the first place.

Reading through the list of Mandela Effect examples I realise that I haven't experienced any of them. The effect is named after the conviction that some people have that they clear remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Whereas I have a clear memories from the 1980s of the Mandela Hall at Sussex University, which was named after him in solidarity with his struggle, and The Special AKA having a top 10 hit with "Free Nelson Mandela".

I do have a couple personal examples though. For example I have quite a good memory for TV dialogue even if only seen once. I was convinced that in the famous "Kitten Kong" episode of The Goodies at one point Bill Oddie says, "Well, it's eaten up the Post Office Tower!" However on watching the eventual commercial release of the show on VHS I discovered that the line is subtly different: "It's already eaten the Post Office Tower!"

Of course if memory is stored in the physical structure of the brain then even leaping from reality to reality wouldn't do any good as each time you'd arrive in a brain with only the memories of that reality... For all we know we're already doing it all the time.

However, I am convinced that there never was a cartoon called The Berenstain Bears, however it was spelled.

Once Upon A Time

2022-08-27T10:57:00.001+01:00

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