Robert Carter's Blog: http://novelcarter.blogspot.co.uk/, page 15

The great Scheme of Things "Courtesy of Atrocity"

What are the consequences if human life as a whole, and yours in particular, has no discernable aim?

Does this mean that, since we would have no clue as to any end-point to which we should be working, we are therefore unable to judge which of our actions are right or wrong?

One solution, of course, is God, which supposes an overarching will and some human knowledge of it. The problem we have with that solution is that God seems only to make His revelations known through human intermediaries, and that's a very appealing open door to would-be practitioners of fraud.

So what else could be a guide? "Do whatever you think is best according to your own ideas." That is a possible solution, but I foresee a wake of blood with that because of the many psychopaths and sociopaths whose ideas regarding how to do what they consider best tend to lack community spirit.

How about: "Do what you will so long as it harms no one else."

Better, but wouldn't a community of pure individualists be no community at all? Wouldn't such a society lack the dimension of charity, and possibly even group endeavor, since most group endeavors require sacrifice? (Think of armed defense for example.)

Moral philosophy is, as far as I can see, the field within philosophy that shows the greatest promise, but it has at its heart, rather as mathematics has, a nasty, empty black hole. Consider this: if everything proceeds by cause and effect, and if we accept chaos theory's notion that small perturbations may end up adjusting the world at large in big ways, then every action that has taken place contributes to the future.

Now think about the world wars. They adjusted the world into what it is today. Moreover, they changed the very people who populate the world - my mother would never have met my father at exactly the right time to create me had not every last detail of the world wars taken place exactly as they did. This is as true for you as it is for me - whoever you are.

So you and I, and everyone else born after 1945, are only here courtesy of atrocity.

Watching TV

One of my interests is watching TV. It is possible to passively absorb TV, in fact some might argue that that is its primary use. But what I mean by "waching TV" is really monitoring the changes in how TV goes about its business.

My time working at the BBC taught me to see TV from the inside, and perhaps that's why I like to follow its evolution. This has come to include TV advertising too, a whole world in itself.

There has been enormous change in the nature of TV over the last 20 years. The emergence of what people call "Reality TV" has transformed the televisual landscape, as has the onset of "dumbing down" and of course helping us through it all is that squad of TV stalwarts the "stand-ups". Never have we been able to name so many, from the ubiquitious Stephen Fry, to the "Live at the Apollo" guy whose name you can just about recall (I mean by that either Jason Manford or Micky Flanagan.)

The present panjandrums of TV-land firmly believe that we (the audience) can best be entertained (and sold to) by amusing people with a high affability rating (comedians). Off the top of my head, how would I order the Apollo stand-ups in terms of those I'd like to see trying to sell me something:

Lenny Henry
Jo Brand
Dara Ó Briain
Rich Hall
Michael McIntyre
Rhod Gilbert
Rob Brydon
Al Murray
Lee Mack
Sean Lock
Andy Parsons
Kevin Bridges
Jack Dee
Alistair McGowan
Julian Clary
Ed Byrne
Sarah Millican
John Bishop
Patrick Kielty
Alan Carr
Russell Howard
Jason Byrne
Shappi Khorsandi
Stephen K. Amos
Frankie Boyle
Russell Kane
Jack Whitehall

I wouldn't buy anything, but I'd like to see them try to sell it. Who would feature at the top of your Apollo list?

Ernest Borgnine Dies at 95

A few hours ago a friend of mine rang to tell me that Ernest Borgnine had died.

I'm a movie fan, and a fan mainly of movies made last century. That was when they had the idea of letting proper writers write movies (instead of somebody's nephew, who might or might not have done a creative writing course.) Back then there were no special effects worth mentioning, so movie moguls couldn't charge a wad of cash to have people stare at a bunch of gosh-wow dinosaurs/robots/toons/whatever galloping around to no discernable purpose. Actually, there are some very good 21st Cent. movies, but I don't see any remake of A Man for All Seasons topping the original.

Ernest Borgnine, as well as being married a stack of times, and winning an Oscar, was immortalized by John Cooper Clarke, punk poet and quasi-genius. Be sure to watch at least one of his films before you
die yourself.

The Virtues of the Wok

Did I tell you? I love my wok!

Where did I get mine?

My local vendor of oriental supplies: Hoo Hing. (Ainsley Harriott, the excellent TV chef and guest star of  a recent Rocky Horror Show, loves the place as much as I do.) They stock a large range of Chinese kitchen equipment which means you can get the real thing.

Woks are made of thin steel sheet, so that as little as possible comes between you and the flame. But it's really the shape of the wok and the spade that comes with it for keeping contents on the move that is the wonder of the device. It has that quality, the one all good craft tools have: the look of what you might call "incorporated experience" It just looks like something that has evolved over a long time.

So - sweet chili sauce, canned water chestnuts, dried prawns, mushroom soy, tom yum paste, and fifty different sorts of noodle ... Looks like I'm going to be busy with my spade tonight.

And let's not forget the 24-pack of Tsingtao beer. You didn't know about Chinese beer? This brew takes me back to my time in Hong Kong when we used to get them for a HK dollar a bottle. Hong Kong can be hot and very humid at certain times of the year. That's when a throat cries out for Baltic ambrosia, or perhaps a good Chinese substitute. Tsingtao is just superb beer, and guess what, when chilled it goes perfectly with Chinese food.

Fridge Clearout - "Eat All You Buy"

I have a real downer on food being wasted. I figure that if an organism has been good enough to lay down its own existence in order to support mine, then the very least I can do is behave with a little gratitude.

For me, this means actually eating all the food that I buy.

The alternative is to flush uneaten food down the sink and into the sewers for the benefit of London's many rats, or adding to our land-fill problems. This question of disposal seems to me to be the practical reason to eat all you buy, but the secondary reason is the feel-good factor you get from knowing you've done right by the many other species responsible for keeping you alive.

The British war-time generation knew this very well. Instead of moving toward an Eat All You Can culture, we should be heading for an "Eat All You Buy" culture.

I think I ought to patent that phrase now.

Federer vs Murray

Oh, dear. Somebody had the temerity to say: "Let the best man win."

And, unfortunately, he did.

My brother, Mycroft, a man of the old school, remarks that it hardly should matter to an Englishman that the final was played between two foreigners, it's the taking part that matters. Let's hope his attitude does not prevail over the Olympic spirit, and that somebody from these islands wins a gold medal ...

The confluence of ideas

Looking back at my last two blogs, I see that there is something of a common vein: Hollywood mining old TV and movie material, the Victorians of the 1860's suddenly switching into backward-lookingness (I hope that's a word, though perhaps it shouldn't be.)

There seemed to be another, rather worrying, thought just a knight's move away:

Does the first sign of decline appear when a culture starts to take too keen an interest in its own past ...?

Civilizations rise and fall. The British have had their two hundred year-long day of glory. Their successor seems to be heading along the same twilight road, while other places appear to be on the up and up.

Interesting times.

A London icon betrays itself

A London icon betrays itself A while ago an out-of-town friend visiting me at Carter's Castle suggested we go down to take a look at the Tower of London. (We share an historical interest, he being an erstwhile Oxford historian.) I must admit that I had fallen into the Londoner's trap of never visiting our local places of interest until an out-of-towner came and forced me to do it.

Anyhow, I said "yes" and off we went. At some point after the visit, we sat down for a coffee nearby. He pointed up at Tower Bridge and said, "Just think, that was built in the late 1870's. Eleven thousand tons of steel and the very last word in bridge technology, and all concealed inside a casing of medieval stonework. It's actually got gargoyles on it, for chrissakes!"

I didn't immediately see what he was driving at, so he persisted. He asked me to cast my mind back a few decades earlier and consider Brunel and all the other great engineers who transformed Britain. "You wouldn't have caught Brunel or any of that crowd putting gargoyles on stuff." It was true. I had been led to wonder what had happened to turn a future-forging, forward-looking culture into one obsessed with its own past. Had Britain just lost cultural thrust and reached inevitable middle age?

And Klaatu barada nikto to you too.

I watched the re-make of @The Day the Earth Stood Still recently. Pure hokum, of course, but it had the rather solemn-looking Keanu Reeves playing the part of Klaatu, an alien visitor to Earth with an up-to-the-minute eco-agenda on his little green mind. Personally, I much preferred the classic '50s version which spawned the cult phrase, "Klaatu barada nikto" - and yes, you @can get it on a T-shirt if you are prepared to encourage that kind of wardrobe. Being a writer, I thought: when will Hollywood stop mining the films and TV series of yesteryear instead of boldly commissioning sparkling new efforts such as my own? You can understand the profit motive, of course. I probably wouldn't have tuned-in to the 're-make' if it had been called something else. But to a man with a personal stake in creativity, and we all have that if we are comsumers of the end product, this kind of re-hashing does smell suspiciously like a con-trick. Perhaps we ought not to stand for it.

Shopping trolleys and Supermarket karts

I've always been fascinated by what other people buy. It's one of the few opportunities a person gets to look through a window into the lives of strangers. When I'm at a supermarket checkout I find myself looking through the various victuals that the person next to me is planning to consume.

Most of the time pleasure seems to outweigh health considerations, with many karts groaning under ready-made offerings that are chock full of additives and chemicals. Biscuits and cakes and cookies and and crisps ... all kinds of industrially manufactured items are usually evident in surprising amounts. Can't say I'm not tempted, but I do try to buy ingredients rather than factory produced microwave meals. I must be odd, because I actually enjoy doing a little cooking!

What's more, the results, after a few months of practice, are becoming reasonably edible. Writers can easily turn into porkers, so we have to be a bit self-monitoring. My solution was to buy a wok. (The Chinese know a thing or two about food.) And now I am leaving ready-meal purgatory and entering home-made chicken and bean shoot heaven!