Some said these weapons never existed but I said they did and my saying it made it the truth and without my saying it I could not have come in peace and truth. The truth was that the evil man threatened a terrible war, a war that would trouble not just this region but the whole world. The threat of his war was very great, but my peace was greater than his war and it was in peace that I came and defeated him, and that is the truth.
Now I come again, to bring peace to this region, which has for so long been troubled by war. I know in my heart that you in your hearts wish for peace. I have here a little casket. It contains a peace greater than any peace you can imagine. If you accept this peace from me, it will be yours. You cannot open the casket because only I have the key. It is my casket and my peace, but I will give it to you because I am generous, truthful and kind.
However, if you refuse my gift of peace then I will have to open the casket again.
21 August
The Envoy of Democracy
Hi there. Let me tell you a little about myself.
I am a democrat. I come from a democracy. In a democracy everybody has a vote to decide who is going to govern them, and everybody’s vote is equal.
Democracy is a good thing, but not everybody does it right. In my society, we do it right. Some other societies do it quite well. Many societies don’t do it at all well but, generally speaking, even imperfect democracy is better than the alternative, which is dictatorship.
Dictatorship is bad. That’s really all you need to know. Not all bad government is dictatorship, but, generally speaking, all dictatorship is bad government.
However, imperfect dictatorship is sometimes better than imperfect democracy. It depends on the imperfections. In my society, dictatorship would never be better than democracy because our democracy is the best you can get. In your society, this does not follow.
We recognise that, democratically, we cannot impose our way of doing democracy on you. You have to want it, and then you have to do it right.
We are the best judges of whether you are doing it right.
Suppose you live in a dictatorship and you want to try some democracy? Where do you start? First, you have to overthrow your dictator. Sometimes we help to overthrow dictators and sometimes we don’t, but we don’t make a big thing of this. However, once a dictator has been overthrown, we welcome it because, being democrats, we always applaud the democratic will of the people.
But sometimes the democracy with which you replace your dictator turns out to be imperfect. Generally speaking, this is because you are not doing democracy right, the way we do.
When this happens, rather than continue to do democracy wrong it is often better to restore a dictator: not the same dictator, obviously – because he is usually dead and even if still alive was overthrown by the democratic will of the people – but another dictator.
What may surprise you is that sometimes the new dictator is imposed by the democratic will of the people.
We recognise that, democratically, we cannot impose dictatorship on you. But we are always ready to assist.
22 August
The Envoy of War
I come more in sorrow than in anger. This is how I always come. That way it is your fault.
I have told you before, don’t do these things that provoke me. Do nothing, or do things that I can tolerate. If you had paid attention, I need not have come at all.
I drew a line in the sand. You may ask, what line, what sand? I think I made myself clear. But whether you saw the line or chose not to see it, I never said I would not rake the sand or erase the line. If you don’t see the line now, that is not my problem. You should have been paying attention.
Some crimes are so terrible that they cannot be tolerated. Your crimes were tolerated until they became intolerable. You crossed a line when you committed your intolerable crimes. Do not ask whether that line was the same line as the one I drew in the sand. You should have been paying attention.
Do not speak to me of inconsistency. Do not speak to me of one hundred thousand dead here, of fifty thousand dead there. Do you think that I count the dead on my fingers? That my sorrow is touched only when I reach a certain number?
Do not speak to me of hypocrisy. Do not speak of napalm, depleted uranium, cluster bombs and Agent Orange. Do not speak of rendition and torture. Do not speak of arms manufacturers and arms sales. None of this is relevant. We are not talking about what was done yesterday. We are talking about what was done today, by you.
Your crimes are not merely intolerable, they are evil, barbaric, monstrous. I can speak freely now. They are crimes against humanity. An example must be made of you, so that the rest of humanity knows where it stands.
Humanity stands on the same side of the line in the sand as I do. Do not complain that you cannot see the line, now that I have raked the sand. You should have been paying attention.
If only your crimes had remained tolerable, none of my sorrow or my anger would be necessary.
23 August
One Morning in the Library
One morning in the library I opened a book and a bird, bright green, flew in through the window. She flew round my head and out again. When I closed the book I found it was evening.
The next morning I opened another book. I thought I heard someone at the back door so I went to look. No one was there, but I could hear a bird singing. I stepped into the garden to listen.
The bird sang in a language unknown to me but I recognised her bright green shape among the dark leaves of the apple tree. She flew to the high wall, then into the next garden, where I heard the song again but only once. I found a gate in the wall that I had not known existed. It was covered over with ivy. I went through it.
This other garden was very well tended. There were gravel paths between box hedges, and rose beds, and fruit trees, and a wooden bridge over a pond spread with water lilies. I saw a robed figure, whom I took to be a monk, bending down in the distance.
I could not hear or see the bird. My feet crunched on the gravel when I walked over to the monk. He was weeding. ‘Have you seen a bright green bird?’ I asked.
He put his finger to his lips, then pointed to the ground. The green bird was under a bush. She was watching me but she did not sing, nor did she fly away.
I realised I had transgressed. I made signs of apology to the bird and to the monk. The monk nodded. When I walked away my feet made no sound on the path.
I passed over the bridge and the pond of lilies. A frog sat on one of the lilies. He was watching me but he did not speak. I came back through the gate into my own garden, and into my own house.
I found the book lying open where I had left it. I closed it and found it was evening. I searched the shelves for the first book, but I could not find it anywhere.
24 August
One Night in the Library
One night in the library, as I read by the light of a single lamp placed behind my chair, I became conscious of stirrings in the shadowed parts of the room. These fluttering sounds – as of a colony of restless bats in residence behind the ranks of books – interested rather than alarmed me. I knew that there were no bats. What was happening had happened before, in those hours of absolute stillness and quiet, when even the fire has ceased its cracking and hissing. The sounds I heard were the lives contained in all the thousands of volumes that surrounded me, shifting and settling in their paper beds.
I found this reassuring. It told me that all my years of reading had not been in vain: that through reading I had entered into other times and other worlds, experienced the lives of people separated from me by oceans and deserts and generations, and that they remained with me in the library. Thus comforted, I returned to the book in my hands.
But after a minute I stopped reading and looked up. Some other life had entered the room. I saw, dimly, the figure of a man, draped in some kind of robe, standing near the door. Yet the door was shut, and I was certain it had not opened in the last hour. I reached up and directed t
he beam of the lamp towards him.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
The robed figure shook his head. He wanted nothing. Then he raised a hand, shielding his vision, as I at first thought, against the brightness. But no, his forefinger touched the corner of one eye and then pointed at me, or more specifically at my book, and drew lines back and forth in the air. I understood that he wanted me to continue reading.
So I adjusted the lamp again, aware of the intensity of his gaze and something more – the wonder it contained. The books on the shelves were hushed. I thought how much noise is contained in silence. If I looked up I knew that, even if I could no longer see him, his ancient witness would still be in the library.
25 August
The Kites
‘You all know about the cloud?’ the professor asked. ‘Of course you do. Is there any one of us who doesn’t have their photos, their music, their ebooks and emails – their life, in fact – backed up in the cloud? Well, the kites work on the same principle. They’re just more personalised. Completely and uniquely personal to you, in fact.
‘What kills us,’ he continued, ‘isn’t the disease, the crumbling of body parts or the unbeating heart. None of these things can happen without time. Stop time and you stop death.
‘It has taken millennia to reach this moment. Generations of astronomers, philosophers and scientists have chipped away at the concept of time, and time chipped them into dust. Their physical frames, not the ideas, not the dream. We inherited the dream, but we can make it reality.
‘Already we can copy and save the contents – the entire history – of a brain, and reconfigure it on one of these. Look at the size of this thing: it’s smaller than a SIM card, but it contains your entire life. Every thought, every sensation, every memory your brain ever recorded. And on top of that, it can store all the data your brain could ever need to keep it occupied for eternity: the cloud to the power of x. Effectively, we’ve invented immortality.
‘And now we move to the next phase, beyond the cloud. With the kites, we can book our minds into Paradise.
‘Soon we’ll be able to do even more. At the moment each kite is isolated. It’s tethered to the mainframe but can’t connect to other kites. So it could – eventually – get pretty lonely up there. You can access all your old friends but you can’t meet new ones. But we’re working on this. Yes, there will be social media in Paradise.
‘The usual cranks and fanatics will tell you we’ve gone too far this time. They’ll say we’re playing at being God. These people would have rejected the wheel if it had rolled into their cave. They’d have stamped out fire, horrified at the possibilities. That’s their prerogative. But what about you? Do you really not want to fly like a bird, for eternity?’
26 August
The Nummer 14 Bus
See thae politicians at Westminster or Holyrood or wherever they are? They’re no even there, they’re up in space. See whit I want tae dae wi them? I want tae get them on the nummer 14 bus. It should be obligatory. And no jist for a couple o stoaps. The haill bliddy route, start tae finish. It might jist make them realise they’re boarn. It might make them think twice aboot the guff they come oot wi. I doot it, but it might.
That bus yesterday, I’m tellin ye, it wis even worse than usual. I’m no bein insultin. I’m no huvin a go at the folk on the bus or the folk on the street. I’m huvin a go at the politicians and their ‘somethin for nuthin society’, their ‘jist say no’ finger-waggin, their disability livin allowance reassessments and their bastartin bedroom tax. I’m hearin aw that in ma heid and meanwhile three seats ahint me somebody’s hackin awa like they’re gonnae drap deid and folk are gettin on and aff the bus wi sticks and Zimmers and buggies and ootside on the street there’s blin folk and puir folk and pechin folk and folk wi mental problems and folk in wheelchairs and a junkie in a doorway lookin like a loast bairn and black folk and white folk and aw they’re tryin tae dae is get through it, ken, aw they’re tryin tae dae is get through it and these politicians are zoomin aboot in their spaceships when they should be sittin on the nummer 14 bus seein whit it’s like.
There wis this big lang fellae, he had hair like snaw, he wis haudin ontae his wife, she wis aboot hauf his height and every step he took it wis like a ship pitchin in the middle o the Atlantic Ocean. He wis grippin her haun and she wis grippin his and it wis like she wis his anchor but he wis draggin her through these forty-fit waves, every step wis anither monster wave but they were daein it, they were gettin through it, but the politicians wurnae on the bus so how could they see, how could they even imagine it?
27 August
Cromwell’s Heid
By the time I goat hame I wis done in. I biled the kettle and made masel a cup o tea and then I pit the radio on and lay doon on the sofa. And here wis this programme aboot Oliver Cromwell and how when he died he wis gien a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey, but when Charles II wis restored tae the throne they took Cromwell oot o the vault where they’d pit him and executed him for killin Charles I. They dragged his boady through the streets and they hung it at Tyburn for a day and then they cut it doon and chapped his heid aff and stuck the heid on a lang widden pole at Westminster Hall and it steyed there for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years! So folk widnae forget whit he’d done, killed a king, and they’d ken no tae think aboot ever daein it themsels.
And then there wis a storm, and the widden pole broke, and Cromwell’s heid fell doon and it went missin, but later it turned up in a private museum, or onywey the museum had this heid and they said it wis Cromwell’s but how wid ye prove it efter aw that time?
And I wis lyin there on the sofa listenin tae this and I started tae think o aw the people I’d like tae see wi their heids on spikes. I started wi politicians and moved on tae celebrities, and pretty soon I wis intae double figures and nae sign o runnin oot. But funnily enough whenever I thought aboot somebody I kent, I mean really kent, that I hated or thought I hated, like ma ex-wife’s mither or ma boss or some o ma neebors, I couldnae dae it, I couldnae pit their heids on spikes. No for twenty-five years. No even for twenty-five minutes if I’m honest. And then I went through ma list o famous folk and I started tae take their heids back doon because I didnae ken them. Even Maggie Thatcher, the first on the list, I even took her doon. And then I fell asleep and when I woke up ma tea wis cauld.
28 August
Crossing the Border (1)
‘Vancouver?’ the guy said. ‘That’s where we’re going. Hop in.’
We slung our rucksacks in the trunk and hopped in the back seat and made little nests amongst all the garbage, and the guy said, ‘Just throw that anywhere, man!’ and the woman said, ‘Ain’t nowhere to throw it, Danny,’ but Frank said it was fine, we had enough space, and Danny took off.
They were friendly, both of them. Danny turned around to shake our hands and we got that over with fast so that he could concentrate on the road ahead. Then the woman put her smile through the gap between the seats and said, ‘Hi, I’m Nancy,’ and we said, ‘Hi, Nancy.’ Nancy was stoned out of her head.
‘Listen,’ she said, and she waved a plastic bag at us, ‘we gotta get rid of some stuff before we reach the border. You wanna help us?’
So we helped them. She rolled as fast as we could smoke and we smoked as fast as she could roll but by God there was a lot to get rid of. We opened the windows so Danny could see to drive and we could freshen up a little, and Nancy passed us beers from the cooler to ease our throats, and we were very glad it was still a hundred miles to the border. ‘Because,’ I explained, ‘they’ll want to inspect our passports so we’ll have to be coherent.’ And Danny said that luckily because they were Americans they wouldn’t have to be coherent, the officers would just wave them through. And if they didn’t wave them through they’d just drive back down the road, head a little further east and try again at another, quieter crossing.
Well, we got to the border and it seemed Danny didn’t have the right paperwork for the ca
r so they wouldn’t let him cross, but he was very relaxed about it, let us get our packs from the trunk and said, ‘So long, guys,’ and Nancy smiled sweetly and they drove back down the road. And the officers waved Frank and me through and we staggered over the border on foot and that was us in Canada, wasted.
29 August
Crossing the Border (2)
The number of young Englishmen crossing the border to avoid conscription has hit a new high, according to statistics just released by the Scottish Government.
Since the start of July, eight thousand men of draft age are believed to have arrived, bringing the total number, during the present overseas hostilities, to more than fifty thousand. A government spokeswoman stressed that the true figure is likely to be higher, as only those who register for ‘temporary refugee’ or ‘political asylum’ status are counted.
Many of those who come north rather than be called up for National Service are accommodated in specially constructed camps at Langholm, Newcastleton, Kelso and Duns, the so-called ‘Little Englands’. Although there have been occasional clashes with local youths, the Minister for Home and Housing, Ewart Fleming, was keen to emphasise that generally the English draft dodgers have received a warm welcome. On a visit to Little England, Langholm, during which he observed aspects of the educational and entertainment programmes which the camp inmates themselves organise with support from outreach workers, he said: ‘We have no quarrel with these young men, who have voted with their feet against their government’s policies. It is undeniable that their presence here does put a strain on some of our resources, but we will not turn anyone away.’
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