An Appendix to "The Only Solution"

If you’ve come to this page first, read the original piece here. And while you’re at it, read some of the other stuff on there… it’s pretty good!

Just in case you’re concerned, that was intended to be satirical...

Although every piece of research referenced in that article was real, and the findings are often robust, it is patently absurd to worry expectant mothers by telling them that what they are doing is wrong. Regardless of the fairly minimal effects of many of the “significant influences” I referred to (3 IQ points? WHO THE HELL CARES?), the traits being discussed are in most cases incredibly complex, such that our current understanding of the basis of any one of them is sketchy at best. The Maily Dail today carried a headline of “Women who drink organic milk in pregnancy could be harming their baby's IQ”. The most important words there are “could be”; organic milk contains less iodine than non-organic (due to farming processes beyond my ken), but that doesn’t make drinking it bad for the foetus. Besides which, the role of genetics, and post-natal environment is so much greater that the effect is largely swallowed (again – 3 points).

While “doing the right thing”, such as eating healthily, will be better for your child, and in some cases better for you as an expectant mother, the stress of being demonised for your actions is just as bad. In short, the guidelines provided by the Department of Health (which are pretty sane, really) are just that. Maybe cut out the bottle of whisky and eight cigars a night, though.  

Well Hall Pleasaunce

Of the rhythm and rhyme scheme of “Remember” by Christina Rossetti

Dappled sunshine across the scummy pool
Transform it back to past days of glory,
To soft-eyed maids beginning their story
Trailing dainty hands in the shade’s soft cool

A time of chivalry, and actions cruel,
Where soldiers returned from the East, gory
With bad news for widows, their eyes implore-y,
Then sit out apart, their face like a ghoul

But the park and the pool are older now
No more the haunt of the Crusade’s broken
But a sad smear, a stagnant green token
The people no more those empty-eyed knights,
No young men destroyed by a false vow,
Sent off to fight for their leader’s delight.  

Style

The old man sits, feet stroking the grass,

Watching the young men peacocking past
With dangly bits, and waistband slung low
Like sheep; no pen for these ovine ones though.

A young man, a-swagger, glances across
To the wrinkled old mutton athwart the moss.
From a bag draws his phone, the latest design,
Clicks a button, takes a picture, and posts it online.

The very next day, and the post is a meme
With a caption beneath saying something obscene,
And the peacocks all say “Lol, look at his hair”
With the belief that their wit matches that of Voltaire.

But the old man just laughs, and goes out again
To him, it’s a folly, and causes no pain.
Like a cow among calves, he watches, benign
If it’s made him less jolly, he shows not a sign.

Then he spies the peacock, strutting this way,
Stands up, walks across, bids him “Good day!”
He’s caused a shock; the peacock is riled
But the mossy old man has done naught but smiled.

He is kindly, he smiles, he is calm, he is cool;
He doesn’t seem sad to be painted a fool.
Against these charming guiles, the young man cannot speak.
He thinks him mad, this old man so meek.

The time’s nearly four, day soon will be night
And church-grounds are easier to walk round in the light,
So, relaxed as before, the old man takes his leave,
To do his rounds round the graves, and silently grieve.

There lies ‘neath the sod no bosom old friends,
Nor lover long lost – no one grave he tends.
It’s at the old and the odd this smiling man stands;
Those heavily mossed, untouched by hands.

There’s no suggestion why he should pass through
To remember the forgotten that he never knew.
So here’s my question, which I ask with a smile,
Peacock or mutton: who really has style?

Deus Servavi III

It was the rocks that started it really. Bouncing around in the wind, as they often did, throwing sparks, they’d been an intriguing sideshow to the pale apes, and once combined with the conveniently flammable creosote bush, those literal sparks had become the metaphorical kindling of the human race. There was, God thought, a rather satisfying circularity to the whole thing; he’d looked at the rocks and longed for interesting companions to admire, adore, and even to interact with, and eventually the bald simians had arisen. They in turn had stared at the rocks and seen an opportunity to meet new and interesting creatures, then kill them, eat their flesh and wear their skins. God recalled being a little shocked at that initially; they’d always been viscous buggers, even before they’d started walking upright, long before they lost all their hair, but it seemed that the violence wasn’t just an externalisation of the irritation of dusty knuckle cuts or the anguish of fleas. They just seemed to like killing stuff.

That was, of course, the downside to humans as far as God was concerned. But oh how exciting they were! The last 6000 millennia had just flown by. They were so inventive! Where God had seen a rocky ball abundant with life, they saw sunsets and landscapes, they heard grand oratorios, they dreamed brave new worlds and whole new dimensions. And the baths! The baths alone were worth every effort God had put into trying to create life.

But there had been something more. The nervousness of first contact bubbled in God’s memory like rose-scented Johnson & Johnson's (God was aware other bubble-baths were available). How would those tentative first words be received? Who to approach? Would the sheer majesty of exposure to the cosmic consciousness, the infinite made entity, the grand being be too much for their simian mind? God grinned as he thought of Urukli, that first contact; tall, strong, and clever, the leader of her tribe and the first human to use a notched stick to make a pointy stick fly really far. God had come to her as a rock (it seemed fitting, given the role such has played in their respective stories). “Urukli”, God had said, “I would speak with you of the world”. The shock on that face! The surprise! The gentle, almost motherly way she had lifted the rock in her arms! The resounding splosh as she hurled it into the nearest river, and wandered off to hunt more aurochs! Far from being cowed (or auroch-ed) it seemed that, at least initially, humans were more concerned with the calls of the day than the philosophy of existence. Initially, at least. Initially.