Oblique Strategy Number 2,456,342

My daughter now has Googolplex invisible brothers as well as Googolplex invisible sisters. This is obviously due to her now having one visible brother but as the invisible ones are not old enough to commit any misdemeanours, the various 'accidents' in the house are still down to the hoard of Lucys and Abigails who she has invented to cover for her. I cannot wait for the fights which will occur when the brother have grown enough. They will make the battles in Lord of the Rings look like spats. Well they would if you could only see the protagonists.

One day I will get across to her exactly how big a number Googolplex actually is. She thinks it is just a little bit bigger than a million at the moment but sometimes when she sees a Googol written down: -

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

she begins to see that it must be rather large. Imagine how big a Googolplex must be.

I like miserable days. You probably guessed that. It is grey here with spits in the wind. Up in this building there is no hint of the busyness of the city. I went out for the paper on New-Years Day and found the streets empty even at 10am. It was like 28 Days Later or for us older people, the Day of the Triffids. (Must get that book). I love it when it rains.


Short postcard

An Indian sounding musical phrase bounces round my head as I wake up. The sun comes through the palm-leaf blinds and is my alarm for the day. Outside I see a man on a motorscooter who I already know will later blow himself up outside some official building. Although I know this, I feel that the day will go well, like the first day of summer or the time before I had things to worry about. The music trickles through this building like the smell of cooking, meaning annoyance for some of my fellow residents, the late-nighters, the poets and the drinkers, or like for me, a good feeling with no worries. The man on the scooter has gone and now I know what really will happen to him. He will nearly knock down a woman in a long flowing white dress and a wide brimmed hat in the coolie style but bought expensively in some western colony far away. She will shout at him and then he will take her for a drink in some shady bar off the main street and fall in love with her.

The orange-robed monks are here now. I have dressed and breakfasted and now I give something to the calmest men I know. They thank me graciously as they thank everybody. The world began here. The world is centred in this small town. The heat does nothing to make this place dirty like you in your universe may be imagining. Here we are far removed from all those little ifs which made your world like it is. We see ourselves as prosperous because we are and you are lost in poverty. One day we will do something about it. Maybe I will walk with the poets and learn how to write like they do. I would start now but they are all still asleep or nursing hangovers. Our religion means life to us not death which I am sure is what you think of when you see a temple.

The bomb I saw this morning has made me unhappy. There are never bombs here. Apart from not having any reason to set off a bomb, there is no one for thousands of miles who knows how to make one. I see this place in the world whenever I try to see humanity in my head. Any state of human existence is possible on this planet and yet I always see this place. Did that man with the scooter die or meet his mate? I need to follow him to find out. I take my hat and leave the house, water bottle at my side. There he is laughing with his friends by the shop on the corner. The heat makes my shirt stick to me and I am tired already so I but a paper and sit at a cafe table while he continues his discussion. I cannot speak much of the language and I am far enough away to make what he says into complete nonsense but he seems happy. Maybe if you are willing to blow yourself up then you think you are about to enter paradise and then you would be happy. What if you believe totally? "Great Joke Kieu. See you in Heaven. Just off to blow myself up."

That is it. Some idiot has got to him. Make the world unstable; it's a great life out there. Why not make it better by blowing something up tomorrow. We promise you 70 Virgins in Paradise. Bite that apple! Lunacy! I don't want to die and neither does anyone I know. What if they hate us? They can't all hate us can they.

It will rain later. Never cool rain but rain just the same. Something to distract me from an afternoon reading the yellowed books we have found in the house. Everything is damp all the time and nothing on paper stays pristine for ever. I can see the drops falling off the Veranda roof into the garden. It is warm the rain here, like a cup of tea you have forgotten for a while but which is still just warm enough to drink rather than throw down the sink. When I first got here I worried about the food, the deadly animals, the illnesses. Well I got ill and bitten by Mosquitoes and I am still here. We have Doctors here better than yours. "Yours"! See I do not know where I belong any more. They are the doctors I had when I was young in the place where I was born. My mother was one of them but they worked her into the ground. What is the second world because that is where you live now? See it has started raining already while I was off thinking about my home. Home, Home Town, Home Country, Home Planet. Citizen of all of them. This country is about to put men back on the moon. This is where all the money is. We will be outside the solar system before long. Dust here - dust there - its all the same.

My man has started on. I cannot follow him because he is on a scooter. You must expect me to hail one of those motorised single sat taxi things. There are none about because they do not exist. All we have here are scooters and big cars. Maybe I should wait to see the news. I will never know if he meets the woman though. This no longer matters for there she is just around the corner shouting loudly enough and simply enough for me to be able to understand most of what she says. He is smiling and they are walking towards me, towards this very cafe. Life is wonderful when you know exactly what is going to happen. I will go home to watch the rain and listen to the poets arguing