But back to Orbus and a question: what should science fiction do? In Asher’s case his science fiction tells a great roller-coaster story and explores survival, genetics, societies, technology and other themes should be present in science-focused fiction. And he manages to show deep thinking without derailing the story he’s chosen to tell.

The temperature here is climbing now which is nice but annoying because I’m spending most of my time working inside. When I’m not writing I’m up on a stepladder filling the bamboo ceiling (I’ve done about a third of it now) and, within about a week, our new kitchen will arrive and I’ll have plenty to do putting that in.

The Penny Royal book is now rapidly approaching 100,000 words (in fact I should pass that count today) and developing nicely. I reckon I’ll have it done before Zero Point is published and of course more than a year before Jupiter War is published, so that definitely puts me over a year ahead of Macmillan’s publishing schedule. I’ve decided I’ll file these books about the black AI as Penny Royal 1, 2, 3 etc and allow the titles to naturally arise out of whatever I produce. Tentative titles involve the names of various characters and a particular item: Isobel, Spear, and The Spine, but they may change later.

Friday 4th May
Excellent: last night was the first evening we’ve been able to comfortably sit outside on the terrace. The stars were out and gleaming, the temperature at 21C and further use of the stove is looking increasingly unlikely. Another first on this evening will be the first fresh salad from the garden: the various salad leaves are big enough to cut, and the spring onions and radishes are ready. I’ll provide pictures of these below just to annoy some people in England.

Oh, I do believe it’s raining in Britain now, quite heavily. Any sign that they’re lifting the hosepipe ban, or are you being told that it’s a special kind of summer rain? Here on Crete, under the auspices of the corrupt and failing Greek government, lazy tax-dodging workers and cash-strapped local amenities, where the sun blazes down for, on average, about 300 days a year, there hasn’t been any kind of hosepipe ban or water shortage over the five years we’ve been here. They still manage to supply the massive watering systems for the olive trees, and they still manage to supply all households with water, so much so that a hosepipe rather than a broom is generally used to clear outside paths and terraces. They also still manage to supply an influx of millions of tourists each year. The only time we ever went short of water was when the village main was being replaced. So why is it that such a supposedly crappily-run country can manage to keep the water flowing when a supposedly advanced one like Britain can’t? I’ll tell you why: though you hear the newsreaders and forecasters wanking on about the dry weather, that isn’t really the problem. It’s infrastructure failing to keep up with millions of water-hungry people. It’s the population, stupid.

We also get power cuts here, but they never last longer than an hour. Only in England do we get them lasting long enough for us to start worrying about the food in the freezer. Doubtless the delay is due to the time it takes to fill in the risk-assessment forms, don the required reflective jackets and safety helmets, shut down the required parts of the massive grid (population again) and then replace the fuse.

Monday 7th May
Excellent meal in the Stratos last night. Here’s some pictures of the restaurant, view and genial hosts:

Rather than get back to writing on Monday I continued with what I had been doing all weekend: filling that bamboo ceiling (I wanted this job out of the way before the kitchen arrives), which I completed in the late afternoon, even foregoing our half hour of dancing to the Wii. I had considered painting the bamboo white and leaving the beams as they are, but decided that with a bit of tidying up and maybe a coat of clear varnish, this is how it should remain:

We’ve just watched the first season of The Walking Dead, but on the strength of just the first few episodes we decided we wouldn’t bother with another season. It was mildly enjoyable in so much as the alternative was Greek TV, BBC World or other DVDs we’ve already seen, but that’s the limit of it. For Caroline it failed to grip and was directionless and ‘Lost’. For me it was the glaring holes always found in zombie films. How do zombies who move like, well, zombies, manage to take over the world? As was demonstrated in this the only way these things, which move like rejects from the Ministry of Funny Walks, manage to catch someone is if that someone stupidly manages to plonk himself in the middle of a crowd of them. How do these things, killed by a shot to the head, unable to open doors, climb ladders or drive vehicles … in fact things less capable with any kind of technology than a three-legged cow … how do they succeed against assault rifles, tanks, jets and flame throwers? It just makes no sense at all.

On top this logical hole there was plenty of plotting and directing silliness. In one scene we have someone bargaining for tools, in America, where every garden shed or garage would be full of them. In another our heroes have to cover themselves with zombie blood and guts to cover their smell, then walk along a zombie filled street to a place where keys were available for vehicles they could use to escape the city. Subsequently, after fleeing zombies and finally acquiring a truck, one of them breaks into and hot-wires a car for the other to drive to draw off the zombies. Well why didn’t he do that in the first place with one of the many cars parked nearby, where the zombies weren’t crowding? And how did anyone think that having these things stumbling around the streets making sounds I last heard on Monty Python could be anything less than risible I have no idea.

One first season we did enjoy, and that was Deadwood. I found Calamity Jane an annoying screw-up whose speech I mostly couldn’t understand, but the rest of the characters were excellent, and Ian McShane was superb. The whole setting was a grubbily believable depiction of the lawless West – the whole look of the thing just right, down to the details of clothing, weapons, tools, ways businesses were run, everything. Unfortunately I believe this was a series that fell foul of franchise renewal and terminates abruptly. Still, we’ll buy the rest of what’s available.

Another we watched was The Borgias. I vaguely remember the old series of this and how much I enjoyed the Caesar character and his pet killer and in this found them both a little disappointing. I also had trouble understanding what many of the characters were saying throughout the first few episodes. Whether this is down to my tinnitus and increasing deafness I don’t know. It may be that they’re trying to be more naturalistic in speech just as many film makers have been with their camera work – you know, the annoying close-ups and shaky camera shots. But after a few episodes I did get hooked and did enjoy it. It’s not quite in the class of The Tudors but certainly we’ll buy the next season.

Yesterday, after shopping in Sitia, my labours over the previous days started catching up with me, along with a temperature of over 30 down there and 28 up here. I was rather knackered so confined my work for the day to preparing spare ribs, which we’ve not been able to find here before. Today the temperature at 9.00AM was 22.9C whereas yesterday, at the same time, it was two degrees lower, so it’s going to be a hot one. However, I must get back to my keyboard and do another 2,000 words of the Penny Royal thing, which now stands at 102,721 words.

That’s all for now. Contemplating a swim.

A few patches of mould lifted some paint in the ruin over the winter so yesterday I went in there to wire-brush those areas and paint them. I knew the ruin had a guest behind the fridge from when I went in there before, and it was still there when I moved the fridge for painting. The cheeky thing has been living in the evaporation tray at the back of it, doubtless for the warmth. I caught him to show Caroline then, when I’d finished the painting, I put him back. Better to have geckos living in your house rather than those visitors with rather more legs.

Sunday 29th April
One could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve entered the age of the righteous fuckwad, what with smoking bans, minimum pricing on alcohol and taxes on hot pies, but you would be wrong. I submit that the urge to tell people what to do for their own good has been with us since the dawn of history, and always transforms into the urge to force people to behave correctly. We’ve always had those with us who get niggled by the thought that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves and that it should stopped. There should be a law. They should be taxed.

The latest wheeze (forgive the pun) is in the Netherlands. Righteous fuckwads there have decided to ban foreigners from cannabis cafes which of course, like all forms of bansturbation and just like the smoking ban, is just a step on the road to stopping that enjoyable, unhealthy and terribly terribly wrong activity. But hang on a minute, what are those running the cafes supposed to do? Should they put up signs saying ‘No English, No Germans, No French’? Surely that is discrimination on the basis of national identity? The basis of this latest bit of idiocy is that smoking cannabis is illegal in other countries. So, working with that basis … isn’t alcohol illegal in some countries? Will bars in the Netherlands soon be putting up signs saying ‘No Saudi Arabians’ or, since the ban on alcohol in such countries stems from their particular religion, should they ban Muslims from entering? Yeah, right.

Tuesday 1st May
There is, apparently, a debate across the world about the benefits of austerity as opposed to spending. There are those who feel ‘spending should be increased to boost business’. Yet surely that depends on who is doing the spending and what the money is spent on. Our governments cannot resist agenda-driven spending so we get ‘investment in green energy’ which means expensive, inefficient and heavily subsidized fucking wind turbines. It ‘invests in people’ (thank the Anti-Midas Brown for turning the word ‘invest’ into a joke) which means more social, down-the-toilet spending that fails to generate any wealth at all. By all means spend, but on shale gas, nuclear power, and emerging technologies like biotech, nanotech or … here’s a radical idea: since every pound paid in tax ends up as 30 pence by the time the bureaucrats and politicians have taken their cut, how about cutting out the taxes and leaving the money in the hands of those more competent at investing it?

I’m hearing a lot of sobbing going on at the BBC about the rise of right-wing parties across Europe. In France it’s Le Penn and in Greece its Golden Dawn (with a flag that looks like an amalgam of Greek key and swastika). How can this possibly be happening? I guess people are starting to learn the truth behind Margaret Thatcher’s, ‘Socialist eventually run out of other people’s money’. Of course the left is kicking up a stink too against austerity, but that’s just short-sighted self-interest – their wonderful response being, ‘Spent too much money? Spend more!’ While the far left is also gaining more support. The reality here is that all across Europe those who are not bored shitless by politics are looking at the main parties – usually centre left and centre right – seeing them perpetually screwing up and noting that you couldn’t slot a fag paper between them, and are looking elsewhere. The problem is that they are looking for solutions in more state control. Those like me who see ever-expanding government as the problem are heading down the pub.

Wednesday 2nd May
Enough of this ranting nonsense. Here’s how the beach looks by Revan’s bar:

Penny Royal stands at 82750 words so I’m steadily climbing back to the point I’d reached before excising all that stuff about Tuppence. Again I’d hit a wall and that point where Raymond Chandler would walk in someone carrying a gun. And, as always happens, the answer when it came to me seemed blatantly obvious, almost preordained. In this case the man with a gun has been supplanted by a vengeful prador Father-Captain in a wartime dreadnought because, in the end, Penny Royal did not just have dealings with human beings.

I just watched a delightful BBC news report about acid attacks in Pakistan on women. Of course the ‘I’ and ‘M’ words weren’t mentioned. Obviously, a fundamentalism that consigns women to second-class status and considers rape a viable response to them not walking about draped like Daleks under dust sheets, and considers stoning them to death a viable response to them being raped, has no effect on the attitude behind these attacks.

Sunday 22nd April
A guy called Dimitrios delivered our wood yesterday. He spoke pretty good English and along with my broken Greek we had a chat as we unloaded the wood from the back of his truck. He’s a prime example to dispel the myth of Greeks who don’t work hard enough. It’s a given that he’s chopping up wood and selling it to make a buck, but other things arose during the conversation. At one point he must have thought I was tiring and suggested I take a rest. Affronted I said in Greek, ‘I’m not old!’ This led in to some talk about his 50 year-old mother. Apparently they have something like a thousand olive trees and just he and her harvested their olives this autumn and winter. Now, I’ve done this job with a few other people on maybe twenty or thirty trees and, believe me, it took a week and was thoroughly knackering. Enquiring then about more wood I learned that he has a limited time to cut some, first because the fire season is starting so he cannot burn off the scrub and branches that are the inevitable result of pruning or cutting down trees, and secondly because he’s returning to his summer job at the Mikropoli hotel. There he will be working 15 hours a day because he’ll be doing the jobs of two people, for less money, and with the hotel owing him €3000 from last year. That, then, is the reality for a lot of Greeks now.

And another myth to dismiss: if you read any tourist publications about Crete you will learn that, apparently ‘cats are cool’ or that ‘Cretans love cats’. This is total bollocks. Most Greeks don’t like animals unless they can be used to hunt things or be eaten. If you see the cute cats down in the coastal bars you must be aware that they are only there for you, because the Greeks know that a lot of Europeans are soppy about animals. Next year there will be different cats because the ones you saw the year before were abandoned during the winter to starve or be poisoned or shot. Here in the village a local guy doesn’t like them shitting in his garden so he’s out on his balcony in the evening with an air rifle. Almost certainly he is the reason why it is a rarity for us to see any of the cats we saw last year. Now some local kids join him there to take part in the fun. Caroline saw one of those kids snap off a shot at one of the cats she was feeding, and now thinks it is probably dead.
(Update: he missed)

But really, one has to be realistic about this stuff. The cats are wild and they are fertile so is it a great idea to feed an animal that can produce two or more litters of kittens a year? You only have to do the math: a healthy male and female here can result in eight more cats by the end of the year. If half of those were female, then by the end of the following year the total would be 52 cats. If everyone was a kind-hearted cat-feeder here, this village would be overrun with thousands of them, every garden a cat litter, and many of them would be quite hungry enough to take on the local chickens. And really, the cats only love you because you provide dinner, and sometimes it is difficult to accept foreign definitions of vermin.

Monday 23rd April
We brought the Wii here with us from England have continued dancing for half an hour every day. This, on top of being a lot more physically active than I am there, has taken my weight down to 13 stone (on average – it was 12st 10lb this morning). I’ve also had to punch some more holes in my belt and 32 inch waist jeans would drop to a teenager-fashionable level without a belt.

Curious about how this related to my BMI I did a few calculations. If I wanted to have a BMI right in the middle of that 18.5 to 24.9 my weight would have to drop to 10st 11lb. This seems crazy to me – at that weight people would be offering to buy me something to eat. I would probably need 28 inch jeans and generally a whole new wardrobe. I then calculated for the top of the index at 24.9 and got 12st 0.7lb. This seems wrong too – through weight training and the like I carry a bit of muscle so surely that normal BMI is wrong for me. Then again, am I kidding myself? Have I been too much influenced by the opinions of those around me, most of whom who are overweight and in a bit of denial about it?

Whatever, I’ll continue aiming for my own particular index – call it the clothing index. If I am conscious of a gut and love-handles while I have my t-shirt tucked in then I’m still overweight. If I still feel the need to get out of jeans in the evening and into loose tracksuit bottoms or, as we call them round here, comfy trousers, I need to be a bit active and a bit less piggy. I’m close to being in that index now, so maybe 12st 7lb…

Tuesday 24th April
Wonderful day the day before yesterday. First we had flying ants coming out of the living room ceiling so I had to spray insecticide about and of course plenty of clearing up ensued. Later I stripped off the outer leaves of some lengths of bamboo I acquired, bagged them up and shoved them in the stove to get the fire going in the evening, since it still gets fairly cold here when the sun goes down. I lit up the stove but it just struggled – smouldering and igniting intermittently and blowing smoke out inside the house. We had to abandon house a few times and I spent time waving about large plastic blanket container to try and drive the smoke out. In the end, after one of the door glasses cracked, either because of a falling log or because of a vacuum created in the stove, I gave up.

Surely the stove pipes couldn’t be blocked since I’d run a brush through them recently (one I bought in England and had fun bending the rods to fit it in my suitcase since I haven’t been able to find one here). Was it because the evening was so still, because the bamboo was damper than it appeared, does bamboo simply not burn too well? The next day I ran the brush down the chimney and through the pipe running across the ceiling, loaded the stove with dry wood and paper and tried again. Not so much smoke this time. The stove simply kept going out and even firelighters wouldn’t burn. I was baffled. Maybe the pipe rising up from the stove, the one that never gets blocked, was blocked this time? I banged this a few times and listened to crap dropping out of it. I lit the fire about five times, banging the pipe every time. On the last occasion, and when I was about to give up, the fire flared into life and burned beautifully. Lesson learned then: never make assumptions about that last damned pipe!

Going back to that living room ceiling… It is original on the inside and very old: beams supporting bamboo, a layer of reeds then mud on top of that, which is just how roofs were here before concrete arrived. However, on top of that now is reinforced concrete and then tiles. I would guess that it is about two feet thick and I am certain that the ants must be living in that layer of mud. I’ve now decided I must finish a job I started five years ago. I began filling between the lengths of bamboo because I was informed that scorpions might be living up there and occasionally dropping on our heads. No sign of them, but the thing always sheds dust and if ants are now living in there I want to seal it off.

A few shots here of Sitia market here. There are about thirty stall like this loaded with local fruit and veg. In the second picture here the red net bags at the front contain snails.

Wednesday 25th April
After removing 18,000 words from the Penny Royal book a couple of weeks ago and reducing it to 70,000 words I’ve now managed to bring it back up to 88,000 words again. The prador Father-Captain slots in much more logically and story threads are sprouting from him like growths from a crystal dropped into a chemical garden (I’m trying to remember the chemicals used … the solution was egg-preserver as I recollect?). I will have to keep control of those threads, though of course the sheer nastiness of prador society and politics has its attractions and there’s still plenty of world-building to do concerning them.

It looks like it’s going to be a hot one today. The temperature was up to 19.2C at 9.00AM and the overall temperature for Crete is predicted to be 28C. The timing of this is pretty good since the Cabbiano (or Gabbiano depending on whether you take the spelling from their sign of their napkins) is opening today and we’re heading down there for a meal. I’ll be having paithachia meh skortho (garlic lamb chops) which became a particular favourite of mine last year.

Thursday 26th April
We popped over to a village called Agia Triada yesterday – beautiful displays of flowers:

Last year, the son of Yorgos – one of the brothers who run the Cabbiano – crashed his bike and broke his back. He had various operations here but, from the break downwards (it was in his upper back) he was paralysed. Last night we asked how things were with him and discovered that while work had been done on his back here it hadn’t been straightened up properly. As far as I could gather, two vertebrae, or two parts of a broken vertebrae weren’t lined up and where pinching the spinal cord. As far as I could work out further, the doctors concerned here were not doing their job properly. Stelios, another of the brothers, has a Bulgarian wife who organized for the boy to go to a private hospital in Bulgaria. There he was operated on in a private hospital, said operation involving a bone-graft. Within two weeks of that feeling was returning to the boy’s lower body and upper legs and there has been a steady improvement since. If he had not had the operation when he did he would have remained paralysed. The operation and aftercare in Bulgaria cost a total of €10,000. A similar private operation here would have cost €80,000. Greece has its version of the NHS. Considering the state Greece is in at the moment I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Fuck, flying ants coming out of another part of the ceiling right now.

Note to idiot BBC presenter: Chernobyl didn’t ‘explode’, it caught fire. Tosser.

I tried to take night shots with the camera last night because the entire valley in front of our house had filled with cloud. Most of them were unsuccessful, but these two are sort of okay.