Et In Orcadia, Ego
Did the Romans ever make it over Antoninus ?
Did their legions hike the Highlands, past the cirsium and pinus ?
Did they meet his high-king highness,
In his fiery hair and golden torc ?
And did they think this seaside-caesar woaded-rogue or hawkish-ork ?
So did the Fleet Agricolan heave-to in Scapa Flow ?
The orcas and the auks go by, but they don’t know.
Be Fruitful, and Multiply
The rain comes down and the flood breaks free
And ev’ryone dies, from Atlas to Russia
In the year 2348 BC –
Or so says Bishop Ussher.
And after the waters dissipate
Noah and sons and wives make eight.
The empty land is beckoning them –
Europe to Japheth, Egypt to Ham –
And Asia becomes the realm of Shem,
From Turkey to Vietnam.
So now that the land’s no longer wet,
Just how many kin will they beget ?
Well see, the Bible clearly lists out
Sixteen grandsons, thirty-six greats –
And these all boys (the girls are missed out),
To found the known-world’s states.
But such expansion cannot last long
Till plague and war and famine are strong.
So let’s say from here, things settle down
And nat’ral attrition soon appears,
And the time it takes to double a town
Is a hundred-and-fifty years –
In Ussher’s time, with coal and machine,
That’s the highest the world had ever seen.
So, taking his dating of when things happen
And taking that girls are as common as boys,
So fifty years later we’ll start our mapping
And tease some facts from the noise –
We’ve roughly a hundred, in all events,
And spread across three continents.
A cent’ry post-flood, or so James willed it,
The Tower of Babel raises its steeple –
But only forty-odd folks can build it –
That’s all of Asia’s people,
Including elders and babes-in-arms,
With no-one fishing or tending the farms.
Then God tells Abram to start his flock,
His chosen people set to thrive,
He’s having to choose from finite stock
Of just one-hundred-and-thiry-five.
Though he soon adds a son into the mix
To make it one-hundred-and-thirty-six.
In time, when Jacob’s family go
To Egypt – well, the dates allow
For Asia to have three-sixty-or-so
(Though down by seventy now.)
See, that’s how exponentials grow –
They end-up big but they start-off low.
Exodus – 1491,
(A shorter sojourn than modern lights),
And their descendants are on the run –
A-hundred-and-eighty-eight Israelites.
A count of six-hundred-thousand men ?
I think you’d better check it agen.
So, the Bible lists the male descendants down to the fourth generation (Noah’s great-grandsons). If we assume that none are left out (and given the already unprecedented growth rate of 5.42%, I think we have to assume that this is everyone).
If we assume that nobody died, and nobody moved around (except when Ham & Japheth initially upped-sticks), and that this takes fifty years. Separately, let’s also imagine if there was some natural drifting about to equalise the continents. Now, we can take these numbers forward using Bishop Ussher’s dates and a generous if just-about-realistic growth rate of 0.46% to get:
| Event | Ussher’s Date | HE Date | Years Later | Asia | Africa | Europe | Total | If equal |
| Flood | 2348 | 7653 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 8 | – |
| +50 yrs | 2298 | 7703 | 50 | 24 | 58 | 30 | 112 | 37 |
| Babel | 2247 | 7754 | 51 | 30 | 73 | 38 | 142 | 47 |
| Abram | 1921 | 8080 | 326 | 135 | 327 | 169 | 632 | 211 |
| Jacob | 1706 | 8295 | 215 | 363 | 878 | 454 | 1695 | 565 |
| to Egypt | 1706 | 8295 | 215 | 293 | 948 | – | – | – |
| Exodus | 1491 | 8510 | 215 | 787 | 2542 | 1218 | 4547 | 1516 |
| Israelites | 1491 | 8510 | 215 | – | 188 | – | – | – |
So, which figures to use ? I decided to go with the absolute ones, to highlight that when Jacob’s extended family trekked into Egypt, they took nearly a fifth of all Asians with them. I’ve also calculated the number of Israelites from these seventy founders, and it’s not quite the hordes that the Book of Numbers claims…
Soundtrack to the Revolution
Say you want a revolution ?
You wanna be a street-fighting man,
Raging hard against the masterplan ?
But violence is no solution –
However much the Man is to blame,
You’ll never beat him by killing in the name.
We won’t be televised
On Sunday bloody Sunday, between the barricades,
Or meeting with the new boss to lead the black parade.
You wanna be mobilized
By standing in the way of control
As the Eton Rifles take their bloody toll ?
You wanna fight the power ?
Then let the records turn turn turn –
For we are the Antichrist to make ears burn.
Cometh the finest hour,
Then lock up the guns & ammo – it’s clear
That we’ve gotta sing our way through here.
Fernando, can you hear the drums,
Rocking the free world, rocking the casbah –
Let’s sing for a year that we’re dreaming after,
Until the reckoning comes –
And the lost cause chord at last gives birth.
To give peace a chance, for what it’s worth.
Margarita Time
Cleopatra dropped a pearl in vinegar
To win a bet,
And watched her bead dissolve away to nothing
Without one regret –
Although in truth it must have fizzed a day or two
Before it’s done
And in that time she’d lost her land and lost her life
And lost her son.
And Rome, while once her lover, saw her lustre tarnish
Bit by bit –
For strip away her cultured beauty,
And she’s just a speck of grit.
Toxic
Poison and venom – the diff’rence between them
Is pedantry.
Biologists may take exception,
But only they should.
Most of the rest of us navigate life
Quite pleasantly
With a definition that’s still close-enough
To be good.
The Blacktop Jungle
Evolution has no use for wheels –
It walks, it never rolls –
Beyond a tumbleweed or spider
That the random wind controls.
For real life lacks our perfect strips
Of smooth and tarmacked roads,
These alien technologies,
These edges linking nodes.
Biology’s against it anyway,
Unless the wheels are dead –
For how can blood and nerves attach
To grow the spokes, repair the tread ?
Though germs can grow their flagellates
Upon an axle, loosely bound –
And they can drive by swimming,
Just by spinning tendrils round and round.
So give a million years or ten,
And life may well adapt
To these ribbons of oil and gravel,
If they haven’t been buried or snapped.
But while terrain is bumpy
And a bogged-down caster cannot trot,
Then legs will always run the show –
The world may turn, but life does not.
Auto-Desire
I remember watching the cars go by
From the back seat of my Dad’s Cavalier –
A rep-mobile, that would sometimes change
Into a Sierra, or something near.
I could name them all, down the motorway,
From the back seat of my Dad’s works’ Rover
By make and model, and sometimes trim,
And dreamt of driving them all twice over.
But when I left home with a job,
It didn’t come with its own Passat –
And I was living in digs in London,
Without a garage, and that was that.
Besides, there’s never any parking,
And what there is will costs me loads –
And if the Tube is crowded, well,
Then you should see the roads !
But still I eye the kerbside cars
Beyond the pay of my nine-to-five –
And fantasise which one I’d have,
If I’d only learned to drive.
Until my sensible shoes recall
The fossil fuels and rusting hulks –
And the boy inside with the brum-brum dreams
Just sits in the back seat and sulks.
Any Colour You Like, as Long as it’s Charcoal
When did cars become so boring ?
When did roads become less roaring ?
When did bland become okay ?
Paintjobs dull as office flooring –
Offered in a monochrome of grey.
Call it Silver, call it Graphite,
Brooding Shadow, Summer Midnight
Any guff that comes to mind –
But once we see them in the light
You’re surely fooling no-one but the blind.
White and black are offered too,
And boy, that’s really big of you,
But what will people think ?
Leary over red or blue,
And terrified of lemon, lime, or pink.
Remember – we were bright and fun
Before the mortgage and school run ?
Oh, we were colourful and proud !
The dial tuned to Radio 1 –
Not Archers, Proms, or Magic, not too loud.
The reason, I suspect, is that
Our Chelsea Tractors grew so fat
Our excess-baggage showed.
And so we dressed them down in matt
To blend in with the tarmac of the road.
And as a side-effect, we get
To hide the dirt and hide the threat
That purple-headed Greens advance.
So boring cars are worth it yet
To motor on in blissful ignorance.
The Sins of the Fathers
It wasn’t our hands
Which pressed the button, pulled the lever,
Signed the warrant, wrung the neck,
Or delivered the commands.
It wasn’t our hands
Which pointed the gun, swung the cleaver,
Stiffled a yawn, cleaned the fleck
Of bloodstain off our bands.
No, those were our fathers,
Our monsters, whose surnames we bare –
Names that echo everywhere,
Our shameful brands.
But we are not our fathers,
Despite all that we share.
We carry still their genes, their glands –
But not their hands.
If we had been where they were,
Would we have acted the same ?
Do they run deeper than their name,
Through our hinterlands ?
We’ll never know, though we prefer
To think that we would not have killed.
But we are here, our future in our hands –
Let’s use them now to build.
Tidal Locking
The Moon is locked into the Earth,
She only shows her best side,
Keeps her dark side turned away.
But the Earth has nothing to hide,
Beneath her gaze, we spin on full display,
For the Earth is not beholden to the Moon –
Not yet, at least –
And it won’t be soon,
For the Earth is a massive beast.
Yet the Moon is trying, trying,
And will yet succeed, one day –
But not before the seas have boiled away.
Now take a smaller star instead,
Like Proxima Centauri –
Very dwarven, very red.
But orbiting we see Proxima Bee –
A planet similar to Earth,
An eighth as close as Mercury,
With liquid water on its bed.
Except, to be precise,
More likely steam and ice,
With one side always baking dry,
The other frozen, dark and dead.
You see, when this close in, it does not spin –
But wait, that’s wrong,
We ought to say it has a year-long day,
Where the tide is strong.
Now let’s imagine orbiting round Rigel,
A super-blue, so hot and bright,
And though a massive mass, his heat and light
Outpace his gravity –
So if we were to move the Earth to where
We’ll get a decent share to keep it all anthropical,
To keep the Arctic icy and to keep the tropics tropical,
We wouldn’t be so deep within his spacetime cavity.
You see – we’d need to be about, say, twelve-times-Neptune out –
That’s over two light-days.
Our seasons would last centuries, our year now thirteen-hundred years
And all to catch enough, but strictly not too many rays.
And actually, the daylight would be rather dim, I hear –
As most of Rigel’s output, it appears,
Is in the UV band,
And not the visible so much, not that far out.
So even though it’s warm, no doubt,
The photosynthesis of plants now won’t get such a shout,
While all of us get super-tanned.
His stellar wind is vicious, but I think we could withstand
From this far off – but satellites may end in tears.
But at least we get to spin on our own gears,
So that’s a win.
Rigel hasn’t got a hope to lock us in !
As I understand it, a planet wouldn’t naturally form so far out from its parent star, as there’s not enough material. Of course, it could be a captured rogue planet or ripped from another star.
Also, I saw Rigel’s name written down in the astronomy books of my youth long before I heard anyone ever pronounce it, so for me Rigel will always have a hard G.
Meanwhile, you can catch-up some more with Proxima Bee over here, and see a cameo by Rigel thisaway.
Rhyming Couplets 