Colin M. Drysdale's Blog, page 16

The Rocking Chair Test

When I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time worrying about whether any decisions I made were the right ones or whether I should’ve done something else. I’d also spend a lot of time worrying about what would happen if I tried something and failed. This meant I often ended up doing nothing rather than something, and while it might have stopped me making a few mistakes, I probably also missed out on a lot of great opportunities too.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realised this isn’t a good way to lead my life, and looking back, I’d say some of the biggest regrets are over things I haven’t done rather than things I have. This has led me to adopt a rule which I call ‘The Rocking Chair Test’. I’m sure this isn’t very original and I’m sure I’m not the first to have come up with it, but it does provide a remarkably good rule of thumb and a much more positive way of viewing your life. Without it, I’d certainly not be writing this blog (which, as it happens, was a year old this week), and I would probably never have got round to starting, let alone finishing and publishing, For Those In Peril On The Sea.

You see, for as long as I can remember, I’d wanted to write a novel, but the thought of putting it out there for others to read and potentially criticise really had me scared. After all, what if I put in all that effort, and it turned out that I couldn’t actually write? With perverse logic, I justified doing nothing with the thought that if I didn’t write it, this could never happen so I wouldn’t have to risk failing. This simple, and quite logical, thought process was blocking me from even attempting to do something the rest of my brain really wanted to do. As I was heading up to my fortieth birthday last year, I realised that I shouldn’t be letting that one little thought have so much control over my life. Instead, I decided to look at the book-writing issue from a new perspective, that of The Rocking Chair Test, to see if that might allow me to make some progress.

So what is this test? Well, it’s quite simply this: When, in the twilight of your life, you’re sitting on your porch (or wherever it is you picture yourself spending your final days), rocking slowly back and forth on your favourite chair, thinking about all you’ve done in your life, will you regret not having done whatever it is you are trying to decide whether you should do? If the answer is yes, then you should do it. If it’s no, then you should probably shouldn’t.

When I applied this test to writing a book, I realised that if I got to the end of my life and hadn’t at least given it a go, then I would almost certainly deeply regret it. In this sense, I realised, it was the trying, rather than the succeeding, which was important. If I wrote a book and it turned out that I had absolutely no story telling talent and it was truly awful, I could always just bury it in the back of a drawer and no one need ever know except for me. That way, the worst that could happen was that when my future self sits in his rocking chair, he’ll be able to chuckle himself about that time it tried to write a book rather than regretting never having given it a go. This gave me a new way to look at the issue, and it was one which gave me the confidence to sit down and start write.

As it turned out, when I finally showed the book to other people they quite liked it, and so now my future self can rock back and forth, remembering about that book he once wrote, and the present me is much happier knowing that I’ve got one less thing to look back on and regret later in life. However, if I hadn’t used The Rocking Chair Test, I still be stuck in the negative head space which had hindered me for so long, and I’d have nothing to show for it but regrets. I think this is why it’s such a useful test. It doesn’t focus on success, but rather on trying, and that is a much more positive way to lead your life. Once you start using The Rocking Chair test, you’ll find it’s addictive and you’ll find yourself applying it to all aspects of your life from your career to relationships, and it’s definitely a better way to live than forever worrying about the possibility of failure or of making the wrong decision, and, as a result, missing out on things.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Do You Do When You Run Out Of Bullets In A Zombie Apocalypse?

The head shot. We all know it’s the key to killing zombies, but sooner or later you’re going to run out of bullets; then what will you do? You could get up close and personal, and smash their heads in with that old favourite, the baseball bat, but that involves a high risk of getting bitten and it should always be a last resort.

You could try using a bow and arrow, or a crossbow, but they’re not exactly common so it’s unlikely you’ll find one just lying around. So what other options do you have? Well, how about using a toilet brush gun? Yes, you heard me right, toilet brush gun!

You might think I’m joking here, but I’m not. There’s a guy called Joerg Sprave who has created a revolver out of nothing more than bits of wood and rubber hose which can fire four slightly-modified toilet brushes in rapid succession with more than enough force and accuracy to kill a marauding zombie from a nice safe distance. And it’s almost completely silent too so the zombie won’t even hear it coming (and, more importantly, nor will it’s friends). If you don’t believe me, you can check out the video below.









This isn’t the only type of gun that Joerg has created using the basic principles of the slingshot. He’s also built a machine gun which can fire 32 rounds in five second, and what does it use as ammo? The humble HB pencil! It’s not exactly portable, but it’s pretty impressive.









If you don’t happen to have any pencils or toilet brushes, you could just make a gun which fires machetes! This means you can safely kill zombies with your faithful blade without having to get too close.









Or you could fire chainsaws!









So what’s the point I’m trying to make here? Well, I think there’s two important take home message here: Firstly, the humble slingshot is a greatly overlooked weapon when considering what weaponry would be useful in zombie apocalypse. They’re simple, they’re silent, they’re easy to make, and, with a bit of ingenuity, you can turn almost anything into a lethal projectiles. Secondly, if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, I’d want Joerg Sprave on my survival team!

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Would You Do If One Day You Woke Up And Found You Were Dead?

Having read the title of this post, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “that might be an interesting question in theory, but be honest, it couldn’t actually happen, could it?” Except it can, it does and it even has a medically-recognised name: Cotard’s Syndrome.

Cotard’s Syndrome is a mysterious, but thankfully very rare, condition which leaves people feeling like they, or parts of their bodies, no longer exist. Basically, people with this condition feel like they have died, but that their bodies haven’t realised it because they’re still moving around. This is where the disease gets its other name (and I promise I’m not making this up!): Walking Corpse Syndrome. Recently, some scientists put someone with Cotard’s syndrome through an MRI scanner to look at their brain activity and saw, to their amazement, that the man had less activity in his frontal lobes (the bit where our consciousness resides) than someone in a vegetative state. To all intents and purposes his conscious self was, indeed, dead.

So far, so interesting, but it wasn’t until today that a new discovery caught my eye. Cotard’s Syndrome can be caused by (amongst other things) a rare side-effect of a cold-sore treatment drug called Acyclovir (also known by the brand name Zovirax), but only in people with renal failure. This gave scientists the key they needed to start getting an idea of what’s going on in people with Cotard’s Syndrome. As it turns out, in the body, acyclovir breaks down into a number of things, one of them is called CMMG. CMMG is usually found in very low levels in the human body and is normally filtered out in the kidneys of people who take the acylovir. In the people with kidney failure, this wasn’t happening so it built up to much higher levels than normal. This seems to cause some sort of constriction of blood vessels in the brain, which it turn results in people feeling like they’ve died, but no one has quite told their bodies. Interestingly, kidney dialysis filters out the CMMG, causing them to feel like they’ve come back to life.

So, here we have a chemical in the body which if, for some reason, the levels get too high, leaves people feeling like they’re nothing more than walking corpses. Of course, they don’t run around trying to eat everyone’s brains, but they’re still for all intents and purposes, living, breathing zombies.

Now, here’s the interesting (and much less scientific) bit: Imagine if someone got hold of CMMG and tweaked it a little so even normal people couldn’t filter it out of their blood stream, and then found a way to deliver it to an entire city in large and continuous quantities – maybe through the water supply or something like that. Almost instantly, the whole of the population would be left feeling like they were nothing more than walking corpses. What impact would this have? How would someone who was unaffected feel when they found themselves as the only one who felt alive in a city full of people who all though they were dead? It would be a pretty weird and frightening situation.

Think, then, about what if some unscrupulous person, or organisation, or nation did this for their own gain. With everyone feeling like they are dead inside, they could do whatever they wanted: Rob bank vaults, fiddle stock markets, empty bank accounts, steal diamonds, rifle through secret government files, commit unspeakable crimes, take over entire countries without having to fire a shot, and they’d be able to do it front of everyone because they just wouldn’t care because they felt as if they were dead. It’s a strange, strange thought, but then again Cotard’s Syndrome is a strange, strange disease. It’s also potentially a very interesting premise for a novel.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Six Dos And Don’ts Of A Zombie Apocalypse

Recently, I noticed someone had ended up at this blog using the search term ‘What to do and not do in a zombie apocalypse’. I thought this was an interesting idea, and decided to put together six tongue-in-cheek dos and don’ts on a zombie apocalypse. So with no further ado, they are:

1. When the zombies start to rise, do head for the hills as quickly as possible. Don’t stand in the middle of the road, waving your arms in the air while screaming at the top of your lungs.

2. When the zombies are hammering at the door, do pile all the furniture you can find against it. Don’t throw it wide open and invite them in for a bite to eat.

3. When trying to kill zombies, do aim for the head. Don’t shoot wildly at anything which moves until you run out of bullets.

4. When you see a zombie in the middle of the road, do put the pedal to the metal and mow it down without a second thought. Don’t pull over and offer it a lift.

5. When fleeing from a zombie horde, do run as fast as you can. Don’t stop to re-tie your shoelaces just because they feel a little tight.

6. When hiding in your safe house, do keep quiet and make as little noise as possible. Don’t crank the stereo up and invite the neighbours round for a wild party.

If you have your own tongue-in-cheek dos and dont’s for a zombie apocalypse, feel free to post them as comments on this article.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

What Would You Do If … Dilemmas In A Zombie Apocalypse: No. 29 – The Rendezvous Point Dilemma

You are the leader of a small group of survivors clinging on as zombies take over the world. Last night, your compound was over-run and in the scramble to escape, most of your group got separated from each others. Luckily, being a sensible leader, you’d had a plan in place in case of such an eventuality, and you’d previously told everyone that if this ever happened, they should aim to meet up at a crossroads five miles east of your base. You also told them that they would need to be there by sunset of the following day at the latest as being over-run would mean the local area was no longer safe and you would need to move on in search of somewhere safer as quickly as possible.

The sun is now going down all but two of your group have made it to the rendezvous point. The two missing people are your teenage daughter and your second in command. The best thing for the group as a whole is to get going as quickly as possible because the local area is now crawling with zombies, and there’s a good chance that if they haven’t made it by now, they’re dead – or worse. Yet, there’s a slim chance they’re still alive and that, for some reason, it’s just taking them longer than expected to get to the meeting place. In fact, they could arrive at the any moment, and you know your daughter would be devastated if she got there and found you’d left her behind. You could send the rest on ahead while you waited, but without your second in command, there’s be no one to take charge, so either you all go or you all stay, and that includes you wife and your other children. The longer you stay, the greater the chances that the zombies which over-ran your compound will catch up with you. What do you do?

Take Our Poll

As always, this dilemma is just here to make you think, so there’s no right or wrong answer. Vote in the poll to let others know what you do if you were in this situation, and if you want to give a more detailed answer, leave a comment on this posting.

If you want to read more about the importance of having rendezvous points in a zombie apocalypse, you can read the article posted here.




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

First Time – A Flash Fiction Zombie Story

‘They say you never forget your first time and, I can tell you, I won’t be forgetting mine any time soon. I guess she was eighteen, maybe nineteen at the most, and I didn’t even know her name. If I close my eyes, I can still see her: long, blonde hair framing a pale face as she walked slowly across the room towards me. Since I’d never done it before, I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean I’d heard stories from other guys, and seen a couple of movies, but it’s not the same as actually doing it, it is? As she drew close, she moaned softly, letting me know she wanted me as much as I wanted this to happen. My heart racing, I wiped the sweat from my hands and stepped tentatively towards her. She moaned again, louder and more urgently, her mouth slightly open, arms reaching out towards me, ready to embrace me. That was when I knew the time was right. I stepped forward again, this time with more confidence, closing the gap between us as I swung the baseball bat I was carrying. There was a dull thunk as it connected, sending her tumbling to the concrete floor but within a flash she was back on her feet, snarling angrily through clenched teeth. As I swung the bat again, I smelled the distinctive scent of her rotting flesh. She went down for a second time, and this time I made sure she’d never get up again. When I close my eyes, I can see her lifeless body lying there in the deserted warehouse, blonde hair streaked with blood, the left side of her face unrecognisable. I swear as long as I live, I’ll never forget the night I killed my first zombie.’




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

The Importance Of Rendezvous Points In A Zombie Apocalypse

We all have our favourite places to meet up with our friends and family, especially if we’re heading on somewhere else for some entertainment. For some, it will be a local café or bar while for others it might be public landmark. Some of these are so obvious that many people, more or less independently, will all choose the same spot and this can become a local tradition. Famous examples of this include the top of the Empire State Building in New York (all because of that scene in that film – which was used in that other movie!), and the under the clock at Waterloo Station in London. In my home town of Glasgow, it’s the steps in front of the Royal Concert Hall at the top of Buchanan Street – and indeed I’m using them for just this purpose in a scene at the start of the next book in the For Those In Peril series, which I’m currently working on. What do these places have in common? They are centrally-placed, easy to find and difficult to get wrong (there isn’t another Empire State Building in New York, there’s only one clock at Waterloo Station and you can’t miss the steps at the top of Buchanan Street). What on Earth, I can hear you wondering, has this got to do with zombies?

Well, here’s my point. In a zombie apocalypse, it’s likely that to survive, you will frequently find yourself running for your life, and when this happens, there’s a good chance that, at some point, you’ll get separated from others in your group. Think, for example, of what is likely to happen when the outbreak first starts. It’s unlikely that you and all your friends and family are going to be in the same place, and even if you are, there’s likely to be a lot of confusion with people running left, right and centre. This means it’ll be easy to get separated from one another. The same is true if your safe house gets over-run by a zombie horde, or raiders. It might even be as simple as your group having to make an unexpected move while others are away foraging or scouting ahead.

If you get separated from your group, there’s a good chance you’ll never find them again – unless, that is, you have agreed ahead of time exactly where you’ll meet up if this happens. Or in other words, you’ve got agreed rendezvous points where you can re-group in the event you become separated.

Of course, you have to put some thought into coming up with your rendezvous points. For example, in a zombie apocalypse, under the clock at Waterloo station is probably not going to be a good meeting place since it’s likely to be inundated with undead staggering around looking for something to munch on. Instead, you should choose locations which, while easy to remember, are likely to be as zombie-free as possible (no where will be completely safe, but some will be a lot safer than others). You will also want to pick locations which are well-defined so that there’s not going to be any confusion (there would be nothing worse than missing someone simply because you were both there but didn’t find each other!).

You will also need to be careful with what time you arrange to meet at a specific location. You can’t leave this open-ended as no one can remain at a rendezvous point forever just in case a missing person turns up, but working watches may be hard to come by, so setting a meeting for 2.30pm isn’t going to be much use. Instead, it’s better to pick a time that is easy to tell even if you don’t have a watch, such as sunrise, sunset or mid-day (when the sun is at its highest in the sky). Similarly, you would need to set your date using something which can be measured when you don’t have a calendar to hand. It could be a specific date which can be easily identified, such as the summer or winter solstice, or the second full moon of the year, or it could be a specific length of time (e.g. 5 days after we get separated – although remember to make sure you can all get there in that length of time, with the transport you’re likely to have available to you in a post-apocalyptic world).

It’s also important that you have more than one rendezvous point since you might struggle to get to a specific one in time, or get there and find it’s unsafe because it’s crawling with zombies. You might also want to pick ones which have a wide geographic and temporal spread to cover all eventualities. For example, you might have a local rendezvous point where you aim to meet 48 hours after a zombie outbreak starts so that all your friends and family know where to head if something happens, but you’ll also need to have a more distant one where you’ll aim to meet anyone who couldn’t get to the first one on time a week after it starts. Similarly, once you’re all together, you might want to pick locations and places where you’d aim to meet up if you get separated again, at various time periods over the next year, or on specific dates, with some of these being near at hand, and others further away. This means that if you have to leave your local area, you’ll all be heading in the same direction.

As I said before, these locations should be easy to identify (if not necessarily easy to get to), but they also need to be chosen to avoid the possibility of an ambush. This means if one of your group is captured and tortured for information, even if they give it out, anyone meeting there can’t be taken by surprise. Usually, this means being able to see anyone coming from a long distance away, and having a separate route out. It can also be an idea to make some of them quite difficult to get to as this will reduce the chance of anyone else simply stumbling into you as you’re waiting, out in the open, for someone to appear. Good examples might be the tops of unforested hills, remote beaches or under specific lone trees in an area of grassland. However, you also need to be able to navigate to the rendezvous points without any maps. This means the directions to get there have to follow easy to spot features, such as rivers, roads or obvious landscape features. If you want a great example of this, think about the instructions Andy gives to Red about where to find the note he left for him at the end of The Shawshank Redemption.

So, hopefully, you can now see why having a list of pre-defined rendezvous points is an important aspect of survival in a zombie apocalypse and what you need to think about when you’re picking your own. Since you never know when one might arise, maybe you should start thinking of good places to meet right away, and share them with your friends and family – just in case.

Oh, and for those you know me personally, you know what the plan is and where to meet up. If I don’t see you before, I’ll see you there. I’ll be at the first one week after it starts, and the next a month later (just follow the river and you’ll be able to spot it from about five miles away). If I don’t find you at either of these and you’re still alive, then I’ll be at the last one on the list, once a year at sunset on the summer solstice, and each time I’m there, I’ll be hoping it’ll be the year you finally turn up.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Mondegreens, Eggcorns, Malapropisms And Spoonerisms

Language is great when it works, but sometimes it’s a lot more amusing when it goes horribly wrong. Frequently, these mistakes also have rather interesting names, and indeed histories. So, without much ado, here’s a few of my favourites.

1. Mondegreens: This is something we all do, but you might not have known there was a proper word for it. Effectively this is hearing one word or phrase as another. These days, the most common are in song lyrics. According to one of my favourite radio presenters (Stuart Maconie on Six Music), the most common of these is from Purple Haze where people mis-hear ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky’ as ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy’. I frequently do this myself and for many years thought ‘Forever in blue jeans’ was ‘For Reverend Blue Jeans’! The word Mondegreen was coined in 1954 and itself comes from the mis-hearing of an old Scottish folk tune, in which, as a child, the writer Sylvia Wright heard the lines ‘They have slain the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green’ as ‘They have slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen.’

2. Eggcorns: Again, eggcorns is not a word you might be familiar with, but you’ll know exactly what it means when you find out. It’s when someone mistakes one word for another but somehow the meaning remains the same. The most famous example is the use of ‘Old-timers disease’ for ‘Alzheimer’s disease’, but the word itself, which was coined as recently as 2003, comes from replacing ‘Acorn’ with ‘Eggcorn’, which, while wrong, you know the meaning of right away. If you want to waste some time on a Friday afternoon rather than work, you can check out the Eggcorn Database for more examples, some of which are very amusing.

3. Malapropisms: In many ways malapropisms are the opposite of Eggcorns. This is where you replace one word with another that has a similar sound which has a completely different meaning. One of the best examples comes from Yogi Berra when he said ‘Texas has a lot of electrical votes’ rather than ‘electoral votes’. If that sounds like the kind of thing a recent American President would have said, you’re right but I’ll get to that later. The word Malapropsim comes from a character called Mrs. Malaprop from a 18th century play called the Rivals.

4. Spoonerisms: Spoonerisms are those mistakes that newsreaders dread, but occasionally make. It’s when you exchange the first letters or syllables of two neighbouring words to get something completely different. Named after the British Academic Reverend William Spooner, one of my favourites attributed to him is when he used the phrase ‘The Lord is a shoving leopard’ rather than ‘The Lord is a loving shepherd’.

5. Soramimis: Soramimis are related to Mondegreens, but involve words or lyrics which mean one thing in one language but are interpreted as meaning something different in another one because of what they sound like. For example, the line ‘We transgress the context of commonplaceness’ from the 1999 song ‘Decade of Therion’ by the death metal band Behemoth can be interpreted in Polish as ‘Łyżwiarz wie, że kotek odkopał prezent’ or to give it its English translation ‘The ice-skater knows that the pussycat has dug up the present’.

6. Neologisms: Neologisms are new words or phrases. When you first hear them, they’ll often sound odd, but after a while, if they are used enough, they may become a normal part of the language. Neologisms might start with a single person, but often the precise point they enter the common lexicon is unclear. Neologisms which have made it into the dictionary in recent years include things like laser (an acronym for ‘Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation’), Taser (another acronym, well of sorts, this time for ‘Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle’) and Blogging (which originates from ‘Web logging’). Indeed, many of the above words started off as neologisms. Interestingly, the zombie genre is often repleat with neologisms for the undead, such as walkers, twitchers and (from my own book) drifters, each of which signify a slightly different class of zombie-like creature with its own specific characteristics. While the use of neologisms by children is considered normal, the tendency to use them in adulthood can be a sign of psychopathy.

7. Stunt Words: A stunt word is a neologism which has no meaning, and they are often used by writers and performers for poetic or humourous effects. Dr. Seuss is probably the most familiar example, but they are remarkably common in literature. Interestingly, the ability to infer the (hypothetical) meaning of a nonsense word from context is used to test for brain damage.

8. Backronyms: Backronym is both a neologism in its own right, and a way to create a meaning for other neologisms. An acronym is where the initial letters of a phrase create a word in its own right (such as the laser example given above). A backronym is where a phrase is created from a specific word, often already in common usage, to justify its meaning. For example, the term ‘Ned’ is commonly used in Scotland as a term for a specific type of juvenile delinquent. While the term has been around for years, recently it has been defined as standing for ‘Non-Educated Delinquent’, and has even been used in the title of a film about ned culture. Others include ‘All Day I Dream About Sports’ (for the sports brand Adidas), ‘First On Race Day’ (for the motor company Ford) and Port Out Starboard Home (for the origins of the word ‘Posh’). Of course, some of the worst offenders when it comes to backronyms are politicians. Take for example the ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001′, more commonly known as the USA PATRIOT act.

9. Bushisms: Bushisms are really a collection of many of the above mistakes with a few others which don’t really have their own names thrown in for good measure and are named after the former US President George W. Bush because he frequently made them while speaking. One of my favourites is ‘There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again’. Slightly more worrying is ‘Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.’ or ‘For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It’s just unacceptable. And we’re going to do something about it’. And then there’s the classic ‘They misunderestimated me’. It will be interesting to see if the word Bushism (itself a neologism) will, like Spoonerism and Malapropism, become codified into the English lexicon and live on long after its original namesake.

10. Typos: Of course, all of the above refer primarily to the spoken word, but similar things exist in the written word. While they are generally grouped under the term of ‘typos’ (a neologism which originates from ‘typographic error’), they probably fall into a number of different classes. Probably most amusing are the single letter substitutions (SLSs) that can completely change the meaning of a word or phrase. There are to particularly famous examples of this which are household names but that you might not even realise originated in SLSs. The first is the ‘Lonely Planet’ travel guides. This comes from the lyrics of a Joe Cocker song which starts ‘Once while travelling across the sky, this lovely planet caught my eye..’ This was misheard by the founders as ‘Lonely Planet’ (making it a mondegreen!), and so the brand was born. The second is the computer game ‘Donkey Kong‘. Have you ever wondered why it’s called donkey kong when it’s about someone trying to defeat a gorilla? Well, one story claims that it’s an SLS which occurred during translation and it should have been the much more logical ‘Monkey Kong’, although this may well be an urban myth.

Of course, modern spell-checking programs are meant to do away with such things, but they only work if the typo doesn’t happen to create a real world. I heard great example of this yesterday where someone came across an employment training course titled ‘Learning how to work for otters’ rather than ‘others’. These are, apparently, known as ‘Atomic Typos‘ because of their potential to do so much damage if they go undetected. I’m not immune from these and at one point, when writing For Those In Peril On The Sea, realised I’d created such an Atomic Typo when I’d accidentally replaced the ‘o’ in rope with an ‘a’, completely changing the intended meaning of the following request from one character to another: ‘Jon, give me a hand with this rope.’ Luckily, I spotted this before it was too late. Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true of the author of a poster I once saw at conference which stated in six-inch high letters across the top that it was about ‘Pubic Attitudes Towards Whales And Dolphins In Western Scotland’ rather than the intended public attitudes.

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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Forever Autumn: A Post-apocalyptic Survivor’s Favourite Time Of Year

Those of you who like your 1970s concept albums based around early twentieth century post-apocalyptic fiction will know where the first part of the title of this post comes from and it happens to be one of my favourite songs so I couldn’t resist shoe-horning it in. However, this post has a serious side for those interested in post-apocalyptic survival.

Autumn (or fall as it is known in some parts of the English-speaking world) marks the transition from the heat of summer to the cool of winter, and in almost any post-apocalyptic situation it will be the only time of year when you won’t have to struggle to find food. This is because you’ll be able to find food everywhere, just waiting for you to pick it, catch it or shoot it – or at least that’s how it is in Scotland at this time of year. However, if you want to be able to make the most of the bounty that will surround you, you’ll need to know what you’re doing because making a simple schoolboy error can result in at best a badly upset stomach and at worst a long and painful death.

So what am I talking about here? Well it’s what has come to be known as wild foraging. In its most recent incarnation, this is a trendy new middle-class pastime endorsed and encouraged by a flock of celebrity chefs, but when I was a kid this was just a way to make money stretch by getting food for free (I don’t think I ever ate store-bought jam until I was well into my teens). Wild foraging is, quite simply, making the most of the food that is available all around you in the countryside, and sometimes even in the city. At this time of year it’s everywhere and knowing how to exploit it will be a key skill for post-apocalyptic survival.

Wild brambles are everywhere in autumn, and you can even find them on any waste ground in most British cities.

Just to show you how much there is, this is what I found along a half mile stretch of a long-distance pathway called The West Highland Way that’s within a day’s walk of where I live in Glasgow. Firstly, there’s brambles. Brambles, known outside of Scotland as blackberries, grow almost anywhere that’s left unattended and in autumn they provide a super-abundance of large, black, tasty fruits. There’s two secrets to picking them. The first is to wear a thick glove on one hand so you can push the thorny runners out of the way without getting hurt. The second is never to pick anything that is below the height that a dog can lift its leg (if you’re wondering why, it’s the same reason you shouldn’t eat yellow snow!

Known as haws, the fruit of the hawthorn tree can be used to make a tasty jam.

Hawthorn trees and hedgerows are also awash with their bright red fruits by late September. Haws are most often turned into jams and jellies, which can then be stored to provide sustenance throughout the long winter months, but you can also eat them raw from the tree (apparently according to this source – I’ve never actually tried this though). You can also eat the leaves of the hawthorn tree (they used to be known as the poor man’s bread and cheese because of their flavour). These are tastier when they are young and tender in spring and by autumn they can be a bit tough and bitter, but they’re still better than nothing.

If you know what you’re doing acorns can be ground into flour to make bread.

Acorns can be found anywhere there are oak trees, and this will include many city parks and tree-lined avenues. You might have to soak them for a while to get out all the rather poisonous tannins they contain, but do it right (it’s a bit of a black art and isn’t something for the uninitiated to try) and you can grind them into flour to make bread.

Rose hip are what form if you leave roses on their bushes, and believe it or not they’re edible.

Who would have thought that roses could be a source of food? Well, they are. Leave the flowers on the plant and they form edible rose hips. Again, you need to know what you’re doing to process them properly but get it right and they can be mixed with haws to create jams and jellies with a richer flavour. You have to be careful about seeds though as they can cause a great deal of irritation if ingested.

Nettles might sting, but they can also make a tasty soup.

We might think of nettles as weeds, and they do grow anywhere shady, but boil them up and you can make a tasty soup. Okay, tasty is over-doing it a bit, but it hot and nutritious and that’s what counts when you’re talking about post-apocalyptic survival. You also need to remember the ‘dog leg’ rule mentioned for brambles when collecting nettles to eat.

Apples can be found both growing wild and city gardens, and they can be a great food supply.

Apples are everywhere in autumn and whether you’re talking about wild trees or ones in your local parks and gardens, come the end of the world, you’ll be able to stuff yourself with them at this time of year. You can eat them raw off the trees or cook them into a wide range of pies, crumbles and sauces. Alternatively, you can turn them into cider (whether of the alcoholic version found in Britain or the non-alcoholic version that seems to be favoured in the US). Find a cool, dry place and you’ll be able to store them, providing you with a ready supply of food throughout the cold and dark days of winter when there will be little else available.

Elderberries can be used to cordial syrups or, if you’d prefer something a little stronger, wine.

While elderberries are inedible when they are raw, if you boil them up, you can a nice rich syrup which you can use to flavour other food. However, in Scotland most people who collect elderberries use them to make elderberry wine, and let’s face it, after a long day of surviving the collapse of civilisation, you could do with kicking back with a nice glass of red.

In Britain, sloe berries are most often used to make something called sloe gin.

If your day’s been really bad and wine just won’t do it, you could always hit the gin, and for that you need sloe berries. It’s not real gin but it can have one hell of a kick. This makes it the perfect thing help you forget your troubles of few hours after you’ve just watched your best friend being torn apart by zombies. Of course, you can’t get too drunk or you might not hear the undead horde when they come back for you!

So as you can see, there’s plenty out there to feed the hungry post-apocalyptic survivor in autumn, and so far I’ve only considered the plants I found. There are fungi everywhere at the moment too – although I don’t currently have the knowledge to know which are edible and which are lethal so I don’t go near them. There’s also animals making a welcome return to my local countryside that add to the autumnal food base. The rivers are full of Atlantic salmon returning to spawn. Find the right spot, and they’ll pretty much leap into your arms. Okay, it’s not quite that easy, but at certain waterfalls you’ll see salmon as long as three feet trying to leap up them to get to the place they hatched years before and it’ll be your best chance of catching them with little or no effort. The salmon are not the only thing migrating around here, and the geese which over-winter in Scotland are starting to arrive. Once they’re here, flocks, which might be several hundred strong, will graze the fields each day and roost on the lakes at night, and they’d be a tempting target for anyone craving a bit of fresh meat.

Of course, if you want to be able to access this cornucopia of wild food, you really need to know what you’re doing because the stakes are high: if you eat the wrong thing or prepare it in the wrong way, you and anyone else you feed it to can end up dead or incapacitated (and in a post-apocalyptic world they are pretty much the same thing).

Luckily, there’s plenty of places you can go to learn some foraging skills, and it’s surprising the number of courses which have sprung up in the last few years where you can go along and have someone show you exactly what you need to know. So don’t delay, book one today because you never know the world might end tomorrow and you need to know what’s safe to eat and what’s not. And even if the world doesn’t end, you’ve gained a useful life skill which allows you to eat for free – and let’s face it with the way the economy is these days, anything that helps you keep the bills down is a bonus!




***WARNING: Tasty things often look very similar to poisonous things, so do not eat anything unless you know exactly what it is. Also, you should not use the photos in this post to identify what might be edible and what might not. I’m no botanist, or trained wild forager, and while I’ve done my best to make sure I’ve photographed the right plants to illustrate this article, I cannot guarantee it.***




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.

Extreme Running: The Perfect Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Training

You see them everywhere these days, people in their fancy (or, in my own case, not so fancy) running gear, jogging along as they pound the pavements beneath their feet. Most of them are probably just doing it for the good of their health, but I’m sure at least some are thinking about the cardio rule from the movie Zombieland, and are doing it as part of their zombie apocalypse preparedness training. However, while it might help keep them fit, I suspect it will do little to help their survival if (or should that be when?) the undead rise. This is because there’s a big difference between running slowly round the block while listening to your favourite tunes on you iPod and running for your life. This difference is that to survive in a zombie apocalypse you need to be able to think on your feet while you run. For this reason, if you want to prepare yourself for life in a zombie apocalypse, you should consider not just running, but extreme running.

Now, I know you probably won’t be familiar with this term, but it’s a catch-all term for a growing collection of extreme events held all over the world which set challenges that mix basic running with other skills. Take the Spartan Sprint events which are held across the US, Canada and the UK. These mix a 3 mile race with 15 pretty serious obstacles which you need to get over in order to complete it. This is exactly the type of thing you’d need to be able to do to survive the immediate threats at the start of a zombie outbreak (forget about fighting back – getting the hell out of there as fast as you can is always going to be your best option). If this sounds a bit too light weight for you, there’s harder versions in the Spartan Racing series, right to marathons with as may as 50 obstacles for you to surmount.

Similar to the Spartan races are ones known as Beasts. These tend to put particular emphasis on the obstacles and are generally over much rougher terrain, and are based on assault courses used in special forces training. If want to get an idea of what one of these would involve, you can look at the course for my local one in Scotland, called, quite simply, The Beast Race.

Beyond these relatively simple obstacle courses are the more complex adventure racing and rogaining events. These are long-distance races across hills, mountains, rivers, lakes and seas which combine a range of skills and challenges, and often take place across several days. In them, you have to carry everything with you and cannot use motorised transport or GPSs for navigation, and the clock never stops meaning at the end of a day you have to choose between getting some rest so you’re fresh for the next day, and carrying on into the night to save time. Now that good training for surviving in a zombie apocalypse.

Of course, none of these will prepare you for being chased by a horde of zombies, but this is where the 2.8 Hours Later events come in. These are open-ended events which take places in real world locations over several hours and involve being chased by real life zombies (ok, they’re only actors dressed as zombies but they seem real enough when the jump out at you from an alleyway – if you don’t believe me watch the trailer posted on their website!). If that doesn’t help prepare you for surviving when the undead rise, then nothing will.

Finally, if you don’t want the fear when you’re running to be fake, there’s the famous Running with the Bulls in Pamplona in Spain. This involves hurtling through narrow cobbled streets over a distance of 825 metres. It doesn’t sound like much until you find out you have to do this while being chased by a herd of bulls. It’s probably the closest you can ever get to being in a crowd fleeing from marauding zombies (until a zombie apocalypse happens, but by them the time for preparation is over!).

So what’s the take home message here? Well, I think it’s that while the cardio rule is good, there’s more to it than just being able to do a couple of laps around the block. Instead, to prepare yourself for a zombie apocalypse, you need to train yourself to do more than just run! And for once I’m going to put my money where my mouth is because I’ve rather rashly agreed to take part in my local Spartan Sprint in Edinburgh. Luckily, I’ve missed this year’s event so I’ve got just under a year to get myself in shape (or work out a way of getting out of it!).




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From the author of For Those In Peril On The Sea, a tale of post-apocalyptic survival in a world where zombie-like infected rule the land and all the last few human survivors can do is stay on their boats and try to survive. Now available in print and as a Kindle ebook. Click here or visit www.forthoseinperil.net to find out more. To download a preview of the first three chapters, click here.

To read the Foreword Clarion Review of For Those In Peril On The Sea (where it scored five stars out of five) click here.