When my sons have friends around to stay over night, more often than not they all sleep huddled up like kittens in our living room. Other people, I assume, have more rooms?
When Tom stayed at a mansion in the country...or so it seemed to me- I remember the gates looming in the darkness, the silence of the surrounding area- he slept in the kitchen, so I'm not so sure about rooms or even the meaning of rooms.
What we lack in rooms, we make up for in futons. This house has at least five single futons. I don't really remember how we got to five?
We bought four from a shop that is no longer there...that leaves one.
We seem to have quite a few duvets too. The only ones I remember buying are the ones we sleep under. Things have a mysterious history.
Amnesia is only partially to blame.
We get to give floor space to run-away boys, now and then.
No great charitable feat.
They are friends of my sons who for one reason or another have run-away.
It usually lasts for one night.
Last such ran away because his mom had gone into his room and left a pile of freshly laundered clothes on his bed.
So it goes.
Last week Gavin found a 1980's John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids in Oxfam. Nice to revisit Wyndham. I remember my mom telling me the plot when I was a child, I was probably reading the book at the time.
She got the story wrong.
Hadn't read it, just seen it.
The filmed version failed to understand that this story is science fiction, not horror.
Wyndham followed on from Wells, if the history of science fiction is a lineage.
H G Wells' War of the Worlds was a statement of paranoia, a reflection of what everyone knows to be true (meaning that it probably isn't): the concept that there are always others jealous of what 'we' have- wanting to take 'our freedome' etc.
John Wyndham is more dystopian. There doesn't have to be an invasion, or even a great intelligence behind catastrophic events.
Random events can add up catastrophically and tip the complexity of civilisation into the bin. The triffids- a genetically modified sunflower breed to produce oil- had an advantage once everyone became blind. Of course, people don't just go blind on mass...normally.
In the book blindness is caused by a random event, the meteor shower. There is no plot or plan, only Darwin.
Day of the Triffids is the mother of all zombie apocalypse films from here on: opening scene (best filmed version is 28 Days Later). Waking up in a hospital bed, blind only because of bandages. The strange silence punctuated by noise that does not make sense. The all pervading atmosphere of wrongness, of life having tipped terribly out of kilter. People committing suicide, people behaving like zombies...and then the army. The army signify a brutish, 'Iron Age' culture of might makes right, of order signified by rules and ordering people at gun point as the only response to chaos.
Anyway, this 2006 version of Random Quest (Parallel universes) seems intriguing.
The original story was written in 1961, I don't remember it, only the title story Consider Her Ways in which a woman accidentally time-travels and finds a female only future.
The story stands as the perfect antidote to the previous generations besottedness with matriarchy, I thought.
Back to 'Patriarchy' and it's ills.
The U2.
It stands as a testimony to my ignorance that I cannot see for the life of me what advantage it gives anyone to be able to skim the edge of space- 'invaluable, strategic, intelligence data for the mission of defense' apparently- but then, I can't hear the dialogue on the film because son is practicing his drums downstairs.
Almost every time I have used Google Earth to navigate, I've got things wrong. I do much better with an A to Z.
I find this inexplicable.
But even if I could hear, I'd still see the U2 as art, not defense.
Nor do I even know what it means to be a part of a culture that can produce such objects as the U2. as far as I can tell, I'm not a part of it at all.
