“Do you talk more when it’s dry?”

Fans of John Wyndham may recognise this quote from ‘The Day of the Triffids’. One summer evening in the days before the disaster, the narrator and a colleague at the triffid farm where he works are listening to the rattling noise made by the thousands of tethered plants in a nearby field. The colleague, a plant expert, suggests that the noise, rather than a random effect of the weather as Mason thinks, may actually be a form of communication. Although Mason is initially sceptical, later events cause him to re-evaluate the theory.

I was reminded of this scene by the news, a couple of weeks ago, that scientists have recorded hypersonic ‘clicks’ given off by plants under stress and are putting forward the theory that these noises can convey information about the condition of the plant. While the researchers concentrated on dehydrated tomato plants, there is also footage of a rather disgruntled-looking cactus wired for sound and emitting a definite clicking or popping noise.

This is not the only triffid analogy in the news; nearly ten years ago, I quoted from the book in response to a story about plants being engineered to produce omega-3 fatty acids hitherto found only in fish oils and animal products using genes from marine algae (technically neither plant nor animal). Since then, successful trials have led to the proposed feeding of the new oils to farmed fish and poultry and to the beginning of the process to approve them for for mass production for human consumption.

In Wyndham’s 1951 novel, which is starting to look alarmingly prescient, the origin of the triffids lies in the manipulation of plant DNA to produce a vegetable oil which far outperforms the best fish oils. When specimens appear worldwide, a large industry quickly springs up to exploit the benefits of this new - if somewhat problematic - crop; it is this abundance of lethal triffids on Home Counties farmland which renders the United Kingdom particularly vulnerable to the subsequent global disaster, one in which the triffids’ ability to communicate, albeit at a basic level, plays a significant role.

Bearing this in mind, it is, perhaps, a little unsettling to read that there is currently an application in place to grow GM Camelina Sativa plants which have been engineered to produce this new fish oil substitute on open-air agricultural stations in Suffolk and Hertfordshire.

What, as they say, could possibly go wrong?

As an aside, 1951 was something of a vintage year for novels, giving us not only the triffids but also ‘Foundation’, ‘The Cruel Sea’, ‘The Daughter of Time’, ‘Nightrunners of Bengal’, ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ and many others.

Uh-oh!

An application to conduct field trials of a genetically modified crop containing Omega-3 fatty acids normally found in oily fish has been submitted.

By substituting synthetic versions of up to seven genes from marine algae, the researchers have engineered Camelina plants to produce two key Omega-3 fatty acids normally obtained from oily fish, EPA and DHA. 

"By the end of this decade, there's a possibility that people will be able to obtain a GM plant-based source of fish oils," Prof Napier said.

Ring any bells? How about this, from a novel written in 1951?

     His first appearance as a possibly disruptive spanner on the neat machinery of the edible oil interests occurred when he walked into the offices of the Arctic and European Fish-Oil company and produced a bottle of pale pink oil in which he proposed to interest them. 
     The first thing they discovered about it was that it was not a fish-oil, anyway: it was vegetable, though they could not identify the source. The second revelation was that it made most of their best fish-oils look like grease-box fillers. 

     'Do you mean that it is some new species? Because if it merely some improved strain more easily processed...'
     'I understand that it is a new species - something quite new.'
     'Then you haven't actually seen it yourself? It may, in fact, be some modified kind of sunflower?'
     'I have seen a picture, senhor. I do not say there is no sunflower there at all. I do not say there is no turnip there. I do not say there is no nettle, or even no orchid there. But I do say that if they were all fathers to it they would none of them know their child. I do not think it would please them greatly either.'
(John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids)

Flying tonight

Regular readers may have been surprised at the recent silence here on the subject of 2012 DA14, not all of which has been due to such half-term obligations as taking a nephew to the zoo.

To be honest, I've been in a bit of a sulk. I feel rather like a die-hard fan of an obscure indie band which, after years in the musical wilderness, has an unexpected number one hit.

Suddenly asteroid is the mot du jour and everyone's an expert - well, nearly everyone (my thanks to Nourishing Obscurity for that one).

On all sides, the media are eagerly imparting details of tonight's close approach, along with, at the more irresponsible end of the coverage - and in spite of the repeated assurances of experts - lurid speculation about the damage that an impact might cause.

And then, to top it all, the cosmos sends us a timely reminder of our fragility in the form of the Russian meteorite, supplying the sort of spectacular footage that will be distinctly lacking from tonight's flyby - though I can't be the only one who found, in the news footage of witnesses whose bandaged eyes were injured by shattering windows as they watched the display, a chilling reminder of 'The Day of the Triffids'.

The Russian strike is a reminder, along with the passing asteroid's chronological designation, that we are always vulnerable to a bolt from the blue; Newtonian mechanics and supercomputers may enable us to calculate trajectories with remarkable precision but that's no good if we haven't yet spotted the celestial body barreling towards us on a collision course.

Still, eat, drink and be merry is the best philosophy; as ever, we at the Tavern will be roistering tonight in honour of 2012 DA14 even if it's not such an exclusive celebration as usual, so please pour yourselves a drink and join us in spirit.

A tangled web

'I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all of God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation, which makes it funny how so many versions of the same affair get about.’
(John Wyndham: The Kraken Wakes)


Step forward Baroness Warsi, Tory peer and party co-chairman.

The baroness has been cleared of wrongly claiming around £2,000 in overnight expenses while staying at the home of one Dr Moustafa, a party donor and aspiring politician (previously posted on here). According to her own statement, she made a 'financial contribution' while staying there, 'appropriate payments' equivalent to hotel costs.

So that's sorted that out, hasn't it? Well, no; not according to Dr Moustafa. The way he tells it, he met the baroness at a Party event in 2006 and offered to let her stay in his home, which she did on several occasions. By his own account a generous host, the doctor took her out for meals and gave her lifts to and from work while she was staying with him.

In return for this hospitality, he says, the baroness criticised him for eating non-halal meat and objected to the presence of alcohol in the house, threatening to smash the bottles. As for money, he claims never to have discussed money with the baroness or received any payment whatsoever.

So where did it go? Out third witness is Naweed Khan, a Tory party official and mutual friend of the doctor and the baroness (and later her special advisor). Mr Khan was, allegedly, staying rent-free on the top floor of Dr Moustafa's home, and this is where things get decidedly odd.

Mr Khan, says the doctor, was invited to stay for few weeks but ended up occupying a top-floor bedroom for a year and a half, without ever contributing to the expenses of the household; even by the accepted traditional standards of hospitality of Dr Moustafa's Egyptian background, that is surely above and beyond the call of duty.

Mr Khan, meanwhile, confirms that he did indeed receive payments from the baroness to compensate him for the 'inconvenience' caused by her presence (whatever that may have been); what he did with the money - the best part of £2,000 - remains a mystery.

Small wonder, then, that the former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life described the situation as "very muddy and blurred" - and it's not helped by the fact that Dr Moustafa is in dispute with the Tory party over an unconnected matter.

The fact that the baroness has been cleared of wrongdoing establishes only that she is deemed to have acted in good faith. Should we taxpayers be entitled to know what happens to our money once it has been paid out in expenses? And if so, what did Mr Khan do with the cash, and why was he given it in the first place?

If anyone finds out, perhaps they might like to let Dr Moustafa know - unless of course, he's the one being economical with the truth.

Per garbage ad astra

There's something rather unsettling about a former NASA scientist admitting 'We've lost control of the environment' - it's the sort of line that's usually followed by the arrival of a bunch of voracious extra-terrestrials and a lot of special-effects gore.

This time we're perfectly safe, as long as we stay put here on earth. For those, venturing into orbit, however, the amount of debris out there has reached a critical point, according to a report submitted to NASA last week.

It seems we've left so much rubbish lying - or floating - around up there that we may have effectively prevented ourselves getting out. (Much the same thing, interestingly enough, seems to happen regularly with the Urchin's bedroom floor - perhaps it's simply human nature.)

Part of the problem is our increasing dependence on satellite technology; with an average of 76 satellites a year launched over the past decade and more planned for the future to feed our insatiable need for communication technology, it's getting awfully crowded up there even without the rubbish.

Add in the myriad pieces of debris, from chunks of rocket down to minuscule flecks of paint, and you effectively have a cage in which we have managed to imprison ourselves; astronauts who honed their skills on games of Asteroids in the pub now apply the techniques for real to evade rogue particles.

And - guess what! - it turns out we've been naughty in more ways than one: 'The extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere down the years has cooled some of its highest reaches - the thermosphere.

This, combined with low levels of solar activity, have shrunk the atmosphere, limiting the amount of drag on orbital objects that ordinarily helps to pull debris from the sky. In other words, the junk is also staying up longer.'

Well, it never rains but it pours! And it could get worse - though this particular aspect of the situation has not so far made the news. Regular readers may recall that we have mentioned this subject here before, and touched on another aspect of the potential Nemesis floating above us:

'... in ‘The Day of the Triffids’ it was the release of biological weapons from accidentally damaged satellites which ultimately paved the way for the destruction of human civilization as we know it.'

Computer models suggests the amount of debris "has reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures."  Even if we escape the disastrous effect John Wyndham envisaged, we could be effectively marooned on earth until we do a bit of cosmic housework.

Update: The Mail reports this morning that Phase One of  Richard Branson's Spaceport America is now 90%complete, with commercial space flights being planned for early 2013. Should you feel like taking your chance up there in the craposphere, you can secure your seat reservation with Virgin Galactic (yes, honestly!) for a deposit of only $20,000.

Trouble with Bunnies

In its time-honoured tradition of printing press releases verbatim and claiming they are news, the Telegraph reports the planned comeback early next year of London’s Playboy Club.

The original London version opened in 1966, catching the Zeitgeist of Swinging London – Groovy, Baby! – but closed down after its gaming licences were revoked, to the manifest approval of the feminist lobby.

Hoewever, like the planetary engineers of Magrathea, it seems Hugh Hefner’s British operation had merely retreated into suspended animation, awaiting the development of a new civilization with abundant cash and a desire for tasteless ostentation.

And now, it seems, the time is right; Hefner is quoted as looking forward to returning to London and “again sharing the notions that are celebrated in the magazine, the concept of good food and drink, pretty girls, and exciting entertainment.''

Any record of what the ‘pretty girls’ might feel about being stuck between the food and the entertainment as an amenity? Since Hefner’s minions have announced that ‘Playboy Bunny hostesses, croupiers and cocktail servers will be part of the new set-up’, they must expect to have some on the payroll.

At last, all becomes clear. The controversial Playboy Bunny pencil-cases and bags carried by little girls in primary school and the Playboy-branded pink tracksuits worn by their older sisters were all part of a softening-up campaign; the ultimate in sly recruitment.

As the press release – sorry, news report – says, the return of the club has been trailed for at least a decade – long enough to brainwash a new generation of girls into believing that career fulfillment can consist of fawning on rich businessmen while wearing pink satin ears and a leotard.

If successive governments had ever really been serious about improving the role of women, that’s where they should have been looking. Changing from the top down just won’t work – you can have all the all-female shortlists and pro-women policies you like but it is unlikely to have much impact on the celebrity-fuelled day-to-day culture of the playground.

In 1960, the same year Hugh Hefner opened his first Playboy club, John Wyndham described in 'Trouble With Lichen' the difficulties facing teachers of bright girls:

'You not only teach and attempt to educate a child; you conduct a kind of jungle warfare on her behalf  - and the better-looking the child, the more slender are her chances of survival, for the partisans of ignorance enfilade your route in greater numbers 

The touts for dead-end jobs slink along beside you...the miasma of the picture-papers taints the air, the sticky webs of early marriage are spun close by the track, hen-witted mothers dart suddenly out of the bushes...'

Fifty years on, it seems all those hazards are still out there, compounded by the insidious drip-feed of Facebook and the mass media. A generation of feminists overturned the real inequalities years ago and there's nowhere left to go but backwards.

If our schools are still turning out aspiring Bunny girls, then there’s something very wrong indeed.

Watch Thou for the Mutant!

Here's a handy hint for any aspiring local politician (and Sally Bercow); if you're going to blog/twitter/post a video diary on youTube, avoid saying anything derogatory about the electorate.

It's a fair bet that the Mayor of Ellesmere Port won't be showing his face in his local Asda anytime soon - at least not after posting a video diary with the comment,

‘My usual visits to Asda would probably be later than this... mostly to avoid the mutants who go in during the day.’

In an impressive display of stable-door-bolting, Anderson explained that he was referring to a particular group of customers who had abused him on two visits to the supermarket and not to Asda customers in general, but the damage was done.

The Daily Mail obligingly found some outraged locals to express their indignation; here's one Ellesmere Port Asda shopper:

‘What an idiot. Next time I see him he’ll be getting a lung full off me. He’s not helping himself get votes for next year.’

And another:

‘There are a lot of kids hanging around outside the supermarket and we see a lot of drugs, but people like me just come here to do their shopping. How dare he say we are mutants?'

Meanwhile, Labour Councillors have merrily hopped on the bandwaggon:

‘Mr Anderson says that his comments were taken out of context, but I do not see how that could be the case. He quite clearly calls Asda shoppers mutants in the video. He shouldn’t have said it and he owes an apology to the people of the town.'

As they say, if the cap fits...

Allergic to Triffids

Today I have been truly blessed. Repeatedly. By all and sundry. Thanks to a bad bout of hay fever, I can’t stop sneezing, and every time, some kind soul says, “Bless you!” (which is frankly rather galling for an atheist).

Still, there’s no reason to take offence, although personally I favour, “Gesundheit!” instead. They mean well, even if they then put me in that dilemma of whether or not to thank them (that does upset some people, unaccountably).

There’s been a lot of speculation recently about the rapid increase in hay fever among adults. People who have previously never suffered so much as a sniffle in June are suddenly breaking out with the full eyes/nose/throat package. Sales of anti-histamines have gone through the roof, and those lucky people at Kleenex are rubbing their hands with glee, thanks to the mystery proliferation of the allergy.

My money’s on conifer hedges; newly fashionable back in the 70’s, in imitation of West Coast America, small saplings of newly-created hybrid varieties were merrily taken home by thousands of new owners to form hedges in newly-built housing estates.

And when they finally reached reproductive maturity, the genie was out of the bottle. They produce dense clouds of pollen designed to float for miles on the breeze and, as the years go by, increasing numbers in built-up areas get to an age to reproduce.

Something familiar about this? An artificial hybrid plant cultivated on a massive scale that, on maturity, unleashes an attack on its human creators? We’re straying worrying close to Triffid territory here.

These hybrid conifers may be merely a nuisance at present, but when next year’s predicted spectacular meteor shower arrives, I, for one, will be keeping my eyes firmly shut.

Meanwhile, Ray Davies says it best....

Live long and prosper - at a price

The future is here - at least if the Sunday Times is to be believed. Fans of quality science fiction came in for a treat today with reports that we are on the way to not one but three scenarios we have previously seen played out only on our bookshelves.

First we have an anti-aging treatment - John Wyndham: Trouble With Lichen - estimated to appear in the next decade following genetic research. Then there are the six intrepid cosmonauts spending 18 months on a simulated trip to Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson, Ben Bova and a dozen others - and, as if that were not enough, the Brave New World of IVF for all - perhaps the first step towards babies in bottles.

Of the three, it is the first that, despite the advantages it purports to hold out, would have the most devastating effect on society - after all, it's a fair bet humans will continue to conceive in the traditional way for the foreseeable future. In Wyndham's novel - a trenchant social satire - a scientist describes his growing sense of alarm when he realises that he has discovered an antidote to aging:

'But just imagine the result of a public announcement....simply the superficial result of knowing that the means to extend one's term of life exists. The thing would be off like a prairie fire. Think of the newspapers fawning on it.[...] The contriving, the intriguing, the bribery - perhaps fighting, even - that would come of people trying to get in first to grab even a few extra years,[...] The whole prospect was - and is - quite appalling.'

And now, according to Eleanor Mills, a team led by Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, is already developing drugs to mimic the effect of centenarians’ super genes; testing on humans could begin in 2012. He reckons that within five or 10 years people will take these pills at around 40 “and their lives will be longer”.'

So what will be the effect on the day he announces a drug that will prolong life? Well, if past experience is anything to go by, whichever pharmaceutical company is backing his research will immediately slap a price-tag on the product that will rule it our for all but the super-rich. After all, the situation already exists.

For many people with terminal cancer, there are drugs out there which can change life expectancy from weeks to years - at a price. If you - or occasionally the NHS - can fork out £50,000 pa, life goes on; if not, it doesn't. The drugs companies aren't in the business of charity; the bottom line is always profit.

After decades of research, they're going to want some return on their investment in the ultimate in marketable commodities. The Times thinks millions of people will take the drug, leading to the social upheaval foreseen by Wyndham's scientist - think about the effect on annuity values or insurance premiums - but we're far more likely to see a ruling elite firmly ensconced for decades while the workforce live and die as they always have done.

Sulking with Triffids.

Mirabile dictu! A new John Wyndham book is to be published. But there's a catch. This treasure will set you back a cool £60. SIXTY QUID!

'Plan for Chaos', previously unpublished, was an early Wyndham work, presciently exploring the issues of cloning. Although by all accounts a flawed opus, it would still be great interest for admirers of Wyndham's particular brand of 'cosy catastrophe', as it was called on the Today programme.

So why the sky-high cost? Surely not a tiny print-run, although so far I can only locate 10 copies on Ebay - aa affordable new Wyndham would sell thousands, particularly with a BBC Triffid remake on the way. So is it just a way to extract the maximum profit from loyal fans - a technique the Premier League have been employing for years?

Forget it! At £60 a throw, I'm sticking with my Triffids.

Dystopias Unlimited

The water lapped slowly above the parapet and against the sandbags. Here and there it began to trickle through onto the pavements....Presently there could be little doubt what was going to happen. Some of the watching crowd withdrew, but many of them remained, in a wavering fascination. When the breakthrough came, it occurred in a dozen places on the North Bank almost simultaneously.


So begins the account of the flooding of London from John Wyndham’s 1953 science fiction classic The Kraken Wakes, inspired by the storm of March 16, 1947, when a combination of melting snow, heavy rain and a tidal surge caused severe widespread flooding in East Anglia. Wyndham describes the disintegration of British society as sea levels rise; the futile attempts to build ever higher flood barriers, the abandoning of London and other low-lying cities and the eventual breakdown of law and order.


Now we hear that sea levels may rise by up to a metre by 2100 and go on rising at increasing speed, Wyndham’s description may become unintentionally prophetic. We have already experienced the Orwellian doublethink of modern politics – Big Brother’s chocolate ration, anyone? – and the arrival of soma a.k.a. ecstasy and a host of legal anti-depressants. Now once more we find ourselves facing the dystopian visions of half a century ago – only, thankfully, minus the invading aliens.


‘O brave new world, that has such people in it!’



A nod to JM, who referred to this last year.

Cosmic Kerplunk

It seems we’ve all been walking about oblivious to the risks of collisions over our heads. In a sort of orbital pinball, thousands of satellites have been zooming round the earth missing each other for years – until now, that is.

The collision of a Russian satellite with a privately owned American one was the mass equivalent of a Ford Fiesta skidding into an MG Midget – a spectacle easily imagined by anyone who has visited a supermarket car park during the recent freeze – and has littered Earth's 500-mile orbit with debris. Some of this may eventually burn up as spectacular meteors but most of it will rather inconveniently hang around up there for years to come, ready to collide with other satellites.

With 17,000 known pieces of debris already whizzing about in orbit, collisions, already the single biggest danger to space flight, will be increasingly common in years to come. Add to this the inevitable decay of earlier satellites and it may eventually become too risky to send manned craft into space at all, leaving us ironically marooned inside a cage of our own creation.

Anyone familiar with the works of the late, great John Wyndham could be forgiven for feeling a little uneasy about all of this; in ‘The Day of the Triffids’ , the survivors eventually concude that it must have been the release of optical and biological weapons from accidentally damaged satellites which ultimately paved the way for the destruction of human civilization as we know it.