Exit Strategy Number 1 – It Certainly Isn’t!

I've been making stupid, small mistakes all week. Not sure why but it's beginning to worry me.

I finished The Ghost Road and I am not sure how I feel about it. The moment of completion was spookily frightening and I was worried about getting to sleep but a few weeks of strange bed-times meant I was out in seconds. Next day brought a sort of uplifted feeling though the final chapter seemed to be neutral of any criticism of the war save for the 'shotvarvet' shouted by the dying soldier in the hospital; you will have to read the book to find out what it means.

I may be in limbo because of the strange mix of fact and fiction that is The Ghost Road. The final battle, days before they end of The First World War, involved real people, Wilfred Owen being the most famous, but I think the focus of the book was the fictional Billy Prior. I'm not even sure it was a horrifying as I was expecting but that may be because of the shrinks who had got at the evacuated men to make them go back to the front. Prior seemed to be a machine, emotions bubbling under the facade which made him say he would have been an idiot to have taken the desk job he was offered before he went back. I was expecting it to be a long way from the gentle limp and shake of David Powlett-Jones making his way from the Station to the School at the beginning of To Serve Them All My Days.

I have this weird excitement about the fact of the fighting in all these books but it is a sort of gung-ho pacifism that says such horrors are necessary at some stage in order for us to feel that they should never happen again. We should be thankful that the death of 100 British Soldiers is unacceptable to public opinion these days as opposed to the acceptance of hundreds of thousands of deaths less than 100 years ago; I would hope that our dear leader does not take any comfort from this. No comfort at all. One dead soldier as a result of any decision I made would be enough to put me in the shakes ward but then again I am not PM and do not want to be. Call me simplistic if you like but I know how I want the world to be.

On the subject of the death of British soldiers, this open letter to TB is in The Guardian. I wonder if he has read it.

The sky is so interesting at the moment. We had snow this morning and it came from fast-moving, dark clouds that seemed to connect the azimuth with the horizon, like paintings made with various colours of engine oil, lots of high-contrast billowing and weird sideways light from the sunrise. I know we don’t have high mountains, sweeping forests or vast and remote lakes but we do have interesting skies. And trees! The one thing that an Alien would find .. er … alien is the existence of trees - strange shapes, all a variant of the same basic pattern. Think about them for a while and they will be like the familiar word which repetition beats into strangeness. What is even stranger is the fact that they share so much of their design with us humans. We are all part of one big continuum.

Which because it reminds me of Richard Dawkins has reminded me of the discussion of memes which was on Thinking Allowed yesterday. One of the interviewees seemed to be dismissing the idea of memes (which is a tautology if ever there was one though I am sure he would have described it as more of an oxymoron). He was especially referring to the dismissal of religion as being almost a virus, a negative meme that causes so much trouble. He kept referring to the organisations behind various religions, seeming to think that the fact that many people join up to have the same view of the world is the fatal blow for the meme. I could not see the logical progression which makes the two ideas mutually exclusive. Firstly I could say that just because a million people do a stupid thing, it does not mean it is NOT a stupid thing. Secondly, I would put a reductionist interpretation on it and say that the small memes which go together to produce a more organised patter do not do themselves out of existence by doing so. The individual cells of a human being still exist and yet in 6 billion people, they still form the same basic pattern. Finally, joining together to form an organized religion does not mean that everyone thinks the same. See this Emo Philips joke.