New Book from the Editor - The Investigations of the Para-Usual

Maverick academic, Professor O'Singh, believes he may bestow upon mankind the ultimate gift – the key to all knowledge. Haplessly, and not until it’s too late, does he realise that he’s precipitated the destruction of the planet.

Here is an excerpt, the first three chapters of The Investigations of the Para-Usual.

Candyman ¹

‘Aerial burial!’ yelled the man, imagining the launching of his lifeless corpse into outer space.

His considerable bulk was being rocked, about to be hauled upwards inside what was the tight fit of an antiquated wooden lift car – the projectile coffin of his imaginings; his pine overcoat, his pine spacesuit, as it were.

Lift off.

‘Graveyard declutter!’ he bellowed, seizing on another thought. Might outer space be the answer to overcrowded cemeteries in the modern age? Much as as al fresco became ‘the rage’ when the sinking of the dead beneath church flagstones was stretched to saturation point?

Must be the most morbid instance of sweeping under the carpet, it occurred – the Medieval practice of burying people under paving slabs.

Even as the lift cables took up the slack and began to strain, that single notion – burials in space – catalysed thought connections that cracked and fizzed pyrotechnically inside the bulky man’s cranium.

‘Negative burial!’ he exclaimed. Burial in space must be considered negative burial, because the deceased is headed in the opposite direction – up instead of down. 60,000 feet above the ground, rather than 6 feet below. 

‘Pushing down the daisies!’ the bulky one shouted.

The big man squeezed his arms up the rattling walls of the lift and above his head the way an escapologist might, reassigning his limbs in the preliminary stages of escape. Thus, was he able to clasp his hands over his ears. He needed desperately to crowd out those thoughts. He needed extreme focus. Supreme concentration. He clamped his eyes firmly shut.

‘Come on, O’Singh!’ he muttered, in the manner somewhat of somebody speaking in tongues. ‘Take strength from Strathclyde!’

Professor Breville O’Singh was transported back in his mind to the University of Strathclyde, preaching there from the stage of the amphitheatre, rolling his hands one over the other to facilitate the order of his speech. Not rhythmically, but in the fashion rather of a father dancing at a disco, to Sister Sledge.

A bear-shaped man was O’Singh, or perhaps a man-shaped bear. A big man as imposing a figure as Cassius Clay, though always looking sorry for the imposition. Kind of limp, drawing in his bulk. Professor Breville O’Singh was apologetically large.

‘When asked a question to which there is any number of possible answers, we reply, “How long is a piece of string?”’ observed Professor Breville O’Singh, from the stage. ‘But equally we could ask, could we not, “How wide is a piece of string?”’

O’Singh stopped to survey the reactions of his audience, a gaggle of professors, sat in various attitudes of contemplation, in judgement, squinting into a blinding low-angled shaft of Spring sunlight.

O’Singh’s eyes popped open. The floor indicator light flickered on ‘4’.

‘Come on, man! Erm… Extract from Exeter!’ he urged himself. (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW):

Track of the Week

Track of the Week

Track of the Week

Tesco Self-Checkouts and Self-Diagnosis

It’s a nice touch in the classier supermarket: enter the establishment, there’s the decorative table of samples. There’s the organic Shropshire lamb’s cheese; the Fairtrade Chinese gooseberry flavoured dark chocolate. But they have to get it right. They’ve got to be careful, for instance, with a new line in lime cordial. People tend to shy off that colour liquid offered as samples.

Tesco, the supermarket chain is in crisis (CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW).

Track of the Week

The Reign in Thpain

‘Hi nigh brine kai?’ is often the first sentence you will learn in Received Pronunciation (RP) – how to enquire about the health of a brown cow at a precise moment in time.

Of course, the Queen’s English is used not only to establish the welfare of tan cattle, but to impose the way people expect us to speak. And by ‘people’, we mean society. One needs a clipped accent to be respected or to have one’s authority accepted, in order to advance in life.

What might not be appreciated so much is that that word ‘received’ is loaded. The suggestion is that one’s pronunciation should be something that should be communicated or despatched (from the ruling classes) and accepted (by the hoi polloi) i.e. received. The pronunciation must be registered (in our minds), much as one might in analogy sign for a courier-delivered parcel to verify its receipt. By wiggling one’s finger across the screen of that big mobile phone thing couriers hand you.

‘Is that OK?’ you ask the courier. ‘Is that alright as my signature?’

‘Yuh.’

‘So, I could have just twitched; squiggled anything? And you would have accepted that as my signature?’

‘Ar.’

‘Or I could have forged the signature of the person who this package is for? Like forging banknotes, but instead of making fake money you can spend fraudulently, getting something random you might not want from Amazon? Like unexpected socks?’

‘Alright, mate?’ says the courier by way of taking his leave, finding an excuse to terminate the further probing of the verification process. He is on a mission to deliver as many parcels as he can, aspiring to prove to Jeff Bezos that he can meet the minimum wage on a zero-hour contract if he works fast enough and doesn’t waste time on signature talk.

It wasn’t though, as commonly thought, the British who invented Received Pronunciation. That honour belongs to...

(CLICK ON 'Read more' LINK, BELOW)