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Disaster Movie In Real Time

Tuesday 3rd July. Rain today, but nothing spectacular. The trees and houses across my valley hidden in mist, and a thick, Irish drizzle filling up the air between. I'm going through my tax receipts (which is kind of a holiday, and end of term day); while down in the depths of the house Gabriel works on the Liszt sonata, hissing and groaning happily through his teeth, as the music thunders and sighs.

Not sure what's going on with that Higgs Boson. Having read the CERN press office release, I find I cannot share the general (okay, faint and esoteric) excitement. "On Wednesday we might be able to tell you that we soon expect to have seen a glimpse of the beast..." I just wish there was some way to stop them (not the press office) calling this elusive beast "The God Particle". How about "The Gaffer Tape Particle" As in, "the particle that we can wrap around a rather battered old theory, which we are very fond of but the Universe is no longer keeping in stock, so it will go on working a while longer, and we don't have to squabble over what to buy instead..."

Don't you think, in some ways, our current times, what with the end of the rule of law, the collapse of western civilisation, the rising seas, the dying oceans, the wildfires eating great holes in the USA, the levels of fantastically unchecked wickedness in public life to make Sodom blush (nb, that's not the sexual practice preference, that's the hardcore moral depravity) have the character of the most blatantly outrageous disaster movie. Only in real time, instead of 127 minutes or so? All we lack is the Crocosaurus. And it would be here, only unfortunately it choked on a 100 tonne coagulation of plastic bottles and carrier bags out in the Pacific.

As always, I write these things, I think these things, and I hope I'm wrong. But I know this is how it happens, in slow motion, inexorably; not in two hours, but in two or three generations. I refer you to Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders, for the model case that inspired me when I was writing the Bold As Love sequence. (The Thermohaline Circulation thing, nb, turned out to be completely inadequate. The real workings of the winds and currents life-support machine we seem to have broken are much more complicated than that.)

But maybe I'm just scaremongering. I must be, mustn't I. Or we'd be on a war footing, and fossil fuels (just for a start) would be banned like poison gas... er, I mean, like poison gas used to be.

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Traffic on the live meal worms is slowing, this may be the last week or so. Tadpoles in the plasterer's tub are giving me an unusual problem, this is my best year, for numbers, but they aren't growing very fast. I have had to resort to commercial Tadpole Food. Oh, dear. It's the slippery slope.

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