I'd like to offer my appreciation to the surprising number of people who tune in to this blog on a daily basis, particularly those who join in now and again. I should add that dissent, feedback and suggestions are always welcome.

As for the Liberian reader, yours is a love that should not speak its name. To answer your questions, I'm a lady of advancing years, I suffer from necrotising halitosis and I live in Inverness with my retinue of sporran-flinging highland assassins.

In a day or two, we'll be off to California for three weeks, during which time I'm not likely to be posting. From 10th April I'll be back, refreshed and ready to rant, so please tune in again from then.

Matthew, if you're reading, you owe me a long reply. Sorry I put your name in my last post. I don't really want to trap you in a burning barn, but that could change if you don't send me something to read quite soon.

The sky was yellow and grainy like old newsprint. Every few minutes, an airliner would traverse it, drawing an arc of noise and grime all the way from Torremolinos to Ringway. The whining would swell into fierce pressure that flattened the world and receded as slowly as the day’s heat. There was no room for simple heroism in these skies, no silk scarves and goggles, no delirious vapour trails as heroes in Spitfires and Hurricanes slashed across a blue and better sky to fend off the evil Nazis.

The blonde boy screamed a throaty, twelve-piston roar as the Spitfire in his hand swooped and rolled in pursuit of Matty Henderson’s Messerschmitt. Matty flung the yellow-nosed craft into an inverted loop but the pilot’s efforts were in vain when Matty’s toe hit a stone and he crashed to his knees. Matty rolled onto his backside, knees glistening with blood and ribbed with peeled skin, the 109 still held heroically aloft. The silence thickened and Matty’s eyes glistened as he considered whether or not to cry.

“Gerrup, you puff,” said the blonde boy. Matty nodded at him, sniffed and stood. Eight year olds don’t cry. “I’ll give you a head start.”

“Oi, Pyro, why am I being chased all the time?”

“’Cause you’re the Jerry. Good guys win. We won, stupid. Anyway, don’t call me that. ”

“Why not? That’s what my dad calls you. I’m not supposed to play with you ‘cause you’re a pyroniac and dangerous.”

“Why not? ‘Cause I’ll give you a dead-arm times ten, that’s why not.”

“Oh, ok. Anyway, why am I always the Jerry?”

“My aeroplanes. My rules. Look out, achtung, Spitfire out of the sun.” The blonde boy brought the plastic killing machine in a high arc down towards Matty’s head.

“Catch me first.” Matty ran, one leg stiff at the knee and smeared red. The blonde boy followed, machine-gun noises and flecks of spit flying from his mouth.

A Maxi was labouring and spluttering up the track towards them at crawling speed, windows open, radio belting out some nonsense about a brand new combine harvester. Tethered to the wing mirror an old greyhound lurched along, no more than bones and gristle knotted together by overstretched skin. The boys knew the old man at the wheel would have something to shout about because he always did. They could already see his lips working soundlessly beneath that famous nose, wide and blossoming red and purple.

Matty took a leap into the weeds, kicked another brick out of the farmer’s wall as he half jumped, half fell across it and set off through the nettles towards the field thick with yellow stubble and the barn beyond. The blonde boy followed, pausing when he was safely over the wall to flick the V’s at the old man. The dog yelped as the car’s brakes dug in and its lead was jerked to a stop. Whatever the old man shouted was lost as another airliner churned the air into noise and grime.

“My plane is faster in a straight line, you pyro divvy,” shouted Matty as he sprinted across the field, stubble crackling under his Dunlops, once white now grey like old chewing gum. The blonde boy pelted after him, knowing his gangly legs would close the distance quickly. The familiar throbbing in his temples had returned.

They both slid to a stop as they found the corrugated cement of the farmyard. The barn doors were open, a safe darkness lay within and it wasn’t overlooked. The air carried the sweetness of hay and the tang of dung, a distant rumble of generators, the slow lowing of cattle nearby.

“It says not to trespass over there,” whispered Matty, Battle of Britain forgotten.

“Been here lots of times. That barn’s haunted or something. No-one ever comes. You scared?” Matty shook off the question as though it were an inquisitive wasp.

“Right then.” The blonde boy sprinted towards the barn. “Last one in loses the dogfight.”

Shadow embraced them as they lurched inside, Matty trailing yards behind. This shadow should have felt cool but it nursed towers of baled hay, reeking of heat and cut grass. Stalks and cut twine were strewn on the floor and the corrugated roof and wooden beams ticked and groaned above them.

“You lost the dogfight.”

“Not fair. You didn’t say go.”

“Doesn’t matter. Shot you down in flames.”

Matty dangled the plane by its tail and let it pirouette to the floor with a rising howl followed by a phlegm-filled explosion. He laid it down gently without even bending a propeller blade. “Let’s go back, it’s nearly time for my tea.”

“Not yet. I shot you down in flames so that plane needs to burn.”

“It did. I made an explosion and everything.”

“No, I mean like really.”

“But you made this one.”

“I’m a bit sick of it. Anyway, I’m getting a Focke-Wulf at the weekend.” The blonde boy handed Matty his Spitfire and pulled a plastic lighter from his hip pocket.

“You are tapped. And a pyro or something.”

“What you afraid of? A few cows? Just watch this Nazi burn.” With a practised motion, he struck a flame and held it to the plane’s tail. Both boys watched goggle-eyed as the fuselage blackened then drooped and refused to catch light.

“Thought you knew all about fires then?”

“Not my fault. I thought all that glue would burn. Just give us a minute.” The blonde boy picked some long stalks from the floor and wrapped them around the plane with a length protruding from the tail. He flicked the lighter again and the length embraced the flame.

“Watch him go down in flames now then.” He tossed the plane earthwards, trailing orange flashes and pungent smoke. The moment it left his hand and moved beyond his reach, a new knowledge moiled in his guts. Even before it fell to earth, he saw in a flash of flame and destruction and heartache what he might have done, and knew he no longer wanted to share a body with the prattling fool who made him do these stupid things.

The plastic plane crashed and splintered onto the hard floor and slid into a bale, no longer aflame but blackened. Matty’s mouth twitched into the ghost of a smile. For a second, the blonde boy breathed again. Then the parched straw found the heat and let out a grateful gasp of white smoke.

“What did you do that for? What do we do now?” Matty was shifting from one foot to another, still holding the precious Spitfire.

The blonde boy pinched his eyes hut and slapped himself once then twice. “Can’t have this again. Go get water.” Matty’s eyes were beading and his lower lip trembled. “Go on. Just get water.”

Matty ran, his Dunlops slapping the concrete hard. Matty stood and watched, willing the bale to stop. The sweet grassy air was turning into something hot and bitter, something that tickled the back of his throat and squeezed his eyes. He grabbed the smoking bale, tried to move it, felt it crackle and breathe heat at him, dropped it and stood back, trembling.

He shouted for Matty and the water and slapped himself again, harder. Minutes passed, or seconds, and Matty didn’t come. He couldn’t see the roof and the high beams were receding from view, shadows dissolving in gauzy heat. Smoke and flame were leaping from more bales as though they’d been waiting there all summer for this chance to escape. He plucked the lighter from his pocket, swore at it, dropped it and stamped it until it smashed.

Then he ran, the way Matty must have done. Lungs working like bellows, drawing the smuts and the smoke and the taste of his own wicked stupidity deep into his lungs, he reached the tree-line, hunkered down in the weeds and turned and watched. Help must come. Farmers had hoses and water. Only the old man had seen him near here. What would happen? Would his life end? Would he go to jail?

Tiny compared with the stocky farming lads he wanted to see, Matty staggered into view, lop-sided with an enormous grey bucket in one hand, and lumbered into the smoking maw of the barn. He didn’t come out until after the beams crashed in, after the farmer in his blue overalls had tried and failed to defy the flames, after the fire men had hosed it all down. Then the ambulance men turned up with a stretcher and a red blanket to bundle up something the size of Matty.

This conspiracy goes deeper than you thought. Fox Mulder, high priest of UFO conspiracy theory, was a triple agent all along. The faded poster always in shot during heated debates in Mulder’s basement office proclaimed the fatal fallacy at the heart of the UFO creed: ‘I Want To Believe’. If a belief is based on need, it is unlikely to be based on objective fact. Or, as any science student will confirm, if a scientist sets out to prove a predetermined theory, it is all too tempting for them to embrace facts that support that theory and jettison the rest.

The very term UFO has been abused; an unidentified flying object is just that, rather than an interstellar voyager which must be knowingly referred to as a UFO in case The Man is tapping our calls. UFO theorists tend to be creative and sensitive people, so sensitive that they’re afraid of cutting themselves on Occam’s Razor. To paraphrase that principle, to stand any chance of being truthful, a theory should dispense with as many far flung or bizarre assumptions as possible. It is one thing to see strange lights in the sky; it is an outrageous leap to suppose that because we can’t explain them they must be extra-terrestrial tourists.

Not that extra-terrestrial visits are impossible; they are just wildly improbable compared to the mundane truth of most sightings. The list of suspects is long and distinguished: hallucination, collective or otherwise; weather balloons; satellites, falling or orbiting; aircraft of all shapes and sizes; atmospheric, magnetic and solar phenomena; meteorites; our own spacecraft. From time to time, a sighting will defy explanation, but that doesn’t entitle us to pin a fantasy to it. For example, can we really presume to know everything about how our own atmosphere interacts with our solar system?

As for a military conspiracy, is there really anything strange or sinister about cutting edge military contractors not sharing their latest findings with the world? Secrecy in matters of defence technology is de rigueur and always has been. Some now familiar aeronautical marvels were once jealously guarded secrets whose outlandish appearance might have sparked all kinds of yarn-weaving before their public debut. The SR71 first flew more than forty years ago, the B2 more than twenty: military science doesn’t stand still and doesn’t shout about its achievements. Any public servant or defence contractor who signs the Official Secrets Act is in on the conspiracy, if you feel compelled to call it that.

Besides, don’t conspiracy theories of all kinds give too much credit to governments? Considering the intelligence failures, whistle-blowing, and domestic and foreign policy disasters of the last decade alone, can government as we know it really be capable of stage-managing the kind of labyrinthine and delicate conspiracies that Mulder used to be so fond of? How can it be that the nation which salvaged a bone fide spacecraft at Roswell has only just managed to create a supersonic VTOL fighter and is still soldiering on with the crude and dangerous Space Shuttle?

Perhaps I want to disbelieve in UFO conspiracies. Am I just as guilty of cherry-picking facts to fit a preconceived case? Maybe. Yet I believe wholeheartedly in extra-terrestrial life. Such is the incomprehensible size of our universe, it seems inconceivable that we are entirely alone. However, UFO theorists should think hard about spacetime rather than space in isolation. Not only could we be separated from other sentient life by millions of light years, we could equally well be separated by millions of calendar years, and that’s without considering travelling time. Even if another sentient species had mastered FTL travel and propelled itself in the right direction, the odds against them occupying a sufficiently proximate niche in spacetime to happen upon us are, well, astronomical.

And if such a mighty civilisation managed this feat, would they have done so just to probe the gullible, molest cattle and tease airline pilots? I wouldn’t presume to know how an advanced xenoc thinks or feels about such matters, but the activities usually ascribed to them don’t seem to justify the effort involved in getting here. Having said that, the Apollo programme cost $25 billion in 1969 dollars and the benefits might not be obvious to an outside observer: one unsatisfactory game of golf, an extreme sports holiday for 21 Americans and a quantity of interesting rocks moved 250,000 miles.

The most objectionable aspect of UFO conspiracy theories is the old fashioned geocentric hubris behind it. We can’t resist seeing ourselves as the centre of the universe and therefore the most fascinating thing in it. Even when we colour in the vast blank spaces left by UFO sightings, we create spacecraft crewed by humanoids who reflect the cultural preoccupations of our times. In the white heat of the Cold War, they’re obsessed with our technological advances. In a more climatologically aware age, they’re fleeing a barren homeworld for our blue-green oasis. Choose whatever fairy tale suits you.

As some good and bad sci-fi writers have suggested, for any xenoc race to go to the time and trouble of getting here, they’d have to have a very good reason. We wouldn’t be shaking hands and staging light shows with frail, benevolent humanoids interested only in curing cancer and swapping CD collections. We might find ourselves quite reasonably regarded as vermin by superior and incomprehensible beings who want our real estate. We should be careful what we wish for.

If you want to believe a thing before you’ve even seen it, the chances of your seeing the truth are slim indeed. I must sign off. The Man is buying me lunch.

On the lip of the depression, a hand was splayed on rough stone, lopped off and cauterised in a precise cross-section at the wrist joint. I knew I hadn’t lost that much of myself, nor do I wear violet nail polish or a ring on the third finger. Fedora man had a matching ring, a thick band of unadorned gold. It seemed Portal had been laughing because it didn’t know. If it condescended to speak to its new guest, I wonder if she’d have been reassured to hear that she wasn’t far from home in purely spatial terms.

With a bulge of vertigo, I sensed slo-time winding down. I shunted all thought of our first victim to the back of my mind and took in my surroundings. I was on a wide esplanade in a world made of sandstone. On one side, an ancient wall rose from buttresses of dark silica which jutted into a sea of dark blue shimmering into green; rasping and sucking as it mauled the rock. On the other, buildings jostled for space on the shorefront and climbed uphill away from it in a jumble of terracotta rooftops, hotel balconies, crucifixes, aerials and satellite dishes.

What I took for tourists with skin tones ranging from snow-white to lobster-red crowded the street cafes. A police car idled in traffic a hundred metres away, the sole occupant’s gun hand tapping out the Morse code for boredom on the roof while the index finger of his other hand explored a nostril. At least a dozen people were looking at me and would start to react in half a second. I had my explanation for why a vermillion giant was standing naked near the dismembered hand of a respectable married woman and her screaming husband. The onlookers would no doubt find their own.

With the active camouflage utilities in my suit, I could have become nothing more than a thickening of the air and slinked away in my own good time. Still, I wasn’t without resources. As I snapped back into real time, I launched myself at the seawall, registering only a chorus of screams and the flicker of a policeman’s shades in a rear view mirror as I took flight. Whipcord muscles allowed me to fly as far as I fell, and I hit the unyielding silica hard. The shock reverberated through my endoskeleton and my vision blurred. I carried some of the shock into forward momentum and, inflating my lungs and pinching closed my lips, I pitched myself into the spume.

Pain warnings whined at me again as the salt found my scorched skin. I acknowledged and silenced them all as I dragged myself down. I was lucky to find no shallow littoral but an abrupt shearing of the land into dark depths. Schools of fish flitted and flickered around me, group minds with dumb curiosity. At fifty metres, I lodged myself in a rocky overhang, willed my heart-rate to a near standstill, and waited for dusk with a drip-feed of oxygen from my over-inflated lungs.

The door unsealed itself in front of me, petals opening then spiralling away. Portal was no longer trying to engage me in conversation and was humming something not unlike Cavalleria Rusticana. It could have orchestrated the melody without taxing its diodes but instead chose to deliver it in a phlegm-filled murmur. Was it a critique of my fatuous desire for heroism, or just a mild annoyance to keep my mind occupied? I suspect both.

Once again, I ran diagnostic routines and all my sub-systems responded as intended. Peripheral fields offered me views of the chamber in all relevant spectra, there were no glitches in the autonomic suite and the displacement utilities were primed. I tightened some straps, smoothed my eyebrows and adjusted my lucky pants. I bit into my left thumb until I tasted copper, heard the polite chime of a pain response and watched as the puncture laced itself closed and a bead of blood fell to the floor where it bounced once then rolled to a stop. Portal stopped humming with a choking sound. I apologised, stooped and flicked the ruby out of the chamber.

I remained stooped as Portal cleared its non-existent throat. The door sealed itself behind me, the petals this time no prettier than closing jaws seen from the wrong side. The roseate light neither alarmed nor comforted and the silence was impenetrable, bereft of the whip and crackle of massive energies pulling at the leash. My fields showed me that the spots where my crystallised blood had touched the floor had just been irradiated. Portal apologised for being so surgical but this was after all a kind of transplant. It suggested I might like to count down from ten, assuring me that I’d be gone by zero.

I got no further than forming the words ‘ready when you are’ in my forebrain. I’d squeezed my eyes shut and before I could pry them open again numerous pain receptors were chiming and I was outdoors under a deluge of UV light being propelled away from a figure by pre-programmed reflexes. I stifled the offensive protocols which were vying with the pain to be heard. I gave myself a surge of stim to help cut down the processing time. I rocked on my haunches on hot stone as this new world rolled slowly around me.

Nothing I saw resembled a weapon, much less any hostile intent. I could see, hear, feel and breathe; all encouraging signs. I didn’t need my eyes to tell me the bad news. Portal hadn’t transported as much of me as it had planned. Had it been a carpenter, a discrepancy of a millimetre or two might have resulted in nothing worse than a sticking door. In my case, I’d lost most of my hair, all of my clothes and the tips of several fingers and toes. My skin looked like it had been flash-fried and was still crimson with heat.

I noted and filed the pain bulletins, raising a prayer of thanks to the gods of technology. Before my medtech had been installed, I’d experimented with old fashioned pain just to see what all the fuss was about. What I found would have supported an argument for an utterly malicious creator. Good as the entry level brain is at reporting pain, it can’t leave it at that. It has to keep screaming its message at lung-bursting volumes, and won’t desist even when the unfortunate victim has done all they can about the source of the pain. Opiates and the like seem to have been about as effective as holding a pillow over a screaming patient’s head; the only way to really kill the pain was to really kill the patient. Don’t hate me too much because I’ve never experienced toothache outside a virtual sensorium.

Had such a thing been possible, the flashing and jabbering of pain bulletins would have given me a headache. My nanonics could solve some of my problems, but I’d need shelter and nutrition first. Even then, I could hardly re-grow my suit and its fabulous toys. A short jump from where I squatted, on the lip of a smouldering, concave depression in the stone, teetered the figure I’d first seen. In the slo-mo time induced by the stim I could just make out that he was falling forwards. He was short and wiry by our standards, with a complexion like varnished maple. He wore a baggy linen suit with matching fedora. One hand was moving to protect his face with its clenched teeth and half-closed eyes; the other held the stalks of a bouquet of flowers, neatly cut and smouldering, the blooms nowhere to be seen.

TBC

Most news is just entertainment with a gloss of social conscience. For purveyors of daily or rolling news, the instant drama of earthquakes, plane crashes and the abduction of pretty blonde children can't be scheduled or relied upon. All too often, old news or humdrum truisms have to be prodded and squeezed into controversy that can be passed off as news.

The worst offender has to be the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2, a.k.a. Daily Mail FM. On slow news days, the show will polarise the most banal observations into issues worthy of heated studio punditry and breathless hands-free tirades from truckers. The show's nadir was surely the punishment meted out to the Oxfam spokesman who, presumably having drawn the short straw, was wheeled on to whisper that although his charity was grateful for all saleable donations, they'd be equally grateful for less useless tat such as headless dolls, single shoes and well scrubbed-in underpants suitable only for landfill. Naturally, some ranting loony from Civitas, Gravitas or Bigotras was tasked to excoriate the hapless hemp-wearer for his effrontery and ingratitude. I didn't take notes, but it was something to do with workers, voters, taxpayers and charity beginning at home, although it wasn't clear whose home.

Yesterday however, the show finally drew me in and had me howling and snorting at the radio. A deaf couple were reprising the view, given earlier that day to John Humphreys, that deaf parents should be allowed to screen embryos to ensure conception of a deaf baby. Apparently, there is within the deaf community a small but vocal lobby in favour of allowing parents to choose offspring better suited to deaf family life.

The articulate and intelligent couple were steadfast in their view that deafness was not a disability, but a different ability. If during an IVF procedure they were offered four embryos, they would cast aside the three with entirely normal genotypes in favour of the deaf one. Through their very fluent hearing translator, they refused to concede that deafness was in any way a physical impediment or abnormality. Far from maiming their offspring, they would be endowing them with their own rich language and culture.

If my wife and I were paraplegics with strong ties to a support group and perhaps a Paralympics medal or two, would that entitle us to cripple our child to make it better suited to our cultural and home life? It might be the case that our disability had made us exceed ourselves and find pride and meaning in adversity. We might be in better mental and aerobic shape than the average able-bodied couch potato. It wouldn't entitle us to choose that ordeal for any other living soul.

Nor could we dispute that we were disabled. The overused term 'political correctness' is often just an excuse for unthinking moral relativism. Were I paraplegic, I would be disabled. I have a back injury with long-term effects which renders me somewhat disabled, though sadly not to a degree which would score me a parking permit. Disabled does not imply unequal, invalid or incapable, but it might come to be seen as a blanket term for all of them if it is made a dark incantation that dare not be uttered in the presence of the otherwise enabled.

If a disabled person has exceeded their disability, all glory to them. It doesn't then follow that they should be allowed to inflict it on any other person just because they've tailored new cultural prejudices from ill-fitting cloth. It seems certain lobbying charities have gone beyond the worthy bid for equality of opportunity to find themselves defying reality. The fact that someone has a disability, regardless of the nomenclature used, doesn’t mean lunatic views should be indulged. To do so would be demeaning to all concerned.

This debate isn't likely to go away. Genetic science may soon enable us to both screen out faulty genes and screen in advantageous ones. If an ambitious couple are one day allowed to engineer the super-athlete they always dreamed of hot-housing, shouldn't disabled parents be afforded the same opportunity to indulge their idea of cultural worth? If idiots with numerous healthy kids are allowed fertility treatment just to correct a gender imbalance, shouldn't deaf people be allowed to indulge an equally fatuous ideal? I’m sure Jeremy Vine will cover it.

Disjointed rant ends.

Harkness staggered under the weight of whisky sloshing around in his forebrain. Not the good stuff either; this didn’t seduce or lull, it bludgeoned. His pulse struck up a merengue in his temples and his stomach agreed to join it on the dance-floor. Heat chafed him everywhere save between his toes where he’d found grass dampened by beer. A fugue of gossiping voices underscored by his least favourite eighties compilation encircled him. So much to think about. But he had a job to do, if only he could focus. His forearms prickled, a plastic bottle crumpled in his hand and thick fluid arced from its nozzle. A high octane tang found his nose and squeezed his eyes half-shut. An evanescent wall of light brought a blaze of pain. His feet let him stagger back.

“Jesus wept, Rob.” A familiar voice separated itself from the
fugue. “Look what you’ve done to my sausage.”

The bottle was torn from his hand by Sugden’s familiar shape, reduced to a jumble of impressions; pink limbs, too short shorts, an Iron Maiden t-shirt, a goatee making up for what a bald-patch lacked. Beyond grey stinging smoke, the crackle of a barbeque could be heard.

“Earth to Rob.” Sugden wafted a hand in front of his face. He found himself staring into the ruby eyes of Eddie, the trademark skeletal ghoul plastered across Sugden’s pert beer gut. At least Eddie was amused. Another shape arrived, unmistakably Charlotte, hands held fidgeting at her hips as she resisted the temptation to fold her arms and sigh. He imagined a dozen other faces looking at anything but him.

“What?” he demanded, more loudly than he’d intended. Important to stay in charge of the situation. Better to be drunk and in charge of something than to sit in a corner waiting for something to take charge of you. Who were they to take charge of this highly charged situation when he was so good at charging in and making the charge stick? If he didn’t take charge, he might be dishonourably discharged. He twitched his head, hoping to jumble more sense from his inner monologue. He knew he was drunk when he couldn’t walk or think in a straight line. A vague burning smell was defying all attempts to shake it off.

“Bring him inside, Sug,” said Charlotte as she moved towards the patio doors. Someone had turned off the music and glances were being flicked at watches. He hadn’t noticed the darkness falling on them, as hot and black as ash. This didn’t feel like the kind of night that would bring relief from the day; it would only thicken the heat and poach them in their sopping beds.

“Water, Sug. Why won’t it rain? Have a word, would you? Someone should grip it. Too hot.”

“I hope you weren’t too attached to your eyebrows, sparrow. And you’ll have a tan like a Scotsman.”

“What?”

“About two minutes ago, you flame-grilled your face. More accelerant and enthusiasm than my cold sausage dilemma warranted. And you’re absolutely shitfaced. And you’re on call.”

“Balls. Big balls of fire.” His forehead crumpled into a frown which showed him exactly where it hurt. “Need first aid kit. Need fluids.”
“This we can do.”

In the time it took Sugden to catch a sympathetic eye through the dissipating smoke and open his mouth to speak, Harkness had traversed the patio in a headlong lunge, ripped the lid from a water butt and plunged his head into its mossy depths. The plastic resonated to the muffled pounding of Harkness screaming into water. He withdrew his head, glistening and red, and grinned.

“Better! Again.”

A phone was ringing somewhere in the house.

A bitter heat followed the house martins back from Namibia to their cool and verdant summer residence. It had been dragged across vast skies by the sucking chill of the outgoing winter, nourished by the equatorial sun and laden with quartz by Saharan dust-storms. Now, long after dark on a lazy bank holiday evening, it hung over a world of privet hedges and tamed horizons, letting the air thicken into a promise of stormy weather.

For a while longer, the heat warmed house martin chicks as it bled from the brickwork of 13 Marne Crescent. Flitting through cooler skies weeks earlier, their quick eyes had found this dream home in suburbia. With its sheltered eaves, solid brickwork and a ready supply of mud, grass and wind-blown insects, it was a desirable residence for any young family. It hardly mattered to their bird brains that the neighbours on the other side of the brickwork had a language harsher and louder than theirs. Nor did they appreciate the new guttering, the re-pointed mortar or the UPVC double-glazing. It was enough that they could remain comfortably aloft, far from the dirt and tarmac and the lumbering creatures who had to make do with walking and crawling.

It was generally a quiet roost, save for the unceasing demands of the chicks. So feathers were ruffled and a black eye glistened when long after sundown the gravel shifted on the driveway beneath. The moment stretched, a movement held mid-step. The bird had almost settled into sleep when the gravel moved again, this time rhythmically, starting at the front of the garden and ending at the front door. The bird peeped but her challenge went unanswered. The chicks began to clamour under her half-spread wings, her alertness a sign that some wriggling morsel might be forthcoming.

Thirty feet below, the crunching of gravel ceased and was replaced by a sequence of sounds that were unintelligible and therefore meant danger. A faint wheezing, as of lungs barely able to choke down stodgy air. A sloshing of liquid in a container, a flat note when it struck gravel suggesting fullness. The spattering of liquid poured onto a hard surface, punctuated by the glugging of air replacing it in the container. A dry rattle, a harsh scrape and a small crackling burst. Gravel shifting as footsteps moved away, their direction lost in a hungry purring.

Tendrils of smoke carried danger to the nest, the first predator to do so. The bird cast herself from the nest and scoured the air, finding no enemy she could understand. The chicks peeped with dumb desperation, understanding only a renewed need for succour. A monster had enveloped the house in its flickering tendrils, and it crackled, spat and belched black smoke at the bird.

Jagged, shimmering flames lapped at windows behind which human forms danced in imitation. The frames shook as fists were pounded against their panes, and held firm. The bird shrieked her alarm but the predator was not dissuaded and no help came. She flew in tight helpless figures of eight around the nest, finding no vector of escape. Her lungs were raw with inhaled poisons and she could smell her feathers singeing. Instinct had to be obeyed, first, last and always. She pirouetted in black air, folded her wings and dropped into the nest. Alarm and pain filled her senses and there was nothing to do but shelter her shrieking brood from the beast.

She didn’t hear and wouldn’t have understood the voices of pleading and terror outside, the sirens, diesel engines and pumped water. As the shrivelled nest fell to ground under the first high-pressure blast, the weather changed. The heat shrivelled into cool spring air and released fat raindrops onto the conflagration, blood-red with sand from a cruel emptiness far away.

Why am I telling you all this? It’s not a confession as I’ve done nothing wrong by my own standards and I don’t hold myself accountable by yours. Nor do I need you to believe me, persuasive and debonair as I am. Even if I played and won some elaborate mind-games with you, or showed you some of my niftier toys, it would still resemble trickery that could just about be faked in your world. It would require hypnotic suggestion, mind-altering drugs and Oscar-winning CGI, but it could be done. You’re intelligent, sceptical and movie-literate. You know I’m too like you to really come from another dimension, a concept which in any case is as lazy and implausible a science-fiction cliché as faster-than-light space travel or teleportation.

I’m telling you because you’ll put it on record. If things go badly between my compatriot and me, I want you to know what he is and how I tried and failed to stop him. If you too are tragically snuffed from existence, I know you’ll have made sure that this can be goggled on your interweb, or whatever your crude equivalent of Consensus calls itself. If enough outlandish people connect his impossible activities to this improbable journal, perhaps something can be done.

I know you won’t neglect the possibility that I’m manipulating you for reasons of my own. Even if you did believe I was a dimensional traveller, I could still be the first and have sinister designs on your stagnant puddle of a world. You could be right, but only if you added hubris to your list of deficiencies. Extraordinarily bright as you are by local standards, what with all those baggy jumpers, letters after your name and progressive jazz records, you’re hardly a mover or a shaker. You may understand the basic physics of my presence here but, beyond featuring on a GCHQ watch-list for your excessive use of the words ‘Rubicon’ and ‘rapprochement’ in telephone conversations, you are bereft of any influence, leverage or savvy in matters that matter. The mould on the windowsills of your bed-sit is more culturally attuned than you are.

Let’s call him the Founding Father. I’ll have to keep moving; I can’t rule out the possibility that he’s developed tachyon detectors to alert him to interlopers. I’ll need you to drop your job and your friends. I know they mean very little to you and once I’m up to speed with your crude infotech, I’ll ensure that you’re well remunerated. Apologies. The narrative got a bit terse there for a moment. I’m barking orders at you and snubbing your culture and I still owe you some narrative. Where were we? They propel me through spacetime when I can’t even find my way around a simple narrative.

TBC

Isn’t it high-time that Creationism was filed away with Shamanism, Alchemy, Astrology and Scientology in the annals of hokum, bunk and pseudo-science? It has endured this long because it is a comfort blanket, hiding the difficult complexities of the universe while remaining impervious to reason and entirely divorced from any moral purpose. How else can its appeal be explained?

Christianity as a vision for the greater good of mankind cannot easily be separated from the moral fabric of Western societies. Indeed, from a secular viewpoint the most respectable Christians are those who put their moral code into practice for the good of others. There is a very distinct difference between those who manifest their belief by staffing soup kitchens or leper colonies, and those who devote themselves to harassing gays and scoffing at dinosaurs.

The difference is not strength of belief, but focus of belief. To some, the practice of philanthropy is more important than belief without action. To others, belief is everything: Nothing can be more vital than unquestioning obeisance to their jealous desert god’s every word and the personal salvation this will bring, and any unbeliever deserves eternal torment regardless of their moral character.

Not only does Creationism defy reason, it cannot serve any moral purpose unless we are to assume that every shibboleth and nugget of bloodthirsty bigotry in the Old Testament is a complete and coherent guide to life. Perhaps the real purpose of Creationism is more Orwellian. Is it a variety of Doublethink, a knowing acceptance of an impossible lie to train the mind to believe anything it is told to believe?

Science doesn’t have all the answers, nor does it pretend to. It is a constantly evolving system of hypothesis, enquiry and experiment, open to criticism, debate and competition. The truth shifts from generation to generation because our ways of seeing become more acute, and the ends to which we use science vary. Like any other discipline, evolutionary theory is likely to evolve as our view of the universe and our means of seeing it are refined.

Creationism has none of these drawbacks. In the absence of logic, it has the benefit of a self-fulfilling loop of faith. It presents the most outrageous and unlikely explanation for the creation of life and arrogates all claims to the truth by insisting that faith renders proof irrelevant and wrong. In what other branch of science would that pass muster? Would a Creationist welcome such an approach from their child’s doctor? Evolutionary theory has logic and rigour in place of blind belief and desperate faith.

Cosmology has no easy answers to the origins of all matter. As insignificant as we are in this infinitesimal universe, the big answers may be forever beyond our range and intellect. But it doesn’t follow that we should stop thinking and simply ascribe it all to an anthropomorphic deity of our choosing. That would be hubris on a cosmic scale.

If you live in a pre-industrial age and your neighbour’s olive grove and the utterances of your village elders form your boundaries, a simplistic and figurative view of how the world came to be might pass for truth well enough. In the 21st century however, Creationist myopia requires such a perverse effort of will that this debate may thrive for generations. If Christianity really wants to shore up its identity against the challenges to come, it will need far more credibility than Creationism can give it. Perhaps the debate will end when we've evolved a little more.