New mini-anthology

The Hamster returns in "On the Dock of the Bay":

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6ZRC9PrlWudQ2stMHk4TDA0S3M/view?usp=sharing

Illuminations Released

Following the abject success of his first anthology, the reclusive hamster Lord has emerged once more from Wrigglesworth Manor with a second short anthology, accessible at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6ZRC9PrlWudNUhPWi0zM2Z0XzQ/edit?usp=sharing

The Worst Word

A brief bit of context - I've been in a couple of talks, and read a couple of things (including this) recently, which set me thinking. This is an early part of an unformed train of thought.

The Worst Word

No-one means to hurt by it

Or to single anyone out

Regardless, it remains the worst word

Malignant, dripping into the soul

Apart you stand, outcast from the herd

Lost to your identity, separated by who you are

You are not normal.

NO-ONE IS.

The Golden Rule

Because I am, on occasion, a rather sad individual, I’ve spent a bit of time recently reading books about God. Ok, two books. For about 30 seconds each. And one was just parroting the other. But still, the point stands. 

The first point both books raised was centred on what Kant calls the Golden Rule (note to philosophers – I know nothing of Kant. Please don’t talk to me about Kant, unless we are in a pub. Although, thinking about it, I’m not sure philosophers exist outside pubs. If a philosopher leaves a pub, do they make a sound?) Namely, 

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” 

Although apparently that is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and not the Golden Rule. I am now confused. Whatever. Basically, to go all Judeo-Christian on your ass:

"Do to no one what you yourself dislike." —Tobit 4:15

Ah, bollocks, that’s apparently the Silver Rule, on account of being phrased negatively. Matthew 22:39 (see also Antonio, Merchant of Venice, Act I:III), that’s the ticket:

“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Both C.S. Lewis and Francis Collins (the first a reformed atheist and charming orator, the second an amazing geneticist) contend that the universality of the Golden Rule (seriously, Wikipedia it, it’s bloody everywhere) argues for a unifying morality of humankind that crosses all boundaries of separation, and as such a heavenly Father passing commandment from on high. Furthermore, both assert that an instinct to obey such a rule cannot evolve from the selfish ways of evolution (which, as we all know, drives us all to eat babies on spits).

I don’t agree (that may have been obvious). There is no reason an instinct of cooperation cannot evolve – evolution requires only that a trait is advantageous to its bearer in a given environment (and that is not disadvantageous in any environment to which the bearer is exposed). Let us hypothesise that humans evolved in small groups. That seems reasonable, given that most evidence points to such being the case. In this environment, any individual is liable to encounter any other individual again, probably next Wednesday. If I trod on Bert’s hairy foot last week and then waggled my penis at him when he got angry, it’s quite probable he won’t share his squirrel-on-a-spit with me next week when my mammoth trap (involving a matchstick, a piece of chocolate and REALLY BIG colander) goes tits-up. Therefore, a basic rule of “don’t be a dick” is probably suited to living in a small group, and breaking the rule will lead to punishment and ejection. The concern of why there is a feeling of guilt attached to breaking the rule is similar to why sexual release is nice – disgust is a powerful dissuader, just as pleasure is strongly encouraging. If we make the rule a little more complex, say, “if Bob is mean three times, no-one give him any food for a month”, then there is a strong social selective pressure against Bob being repeatedly mean, and feeling like dirt is an effective way to enforce that.

A final word, and a little bit of heresy (my feet are cold and being burned at the stake sounds kinda warming right now). I don’t think the Golden Rule need be evolutionarily beneficial to have arisen and become characteristic in humans. Even worse, I’m going to say two words, for the use of which my old lecturers would have me taken outside and shot; group selection (*dramatic chord*). I think it works in humans; unlike (as far as we know) every other animal on this planet, communication and memory allow us transgenerational transmission of cultural pressures and rules, and highly effective within-group behaviours. If the head of the group establishes a rule, “don’t be a dick”, and can effectively enforce that rule to the good of the group (no hissing at the back), I see no reason why that rule cannot maintain and become fixed within the group, even if it is to the detriment of most of the individuals therein.

There I’ve said it. Grab the faggots (behave), pour the petrol – I wanna BURN.

Illustrations

To mark my return from internet-based exile (I moved flat), I present a wee anthology, accessible below. Enjoy!

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6ZRC9PrlWudT19pRUZKRVVnd0k/edit?usp=sharing

Utter Bollocks

Upon a golden hillside,

Sits a purple chimpanzee

Who sings a song of underwear

And knits, but for no fee

The bumblebees adore him

And the artichokes he sheds

Near the gaseous burning river

Filled with upside-down dog sleds

What Wasn't There

I walked into the hallway,

Saw a painting on the stair

That filled half the wall and all the house

And showed what wasn’t there.

A man sat in the painting

A pile of books by his chair

The titles were illegible

And spoke what wasn’t there.

I steeped lightly to the riser

Made no more noise than I dare

For that man listened intently

And heard what wasn’t there.

My hands caressed the frame

Carved with craftsmanship and care

My fingers explored the canvas

And felt what wasn’t there.

And so I took the picture

From that hallway cold and bare

I carry it round with me

It shows what isn’t there.

Well Hall Haikus

The sky has darkened

The summer sun gone to rest

To rise tomorrow

The dappled ripples

Spread across the constrained pool

Longing to escape

The fragile blossom

Trembles with the blowing wind

Afraid of falling

Alone, the woman,

Cigarette nervous in hand,

Stares into nothing

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.              

Seriously Italy, WTF?

Sometimes Nature News makes me sad. Recently has been one such time, and frankly there’s only one country to blame: Italy. In the past three weeks there have been two stories that make me somewhat sad, and more than a little concerned for the state of science in the azure nation.

The first was frankly bizarre. At the start of March, some cock decided it was a good idea to set fire to the Città della Scienza in Naples (read the Science Museum), utterly destroying Italy’s biggest science communication complex. That, in of itself, is bad news. What was far worse, however, was the response of Il Foglio (read Daily Mail… actually don’t, no-one should have to do that), which proclaimed the fire a “purification against the scourge of evolutionism”, in the words of one correspondent. Crackpots on the internet is one thing, but when a national newspaper is glorying in the destruction of a centre of learning, it rather demonstrates the need to NOT BURN DOWN THE CENTRES OF LEARNING!

The second, just last week, is sadly not isolated to the fair shores of Italia. Last weekend, animal rights activists broke into a Milanese lab. They chained themselves to the doors to prevent them being opened, mixed up cards and animals, stole several animals and broadcast the names of researchers on Facebook. Eventually they were evicted, with the promise of being allowed to return and remove more animals (it is unclear if this is actually going to happen). Setting aside the debate on animal rights, the actions of this group are totally negative and irresponsible on three counts. Firstly, by destroying the experiments within the lab, they have set the work of the lab (on correlates of autism and schizophrenia) back years. These are distressing conditions that new techniques, including those in animals, offer a real chance of alleviating. By removing these animals, the activists have indirectly harmed human beings. Not that they care; their disregard both for the work of the scientists (students who had lost their entire PhD’s work were seen crying in the corridors – frankly I don’t blame them) and for their privacy shows that the ‘compassion’ of these protestors is a sick hypocrisy. The final irony would be delicious if it wasn’t so sad; the mice removed by the animal rights group were genetically modified to be immuno-compromised, and therefore were kept in very favourable and tightly controlled conditions in the lab. Their removal has been their death sentence.

Obviously this isn’t Italy’s fault; there are many fine people in Italy, of all creeds, and both of these incidents have led to outrage in the country. However, there is a disturbing undercurrent in the view of science in Italy, and it is this undercurrent being shown to the world. Several of the comments on these articles expressed a similar concern – the intelligent majority in Italy needs to become more vociferous and drown these absurd retrogrades.             

Anxious Times

I’ve been intending to write this piece for a while, but I have to confess to some trepidation. I started working in anxiety genetics in October, knowing that it was somewhat of a backwater compared to spearhead fields such as schizophrenia. It’s not that no-one cares about anxiety – there are some incredibly clever people working in the field – but there is a definite feeling that it is understudied. With this in mind, it was with some reticence that I told people what I was to do in my PhD. To my surprise, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to, from those who’ve known me since before I was born, to the drunk woman singing Les Miserables on the train, has responded incredibly positively; folk really think anxiety is important, and the value of improving treatments of the disorder is seemingly obvious.

Which is wonderful. Obviously. I mean, anxiety IS important, and improving treatment will benefit a hell of a lot of people. It’s just… I need to actually understand it now! I’m not a psychologist by any means but if I’m going to really sell my stuff to the world at large (which is the whole point of science, as far as I’m concerned, and arguably one of the things it does least well), then I have to be able to offer insight on the disorder.

One thing I can try to explain is why anxiety is understudied, and why it’s probably always going to be a challenge. Historically, work in psychiatry tended to focus on studies using inpatients of psychiatric hospitals; to be blunt, such patients tended to be those separated from society out of fear, and hence the dominance of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In comparison, anxiety and depression, though widespread, are viewed as much more normative; tell someone you refused to fly because you’re scared of planes, and they’ll regale you with their own ‘quirky’ fears; tell them you don’t like to fly because the plane talks to you while you’re trying to sleep, and they’ll back away… slowly.

The divide still exists, and it is likely to remain. As psychiatric genetics has progressed to the current trend for genome-wide studies of association (basically “is this bit of DNA found in patients more often than in non-patients?), it has become clear that most psychiatric disorders have complex causation at a genetic level. However, anxiety and depression may be the most complex of the lot. In schizophrenia, there are now tens of genetic variants that have cropped up in multiple studies, and which we can be relatively confident are playing a role in predisposing their carriers to developing the disorder (quite how they are doing this is an entirely different kettle of fish, or possibly a lake of whale sharks). In depression, no finding has proved consistent. Not a one; and that’s taking into account a lot of data being analysed by the best minds in the business. The story is likely to be the same for anxiety, although that’s not clear because the necessary study size just hasn’t been reached yet.

Therein lies a crucial point; anxiety and depression are common – the chances are you know multiple people who’ve suffered, or are suffering from one or the other. Why, then, are the sample sizes not big enough to make firm conclusions?. You could say that the question is a silly one, that there’s no such thing as a big enough sample size, that bigger is always better (I’ll avoid the crude sexual pun, not least because there’s the suggestion it’s untrue - Paper abstract (aptly enough from PNAS)). You’d be quite right; we can make a conclusion from the study sizes we’ve got, and it is that none of the bits of DNA we’ve looked at has a big enough effect to be greater than chance in the samples we’ve used. This is one probable reason why anxiety and depression genetics has had fewer positive results than schizophrenia genetics; the relevant genes have smaller effects.

There is another problem; there’s too much variation. Anxiety and depression can be categorised into a plethora of different forms, and even within those forms two presentations might involve quite different symptoms and require diverse approaches to treat. This is a general issue of psychiatry (and arguably of medicine), but it does appear to affect anxiety and depression rather a lot . It’s also a big sticking point for the studies being done. If the patient group being looked at is made up not of one disorder, but of several sub-disorders, each sub-disorder may have specific genetic bases, and, because they are all mixed together, none of them can be found. Imagine you have two baskets, and two sets of balls with slightly different colours. If you have equal numbers of balls, and you separate them such that almost all the lighter balls are in one basket, it is easy to split the baskets. If you only have a few lighter balls, however, it becomes very difficult to tell the baskets apart; without examining every ball, the baskets look essentially identical. That, in a nutshell, is the current situation for anxiety and depression genetics. They’re a load of balls.        

Deus Servavi: II

The purple duck bobbed, ploughing the suds with the tenacity and vigour only attainable by the very finest rubber ducks. God sighed contentedly, and flicked the duck with her foot, sending it swashing off to new adventures in the far-flung outer reaches of the bathtub. The bath had been a good idea, and God let her auburn hair fall down the sides of the tub to brush the warm slates of the floor below. Of course, being the manifestation of a shared cosmic consciousness, the auburn of the hair could easily have been grey, or blue, or even ultra-puce, and, given that there was no observer, it was all three and none, all at the same time. But the bath was real, and the room was too, a little piece of metaphysical engineering of which God was rather proud. It might be made of the coalescence of countless trillions of thoughts and dreams, but it was as solid a foundation as rock. The trouble was, God wasn’t a huge fan of rock; and, looking at the duck, now fighting bravely against the impossibility of progression beyond the ceramic cliffs of the bath’s sides, her thoughts strayed back through billions of years…

 

Rocks. That was what they were. If God had been in a generous mood, she would have admired the fascinating geology crafted by the effects of the few simple rules she’d established right at the Bang, rules that now led to plumes of fire and crafted new types of rock in the heart of the planets. She didn’t admire it; they were rocks. Squeezed, leaking rocks. Truth be told, she was lonely. Oh there were the angels, alright, but they were merely extensions of the same cosmic consciousness as her, and as such dull. She’d swiftly found that conversations with someone who held exactly the same thoughts as you couldn’t be conversations at all. She might as well have been talking to the backs of her hands, and she’d given that up after a few millennia, so the angels had never got off the ground as companions. But here, in the stuff that had come from the nothingness, there was potential. The rocks were oozing with it, or at the very least oozing. She summoned all of the power at her disposal, which, given the whole omnipotence thing, was quite a lot, and focussed, forced consciousness into the very matter of the planet below, crafting a spark within it; life! The planet, new, aware, a sudden entity in a vast unknown, was confronted by the beauty and wonder of creation. The stars! The planets! The endless gaps between them! It drank it all in, and, with a surge of its newly acquired life force, blew itself into a billion pieces.

God sulked for a week.

But when she returned, something was different. Far at the edge of boundless space, one rock was, well, weird. She walked on its surface, the blistering heat doing nothing to the cognitive mist of her soles. Her soles of souls. Within the green pools of this world, there were… things. Tiny things, little more than chemical strings, but things nonetheless. She felt a brief moment of concern that she wasn’t sure how they got there. Oh she knew, of course – it was in the description, as it were – but the exact details were foggy. It was like the beach on which she walked; she knew it was made of 123434776463 grains of sand; it was just that finding grain #100352834586 would be more than a bit of a bugger. The conscious rock had exploded, and that had, in some fashion, brought about this stuff, this essence, this life. Who cared quite how it had got there, it was the chance she had wanted.

She considered the next move. What she really wanted was something to watch, to be fascinated by, maybe even to talk to. But to just make it… that seemed wrong, too simple, too limited – she might just make a slightly different version of the angels, and frankly there’d been enough games of celestial charades where everyone played “the endless bounds of eternity” to last her, aptly, eternally. No, the best move seemed the least. She looked back at the planets, spinning in their full nothingness, and thought of the rules she’d put in place. She smiled.

 

And so it had been. A few simple rules had seen to it that survival begat survival, and off the little things went. And God sat, and she watched across the millions of years, and she wondered at the brilliant branching it all took, flying off in all directions. Here, a line had taken to the skies, soaring across the planet on limbs replete with feathers originally designed to cool the blood; there, life had stayed simple, but now ruled deep within the crust of the planet, all but unknown to its distant brethren above. All had come from those little squiggly lines; so much, so amazingly different, so fantastic. And God felt a little guilty to pick favourites, but there were favourites to be picked, and among them walked the funny little pale apes…

 

But, thought God, as he arose from the depths of the bath and shook the water from his silky fur, that was a story for another bath.

 

Sex, Gender and Sexuality

I’ve been thinking about sex for some time. In fact, I’ve been thinking about sex for about 11 years, and even more so recently (which I am attributing to the long-term effects of someone –who-shall-not-be-named giving me ant-flavoured hot beverages at the weekend), but that’s not what I’m referring to. It’s not even the same meaning, which is apt, as the meanings of sex is what this piece is about.

I’d always considered sex and gender the same thing, basically thinking the latter was a more formal and euphemistic synonym of the former. However, as I’ve now discovered, when you hang around psychologists, that bird don’t fly no more. Sex and gender become two different things; sex takes on a biological and deterministic meaning, while gender forms a more abstract, personal psychological concept, with inherent ties to the concept of self, and other such grandiose ideas that tend to send me scurrying for cover. It is this idea that drives the acceptance of transsexualism and gender-queerness, that such characteristics are indicative of conflict between one’s sex and one’s gender.

But my coffee-fuelled mind raises a couple of objections, or at least modifications, to this new idea. Firstly, sex isn’t deterministic. I don’t think it’s a bell curve as such, but rather two overlapping distributions forming a bimodal-like distribution, which I’ve described below:

 

Genetics define the two distributions; you are male if you possess a Y chromosome, and female if you do not. But it isn’t as simple as that. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s syndrome, for example, are XXY; they are phenotypically male, but textbook cases present with feminised features and often fertility problems. Sufferers of Klinefelter’s would fall in the cleavage of my graph (huh-huh it looks like tits), on the male side. However, maleness and femaleness needn’t be typified by conditions; there is probably a normal distribution across the whole population. If gene expression varies between individuals (which it almost certainly does), it stands to reason that some people may exhibit very high levels of one set of sex hormones, and very little of the others, and may fall at the edges of my graph, whereas those with more balanced levels (who may be more androgynous) would be in the middle. This androgyny would be separate to hermaphroditism, in that androgynes would be genitally one sex, but there degree of maleness or femaleness would be similarly low; the runner Caster Semenya comes to mind as an example of a very masculinised female. This complicates the sex-gender conflict; not only gender, but also sex, is a variable concept. Ms Semenya presumably identifies very strongly as a woman, which probably made her biologically ambiguous sex all the more distressing. This isn’t an abstract or philosophical argument either; fertility medicine must be concerned with a patient’s position on the sex dimension, regardless as to whether they identify as male, female, or transsexual.

 

That last word bugs me. I have nothing against transsexuals (I’m not Julie Burchill), although if I know one personally I am unaware of it. My qualm is with the word (still not Julie Burchill, don’t worry). I would much rather it were transgender, as it then lies on a gender continuum:

  The word transsexual confuses gender with sexuality. The two are definitely linked, and are also linked with sex in a three-way (obvious innuendo fully intended) interaction. However, being transgender does not preclude one from being heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual… hang on, there’s loads of these: this one’ll be a really FUN graph…

So, yeah. Those are my thoughts on that. You’d never guess I have real work that I’m supposed to be doing, would you?

Deus Servavi: I

It was a Tuesday, or so the humans said. God always felt strange on Tuesdays, which was itself peculiar, as for most of the previous fifteen billion years they hadn’t existed. But still, he’d always felt strange on Tuesdays. He filed the thought away for a later time, perhaps during one of the nice long baths Gabriel was adept at making. As much as God was always omniscient, it was so much more satisfying being omniscient in the bath.

 

But the bath could wait. For now, God gazed down at the world. His world, as much as any of it could really be called his. He thought back, back to the beginning, to the curious nothingness that had never existed, for how could anything exist without space? It had been a curious time, constrained but endless, eternal but without time. In short, it had been bloody boring. And all of a sudden he’d had an idea; stuff! That was what was needed. Matter! Of course, being both eternal and all-knowing, he’d had the idea ages ago, and wouldn’t think of it for quite some time; sometimes being God made his head hurt, or at least it would have if he had corporal form, or a gender for that matter. He found the baths helped.

 

But the matter thing hadn’t been easy, which would have come as a surprise to God without the whole omniscience malarkey. It wasn’t that he couldn’t make the matter, that was simple enough, but it wouldn’t stay. He made it, and within moments it would undergo catastrophic failure and implode, and it would be back to the nothingness. It would have been incredibly disheartening, but those brief moments, oh those moments! If God had been coarser, he would have found them orgasmic (except that he wasn’t vulgar, and so found them merely intensely and profoundly pleasurable – it had struck him, in the absences between the moments, as grossly unfair that he could be all-kind and all-knowing, but that omni-pleasure was denied him). He became addicted – he had to have more moments, more time. Again he tried, except that, in the nothingness, there was no again, only now and forever; but regardless, he tried again. And again. And again. And then, for some variety, he gave it another go. And finally, after a million and no tries, it worked; a perfect balance, matter with anti-matter, energy perfectly balanced. Nothingness defeated by nothingness; he’d enjoyed the irony so much he’d spent the first billion years in a celebratory bath. The hot water hadn’t been run for a while, and the boiler had given a considerable bang, which had scattered the matter about a bit, but that, at the time, had seemed a side-issue. Finally, there was something!