Chris James's Blog, page 7

More spring in my garden and Race’s first month

Tomorrow, The Race against Time finishes its first month out in the world. It will drop off Amazon’s Hot New Releases chart (and the price will go up, *cough*). If you’re one of the hundreds of readers who have given the book their time, thank you very much indeed, and an extra thank you if you’ve left a rating or review.

Meanwhile, the rhododendrons are in full bloom this week and the whole garden is buzzing and humming with life. Today, I even managed to snap Deirdre the Dove when she stopped by to pinch some chicken feed.

Stay safe, peeps!

Managing hens and new blooms

This week’s post is brought to you by “Surprising but ultimately irrelevant facts about hens”. A few weeks ago before spring began, I fenced off certain areas of the garden to keep the hens under control. Although our 12 birds have their own enclosed area, we like to let them out into the garden for a few hours a day. The problem with that, of course, is that they trash everything. No plant is safe from their relentless pecking, and these birds poo wherever they stand (although chicken poo does wonders for the raspberries!). So, I got some wire and posts, and fenced off a couple of areas where we wanted to grow fruit and veg. What I didn’t expect, however, was to see just how much the hens do to the lawn. In the shot below, to the right of the fence is where the hens can go; to the left is where they can’t. And on the left of that fence, the grass is 5cm higher. It doesn’t really matter because as soon as I eat one of their delicious eggs, whether soft boiled, hard boiled, fried, scrambled or poached, I forgive them all they’ve destroyed and all of the poo. Oh, and the rhododendrons are just coming into bloom, too!

Spring in my garden and Race’s first week

In what has been a first for one of my books, The Race against Time has spent the entire eight days since its release at #1 on the Hot New Releases chart in its category of Hard Science Fiction in the UK. Sending vast gratitude to all of you who helped to make that happen – thank you!

But that’s not the point of this post. Each year it’s the same, and each year I’m amazed. The six weeks from mid-March to the end of April see a complete transformation in the garden. From drab, colourless grass and dirt overseen by spindly bare branches and a seemingly endless winter of dark evenings, these few weeks bring on a sudden burst of life and colour which is wonderful. This year it had greater impact because at the end of last summer, I mullered most of the trees and worried I’d managed to kill them. New shoots all over the place have reassured me, however.

Take care of yourselves and stay safe, peeps.

Maple shooting from a stem pruned last autumnAnother pruned stem; more new shootsMilka the lazy cat with tulips out of focusTulips in focus; lazy cat out of focus

Publication day for The Race against Time

If you pre-ordered the Kindle version my new novel, The Repulse Chronicles, Book Five: The Race against Time, then it should’ve arrived on your device today. There’s not a great deal for me to add apart from to say ‘Thank you’. As always, I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Race actually transpired to be a challenging novel to write. In the 11 months since The Endgame published last year, I have had to manage family and professional issues both large and small, including a bereavement that was as unwelcome as it was, perhaps, expected.

In addition, events in central Europe since 24 February have, I think, affected all of us to some degree, placing a context on our own lives and the twists and turns of fate to which each of us can be subject, especially without warning.

In any event, spring has arrived and Mrs James’s tulips are in bloom. The Race against Time has made it to #1 in Hot New Releases in the UK, and #2 in the UK Hard Science Fiction category today. And that’s thanks to you.

Thank you for reading and be safe.

If you really can’t wait till next Saturday…

I know, this post is a day late from my usual Sunday posting, so my apologies. The final edits on The Race against Time took all of my spare time last week. In a little over 24 hours, Amazon will lock me out of the pre-order novel ahead of its publication on Saturday. However, if you can’t wait for the Kindle version, the paperback is already live, in the UK here, the US here, as well as Canada and Australia. Actually, though, given the glacial speed of Amazon’s print-on-demand process and shipping time, you’re probably better off just waiting for the Kindle version. And you certainly are from the financial perspective

In the meantime, spring has arrived here in sunny Warsaw, so here are a few pics of the garden and the hens.

Happy Easter!

As you might imagine, all my spare time is devoted to preparing The Race against Time for publication in just under two weeks’ time. So, I only want to note in this post that I have the best beta readers in the world, and I’d like to thank all of you who have already pre-ordered the book. Here are a few pics of the James family today (and some of the delicious traditional Polish food we enjoyed), including Mrs James and the three hooligans—which, I think, would make a really good name for an acoustic bluegrass band :))

Happy Easter to you all and be safe!

What happened to the wood

Only time for a quick post today, peeps. The Race against Time is starting to shape up nicely now with just under three weeks to go before publication. This preparation is consuming much of my free time. I had wanted to post a polemic on Russia’s appalling barbarism in Ukraine and voice my despair at NATO and western Europe’s half-measures of support that barely hide their cowardice in the face of the brutal leader of a brainwashed country full of hate, but that will have to wait. My original forecast of Ukraine’s surrender by mid-April is now unlikely to happen (unless the arch-fiend in the Kremlin does resort to nuclear weapons), so I will revisit the subject soon. One thing that has changed is that for Ukraine, surrender in any form now would mean genocide and complete cultural annihilation.

In the meantime, here’s what happened to the wood I collected from the forest a couple of weeks ago. With the help of Only Son and Youngest Daughter, we cut the felled trees into lengths of 120cm and wheelbarrowed them to the back garden, so they looked like this:

Then, it was time to uncover and plug in the desk saw. We’ve had this beastie for over 20 years:

Each 120cm length got two cuts down to logs of 40cm, which, come next winter, will fit nicely inside the fireplace in the living room. So, after a few hours’ work, the wood looks like this:

For those of you who are interested, that volume of wood is around three cubic metres. The forester ended up charging me PLN 17 (EUR 4) per cubic metre (inflation!), and in total it took around four one-person working days to strip the branches from each trunk, cut, transport, and finally cut the resulting logs to length and stack them. Next winter, that amount of wood will probably keep the fireplace (which provides heat to half the house) nice and hot in the evenings for six-to-eight weeks. Which means I still need to get more wood. Shit.

Stay safe, peeps. And warmest thanks to all of you who have pre-ordered Race. There’s not much longer to wait…

Wood work

It’s been another face-palm inducing twenty-four hours on the international stage, don’t you think? Imagine it’s 1940 and Roosevelt makes a speech calling for regime change in Berlin, but then one of his flunkies says he didn’t mean it (“No, so sorry Mr Hitler!”) and Churchill “distances himself” from the comments (“It is, harrumph, for the good people of Germany to decide who shall govern them!”).

I wonder if Western governments even know there’s a war on. It is crushingly disappointing that these mealy-mouthed, so-called leaders still tiptoe around a demented dictator who has now committed innumerable, documented war crimes in Ukraine. It is especially galling to watch those men with the loudest voices continue to misunderstand the enemy, to say things that embolden him and reassure him that he is taking the correct path by murdering innocent civilians. And to think, if the arch-fiend in the Kremlin does decide to use WMD, Western leaders will be the first to scuttle down into safe bunkers where chlorine and radioactive fallout will never penetrate. But yeah, keep making speeches telling us how fucking tough you are, you cowards.

Anyway, regular readers will know I live next to quite a large managed forest. Mrs James sorted out a permit for a sector of forest close to our house, so this week I grabbed my chainsaw, cutters and secateurs, and collected some wood for next winter. In the pictures below, you can see a part of the forest that was cleared in 2005 and replanted with pine. After 17 years, the forester came through to thin the trees out. The permit allows us to go in and collect as much of the cut wood as we want (only the forester can actually cut trees down):

These pines are 17 years old

The area is quite large: from thousands of saplings planted in 2005, hundreds of trees have been cut to thin them out.Once you get a permit, you go in there and “fill yer boots” as my old Dad says.

After a good weekend’s work yesterday and today, here’s what I gathered:

I think that’s around four cubic metres of wood.The same wood from the opposite side. The road in the distance is the road we live on; my house is about 300m along it, so no transport costs. Just cut the wood up and pop it in the wheelbarrow – yay!

The forester issues these permits free to local residents. Tomorrow he will come to look at the amount of wood and charge us a nominal fee of PLN 10-20 (EUR 2.50-5.00). It’s that cheap because the wood has no commercial value to the forester. For us, it’s easy to cut into 40cm lengths for our fireplace in the living room.

Elsewhere in the forest, there is wood that has commercial value. The cycle of felling mature trees, replanting the area, and then thinning is quite constant, and each stage promotes its own environment that favours and is home to a vast range of different flora and fauna.

Mature trees is where the money is!

To end, here is a rare shot of the author at work:

“I shall use my trusty chainsaw to seek out and recover wood that other men have deemed unworthy – and I shall use it to heat my home when the arch-fiend of Russia does cut the gas off!”

A twentieth-century dictator fighting a twenty-first century war

If you’ve ever read about the First World War and marvelled at how civilised societies tolerated their young men being flung at fixed machine gun positions only to be mowed down in their thousands, wonder no more.  In 1914, military commanders adhered to nineteenth-century tactics, but it was a twentieth-century war with far deadlier weapons.  And despite heavy losses, the generals could not accept that tactics they learned from the middle of the previous century and earlier had become redundant.  In today’s idiom, they ‘doubled down’ and kept throwing away young lives.

Today, Putin’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine carries a similar parallel: a deluded mind wedded to an outdated mentality that twentieth-century imperialism is right, where smaller countries are fair game for absorption or, if they resist, destruction.  That the 69-year-old Putin is both strategically out of date and tactically incompetent matters little to the Ukrainian civilians currently dying under his bombs, but it can inform an estimation of what might come next.

Against this ageing throwback to the Soviet era, the 44-year-old Zelenskiy and his forces fight a remarkable defence, not only militarily but also in the information sphere.  Zelenskiy’s humanity in the most trying and provocative circumstances is evidence of a very twenty-first century humanitarianism.  This has led to unparalleled global support for Ukraine.  However, the information sphere is not greatly different in 2022 than it was in 1914—except in one important way.

A century ago, young men read newspapers, pamphlets and novels that portrayed ‘the Hun’ as evil incarnate.  German soldiers were drawn and painted as killing defenceless women and bayoneting their babies.  While today social media may impress us with an immediacy and wealth of information our forebears did not have, the objective is the same: dehumanisation of the enemy to encourage normally decent people to demand the deaths of others whom they do not know and with whom they have no quarrel.  This is the language of Putin’s Russia, of the twentieth century’s wars, of Soviet-era propaganda.

Contrast that with Zelenskiy’s offer to Russian soldiers and their mothers—twenty-first century humanitarianism in its most obvious form and the clearest indication of what today’s technology can achieve, which breaks out of the narratives of governments striving to dehumanise their enemies.  The contrasts between the combatant nations’ leaders and their eras could not be starker.

Nevertheless, what happens next?

The war will likely end by mid-April.  Ukraine will be obliged to surrender when supplies of NATO arms become insufficient to resist Russian missiles and Putin’s merciless shelling of civilian areas becomes overwhelming.  Putin absolutely will not stop killing Ukrainian civilians, so Zelenskiy will be forced to take the one step that will stop the war: surrender.  This outcome can already be seen in NATO’s approach since the war started: it gives the Ukrainian defenders sufficient munitions to hold the Russians, but not enough to repel them.  NATO leaders have no intention of fighting to save Ukraine. Soon, domestic pressure in the West to return to some kind of normalcy, coupled with rampant inflation caused by price rises in energy and food, will see NATO deliver fewer and fewer arms to promote the conclusion it has already decided must happen.

Having been given a lesson in how poor the Russian army actually is, Putin will be forced to limit his imperial aims.  Some kind of UN peacekeeping force may be deployed to Ukraine.  The east of the country and the Crimea will be ceded to Russia. The remaining cities will take years to recover from the destruction visited on them in the last three weeks.  Once the deal is signed, pressure to end sanctions against Russia will increase.  Putin will be able to sell the entire adventure as a ‘victory’ to a population that is already under Orwellian levels of manipulation.

Putin himself will of course escape any punishment for his crimes to expedite a return to market and economic stability.  He may, in the time left to him, decide to try to build a capable army and once again, in a few years, attempt to reclaim his beloved Soviet Imperium.  But after this invasion of Ukraine, the whole world is fully alive to the threat he represents, so any further adventure in a few years would be unlikely to succeed.  It is also possible that Putin will hand over power to a successor (whether willingly or not) so that Russia and its apologists in the West can claim a ‘new beginning’ to hasten the removal of sanctions.

Thus, as with so many conflicts, little will have been resolved and much hatred will be left to fester.

It is interesting to speculate how future historians will see this war: a skirmish that NATO managed to cause to fail before it could develop into a full, pan-European war?  An inevitable continuation of World War Two that took eighty years to come about?  Or the first of a new set of wars linked to the unstoppable global rise of the dictatorships and the final snuffing out of the democracies?  That, however, remains to be seen.

Another interesting facet of military history is the counter-factual.  Wars always offer numerous ‘What ifs?’.  And this war already offers a very salient one: if Ukraine had collapsed in a few days as Putin and his generals expected; if Zelenskiy had accepted the CIA’s offer of escape; and if, today, Ukraine had a new, pro-Moscow government and its cities swarmed with FSB operatives eager to liquidate any and all Ukrainian patriots, then Putin would be energised and emboldened.  His ‘triumphant’ battalions would be massing on the border with Poland, while others would be forming up at the borders of the Baltic States.  And Putin would be rubbing his hands in glee at seeing his prize of reclaiming the Soviet Imperium within his grasp.

No matter what else happens in this awful war, the rest of Europe owes the people of Ukraine a vast debt indeed for being resilient enough to prevent that scenario unfolding.

Thanks for reading.

More cats, now with added hens!

For this week, here are a few pictures Youngest Daughter took of Splidge, the kitten with which Bonnie was pregnant when nature’s sat-nav sent her to my back garden once she’d been abandoned in our local forest (because, you know, muggins here is a softie when it comes to abandoned animals). Youngest Daughter photographed Splidge looking positively regal last weekend. In addition, I’ve added a few shots of our hens. Yesterday, I made them a feast of mashed potato, grain, feed, extra minerals, and reclaimed meat. Those ladies go bananas when they get their beaks in that!

Despite everything going on, it’s important to remember the ordinary stuff. I’m still waiting to see how the war develops before trying to extrapolate what might happen. As the days pass, new light is being shed on old news: Trump, Brexshit and so many other controversies over the last few years can now be seen for what they really were: our enemy’s attempts to undermine and even destroy our democratic societies using only twisted and false information, paid traitors, fifth columnists and quislings. The arch-fiend in the Kremlin has successfully played Western leaders for fools for the better part of the last 20 years, and he is now spending these “winnings”, knowing he only has to threaten nuclear war to cow the leaders of the free world in the EU and the US. The UK doesn’t really come into it because he’s owned the British Conservative Party for some years. I shudder to think how quickly Johnson gets on the phone to Lebedev after the Greased Albino Piglet has had his COBRA briefings.

Stay safe, peeps.