Nigel Gordon

The impact of day boats fishing out of the South West harbors has been very bad. One fisherman interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning had not been able to get out to fish since the first week of December, most have been unable to get out since Christmas. These are not the big industrial trawlers (most of which come out of the East Coast and are not affected) but the small one and two man day boats.

However much it was he must count it as worth it to get his mistress into the opening ceremony.

Thursday was interesting, I was watching the Team Figure Skating, they had the Men's Figure and the Pair's Figure elements on Thursday and it was shown on the BBC Red Button. This was clearly the first transmission that the Russian TV feed had done with a live audience. It the early part of the transmission there were a number of long shots which showed the audience in the background and one kept getting glimpses of the Rainbow Flag in one form or another. As the transmission went on the shots got more and more tightly focused on the skating and the incidence of the Rainbow Flag became less and less until it was completely excluded.

The problem is not so much the rise is sea level, that could be dealt with by increasing the sea defenses, the problem is with the extreme weather conditions. In the Somerset Levels the water has not come in from breached sea defenses but it is run off from the land, the drainage systems that are in place just can't remove the water fast enough to prevent flooding. The irony is that the very system of flood defenses that have been built, like the raised river banks, are now holding the flood water in the flooded areas. The climate is a chaotic system. One of the basic rules of chaos theory is the greater the magnitude of input into a chaotic system the more extreme the behavior of the system will be, increased temperature is an input into the climate system so it is going to get more erratic. There is no way we can within any reasonable period, that is less than two centuries, reverse the current climate trends. In fact it is quite likely that within the next twenty years we will see a tipping point reached with failure of the Northern Tundra Carbon Sinks and a massive release of methane gas. What we need to do now is to recognize that weather patterns which once were considered extreme are likely to become the norm and we have to find ways live with them. In England that means we are going to be facing stronger and more frequent Atlantic Storms with resultant flooding. Where the Atlantic Storms meet up with Arctic air masses we will see exceptionally heavy snow, fortunately that has not happened so far this winter. There is though still time.

This is a remarkably well told story by a remarkable author. Well worth reading.

Unfortunately the best way to save the majority of the properties might be to let some be lost. The Somerset Levels are the natural sink for the whole of the Seven/Avon system. It is only in recent times that extensive flood protection and drainage systems have prevented large scale flooding of this area. The systems were designed to prevent everything but a once in a hundred year flood, the problem we have now is that the weather extremes we have due to climate change are making the hundred year event more like a ten year event. It is not economic to protect areas like the Levels from events like this, they will happen and we must learn to live with them. That will mean redesigning a lot of our communities and our homes. I've lived in Holland where it is impossible to get insurance against flooding. At one point I lived in an area next to the Maas which was very prone to flooding. The house I lived in was designed so that in the case of a flood it was quick to clear up and get back into an inhabitable state. It's an approach called flood-proofing. I was flooded and forty-eight hours after the waters had receded, I was able to move back in. My landlord had come round with a high pressure jet cleaner and washed out the whole of the ground floor. Everything below the one meter fifty level was designed to be flood resistant, even to the kitchen cupboards being made of treated hardwood which would not absorb water and swell, so they only needed to be jet cleaned. We need to stop trying to beat nature and start to think of how we can live with it. A small start would be for all those on the high land who have paved drives or yards to take up the paving and replace it with absorbent alternatives so the water can soak into the ground and not run off and increase the surface water washing down into the flood plain.

I have no objection to readers downloading my stories to their local device provided it is strictly for their own use. Actually I rather appreciate the fact that a reader will go to that amount of trouble to be able to read my stories.

Maybe we should not be surprised given the amount of "perfect body" imagery that turns up in the gay press. Looking at a couple of high street gay magazines it appears that for any gay boy there is one of two choices, either muscles, muscles and yet more muscles or boobs and a drag outfit. Youth generally today is body conscious to an extent that seems mad but gay youth are particularly hit by this. How much do we help in our writing when we give the description of our heroes, so many of them seem to have a perfect body?

That is something well worth remembering.

Today, the 27th of January is Holocaust Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex by the Red Army. I would ask you all to give some time today to remembering the horror that man and do unto man. In remembering I would ask you to remember those who went to the camps and are generally forgotten: The Roma The Sinti The Jehovah Witnesses The Lutheran Pastors who spoke against the Nazis The Political Opposition The others who did not fit into Hitlers idea of a perfect race. And above all the Gay men and women who because of their sexuality were sentenced to Execution by Labour. They were given jobs to do which it was known would kill or seriously injure them. Now is a time to remember.

I started this topic after reading the first four chapters, I have now read the whole lot. All I can say is this is one of the best stories that I have read and it is also one of the best insights into the minds of those who survived the Japanese camps, both civilian and military, that I have come across and I have read a lot in this field. If you haven't read this story then you should.

If you missed this novel because it has been published all in one go in Newest Completed Novels and not bit by bit in Current Serial Novels, you are missing out on some great story telling. This is well worth reading and is Mihangel at his best.

This story is just getting better and better, I thought I had read all of Chris's work but this is one that I had missed and I am pleased to see it appear here. This is Chris James at his best.

Perhaps it's my more conservative nature, but this kid's life just got tagged with details that will never go away. If he changes course and goes to college or applies in the world of business outside the porn industry, there are pictures of him out there everywhere being paid for sex. Regardless of 'right and wrong' people are people (read idiots) and this won't ever go away. I am not sure if it is your conservative nature or an intrinsically Anglo-Saxon social prudity, whilst the Anglo-Saxon world tends to take a dim view of anybody who at anytime has been involved in the sex trade other societies are far more comfortable with it. When I was working in Germany and had to vet CVs for job applications it was not unusual to find that students had worked in porn film to pay their way through University and would openly put this on their CV. The attitude tended to be, so the kid is showing incentive and a willingness to work. That was over thirty years ago and I hear now that they are now taking a much more Anglo-Saxon attitude but might it not be better if we took their attitude.

A friend of mine has recently left teaching after over 20 years. She got a First Class BMaths and that resulted in a number of offers of jobs in the City of London carrying high salaries. However, she wanted to teach so did her PG Dip in Education and qualified as a teacher in the late 80s. She subsequently worked in state secondary school in one of the poorer areas of the West Midlands. One of her students in now a Professor of Mathematics and five, that she knows of, hold positions in University Maths departments. The school where she taught has for the last 15 years been constantly above average in exam scores for mathematics and has had a higher percentage of students going on to do A level maths. In recent years she has found herself in a constant battle to teach mathematics to her students rather than fill them with enough to get through the examinations. To do this she ended up having to run an out of hours school maths club two evenings a week and maths workshops during the holidays. At the start of the Autumn term she phoned me in desperation at the latest set of changes to the system. She was totally fed up with the amount of paperwork and administration she was being faced with, the last straw for her was when she was required to do a risk assessment on her students to assess if they were at risk of stress because of the level of study required for the course they had opted for. She worked out that for every hour she was teaching she was doing five hours administration, so she has resigned. She is now working for a City bank at four times her salary as a teacher and working far less hours. If we want people to teach we should employ teachers, if we want people to do paperwork we should employ clerks.

Well, I have read an early version of the sequel to Wicked Boys I think there is no problem with the style. Freethinker, it is your writing, it is your style, we read it because we like your style, stick with it.

So long as you don't want an editor, a job at which I know I am crap, I'll beta-read for you.

This is a story by Chris James, need one say more.

Does that mean that if I come to Arizona I can burn Christian Fundamentalists in my Wicker Man, I have a fundamental religious belief that this is a sacred duty that benefits the world.

This is the first time I have come across this writer, I must find more of his work to read. This is powerful writing done well.

This, I must say, is not the easiest story to read. At times you find yourself wondering where it is going but where it is going is well worth finding out. To say more would be to give too much away so I won't except to say read it, it is worth the effort. http://www.awesomedude.com/bi_janus/short_stories/outside_in.htm

I sometimes think that maybe we are concentrating too much on making a gay point in our stories, might there not be more scope in writing that reflects compassion and tolerance whether that is in a gay context or not?

There are some I have read where the footnotes are better than the novel, take Terry Prachett's Discworld Series, the best part is often the footnotes.

This was read by three readers and the editor, they all raised questions about the meaning of certain terms and suggested that I explain them. It was a choice of adding the endnotes or putting explanation in the text, so I decided on the addition of endnotes.

Have just read the final chapter of this and it has just got better and better as it has gone along. Well written and well structured, the two don't always go together, this story leads you onwards through the development of the lead character's mindset but it also contains some surprising twists. It is one I would recommend everybody to read.