Fragments

Today was a host of fragments, splinters of the mind's eye, as Alan Dean Foster once put it.

Primus: breakfast, with interesting ladies and a priceless look of startlement on the face of one gentleman of long-standing acquaintance.

Secundus: lunch, where the hands do the burgers, and many shirts were bought.

Tertius: a memory of Luca Pacioli, patron saint of double-entry accounting.

Quartus: an inscription given to King Merikare — "be a craftsman in speech, that thou mayest be strong; the tongue is a sword to a man, and speech more valorous than any warfare."

Quintus: a quiet night, and the scent of forgotten jasmine in the cold hills.

Apocalypse Lost

For some time now, I've been wanting to assemble a collection of media that would be a retrospective of the Cold War. It does indeed date me, to be thinking of it; there are many alive today who were born after the Berlin Wall came down. But every now and then I see a fragment of my imaginary media collection, and I think of war, and peace, and how it was to grow up in a world dominated by the threat of – no, not war, but ultimate destruction.

Here are some of the fragments which have passed through my hands recently. I am not going to link them, for in the days of the Cold War, things were retrieved in the old, difficult, paranoid ways.

1. 99 Red Balloons (Nena): This song was a sort of a one-hit German wonder, originally composed by Uwe Fahrenkrog-Petersen (music) and Carlo Kagres (words), and translated into English by Kevin McAlea. It's a vision of innocence, pulp fiction, and sudden death. Red balloons, indeed.

2. Forever Young (Alphaville): Another German group, and the year was 1984. This is an elegy to the end of the Cold War, written as if from the viewpoint of a peculiar madness which cannot quite grasp that the whole conflict is over.

3. Fallout and Fallout II: These computer games epitomised the post-apocalyptic CRPG. Built on an engine which would one day be utterly familiar to players of Diablo and suchlike, Fallout took you from a deeply buried underground colony in search of spare parts for your water supply and ended with you making the world safe(r) from insane cyborgs. The sequel was even better!

4. We Didn't Start The Fire (Billy Joel): This song, a collection of seemingly haphazard historical items, concealed a whole cornucopia of meaning, the least of which is the idea of, "Well, then. Who did?" The driven rhythm matches the lyrics in winding up the listener. It's a great adrenalin-boosting track.

5. Dinner at Deviant's Palace (Tim Powers): It looks and feels like post-apocalypse novel written as fantasy. It's a gritty and painful bildungsroman, if you like. But mostly, it's a great story in a barren land.

6. A Canticle For Liebowitz (Walter Miller): Another novel, this one dealing with the nature of religion after the apocalypse is some time gone. Rather moving, has a sequel which doesn't quite make it.

And that's it for now.