Black Holes

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As is often the case, I’ve had a lot of things on my mind recently, mainly work stuff as there’s been a lot of uncertainty around mine, and my mate Chris who I work with, roles. All sorted now, well, sort of, I’ll tell you about it another time, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, when things start to overwhelm me, I tend to start ruminating on random stuff I know, or have learnt, that has stuck with me. Today, for no particular reason, other than I’ve been getting quite sciency recently, it has been black holes, and as I seem to have my writing mojo back, I thought to myself, why not put these thoughts to paper and bang out an article for my blog. I know I only have a handful of readers (friends and family who humour me by showing an interest), but I find it quite therapeutic. 

So, Black Holes, what the hell are they really? They’re one of those things that you hear about your whole life, mostly in passing, science programmes, random articles, the odd bit on the news, songs by Muse etc., and you sort of think you know what they are as in they’re a big gravity thing and nothing escapes from them, right?

That’s all very true, but the more I started properly looking into them, the more I realised that I didn’t really understand them at all. Or maybe a better way of putting it is, I understood the idea of them, but not what they actually are. And that’s where things start to get a bit weird.

So, what actually is a black hole?

At the most basic level, a black hole is just a place in space where gravity has become so strong that nothing can escape it. Not even light, just as I said above, but that alone is already slightly weird, because light, as we all know, is the fastest thing there is. If light can’t escape, then whatever’s going on there must be pretty extreme.

The reason this happens is actually quite simple in principle. If you take a massive object, like a star, and compress all that mass into a ridiculously small space that it fits within a critical radius, the gravitational pull increases. Keep compressing it, and eventually you reach a point where the escape velocity (the speed you’d need to get away from it) is higher than the speed of light, and at that point, you’ve got yourself a black hole.

Simple enough, in theory.

But it’s not really gravity in the way we think, and this is where it starts to shift a bit as black holes aren’t just strong gravity in the usual sense, they’re more like a distortion in spacetime itself. And although that sounds like one of those throwaway science phrases, it’s actually the key to everything.

As Einstein pointed out in his theory of relativity, space and time aren’t actually separate things, they’re part of the same fabric. Spacetime. And massive objects bend that fabric. That is they bend spacetime. The Earth bends it a bit, the Sun bends it a lot more, and a black hole basically folds it in on itself like someone’s tried to fold up a fitted sheet and given up halfway through (to this day, and despite my wife showing me numerous times, I still can’t fold a fitted sheet).

So, what is the event horizon, this so called point of no return? I hear you say

Well, the event horizon isn’t a physical surface. You won’t bump into it like a wall. It’s just a boundary in space, once you cross it, there is literally no path back out. Not because something is blocking you, but because all possible directions you could move through spacetime point further inward, cones of light tilt inward so that all future paths lead deeper in. It quite literally is the point of no return.

And what’s really strange is what it looks like from the outside. If you were watching someone fall into a black hole, they’d appear to slow down as they got closer to the event horizon, they would become slower and slower, until to the eyes of the observer, they appear to freeze there before slowly fading away, so you never actually see them going all the way in, but from their point of view, they just fall straight through.

That disconnect between what’s actually happening and what you see is where things start to feel a bit off and one of those questions that always seems to come up is, what happens if I were to fall in to one? and the honest answer is:

It depends.

I know that answer is a bit of a cop out, but if it’s a smaller black hole, you’re in a lot of trouble very quickly. The difference in gravitational pull between your feet and your head becomes so extreme that you get stretched out into a thin strand. This is what people in physics circles call spaghettification, which sounds almost funny until you think about it.

For a really massive black hole though, like the one at the centre of our galaxy (and the one in the song by Muse), it’s a bit less dramatic at first. You could actually cross the event horizon without noticing anything particularly unusual in that moment. It’s only later, the deeper in you go, that it becomes unavoidable and you’re on a one way trip.

Either way, you’re not coming back.

At the centre of a black hole is something called the singularity. In theory, this is a point where all the mass is crushed down into an infinitely small space, with infinite density, but here’s the thing, infinite in physics usually means we don’t actually know what’s going on. Physics dudes don’t like anything to be infinite as it mucks up all the other stuff we know about the universe. It’s basically our equations throwing their hands up and saying, this doesn’t make sense anymore.

So, the singularity might not actually exist in that exact form. It’s more likely that something else is happening there, something we just don’t yet have the tools or the physics to describe properly, and that’s where black holes start to become really cool.

For one thing, they’re not actually completely black, which surprised me the most when I first came across it, and black holes can actually lose energy.

There’s this process called Hawking radiation (yes, that cool dude who wrote that brilliant book, if you haven’t read it, you should), where tiny quantum effects near the edge of a black hole allow particles to escape. It’s often explained in terms of virtual particle pairs forming near the event horizon, with one falling in and the other escaping. It’s incredibly weak, but over very, very long periods of time, it means the black hole slowly shrinks and would eventually disappear entirely. Which is a strange idea in itself, something that swallows everything, but can also slowly evaporate.

Still with me? Good, as now we get to the bit we really don’t understand and where it all ties together.

Black holes are basically where two major parts of physics collide:

General relativity (which describes gravity and large-scale things) and Quantum mechanics (which describes teeny tiny things).

Both of these work extremely well on their own, but inside a black hole they don’t agree, which leads to some big problems, one of the biggest being, what happens to information?

If something falls into a black hole, all the information about it should still exist in some form as physics says information can’t just be destroyed, but black holes seem to do exactly that, either the information isn’t actually lost (and we don’t understand how it’s preserved), or our understanding of physics is incomplete. And if we’re being honest, it’s probably the latter, there’s something missing from our understanding of physics.

The part I keep coming back to is, as all this stuffs wanders through my noggin, is why does any of this matter? And it matters because black holes aren’t just weird objects sitting out there doing their own thing. They actually seem to play a huge role in how the universe works.

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre which influences how stars form, how galaxies evolve, and possibly even how structure forms on a cosmic scale, but more than that, they’re one of the few places where we can really test the limits of our theories. They’re not just interesting in their own right, they actually do something, we just haven’t figured out exactly what that is yet.

In the end, I don’t think black holes are really about “things that suck stuff in,” even though that’s how they’re often described. They’re more like boundaries. Points where our current understanding of reality runs out and something deeper takes over. And the more you look into them, the more you start to feel like we’re still only scratching the surface.

Which, if nothing else, makes them worth thinking about properly.

Are We Missing Extraterrestrial Archives in Mars Orbit?

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I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox again recently, that slightly uncomfortable question about why, if intelligent life is likely in the universe, we don’t seem to have any real evidence of it.

For decades, the search has mostly focused on listening. Radio signals, communication, signs that something out there is trying to make itself known. So far, despite years of searching we have nothing definitive.

This got me wondering whether we’ve been looking for the wrong thing entirely. If you look at what we’re doing as a civilisation, there’s been a noticeable shift.

We’re getting very good at storing information by placing huge amounts of data in tiny physical space. We have materials designed to last for extremely long periods (fused silica, for example), and more recently, even starting to think about storing data off-world

There are already data payloads on the Moon, essentially early attempts at creating long-term archives beyond Earth. In a similar spirit, earlier missions like Pioneer 10 and 11 even carried engraved plaques, simple, durable messages intended to outlast the spacecraft themselves and potentially be understood by any intelligence that might encounter them.

Because we are sending these data stores to the moon, it feels like a subtle but important step, it suggests something quite different about where technology might be heading. Not outward and loud, but inward and durable.

So, I had this idea, and my thought is this:

What if advanced civilisations don’t broadcast signals, those huge technosignatures and radio communications that SETI have been searching for? What if they leave records instead?

Rather than trying to communicate across vast distances, they might create something that simply persists as a kind of long-term archive. If that’s the case, those archives would probably be, small and compact. passive (no need for active power), and extremely durable, designed to last for very long periods, and possibly deliberately placed somewhere stable and discoverable.

If you were looking for a place to store something long-term in our solar system, Mars orbit actually starts to make a lot of sense.  It’s relatively quiet compared to Earth orbit as there is less atmospheric drag, fewer large perturbations, and a simpler gravitational environment overall. There’s also the added point that Mars itself likely had a very different past, thicker atmosphere, liquid water, maybe even early-life conditions. So, it’s not just stable, it’s interesting from a biological perspective.

From an engineering standpoint, there are a couple of obvious candidates. Higher Mars orbit (away from atmospheric effects and lower orbital decay), gravitationally stable regions like the Lagrange points (L4 and L5), where objects can remain relatively stable over long periods.

What would we actually see though? If something like this existed, I doubt it would look like a spacecraft in the way we tend to imagine it. It would probably be small. Passive. Unremarkable at first glance. Maybe the sort of things we’d need to look for are:

  • Small objects in unusual but stable orbits
  • Occasional bright reflections, glints, where light catches on a surface
  • Slightly odd thermal behaviour
  • Shapes or edges that don’t quite look natural

In other words, subtle anomalies. Nothing dramatic. Nothing obvious. Just things that don’t quite fit. None of this is especially speculative, it’s just basic orbital mechanics.

One of the most interesting parts of this idea is the possibility that we might already have the data.

We’ve been observing Mars for decades now, with high-resolution imagery, radar data. And thermal measurements, But, all of that work has been focused on the surface, not on systematically looking for small, anomalous objects in orbit. Which means there’s a gap. We might already have the data; we’ve just never really asked this particular question of it.

Is all this actually testable? The answer is yes, and that’s what makes this idea interesting to me.

It’s not just a thought experiment,. It’s something that could be tested, even at a basic level by taking existing Mars datasets and running anomaly detection on them. We can look for anything that or behaves in an unexpected way while filtering out the obvious stuff such as known spacecraft, debris, noise, etc.

Even if nothing turns up, we’d still learn something about what’s there, and what isn’t.

Why does this matter? I hear you ask. Well, If something like this did exist, even just one confirmed example, it would completely change the situation, because it wouldn’t rely on communication, It wouldn’t rely on timing or distance or whether anyone is still “out there”. It would just be… evidence. At that point, the Fermi Paradox wouldn’t really be about silence anymore, it would be more like: Have we simply not recognised what we’re looking at?

As a final thought, I’m not claiming that there are definitely extraterrestrial archives sitting out there in Mars orbit, but it does feel like one of those ideas that sits right on the edge between speculative and testable. And more importantly:

It’s something we haven’t really looked for.

Given how much data we already have, and how our own technology is evolving — it feels like a question that’s at least worth asking properly, because if those kinds of records did exist, we might not even realise we’re looking at them.

Hypothesis (for clarity)

Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may prioritise long-term information preservation over visible energetic expansion, and may therefore deploy compact, durable archival systems in stable orbital environments, such as Mars orbit or associated gravitationally stable regions, where such artefacts could plausibly persist over extended timescales and be discoverable through systematic analysis of orbital data.

This is a simplified statement of the idea discussed above.

Full Paper

If you’d like to explore the idea in more detail, including the full framework, methodology, and supporting reasoning:

👉 Download my full paper (PDF):
https://malandally.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/extraterrestrial-data-preservation-and-the-martian-orbit-hypothesis-2.pdf

Killing Joke

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Killing joke are my favourite band and have been my favourite band ever since I first saw them on The Tube in 1983. I particularly remember Eighties from that performance, and although with it being nearly 40 years ago, a quick search on YouTube, and viewing it now for the first time since I first watched it on a Friday evening after school on our little CRT TV, the whole three track set is exactly as I remember, and has brought back instant lost memories of the little house we lived in.

And here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zETNFX-s6Q4

When it was broadcast, I had just turned 14, and although by that age I was very much into Punk, mostly Siouxsie and the Banshees,the Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the Damned, along with Exploited, UK Subs, Chron Gen and Crass etc. this was a whole new sound and image for me. Prior to this, my music taste had been formulated from my disjointed childhood, the archetypal, council estate, single parent family, mostly just me and my mum, my sister being 12 years older than I had more or less flown the nest at that point. My punk aspirations go back to 1979, I can remember watching a feature on Nationwide on the telly about the death of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols, I would have been 9 or 10 at the time and that would be the first fuel on my lifelong journey into the very best of musical genres. It would be a couple of years yet, to my last year at middle school, for the metamorphosis to become complete.

At that time, at 12 years old, my best friend was Duncan Rivett, we were firm friends, the friendship being born of our similar situation of it being just us and our mums, and us both being into the same noise. Together we would discover Exploited, UK Subs, Charged GBH and other iconic eighties punk bands of the time. There was also another kid at school, Jonathan Read (a.k.a Grubby, I’ve no idea where the nickname came from, you’ll have to ask him). My memory of Grubby is him being more of a metalhead, into AC/DC and Saxon, but it was he that introduced me to the Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle. I remember taking the album to one of our school discos, and Mr Watt, the teacher/DJ point blankly refusing to play anything from it until we badgered him into playing Who Killed Bambi.

Anyway, enough of the rambling, there’s another blog post waiting to be written about those last two paragraphs.

Back to Killing Joke. I had just turned 14 when I saw that performance on the telly and I was mesmerised by it. The energy of Big Paul’s drums, the power emanating from Geordies vintage Gibson ES-295, Raven’s thumping bass and the image of Jaz Colman in that make-up and stomping around hit me straight in my chest.

I remember buying the first album in Robin’s Records in Norwich the following Saturday on our weekly trip to the City, desperately wanting to get home to play it. And playing it constantly when I did, my mum yelling up the stairs to me in my room, to turn down that appalling noise, I couldn’t hear her of course, the music was too loud, she scared the shit out of me, as she often did, storming through the door and bellowing at me to turn it off. I remember taking it in to school on the Monday to show my friends, having already taped a few copies to give away (I know home taping was killing music, the record sleeves told me that, but we all did it anyway, in all honesty, without home taping I wouldn’t have discovered many of the bands that defined my youth and are still with me today).

By the time I first got to see them live at the UEA in Norwich, the following February of ’84, I had the full discography, and they were my favourite band (those of you that know me, this was a good 18 months before I turned into Robert Smith). This wasn’t my first live gig, I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts about my sister’s then boyfriend, Chris, who took me to so many gigs in the early eighties, and who had a massive influence on me musically, introducing me to all sorts from Tom Newman, The Grateful Dead and Joy Division, and a boat load of other stuff along the way.

This though, was the loudest I had ever been to. It was amazing, every track they performed, thumped through me, most of the night is lost in my memory, but I do remember Eighties and Requiem as well as Wardance with complete clarity. My ears rang for days after the gig.

I’ve seen Killing Joke a few times since. The Night Time tour at the UEA in ’85. 1994 at The Waterfront on the Pandemonium tour, the UEA again in 1995. I didn’t see them again until nearly ten years later when I went to the Astoria in London in 2003, two gigs over two nights at that venue. And what an amazing couple of nights they were. I’d been playing the new album, 2003’s Killing Joke, constantly since its release, and when the tour was announced there was no way I was going to miss it, and no way I wasn’t going to both. Back to Norwich and The Waterfront in 2006 and 2012, and again at the UEA in 2018, which was the first concert I went to with my punk gigs buddy Paul. Since that first gig in 1984 I have never missed one in my hometown.

The last time I saw them was last night, as I write this, at Hammersmith Apollo for the last gig of the current, short, tour. Travelling down with Paul for yet another gig, we’ve been to a few together now, over the last few years, despite COVID and lockdown keeping us away for two years.

They were awesome, and I spent the whole night bouncing around in the mosh pit at the front, lost completely in the moment, at one with the music and the atmosphere of The Gathering, revelling in the amazing sound of the music emanating from the stage. It was a great weekend, meeting up with so many fellow fans before and after the gig. And, I have to admit, soppy old me with my emotions always plain to see, I shed a tear or two during, at the end of, and after the gig.

My journey with Killing Joke, may not have started when the band first started, but they have been in my life, and constantly in my ears, for nearly forty years. I love each and every Album (not Outside the Gate, it wasn’t really a Killing Joke album anyway, just a Jaz Coleman opus, which having caused the loss of Big Paul led me to resent the recording and I haven’t listened to it since its release). I love the not so popular Night Time and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, Rubicon and Love of the Masses are two songs from the latter that got me through some tricky times. Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions thumped, Pandemonium is my favourite, a powerful album that also reminds me what a great year for me 1994 was as I headed into my mid-twenties. Democracy with its mellower acoustic sound, Medicine Wheel being my favourite from that one. The power and brute force of 2003’s Killing Joke, a return to form that continued with Hosanna’s from the Basements of Hell, that album is ear bleedingly brilliant. Then the return of Big Paul Ferguson and Youth, the original line up back together for the first time since 1982, for Absolute Dissent in 2010. 2012’s MMXII, ready for the end of the world as predicted by the Mayans. Another head-splitting powerhouse outing with 2015’s Pylon, the track I Am The Virus an eerily scary and accurate prediction of what would hit the world a few years later in 2020. The latest release, the Lord Of Chaos EP, an awesome track, which got dropped from the setlist mid tour for an unknown reason. It’s great, I urge you to listen to it. Indeed, I urge you to listen and immerse yourself in all that is Killing Joke.

Honour the fire!

On this scrap of paper, she hastily wrote…

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Thanks to crippling writers block, this is the first piece of micro fiction, or anything for that matter, I have written in a very long time. It is a long way from my best work with a dodgy paragraph or two, and it took me an hour and not the usual ten minutes, but I’m pleased I’ve managed to get something out. Here it is in it’s unedited form as it was written, I plan to revisit it at sometime.

Massive thanks to my awesome friend over at https://lb-writes.com for the prompt, although it did take me three days to act upon it!

On this scrap of paper, she hastily wrote…

As she jumped from the wall, she landed awkwardly and tumbled to one side, letting out a gasp and a slight groan in surprise as she did so, then cursed inwardly as she heard voices from the other side of the wall. “Over here, I heard something, she’s gone over the wall, c’mon.”

She picked herself up, looked up at the wall behind her, noting the light from the flashlights beaming erratically into the sky like miniature searchlights. Her pursuers were close, closer than she realised. She could hear them clearly now, barking instructions to each other as they began to climb up the other side of the wall.

MOVE IT… she screamed to herself as she pulled herself to her feet and ran, falling forward slightly, almost losing her balance as she did so, correcting her gait as she gained momentum and ran for her life.

She kept running, until the adrenaline began to wear away and the pain in her feet started sweeping   into her consciousness, then slumped down, with her back against the trunk of an ancient oak. They had been forced to flee barefoot, her and her beloved, and the wounds on her souls pained her greatly. The memory of her beloved distracting her from the pain in her feet. She wondered where he was, hoping he had managed to escape, they had been forced to separate at the wall, no time for him to climb over as their hunters gained on them.

No time for this, got to keep moving, she cursed to herself, wiping a tear from her cheek as she did so, rising wearily from her resting place, then standing bent over, hands on her knees as she let the sudden rush of blood to her head drain away and set off, once again, as the sudden dizziness dissipated.

An hour later she reached the rendezvous point, an old flint shed tucked away in the corner of a field, secluded somewhat by a thick copse that had grown around it as the disused building had become derelict its use having become redundant as modern farming techniques tool over. She went in and huddled in a corner where there was still enough of the roof structure to afford her some protection form the drizzle in the air.

There she waited. Falling into a deep, exhaustive sleep from her exertions, just as the light of the sun was rising with a new dawn. She awoke, the brightness of the sun arching overhead, breaching the cover of the remaining roof tiles and startling her awake. For a moment, she panicked, forgetting where she was as the memories of the night before reasserted themselves in her mind. What time is it, she wondered, how long have I been asleep? She blinked rapidly against the powerful light the sun in her eyes, judging it to be early afternoon. where was he? Her mind instantly sprang to her beloved, should have been here by now. He must have been forced to take a longer route, he will be here soon, don’t worry. Her mind tried to reassure her.

Several hours passed, and soon the sun was fading, as dusk and the night approached. She had to move, if she stayed too much longer, she would be discovered and taken back to that dreadful place, where she would surely die. From her pocket she fished out a piece of creased paper and the stub of a pencil. On this scrap of paper, she hastily wrote a quick note:

 “My beloved M

I’ve had to leave, it’s too dangerous here for me to wait any longer,
I pray that you find this note and follow quickly my love.
I’ll await you in the secret place at the border. Hurry, please my love,
I cannot bear for us to be apart and yearn to hold you close to me again.

                                    L”


Prologue

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Below is the prologue to my new book. The story I started to put to paper eighteen months ago without really knowing what it was I was writing about. The plot has been rolling around in the back of my mind for the past eighteen years. It is only now I have been able to put the two together. Have a read and let me know what you think, and if you would like a taster of what is to come, let me know.

Prologue

So, time only moves forward, yes? Time does not go backwards, neither does it go up, down, left, right, top to bottom, or slantways?

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in an isolated system, entropy only increases. Entropy is defined as the measure of disorder in a system. The direction in which time runs, which we refer to as forward, is the direction in which disorder or entropy increases.

In thermodynamics, an isolated system refers to a confined space impervious to any external forces or energy aids. To put it another way. If your kids are like mine and you are forever clearing up their toys by shoving them into boxes and back in the cupboard without first sorting them out , they will continue to pile up and become mixed and jumbled up, in a cupboard with mixed and jumbled up toys – an isolated system –  disorder will only increase.

That is what Rudolf Clausius said, the German physicist and mathematician who was considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics during the nineteenth century.

Albert Einstein, initially believed the universe to be static, it just existed, a belief he stated in later life to be his biggest blunder. The Big Bang theory is now accepted universally. This states the universe was formed from an almighty, colossal, cataclysmic event, and expanded outwards, continually travelling forward in time, so when we look through our most powerful telescopes at the very dim and distant galaxies, we are actually seeing them as they existed billions of years ago due to the speed of light and the amount of time it takes for that light to reach us. Another analogy would be to look at our own sun (not literally, that would be silly and probably damage your eyes), which is approximately 93 million miles away from the Earth, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so the light from our sun takes about 8.3 minutes to travel to us, effectively the sun we see in the sky at any given moment, is the sun from 8.3 minutes ago.

What if I were to tell you that Einstein was wrong? And in the very next sentence declared he was right? You would think me a fool, right? After all, I am just an uneducated old man who has spent his life jumping from one job to another, lurching from one mistake to another, and generally making a complete fuck up of everything along the way. All of which is true.

What if I were to tell that time is happing all around us, all at once. Every moment of every event happening simultaneously, predetermined from start to finish, and we are just travelling forward through it obliviously? Would you think me a nutter? Highly likely.

It is true though, as incredible and preposterous as it sounds. It is true and very real. I know this because I live in every single moment of my lifetime at the same time. I am present everywhere throughout the past 99 years, at the same time, and I am able to instantaneously jump and appear as a version of myself at any point within my lifetime, my appearance is always the same and that of my first jump, which happened at a particularly low point in my life, where I have to say, in all honesty, I’m not looking my best.

I have witnessed my birth.

I have witnessed my death, that is, my many deaths.

If you are interested in attempting to understand the how the what and the why, read on, keep an open mind though as you are in for a mind bogglingly, time jumpingly, bumpy ride…

Jones 563

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After my mother passed away in 2008, my sister and I spent a few days clearing out her old council house before we had to give the keys back. Anybody who has lost a parent or a loved one and has had to do the same will understand the roller coaster of emotions that go with this task. I won’t go into all of them here.

When it came to my mum’s old sewing machine, the consensus was to get grid of it, as it was very old, and we both remembered it to be a troublesome beast. I used to use it in the mid eighties to adjust my school trousers to turn them into skin tight punk trousers. It would always jam on me and I was forever re-threading it, more than likely due to my misuse of it rather than any fault with the machine. Usually my mum would take over and do the job for me, obviously without any aggravation or jamming.

Anyway, that evening it returned with me in the car, along with some other stuff to sort through. Me being me, and much to the annoyance of my wife, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it. I had an emotional attachment to it, and along with a load of other stuff that I probably should have binned, I put it in a cupboard in the garage, where it lived for twelve years. Until a couple of days ago.

With the current lockdown thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic my wife had hand made a face mask, which took quite a while and I heard her mutter under her breath how much easy it would be with a sewing machine.

“We’ve got one.” I piped up. “Got what?” She said. “A sewing machine.” I replied, “My mum’s old one, don’t you remember I was supposed to get rid of it and didn’t?”

Anyway, I fished it out of the cupboard in the garage and brought it inside. The case was in a bit of a sorry state and I set to cleaning it up before opening it, adding the obligatory duck tape to the edges to cover up some tatty and chipped bits. I then cleaned the whole thing up, plugged it in, and was very happy to see the little sewing light illuminate. I then pressed the pedal to see if it worked and… all the lights tripped out in the house.

I’d already printed out the manual I’d found here:

Jones 563 User Manual

I had sent a very happy message to Dan Hopgood, whose blog it is, for providing the PDF, providing a brief history of the machine. I soon received a reply telling me he was glad he could help, and the garage wasn’t the best place to store a sewing machine, and he hoped it would work fine. I sent a message back telling him of the electrical issue. Again, there was a very friendly prompt reply telling me where to purchase a replacement motor, as he had done with his machine.

Three days later, the motor arrived, it took me less than five minutes to fit it and, having followed the instruction manual to thread it up, it worked perfectly first time. No jamming either, with the bobbin still in it from the last time it was used all those years ago.

So, I owe a very big thank you to Dan Hopgood, without whom the machine would not have been resurrected.

Take a look here: https://danhopgood.wordpress.com

My Mum’s old sewing machine.
The case.

Homo Stupidus

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I’ve spent the majority of today filling in job applications. At the age of 50 I’ve decided, with the original suggestion and support from my wife, that a career change might not be a bad idea. This is something I have tried to do several times over the past few years. The driving factor being the ongoing struggle I have with my mental health and my increasing inability to deal with the high pressure and stressful situations I always used to handle with aplomb.

Wether this is down to a loss of confidence or some kind of mid-life crisis, I’m not really sure. All I know is, that at any sign of a stressful situation, although outwardly I appear to handle any kind of stress with my usual coolness and expertise, inwardly I tend to crumble and question everything I have been doing, saying, and thinking, to the point where my brain turns to mush with the cacophonous internal monologues overlapping and flooding each other out until I’m reduced to a mental gibbering wreck. All the while seeming outwardly composed and collected until I can find a safe place, on my own, to collapse and gibber physically, completely lost and unable to recollect what I was actually supposed to be doing. Questioning my every thought over and over and over again.

It’s no secret that I had a massive mental breakdown towards the end of 2019, with which I was so mentally crippled with anxiety and self doubt I couldn’t cope with the simplest of situations for several weeks. I’ve always been very open about my mental health issues as I hope that by relaying my experiences in an open and factual manner it would help others suffering inwardly with their own demons, even if it’s only in small way. Wether it does or not I don’t know, I like to think I have a positive impact on someone, somewhere though.

Anyway, this post, isn’t really about my mental health though, those paragraphs were just to set the scenes, as it were, as to what I’ve been doing today and why. What I’ve been doing is applying for various different jobs, a very small fraction of which are related to IT, because I want to do something different, something satisfying, something new at which I can excel for the remainder of my years. I don’t really know what it is I want to do, other than it needs to be less stressful, rewarding, environmentally friendly, and probably to do with working outside as much as possible.

It’s while filling in these online application forms that I’ve noticed a theme which is actually going to bring me to my point. That theme is to ask me my gender, what age group I fit into, what ethnic group I consider myself to be, the nature of my sexual orientation, my religion and other such things, for the purposes of transparency, impartiality and equal opportunities and the like.

It strikes me that these sort of questions are likely to have the counter effect of their intended purpose, which is to ensure that an equal amount of people are selected from said groups. I get that, but surely that defeats the object anyway by also eliminating the best possible applicants for the position in order to fill the positions diversely?

With the unrest we are currently, and rightly facing, following the deplorable killing of George Floyd in America and the rekindling of all the emotions and wrongs that this appalling and senseless killing has resurrected, I can’t help but think back to my original philosophy and the opinions I gained during my anthropological studies so many years ago.

It matters not the colour of skin, religious beliefs, where we were born, what our heritage is, the supposed class under which we reside, the educational establishments attended, etc. There are no such thing as different races. We are one race, one species, and the only one of our kind. We are the Human Race. We are Homo sapiens, taken from the Latin for “Wise Man” as named by Carl Linnaeus who set himself as the specimen for the species way back in 1758. We are supposedly sentient and enlightened cultural beings with the capacity gained through evolution to love and feel and express ourselves. I don’t feel as if we are very wise though. In my opinion we are the opposite. We are collectively exceptionally stupid. We are truly unique on this planet, and probably in the universe, and yet we choose to segregate and persecute members of our own species, people that we are related to by race, no matter what colour we are or where we are from, WE ARE ALL THE SAME RACE. Maybe we could try and stop the pain and hurt and devastation we are pouring on ourselves and everything around us and reflect upon this? Please? For the sake of our own consciences? I know it’s a lot to ask, but I, for one , am beginning to despise my own species.

Muse

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Following on from my FB post…

I remember first seeing Muse supporting Gene at the Waterfront in Norwich in 1999, I wasn’t much of Gene fan, but one of my mates at work wanted to go and see them so I tagged along as well as I’d dragged him to see Therapy? a few months earlier and owed him a return gig. I’m very glad I went. Muse completely blew me away with their originality, sheer brilliance and that amazing sound. The next day I bought Showbiz, and to be honest, I was a little disappointed.

There were a couple of good tracks on it, Muscle Museum and the title track, and I listened to the album a lot, but it never really grabbed me, and the amazing song they played at the Waterfront wasn’t on there. I had no idea what it was called, but it was incredible. It sounded like classical music, industrial rock, heavy metal and punk, all rounded into one amazing cacophony of sheer brilliance.

I next came across them completely by accident performing on Later, with Jools Holland. I rarely watched Jools Holland as I cannot stand his arrogant, patronising, smugness, and he always came across as a bit of a cunt (an opinion that was confirmed a couple of years later when I saw him in Yo! Sushi in Harvey Nichols with his family behaving like a complete cunt to the staff – incidentally, Jools Holland and his big wank band is the only gig I’ve ever walked out of. Shockingly shite he was).

I had not long come in from the pub, switched on the the telly, which was already on BBC2, and walked into the kitchen. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around and walked straight back to the telly as I heard those screaming lead notes of that song I had heard a year previously at The Waterfront. It was mesmerising. An absolutely pleasurable assault on the ears. And now I new what it was called. Plug in Baby.

When Origins of Symmetry was released the I played it to death, I still do, it is an incredible album by an incredible band completely dedicated to their art.

Muse are one of my favourite bands (not my absolute favourite as that will always be Killing Joke). I have bought everyone of their releases and have almost loved every single one, I was very disappointed with The Resistance, although the title track is so far my all time favourite track. Also, I love Showbiz a hell of a lot more than when I first heard it, having not played it for years, revisiting it was a blast and I have to say I love it!

I’m also sad to say I’ve never had the opportunity to see them live again.

Minutemen

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I’ve just finished watching We Jam Econo – The Story of the Minutemen. It is not the first time I have watched it, but it is the first time I have managed to watch it all the way through in one sitting. How come I have never watched it in one go before? It is not because it is heavy going, and it is not because it is particularly long. The reason I have never made it through in one go is because it always makes me cry.

Minutemen where one of the bands of my teenage years, one of the influential bands of my teenage years, maybe the most influential band of my teenage years. They had a massive impact on me musically, at a time when my musical tastes where maturing.

I was introduced to Minutemen by one of my best friends at high school, who in turn was introduced to them by his older brother. It was in the summer of 1985, and although punk music and the American hardcore scene was not new to me, (I had been listening to Black Flag, Dead Kennedy’s, Minor Threat and other great American bands since I was eleven years old along with the British greats of the secomd wave of punk, The Exploited, GBH, Chron Gen etc.) Minutemen were completely new and completely different.

Hailing from San Pedro in California  and despite being labelled a west coast hardcore band (literally, I guess, having signed to Greg Ginn’s SST label), there was more to them than just another hardcore band. They were fast, they were loud and they were shouty, but there was something about D. Boons trebly guitar and the contrast to the deep solid funk bass of Mike Watt. Along with George Hurley hitting drums like I had never heard before, these guys could really play. And these guys were really close, you could tell by reading the interviews in Maximum Rock and Roll and other publications of the times the deep affection Watt and Boon held for each other and what solid friends they were.

I was fifteen in the summer of ’85, and in those days I was more recognisable as a goth, heavily into The Cure and Siouxsie and the Banshees and the like, along with trying my very best to look like Robert Smith with my crimped hair and moody manner. Minutemen had been about for a few years when I was introduced to Paranoid Time, their first E.P. and it completely blew me away. I couldn’t get enough of them. I would save my dinner money every day and on Saturdays would hit Andy’s and Backs Records in Norwich to feed my Minutemen addiction. By the time I had caught up with their back catalogue and fallen completely in love with Project Mersh, with a much more commercial, yet edgy sound, Minutemen were over, D. Boon was dead at 27. killed in a car crash on 22 December 1985. The news didn’t reach me until the January of 1986 when I picked up the first copy of the NME after Christmas (I still have it). I was devastated, the loss of someone I didn’t know, had never met, yet felt I knew so intimately through his music, hit me pretty hard for a sixteen-year-old from Norfolk.

The Minutemen, D. Boon, Mike Watt, and George Hurley, were the first musicians that made me really want to play in a band and dared me to dream that being a musician could be an actual career choice, even though the careers advisor at school, along with the majority of the teaching faculty were saying I would never amount to anything, I truly believed I could conquer the world with music.

I had been playing the classical guitar for a good five years at this point, since receiving my first one for Christmas in 1979, and in all honesty, even if I do say so myself, I wasn’t that bad a player. At fifteen it seemed a logical step to get an electric guitar, so I purchased an Eros Les Paul copy from a kid at school for twenty quid and began my path to rock guitar glory. There was a bit of a problem though, when it came to the electric guitar, I just couldn’t get the hang of it. My fingers fumbled all over the fret board, I got very frustrated and just couldn’t do it, no matter how hard I tried.

I put it down to the strings being too close together, and having played a full-size classical acoustic since the age of 10, I reasoned that being accustomed to the larger size of the classical fret board, and having played it with tiny hands to begin with, was the issue. That is why I switched to playing bass. I didn’t have a bass guitar though, I was a poor kid from the archetypical council estate after all, and I couldn’t afford one, neither could my mother afford to buy me one. So, what I did, much to my mother’s horror having only had the thing a couple of weeks, was to cannibalise the Eros Les Paul and turn it into a bass. The first licks I taught myself on this makeshift bass guitar where Minutemen songs. I loved Mike Watt’s sound and style and I played and played until I could jam along to every Minutemen record I had (I had them all). Playing a make shift bass guitar wasn’t good enough though. I needed a proper one, but had no means to do so.

It the summer of 1986 myself and another best (and now my actual oldest) friend picked strawberry’s all summer. In all honesty I wasn’t very good at it, hated doing it, couldn’t really be bothered and only managed to make about twenty five quid that I mostly spent on Guinness and Marlboro’s.

My friend though was the strawberry picking king, and he manged to make £80. I convinced him that he should spend it on a Black Vox Standard bass I’d seen in Secondhand Land as he already had a guitar and, my reasoning was if he bought a bass, we could form a band. I remember going in to get it and him paying for it with eighty one pound coins.

Needless to say, we never formed a band. We jammed for a bit, trying to play Cure and Bauhaus songs, but that was about it. A couple of years later he went to university and I had his bass. He did return having dropped out after eighteen months, but having got my hands on a bass guitar, I flatly refused to give it back. He very kindly let me keep it, on the promise that I would get my own soon and give his back. I managed to cling on to it for nearly five years! Using it to form a band in late 1990 with another friend from the village.

This was a more serious effort though, the two of us clicked very quickly, we had very similar music tastes, and would talk endlessly about different bands and musicians, introducing each other to all manner of new bands and going to a lot of gigs together. We also practiced and practiced and practiced. We got a few covers down and wrote a few of our own songs and continued to practice and practice and practice. Just the two of us, him with his purple Ibanez and a Peavey amp, me with the Vox and using my Pioneer midi stereo system from my bedroom as an amplifier, as well as using it to play the drum machine through.

By ’91 we were good enough to start gigging, but couldn’t do it with my makeshift equipment. Although I now had my own bass, having purchased a sorry looking 1976 Fender Precision Bass from the same second hand shop as the Vox, for £250 (a months wages back in those days). At the time I was back home living with my mother and she was horrified when I came home with this expensive, shabby looking item and instantly took it to bits. It stayed in bits for two weeks, as I replaced the wiring, tweaked the pick-ups, resprayed the body, straightened the neck and added a picture of Uma Thurman to the scratch plate. A truly unique piece of equipment, and one that is remembered by others and associated with me to this very day. Nearly thirty years later, despite being well gigged, she still looks fantasitic and sounds awesome. Anyway, I digress, we couldn’t gig using my tin pot stereo to amplify my bass, with the DR 550 drowning me out. I needed a proper amp.

How I managed it, I don’t know, but I talked my mum into buying me an amp. I guess having watched how meticulously I rebuilt the Fender, listened to the noise coming from my bedroom as we practiced, and seeing the effort we were puting in, she could see how serious I was, and one Saturday, out of the blue, she took me to Carlsboro and parted with £450 of her hard earned wages on a spanking, brand new,  Peavey TNT 110 bass amplifier  with a massive 20 inch speaker (I wanted an Ampeg head and cabinet, but that was way too expensive). A couple of pedals later, I finally had my first full rig.

Instead of gigging though, we just practiced more. We moved from playing in our bedrooms to practicing in the dressing rooms at The Waterfornt in Norwich on a Sunday morning, and then to alternating between Noisebox and Steady State Studios. We soon recruited a drummer, and just kept rehearsing. This went on for months. There was a reluctance from the guitar player to gig, we shared vocal duties, each singing different songs, but he was not confident with his vocals and wanted to get a singer in. Which I was happy to agree to as long as I could continue to sing my songs, as I really enjoyed it and in actuality I was pretty good at it. We advertised, auditioned several candidates, and pretty soon an amazing female vocalist joined our line up. Now we were a foursome, a proper band, and it felt amazing. And once again, instead of gigging, we just rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. We must have been the tightest band that never played a gig.

In the end the whole thing fizzled out. I’d been moonlighting in other bands as a session bassist, picking up quite a reputation for myself and actually earning a bit of money from it.  I got to play on a few records, had one of my songs picked up by a fairly well-known indie band, and I got to play a lot of gigs at a lot of great venues as well. I loved playing live, it was exhilarating, on stage I could be anybody I wanted to be and really gave it my all, it was so liberating not to be the insecure, introverted individual I was in reality.

It wasn’t enough though, not financially or artistically, so I gave it up. The last paying gig I played as a professional was a one off, hardly rehearsed, drunken and drugged up mash up of covers and improvisational noise at Norwich Arts Centre sometime in 1995 with a couple of mates from different bands. I was in such a state I managed to fall off the stage while trying to pose with one foot on my monitor, I missed it completely, and landed on my knees in the crowd, although I did get back on stage and carry on playing, they swelled up massively and haven’t been the same since.

By the following year I had a well-paying factory job which I loved (the teachers at school would’ve been so proud) and had bought my first house away from the city. I did a little bit of playing with new friends I’d made in a local pub, but that didn’t last very long, and following an accident at work where I dislocated nearly all the joints in my fingers, I gave it all up, having decided I would never be able to play again due to my injured fingers. Looking back on it now, that was just an excuse, in my heart I felt I had failed at the only thing I was ever good at and I just couldn’t face it. I sold all my gear, except for Uma and the Peavey who went in to storage (these were far to precious for me to part with) and that was that. I symbolically joined the 27 club that my hero D. Boon had become a member of 11 years earlier. Instead of me dying though, I quite purposefully and deliberately killed my musicianship.

That wasn’t the end though. I came out of retirement four years later in 2000 and re-joined the village band, who were picking up quite a reputation as a local covers band, replacing the departing bass player. And I still had it, I could still play and I rediscovered my love for playing music again, the guitarist and I were both semi ex-professionals and I gelled with the drummer very quickly, forming a monster rhythm section. We played together for fifteen years. Until I got kicked out, not realising for several months that I had actually been replaced. I’m still not entirely sure why, I had been moonlighting again singing and playing bass for a local punk covers band, I didn’t see any harm in this as the singer had loads of different side projects, although I didn’t tell my band mates, mainly out of embarrassment. I’ll admit I could be pretty lazy when it came to learning new songs, particularly if they were songs I didn’t like. But I would learn them, eventually, often rearranging the bass lines to create a more original sound while still maintaining the integrity of the tune. The whole experience was painful enough to stop me playing and give it all up again. Apart from the odd strum of the acoustic at home, I haven’t played since.

However, despite falling out massively with the drummer for a couple of years, we’re all still good friends, we sadly lost the singer to cancer last year and I miss him dreadfully and wish I had been able to play in the band to the end. I think of him everyday. His loss has had just as big an impact on me as D. Boon passing away all those years ago. This time around, rather than being inspired to emulate my hero, I have instead put away my musical toys, mostly sold everything off, and have finally lost the musical inspiration I had in my youth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sad days.

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On a day when when the UK finally leaves the European Union, I find myself at home, reflecting on the whole sorry situation.

What I find so very sad about this whole sorry situation, and that is what it is folks, is the division and the hatred it has caused not only across social media but, in the press, in the pubs, on the street and just about everywhere else. There are no ‘sides’ in all of this. No winners, no losers. All I have witnessed is a rise of intolerance and hatred. I’m always up for a good argument and have had some fun and interesting debates with some of my Tory voting friends, good friends that I love and have a lot of respect for. I’ve even argued the other side with a family member just to show how skewed and incorrect their argument was. I have been called all manner of names, had my character and that of my heritage called in to question (suffice it to say my family has been traced back a thousand years, and apart from the recent introduction of a smattering of Welsh and Scottish genes into the pool, we have lived on this Sceptred Isle for generations). I have been vilified, on Facebook and Twitter for my opinions, and they are only opinions, not ‘beliefs’ (there are no political beliefs. Beliefs are for religions, and let’s not get started on that subject just now), by people who are supposedly my friends, some of which I have known for 20-30 years or more, all my life even and, by those which are only recent acquaintances and who don’t really know me (or I them) that well. It has been quite frightening to get to know some people whom I thought I already knew very well and have known for a number of years.

From the moment the vote was in, there was never any doubt in my mind that the UK would be leaving the EU, although I have been dreading this day and the ensuing months and years, it is something which I accept and have accepted from the very beginning. It doesn’t matter if I agree with it or not, it is what it is, and always has been. It is just a shame that it has been done on a mountain of lies and fact skewing. It is a shame it has brought out the very worst in people that are both dear to me, and complete strangers, in the continuation of perpetuating those lies without any fact checking, just taking the words of politicians and the likes of Farage et al. as the truth, when it has been shown time and time again their arguments have been built on lies and false and inaccurate information. It’s a shame it has brought such division amongst the old and the young, friends and family. I could go on all day, but I’m not about making political statements, and that is not what this particular rant is about.

Some of you know me as an anthropologist and for the study I have made of our race, the history of our species, and the myriad of different cultures across our world, my love of world history, and my almost fanatical quest to understand all religions dating back millennia. Thanks to my studies and the personal knowledge I have gained through them, there is one thing I can say for certain. Whatever the result of a divisive referendum on a relatively insignificant piece of land on a tiny piece of rock wheeling its way around it’s star. It is mostly irrelevant. Despite the squabbles we have amongst ourselves, and how much damage we do to the only place we can call home. It doesn’t really matter. The planet, and life on it, will still be here. The fact, and it is a fact, that we as a species won’t, and that we would have destroyed not only ourselves but so many other species along the way is what we are missing. This is what we should really be sad about. At a time when we should be uniting as a species for all that it is to be human to combat the daily horrors and damage we are inflicting on our fellow humans and our planet, we are becoming more and more divisive and inflicting more damage, death and destruction as we go.

It makes me very sad. Very sad indeed.