My Fascinating Life – Tony Ballantyne

Sacrificing the alien

I was going to post this last week but I was too excited by the Artemis launch…

The first time I went to Spain it seemed so alien.

It was the first place I’d ever flown to. Stepping off the plane I was hit by a wave of heat: I didn’t release that the climate would change so much in just three hours travel (in those days it took a lot more than three hours to travel by train to London from my home).

I didn’t know anything about Spain. Beyond such basics as adios and gracias, I didn’t know the language. I didn’t even know everyday words like salida, cerveza and chorizo.

The food was unfamiliar, the meals were lacking warming carbs, they didn’t come with potatoes, two vegetables and gravy. You didn’t order your drinks at the bar; you sat at a table and waited for a waiter to take your order.

But it was the heat that I remember above all else. The way the day was turned around, so you stayed inside at midday and went out at night, you closed the curtains against the sun and opened them to the stars. My three thick jumpers stayed in the suitcase for all ten days.

But that was a long time ago.

I’ve just got back from a week in Tenerife. You might have seen on the news that the island was lashed by storms. We were on the south of the island so we didn’t get anything like the trouble up north, mainly just a lot of rain and the occasional lightning storm.

But now the tables were turned, my Spanish friends.

As you stood in doorways holding out your hands to feel the raindrops, we happily strode out in our raincoats. As you shivered in the night we put on the jumpers that we still bring with us as we’ve never managed to break that habit.

We were feeling quite smug until the sea flung a bunch of jellyfish at us as we walked along the front. I took a picture of one (you can see it attached to this post) and sent it to my friend. He said it was actually a Portuguese man o war and very dangerous. Bearing in mind they now seem to be engaging in aerial attacks I’d say he had a point.

Things were quite light hearted to begin with. But then there were the power cuts, the loss of water. Roads and schools were closed, emergency shelters were set up for the homeless… Whilst we were on holiday eating salted sea bass, the locals were adapting to extreme events.

At the end of the week we flew back to England. It seems a bit heartless to say it, but we had a good time despite all the troubles the locals suffered. Essentially, we did our best to make what was happening around us normal, we related it all to our everyday experience. We sacrificed the alien for the sake of comfort.

Don’t judge us. You would have done the same.

How it works

Last night I did something I haven’t done for over fifty years. I watched a moon rocket take off.

I’d forgotten just how exciting it was.

I only just remember seeing the moon landings. I was three years old when my parents woke me in the middle of the night. They brought me through to the little black and white TV in the lounge to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I was tired, I wanted to go back to bed, but my parents refused. They said I would remember this. They were right. I don’t remember very many other things from that age¹.

I quickly grew to love rockets, though. They were on the television all the time, both real ones and pretend ones like Thunderbird 3. Everyone I knew, it seemed, had the Airfix Saturn V kit. I knew (or I thought I knew) everything about rockets. I was surprised, watching the TV last night, just how much the presenters were having to explain. About countdowns and separation and launch delays.

But of course, people nowadays don’t have the advantage of Ladybird books, in particular ‘How it works’ THE ROCKET². I went and found my copy this morning. There’s a photograph of it at the top of this post. This is a book from a very different time, when six year olds were expected to read about Newton’s third law of Motion (see page 8).

Looking back, it seems as if they were launching rockets every week in the early 70s (I know they weren’t, but I was very young.) I quickly got bored with launches and discovered other things to be obsessed with, like trains and lego.

The trouble was, space exploration was an every day thing to me. It had been part of my world for as long as I could remember. Literally

But watching Artemis II lift off last night, I remembered just how exciting rockets were. There was the countdown. Countdowns are exciting, every writer knows that. Even Mr Spoon knows that. I watched on and off throughout the evening, watched the astronauts being fastened in, listened to the back and forth at launch control. I was there for the breathless pause at minus ten minutes when it looked as if things weren’t going ahead, I felt excitement at the resumption of the count…

And finally, the lift off. Watching that ship climbing into the sky (it seemed to rise much faster then I remembered) the sheer visible power of the thing, the thought that four people are leaving our planet… I was surprised how moved I was. I’d forgotten what it was like.

I remembered why I became an SF writer

Every so often I’m reminded that we live in the age of miracles.
I wonder how long it will be before we take it for granted again?

I do remember the BBC News leading with the Beatles breaking up. I’m not sure I knew who the Beatles were at the time ↩︎
If you like Ladybird books and you live near Cambridge you might want to visit The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists Exhibition ↩︎

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Newton Aycliffe: The Town of the Future!

There’s an article in the Guardian about my home town, Newton Aycliffe. The shopping centre is owned by a billionaire businessman. Over half the units are empty, the ones remaining are mainly owned by the big chains. Local shops are left to die.

This wasn’t really news to those of us who came from Aycliffe. When I was growing up it was often said that the rents for shops in the town were higher than those in Oxford Street, London.

I wrote about Newton Aycliffe in Midway. The ownership of the town centre wasn’t the only example of a monopoly. You can read in that book how television aerials weren’t we allowed on roofs and so we had to rent televisions from the same company. That company owned a huge TV mast at one end of the town, it funnelled BBC and ITV to homes via cable. The picture quality was poor, but if this was your first television, how were you to know that?

This was the 1970s. There was no internet, many people didn’t have cars. Our closest big towns were Darlington and Newcastle. All we knew of the world came from newspapers, television and the radio. And books of course. My mother was the town librarian. All we knew was what was all around us, and so that seemed the natural order of things.

Looking back on my childhood it seems like I grew up in one of those towns you get in SF movies. At first, a seemingly idyllic place, but things aren’t what they seem. There are dark forces at work, hidden in the background. Walk by an open door and you get the occasional glimpse of something strange lurking in a room. You see mysterious trucks rolling along the railway at night, there are lights in the sky…

Newton Aycliffe was supposed to be the town of the future. Quite an appropriate place for an SF writer to grow up in, I suppose. When I was a child I imagined aliens and evil supervillains everywhere. But as you’ll see from the article the truth is both far more mundane and ultimately depressing.

As is so often the case, something built with the best intentions ends up being exploited by those whose only motivation is profit.

‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 | Communities | The Guardian

Customer Service

I spoke to the bank the other day.

Well, I say spoke. I was messaging a chatbot. I asked to speak to a human, and got put onto someone called James (I’ve changed the name, you’ll see why later on).

James was not a good customer service representative. His mind was clearly elsewhere. He didn’t read my questions properly, he just posted standard answers based on the first couple of words I wrote. He was so unhelpful I began to suspect that James was just another chatbot, and I said so.

James took offence to this. He said that he was real human, and I should have known that as he’d introduced himself as James. He then spent some time trying to justify his previous answers.

The conversation became increasingly petty with James trying to score points over what he thought I had said (he still hadn’t read my questions properly). I thought about just ending the chat but with patience I eventually got the answer I needed, I said thank you and goodbye and broke the connection.

I could imagine James turning at that point to the person next to him and complaining about me. I certainly wasn’t happy with his attitude.

Two minutes later the satisfaction survey arrived.

Do you know what I did then?

Nothing.

I might not have liked James’s attitude, but I like these surveys even less. Maybe James was having a bad day. Maybe he was overworked and I was just one call among many. Maybe I was a little tetchy having to speak to a chatbot and I was a little short with him. Whatever the reason, a bad conversation is not the worst thing that can happen in a day.

I hate the way that every transaction nowadays is reduced to a five star rating and a comment. Those surveys aren’t about improving the customer experience, they’re a way for our corporate overlords to keep us workers in our place by turning our fellow proles against each other.

I’d had a tetchy conversation, nothing more. If I really wanted to complain about James, then I would have complained properly. There’s something really rather pathetic about firing off one of these surveys after the event as a way of exacting revenge.

Anyway.

I just heard that Gordon Goodwin has died. That’s a sad loss. Amongst other things, he was the leader of Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, one of the great modern big bands.

I’ve written this listening to his Big Phat Christmas. Why not give it a try?

Three stories from my fascinating life

This week my wife and I finally watched the last episode of the TV series Edge of Darkness. We watched the first five episodes back in 1992 but were away in Paris visiting a friend when the sixth episode aired. We returned home to find our flat had been burgled. The video recorder containing the tape with the last episode was one of the things taken. How times change. Nowadays we can watch the last episode when we please using catch up.

The BBC have been repeating the series over the past three weekends on so we finally caught up on Sunday.

Was it worth the wait? Definitely. Here’s a link to the series that should work if you’re based in the UK. I’m aware that the majority of this blog’s readers are in the US. If someone can drop a link in the comments (if such a thing exists), that would be great.

Thinking about video recorders makes me feel old, though not as old as standing in a shop last night whilst my wife bought a new laptop. The (admittedly very helpful) assistant went out of her way to explain to us how computers worked and how easy they were to use. She finished by asking my wife what she was going to use it for. My wife has been using computers since the 80’s when she learned to program. Nonetheless, she smiled sweetly at the assistant and said she hoped to use it to email her children.

Lastly, let’s talk about avocados. The first one I remember eating was when I started work and my flatmate prepared us avocados and prawns for dinner. I watched her eating and copied her as I wasn’t sure what to do. Which leads me to when I was in a cafe today with a friend.

The waiter apologised for the fact they had run out of avocado substitute and only had real avocados available. This cafe prides itself on its ethical approach to avocados (I don’t have any strong opinions about avocados, but it’s a good cafe) but it did make me wonder, why did they have real avocados? It would be like a vegetarian restaurant running out of plant based burgers and so offering beef ones as a substitute. Why would they have bought beef in the first place? And who would they expect to buy it?

Anyway, I’m off to eat guacamole dip while watching youTube on my iPad. Until next week.

Reflections on 37 Years of Teaching and Retirement

This summer I’m retiring as a teacher after 37 years. As my wife points out, I’m only retiring from teaching, I will still be employed as a musician and a writer (which should be good news for Penrose fans).

I’m proud to have been a teacher. The following is an extract from my leaving speech.

I was reading in the paper about the crisis in British schools. It might surprise you to learn that there is a shortage of teachers, that schools are underfunded, that buildings are crumbling and class sizes are growing. It might also surprise you to know that the article I’m talking about was one that I read back in 1988, the year I started teaching. Things have always been bad.

Back then I was given a £1250 bursary to train as a Maths teacher (I think I spent it on a keyboard and a pair of walking boots)

That wasn’t why I did it, though. I’d spent two summers in the US teaching fencing on a children’s camp and it was there that I realised two things:

First, teaching was great fun

Second, teaching is probably the most important job in the world. Helping people to grow into responsible adults capable of listening to both sides of the story, teaching them how to control their emotions and to learn to forgive and forget is always going to make a bigger difference to the world than any book or song.

Which is why I’m so proud to have been a teacher. It was an incredibly hard job when I started, it’s much much harder now.

And yet this what we have chosen to do. And looking around the staff in this room right now I think you were right to make that choice, because when I think of all the things happening in the world right now I genuinely believe you are the only people between these kids and chaos. I’m convinced of that now more than ever.

So well done all of you

And good luck!