Lamborghini build a new car made of carbon fibre for lightness and then adds three electric motors.
Sounds good so far?
Then they add a huge V12 engine as well and all the ancillary pipes for cooling, exhausts and so on. And a dual clutch 8-gang gearbox to handle the 6.5-litre L545 V12's 814 horsepower. Yawn. I suppose it is something for petrol heads to talk about at the pub.
Madness.
After svp, I see another American bank heading south. And the Donald clown facing more criminal charges. Allegedly paying hush money. Lest we forget his self declared immunity from taxes. Or the smacking down with innuendo of his own party members.
I'd been invited to a block party at the Rue de la Confédération, where many of the other residents would be attending, yet I felt too drained to go along. It was some kind of special day in Geneva, when they all eat plum tart. Not my scene. A party with French speakers eating plum tart. I'd already politely declined despite Aude Darmshausen and Bérénice Charbonnier's strongest protestations that I should attend.
Instead, I spend Saturday being a Geneva tourist to hopefully blow away the cobwebs which have formed in my head during the week. I join a tour which takes me into the Old Town, around by the big fountain, a visit to the flower clock, down to the Lake, hop a boat for a Lake Leman cruise. And there was a tram included too, all with a courteous guide named Mr Gabriel.
On the coach and then on the tram, I am sitting next to Melody, who is from Holland and travelling across Europe by train. Melody is pretty with wild, highlighted hair and wears a black outfit and carries a small rucksack. She explains her outfit was so she would not get noticed. She has a slightly edgy accent, but very strong English. I think it is how she pronounces TH as a kind of D sound which is how I had picked up on her accent. She tells me she had lived in nort London for tree years. We chat so much our guide, Mr Gabriel, thinks we are lovers and even makes a joke about us in his commentary.
I joke to Melody that we are meeting like in 'Before Sunrise', the Richard Linklater film and she says it was one of her favourites. We agree to sightsee around Geneva together but not to fall in love like they did in the movie. Melody knew the whole movie plot - which I could hardly remember - and wanted to take me to a cafe where we could drink milkshake, so we could do 'the part about the poem'. When we are at the flower clock she says it is good how the flowers could face either way, following the sun. I don't fully understand but approve of her remark anyway. She says she followed Annie Clark's advice about when in an unfamiliar city to do something real and strange. So here we are on the boat touring the lake at sunset, which is when she said she wanted to kiss me. I'm not sure whether I was part of the real or the strange. I'm sure I was another part of her movie plot.
Melody explains to me - and it wasn't just a brush off - that she has placed herself in what she calls 'deep nun mode'. Single. Focused. 'Completely monastic. Sober, celibate – full nun.' I’m pretty sure she’s joking when she adds, in a slow, funny, unpredictable way, “I mean there are always sex plans. But none for, like, a month.”
We split up late Saturday evening, and agree not to swap any further information. Well, except she admits she told me a false name. She says her real name is Cara. She used Melody from a time when she was in a band. Cara says she'll meet me where we first met on the Quai in another six months - like Céline and Jesse did in that movie.
When I return to Rue de la Confédération, I could hear that the party was still running, but I crept quietly to my room. The cobwebs were gone.
I happen to have a small QNAP box as well, on which I keep a small RAID array, but it recently went wrong. HDD1 failed and went red. Never mind, I thought, the show can continue until I put in a replacement. I usually use the drive for directly connected photo editing, although I'm not convinced it is any faster than my LAN attached Synology drives. After the failure the QNAP decided to play it very safe and went into read-only mode, insisting I put a new disk in before normal service could be restored.
Because there was no spare spinning in the cabinet, I had to wait for another one to arrive, which is now installed - and I'm now using RAID 5 on this little box as well. I've decided it is better to run a full rebuild, which is quite lengthy.
Fortunately I use the 3-2-1 backup rule: At least three copies of the data; two of the backups should be stored on different types of media, and at least one backup should be stored offsite or in the cloud.
Phew.
I've just seen that The Obald is to be made into a podcast and remarketed. I'll have to experience the latest version. I can remember reading an earlier version, which was what gave me some of the inspiration to write Coin, blending in some of my workaday experiences.
The Obald's hint of Clockwork Orange cover art evokes the 1980s when far more was cogs and analogue. It's got an 'early job with plenty of characters' feel which reminds me of my early days in Scientific Computing, riding the new digital wave. When I started we even had a valve-based computer in the 'machine room'. Elliott 803. Everyone smoked and the main technician for the big computers used to field a pipe. Lunch was at Machine Room 3 - The Pub. 'Down the hall' (at Heathrow) we were installing the biggest IBM mainframe in the UK. One of my early projects was about satellite orbit coverage - albeit we had Official Secrets Act conditions around us.
The Obald, by way of a slight comparison, is based in a newly forming information society (CCTV, government files and so on) and drops NATO, submarine collisions and early warning systems into the first few pages, so you know it will be good with its strange parallels with my early days with a 'proper job'.
And Theobald (sewing machines), from which the title is taken, reminds me that I used to do work for a sewing machine company. It was an opportunistic 'bit on the side' when I returned from Germany and was, by then, freelance. I created a sewing machine rental program for a sewing machine rental company in Morning Lane in the East End.
It was based loosely on an existing BASIC program and ran on a TRS-80 computer, using dual diskette drives.
Come to think of it, I later supplied another copy to my friend Colin, who used it for television rentals.
In my case, Coin opens with a bomb situation based upon my early and real experiences working in London. I was alone, working in a strange room with a special kind of computer terminal. In walks the security man from the front booth and tells me to search the room in case there was a bomb. They were simpler times. History reveals that the actual bomb was at The Old Bailey along the road from my office.
The Obald oddly catches me again later (or should it be sooner?) when it talks about the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. I also worked in Geneva, and feature the Large Hadron Collider in An Unstable System and Jump. I'm thinking I'll need to bring an enigmatic character called Melody into my current WIP novel (Artificial) at this rate. The rough-cut cover picture is of Luka the augnmented reality AI which I created using a toolkit and which hasn't even turned up in the story so far.
I used to work near to the Heathrow Trading Estate where the Brinks Mat robbery took place, and although I was there a few years before it all happened, I'd say that the clothing and general appearance was just about right. I worked with someone who had the very line in Emun Eliott's clothing, right down to the early '80s moustache.
The Gold take the era and plays with smoke-filled rooms and cars, swirly sticky carpet pubs and those kind of offices which set up thin partitions and groups of desks, well before computer terminals became the thing.
The robbers accidentally stole £26 million of Gold Bars, weighing 3.5 tons and proceeded to smelt it down, repackage it and then re-insert it into the market, using offshore accounts, then spending the money on apartments to break up the trail.
Come to think about it, it reminds me of The London Laundromat, which is purportedly still running.
Excellent casting and a lightheartedness which suggests everyone enjoyed their part in the proceedings. Checkout Hugh Bonneville doing his best to look like a heavily promoted Dixon of Dock Green. We had our share or writerly interludes within the piece too, where a particular soap box was stood upon by means of a discussion between the characters. I found this interesting at the beginning, but it slightly dipped later in the series.
But how that gold shone, at least before the mangled comedy melted bars were introduced. And the device of a diagram which comprised 'move A to B', explained dutifully by the seconded HMRC expert.
I still found it a fun piece of television and it looks as if they left it open for a second series to see what happened to the rest of the loot, or at least a spinoff.
We paused outside the spaceship of the Sage Gatehead. Across the River Tyne, we could hear the crowd in the stadium for the Liverpool vs Newcastle game. So much so that I took a brief recording of the singing. Those that know the HWKR market, with its street food and shipping containers, will know how much this area appears like Manhattan around Front Street albeit with a different bridge in the background.
