The Answer Is NO!

I'm Not Sure What The Question Is Yet

Give me a minute and I'll find something to be fretfully furious over.  You know me, ever ready to erupt in a volcanic rage at the failure to capitalise an initial letter, or similar.

     <short pause as Your Humble Scribe looks for offensive material>

     Aha!  Got it - Art?

     NO IT CANNOT!

     I've got no reason for saying "NO", just feeling contrary I suppose.  'Kids' should be in their rooms studying, not frittering their time away on games, and for those who say 'At least it means they're not out vandalising bus stops', if it's a bus stop that services First Bus then they have Conrad's permission to render it into iron filings.  Besides which, setting fire to the contents of letter boxes is a dying crime, everyone uses e-mails nowadays, so that argument won't fly either.  

     "But they could make a living as a professional games player!" exclaim the proud yet idiotic parents with £££ signs in their eyes.  O yes, the same argument that every unemployable chav comes out with about football: "I'm going to be in the Premium Lager and make millions a year playing the ballfoot game," at which point Conrad chokes on his loose-leaf Darjeeling thanks to malicious laughter.  Which fraction of a fraction of a per cent of these purblind idiots ever gets to be a professional ballfoot player?  0.0001 at a guess.  The statistics for a professional games player will be just the same.  Art!

1)   Don't start 2) Still don't start 3) Have you stopped starting yet?
4) Make sure you've stopped  5)  Stop starting

     In fact a professional ballfoot player might have a career that lasts from 18 until 35, whereas a professional gamer might (with luck) have from 14 to 21*.  Then what do you do?  Lurch unsteadily outside on atrophied legs, into blinding sunlight that punishes your eyes, to carry out long-neglected physical exertions - such as vandalising a bus stop.

     So, the answer is NO! just in case there was a bit of ambiguity there.

     <short pause as Conrad retrieves his Dog-In-The-Manger-Noodles>

     That reminds me.  Whilst I work from home in the Sekrit Layr, Edna likes to hang around on the off-chance that, perforce, a morsel or two might fall from my plate WHICH OF COURSE NEVER HAPPENS.  When she realises No Food Is Coming, she retires to one of a few Dog Nests she's appropriated, which is not quite Dog-in-the-manger, yet.  Art!

"No fuds?"

Here's One I Took Earlier

With my camera, since the Snip function wouldn't work, nor could I copy it, yet I had to get a copy because it would surely vanish overnight if Conrad left it.  Art!

     Quite.  Let me ponder here.  Either this picture is being symbolic, in which case we shall move swiftly along, or 'Gut Solution' are promoting cinnamon-coated bananas as a laxative.  Conrad likes cinnamon, and is moderately fond of bananas (preferably in a cake); I do not think the two in their raw state make a modern marriage.

Death From Above: Appendix One

Yes yes yes, I know we haven't finished the main item yet, be patient.  Or what?  Or my fingers will dance o'er the firing button of the Remote Nuclear Detonator in a manner akin to Rachmaninov, that's what!

     ANYWAY as you should surely know, we were discussing meteorite impact upon your our green and pleasant planet, and Conrad found a location reference to "The Last Train", a splendidly bleak post-apocalyptic television series from ages ago.  Art!

Obviously, Something Bad has happened

     To be brief, a bunch of passengers on a train accidentally get put into suspended animation when one of them, the butterfingers, drops a can of aerosol sleeping gas.  When they awake, they first think mere weeks, then months have passed.  Sorry, no, fifty-two years.  This means everything is derelict after civilisation has collapsed, thanks to an apocalyptic asteroid strike (our DFA reference here).  Since they are near their destination station, they decide to walk there.  How did the crew create a derelict Sheffield train station?  Obviously they used a derelict Manchester train station: the mysterious missing Mayfield Station.  Art!

     The series was made over twenty years ago, yet the mise en scene is strongly reminiscent of a derelict railway station, which is what it is.  No need for elaborate sets, set dressing or props when you have the real thing right in front of you.  Art!

Redolent of rusty red rails

     Interestingly enough, "The Last Train" has never been released on DVD, which makes Conrad chuckle as he remembers having video-taped it when broadcast.

More Downer For You

Yes, back to "Tormentor" and Luma is being as gentle as he knows how with the new arrival, which is to say not that gentle.

To break the ice, he began giving her a picture of the students and campus in the staffroom, over tea and biscuits.

               ‘We have a very wide catchment area.  Council sink estates, leafy affluent suburbs, and everything inbetween.  So you get a mix of students.  Not all of them are here because they want to study, either, so don’t expect all your classes to be committed to gaining A grades.’

               Laura’s big brown eyes expressed surprise, as Louis had expected – almost predicted.

               ‘Really?  Why not?’

               ‘Ah, thereby hangs a tale.  Some want to get the Education Maintenance Award in addition to whatever jobs they have in real life.  A significant number of the Muslim girls are here to put off any commitment to marriage.  You get students here because their mates came here and no other reason, or because the courts imposed a sentence with education as part.’

               The young woman wrinkled her nose.

               ‘Oh.  I see why the Vice Principal wanted me to have a mentor.’

               ‘Where did you teach before?’

               ‘The Grange.’

               Louis pursed his lips and nodded.  The Grange was a CofE school in Cheshire that selected only the crème de la crème of applicants, cherry-picked primary school children guaranteed to get fistfuls of GCSE’s at A, if not A*.

               ‘Hey, they weren’t all little angels there!’ retorted Laura to his unspoken criticism.  ‘In fact some of the little sh – swine – were as bad as any kids you have on ASBO’s here, middle-class hooligans who knew daddy wouldn’t ever bother to criticise them.’

               ‘Well, any irreducible problems you have, refer them to me.  I have the reputation of being a nasty barky little man, willing to chew students off at the ankles.’

               A little nervously, Laura laughed at him.

               ‘I did hear a rumour that the students are scared of you because they say you use magic.’

               Flinching back in exaggerated surprise, Louis passed a hand over his brow in mock-tragic fashion.

               ‘Alas!  I am undone!  My secret is out!  Yes, I sacrifice a white cockerel at the front of the podium in each lecture.  Seriously, you don’t believe that, do you?  That’s one of the other things about a student body like ours, rumours travel around it in no seconds flat.’

     Okay okay okay, it's not all heart-stopping horror.  Can't have you scared all the time, can we?

Finally -

Back to our old chum the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse, which is being decommissioned shortly, for one, because it's reached the end of it's design life, and for two, an institution known as the 'Dover Strait Traffic Separation Scheme' now means marine traffic stands further out in the Channel, so the Royal Sovereign shoals are less dangerous.  Art!

     Can't say goodbye without an image of the old lady standing on the seafloor courtesy of a WAVES Remotely Operated Vehicle.  Art!

     And with that, Vulnavia, we are most certainly done.

*  Figures completely made-up with an element of guesswork