Small synchronicities

I have a few further coincidences to report. They are nothing like so spectacular as the ones in the article about the green men, but even small synchronicities seem worth recording.

Red Dwarf
I was sitting on a bus recently thinking about the many outside errands I had planned for the day, when I suddenly remembered that this was the day that all of the episodes from one of the later series of the TV science fiction programme Red Dwarf were being shown. 

I didn’t want to miss anything – I had seen this particular series only once before - so I decided to go straight home after visiting the first shop on my list and save the other tasks for another day. 

Just as I made this decision, someone in the seat behind me started whistling the Red Dwarf theme song:

“It's cold outside
There's no kind of atmosphere
I'm all alone, more or less
Let me fly far away from here…”

I didn’t like to turn round and see what sort of person might have picked up and reacted to what I was thinking about, so now I will never know who it was who read my mind!

Reading and thinking in synch with the TV
I wish that I had made notes of the numerous occasions many years ago when I was reading or thinking about something only to hear the same word or phrase synchronously being spoken on the TV.

It happened so often that I came to think of it as normal.

It is still happening.

For the first time in many years, I started to think about someone I used to work with. He once made a ‘T’ sign with his hands and told me that it was a way to ask for time in baseball. 

Just as I remembered this, someone on the TV made that same sign. 

I was just reading “Open your eyes” in a book when I heard this expression on the TV. 

I have started to record recent occurrences of this phenomenon. Any more really good ones will be reported on here.

Sir Terry Pratchett R. I. P.

Sir Terry Pratchett has died. There will be no more Discworld novels and no more stories about his witches.

Reading and writing about certain fictional modern-day witches can be depressing and demoralising, especially when they remind us of people who have injured us in real life. Terry Pratchett’s witches provide a pleasant, entertaining and amusing contrast: their sayings and doings lift the spirits of and bring enjoyment to his readers.

I quoted some extracts from his books a while back, and added some thoughts of my own: there is something about his evil elves here and some of his wise words about magic here.

Goodbye Terry, and thank you.

P. S. I saw Terry Pratchett once, and we exchanged brief smiles! 

It was in Hampstead, in north-west London. I was walking past some shops to the bus stop and saw him sitting with someone at a table outside a café. 

His appearance is distinctive and he was a trustee of a charity in the area, so it was definitely him.

Mary Webb’s legacy: curse or coincidence?

Stella Gibbons wrote Cold Comfort Farm as an antidote to and comic parody of a certain type of fiction: the rural novel as written by authors such as Mary Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. 

I have never been able to see the attraction of what is known as the ‘Loam and Lovechild School of Fiction’ myself  - not even Thomas Hardy’s books have the power to hold my attention – but when I read in an article I found online while researching Stella Gibbons that Stella once expressed her regret to the writer Michael Pick that she had parodied Mary Webb "because she had such an unhappy life", followed by “This was perhaps oversensitive. Webb had, after all, died five years before the publication of Cold Comfort Farm. Her life, though dogged by illness and depression, was by no means without happiness, and her childhood, compared with Stella's, had been idyllic”, I became curious about Mary Webb and decided to investigate further. 

I read the biographies The Flower of Light and Mary Webb, both by Gladys Mary Coles, and the novel Precious Bane, which is generally considered to be Mary Webb’s masterpiece.  

I found some familiar scenarios in Precious Bane; I decided to produce this article after reading about what happened to Mary Webb’s husband after her death.

Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy: a major unseen influence

Out of all of the many works of Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy is the one that I like best. 

I first discovered it at the age of 12 or so. This story educated, entertained and inspired me; it sank into my subconscious mind and some years later influenced the course I took in life. I still occasionally go back to it, and I find it just as enjoyable and moving now as I did when I first read it.

I like the descriptions of life on Jubbulpore, capital of the Nine Worlds. I feel relieved when Thorby, the young hero, escapes from the regimented, restricted, custom-ridden, ship-bound life of the clannish Free Traders, which is my idea of hell. It is an anomaly that he had more freedom in his previous life as a beggar than he did as a high-ranking member of that closed society. 

I feel for Thorby when he experiences the cold wind of fear, when he feels some sick twinges because people he cares about have gone away forever and when he feels lost once more. 

I envy Thorby his string of benevolent mentors, father figures even. His abilities are recognised and he is educated and rigorously trained accordingly.

Older women are there to help him just when he needs it, and he gets some useful briefings from young people too. He has people to tell him the score, to explain what is happening, to show him how to look at situations objectively and put his life into the context of various societies. 

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VII: Charlotte Brontë’s Martin Yorke

Of all the characters in all the Brontë sisters’ novels, Martin Yorke, who appears in Charlotte Brontë’s socio-historical novel Shirley, is my favourite.

Shirley (1849) is set in rural Yorkshire in 1811/12 against a background of industrial unrest, of violent opposition to the introduction of machinery in the local textile industry. 

Charlotte Brontë intended Shirley to be a counterpoint to her first novel, Jane Eyre, which was considered to be melodramatic and unrealistic. Shirley was to be political, significant, true to life and, in her own words, “real, cool and solid, as unromantic as a Monday morning.” 

Similarly, Martin Yorke is far from being a dominant, dangerous, glamorous, smouldering, rugged romantic hero like the demonic duo of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester. Martin is nobody’s fantasy ideal man: he is a funny, greedy, clever, mischievous schoolboy who in my opinion is worth more than both those bad Byronic boyos put together. 

Martin Yorke is only a minor character in Shirley, but the scenes I most enjoy in the book are the ones that he appears in. His antics and sayings remind me not only of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky, but also of people I have known in real life. Charlotte Brontë modelled him on the brother of a close friend of hers.

The Three Hostages: a sinister scenario

I was very young when I first read John Buchan’s thriller The Three Hostages, an adventure story that features Richard Hannay and contains a fascinating mystery to be solved.

At the time, certain expressions that would now be considered ‘politically incorrect’ and offensive did not register, nor did I see anything particularly noteworthy in the horrific mental state of the hostages and the unpleasant, alien conditions in which they were forced to live. At the time, the clues to the hiding places of the hostages and the challenge of finding and freeing them were the most gripping aspects of the story. 

The details of life as lived by privileged, well-connected people were very interesting too. I found the book exciting and informative. I envied Richard Hannay: I wanted that sort of action and lifestyle for myself!

Now, after many years of investigating unseen influences, it is the references to magic, wizards and the stealing of souls, the discussions of psychology and the subconscious mind and the descriptions of hypnotism and mind control that are for me the most significant aspects of the book. 

As his friend and colleague Sandy Arbuthnot says to Richard Hannay:

“…the compulsion of spirit by spirit.  That, I have always believed, is to-day, and ever has been, the true magic.”

There is a lot of general information in The Three Hostages about the sinister and unethical practices mentioned above, and about the attributes, abilities and personality of the kind of man who would make use of them.

Now, what holds my attention above everything else is the effect that these practices have when applied to the hostages, also the details of hostages’ lives while in captivity.  Much of this has relevance to the real world; some of it is also very familiar to me. The resemblances that I can see and the connections that I can make to my own life are very painful to dwell on. 

Diana Wynne Jones: two alarming coincidences

I have written about some connections I made between certain scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s writings and events in her life. 

I doubt whether she ever realised that incidents she had created and dwelt on in her imagination had manifested in the real world. 

Diana Wynne Jones is another matter. She did notice a connection between what she was writing about and unexpected, unwelcome incidents in her life. This example comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:

“… And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.”