Yesterday I threw my legs over my crossbar, cycled to Chester railway station and caught the Holyhead train to Llanfairfechan – what a great name. Instead of walking up through this hilly town to do my usual ridge walk around the Anafon valley (used as the setting for my Left Luggage scifi book), I thought to catch a local bus to the village of Aber… where the famous Aber Falls are. Arrggh, there was a long queue of grannies, probably off to a knitting marathon in Bangor, so I walked the 2 miles to Aber and then on and upwards into the hills. My aim was to find where I’d gone wrong last time I came off Moel Llywtmor, ending up scrambling down a steep gully and slipsliding down a scree slope. I found a great upland forest trail that led me to the above scree slope and from that angle I could easily see the tracks in the limestone scree I couldn’t before.

 It can be rather unnerving traversing the scree if you haven’t a head for heights. Luckily, I had a walking stick – not one of those fancypants hitech poles, although I intend to get one – but a handy length of an Ash tree branch that I found in the forest and which I whittled with my penknife. I was amazed at how much it is easier to walk on dodgy shifting ground with a stick! I returned, not over Llwytmor this time, but via the North Wales Coastal path until it hovered over Aber vilage and then a steep downhill track. A fine walk taking in three waterfalls and stunning views of both the mountains and looking north, the Irish Sea, Anglesey and Puffin Island.

Back in the village, my legs and feet protested at the walk back to my Llanfairfechan starting point so I waited at the newish bus stop. I hate waiting. I read a Cycling World I’d brought with me and ambled about thinking of where my Xaghra’s Revenge subplots were taking me. After another 10 minutes I gave up and walked to Llanfair… The problem is that the footpath, and cycle path is actually alongside the busy motorway-like A55 coastal road. When I saw where a large vehicle must have ploughed across my path and dug up much of the grassy embankment I hobbled as fast as possible until the path digressed away from the dual carriageway. A bus rumbled up behind me and I waved at it. The driver said because of roadworks the Aber village has no buses at present from West to East!

A shock met me back at the Chester railway station. A note was pinned to my bicycle and someone had stolen my panniers! The note said: ” Sorry for the inconvenience. Your panniers have been removed for security reasons and are in the station supervisors office. They are in breach of the station security policy. ” Umm, did they really mean to say that the supervisors are in breach? Hah. No, my fault. I usually ride my mountain bike to the station but this time rode my road bike and forgot to remove the panniers first.  As I retrieved my bike and received a righteous ticking off to which I mumbled my apologies, I asked: “I don’t suppose your office is bombproof?” His look showed me he didn’t follow – bags, panniers = bomb containers. The reason why they shouldn’t be abandoned? Doh. The penny dropped… hah. Still my fault though.

Borders

I took two copies of my thriller, Escaping Reality, and two of the Escape Velocity (pure coincidental similarities in the titles even though maybe Jungian?) to my local Borders – a huge bookshop chain –  a few weeks ago. The store buyer wasn’t available so I had to leave contact details and a note. Today I popped in and finally met the buyer in person. She was friendly, sympathetic and helpful. She couldn’t take the EV magazines cos HQ is rationalizing to reduce the number of independents magazine publishers they have to deal with. But she gave me the name of a wholesaler they deal with who specializes in independent mag publishers!  If you want a copy of Escape Velocity then please visit http://www.escapevelocitymagazine.com the ebook costs less than a bus fare to anywhere, and the paper version is less than a hairbrush yet more satisfying  

She did take Escaping Reality. 10 copies on sale or return. I don’t know if they will sell them at the RRP of £7.99 or less. So that’s big news. They are the largest shop to take my book.
So if you are shopping in Cheshire Oaks, Ellesmere Port then pop into Borders and buy Escaping Reality!

If my editor at DDP is reading this, I’ve revised up to 2/3 of Exit, Pursued by a Bee. It is amazing that no matter how often we re re re revise a novel, we always find another phrase to improve – often by cutting it out.

 We tried out a satnav device today. We often get a bit lost finding a hospital in Liverpool. It is on Crown Street. So I punched in the address into the GPS device and we set off. I know the post code might have been better but it responded with a different street name. We were impressed with the way the nice woman’s voice directed us out of Chester – warned us that our opted route included a toll tunnel, then she shut up in the actual tunnel. Sadly, I didn’t know there are two Crown Streets in Liverpool and it chose to take us to the wrong one! So after annoying a Liverpool bus trying to squash us, I punched another road I knew of and the first instruction was: “Do a U turn.” Arrgggh – we were on a four-lane road in Liverpool where only taxis and bankrobbers do U turns! It did finally take us to the right place but you just know that the woman inside the box was being sarcastic and demeaning when she said: “You are at your destination. Everyone applaud.”

Every year so the Nelder two undertake a pilgrimage to London – partly to remind ourselves why we don’t want to live there, but mostly to replenish our thirst for knowledge at the Science, Natural History and British Museums, and to take in some shows. This time we met up with, Ray, my best man of 35 years ago, and Marion. If you need a peaceful meal in the bustling capital, try The Crypt under St Martins-in-the-Fields, not that there is a field for miles. The first show we saw was the musical Les Miserables. Victor Hugo would have been pleased. The Trevor Nunn version with Drew Sarich as Jean Valjean was perfect. The music brought back memories of my son playing the theme tunes on his clarinet for the Chester Schools Concert Band a few years ago and regaling European cities with them. On a spur of the moment  we opted to take in another show on Friday night. Cabaret. Rushing to the ticket sales we were able to buy two remaining seats in the stalls almost touching the stage.  This risky position puts us in range of any cunning narrator, and in this case it was the celebrity comedian, Julian Clary. No sooner had scantily clad young men and women cavorted about with erotic yet graceful dancing, then Julian encroached near the front and leered peered at us.  He pointed at one unfortunate man in the audience and asked if he would like to take home one of the pretty near naked girls, or a boy. And he asked the next man, and then ME!

“Any thing I can get, please!”

The hilarious act along with semi-and full frontal nudity had a poignant pathos as the Nazi 1930s German politics impinged on the story line. The whole cast stripped for the last scene – earlier it was in jolly sensuous fun, but in the end it was for the gas-chamber…. The applause went on and justifiably on. Sadly, I didn’t get to take one of the beautiful young dancing girls home but I did have a blonde on my arm as consolation.

We enjoyed a rotational ride on the huge Wheel known as the London Eye: the vision of David Marks and Julia Barfield, a husband and wife architect team. The wheel design was used as a metaphor of the turning of the century in 2000.  The top reaches 135 metres above the River Thames allowing us to a view of the horizon 40 km away. The journeys in the capsules are called flights and the 30 minutes journey felt like one.  The photo shows long shadows of people on the pavement below us. Why am I fascinated by long shadows!

Two science museum items amused me. I didn’t know that Rowntrees chocolate manufacturer created the Black Magic box of chocolates after they commissioned a psychologist. He interviewed and tested 7000 individuals and the average consumer wanted a plain black box rather than the pretty flowery or scenic choccy boxes generally found in the shops. I was a caramel disappointed since the display was next to the aptitude testing fitting shapes into the relevant holes test. I always liked to empty chocolate boxes and see how fast I could the diamonds, circles, and squares into their receptacles. And then eat the ones I got wrong!

I also liked the machine that tested for accident-prone employees. A rotating paper passed in front of the candidate, who had to mark the circles nearest a central line. The speed increased and the chances of hitting the correct circles became less likely. The idea is that if the candidate persisted too long in the test then they failed. This is because they were deemed to take too many chances on success and so were more likely to have accidents than workers who gave up easily! Umm, that’s me out then .

Today I hiked 14 hilly frosty miles near Llangollen. Brilliant clear anticyclonic skies allowed the sun to send shadows looming for metres across the grass. I’ve put some photos of the walk on my website

http://www.geoffnelder.com/gallery.htm

I forgot to take a book to the hospital today. I didn’t need one after all even though I waited for an hour in the audiology department for my replacement hearing aids. The Countess of Chester Hospital, like many,  has a nightmare parking problem. Of course the shunting and swearing is all amusement to me because I’m a cyclist – hah. The audiology department has no magazines or newspapers for the forgetful to read, but it has windows all along one wall overlooking a hospital carpark. Today, the carpark was full by 9:30 AM. So I was sitting with my cycle helmet under my chair watching, with a growing smirk, the carpark rage. To park at the hospital you have to buy parking tokens in order to get out again through unmanned barriers. Your car has to queue and wait behind an entry barrier before a computer decides there is a space for you – when a car leaves. So us deaf ones were watching an elderly chap – lets call him Victor Meldrew, after the TV grumpy but comical character. His car was in front of the queue waiting for a car to exit. He tried to cheat by exiting his car and waving at sensors, and he seemed to be putting a token – or bottle top – into the exit machine no doubt hoping for his entry barrier to then rise. Where he thought he could then park when all the places are full? His ruse didn’t work so he did a rage jig waving his arms. If only he could have heard the sniggering in the audiology department. Actually most of us couldn’t either and we were IN there! Ah, eventually a car decides to leave its parking space and head for the exit barrier. So Victor leaps into his car just as his barrier lifts and the electonic FULL sign flickers off.  Sadly, for him, the barrier waits only 2 seconds before it descends. Poor Victor had no chance. So he storms out of his car and does another jig, yelling something. We shouldn’t laugh really, but the compelling chuckle muscles out number the empathy sighs. The nearly deaf woman beside me can lip read but wouldn’t repeat the profanities. I can see what happened. Somehow an extra car must have tailgated another and snuck in an hour or so before but with no where legal to park has stopped on some pretty yellow painted criss-cross lines. So the computer believes the carpark is still full.

Victor has had enough and has either missed his appointment now, or prefers being ill. His reverse lights illuminate the front of the next car in the queue. No chance. There’s at least six cars and they cannot easily all reverse. But another parked car is leaving.. Hooray, but no. The man opposite me in the waiting room stands and excitedly points at another illegally parked car in the carpark. Nevertheless, Victor has put his car back into neutral and smoke comes out of his exhaust as it seems hes’ going for the greatest accelerated carpark entry in history.

“Mr Nelder!” yells a nurse. They all have to yell in here. “It’s your turn!”

“Oh no. Please nurse, let someone else go in my place. I want to see Victor do another rage jig!”

—————-

My agent has asked me for a paragraph to sell my sci fi Left Luggage on the agency website. My problem is that LL has an original premise known only to the few critique readers at the BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) and the handful of other agents and publishers who have read it. I have a niggle that if I broadcast the unique storyline that someone famous will scribble it down and I’ll have to remortgage the house to take court action – not that you can copyright ideas…

So here is the blurb I’ve come up with…

Left Luggage is more than a science fiction novel. Aliens are involved but you don’t see them. There is an original premise in this novel and the idea of it will shatter you – simple yet unheard of.M.Kenyon Charboneaux (award winning author and tutor) has this to say:Geoff Nelder has got to be one of the most remarkable and original thinkers in science fiction today. In Left Luggage he toys with yet seriously examines the concept of memory and the part it plays in making us who we are. Without our memories, we are not ourselves, so burdened with a past that affects our future; we are no one at all, in the sense that an infant is not yet an individual. The psychology of this tale is solid, the science is solid, the physics is solid and the story is tightly written and solid in its own right as literature, not just another genre novel. In Left Luggage, Nelder accomplishes the mighty rare and mighty fine feat of transcending genre without sacrificing good story-telling in doing so.

I’m not religious, but I’m still a jolly good person
Our local bishop has told us all for Lent this year to think of global warming and turn off a light bulb for a whole week.
So tomorrow I’m nipping around to the cathedral and unplugging the fuse box – he he.

Many congrats have been deluging my inbox over the release of our Escape Velocity magazine’s second issue. My first copy arrived today, and it looks fabulous.

 Today I trampled mud and leaves, dodged off-road cyclists and narrowly avoided a stampede by two horses. Yes, an exhilirating hike in Delamere Forest with Deb, a walking companion from a new promenading group in the Chester area. Delamere is mixed woodland with several meres (ponds), and the woodland tracks cross over seven old brick bridges across a railway that cuts through. We stopped on one of the bridges as a train rattled underneath. I waved at the driver, but judging by his face I have a horrible feeling he was expecting me to lob a brick at him instead of a helloooo. I saved the best bit of the walk until last – the cafe on the edge of the forest, but damn it, a house is there instead. I nearly knocked on the door and asked for two teas and toasted teacakes because I’d worked up a fair appetite.  A brilliant hike. Thanks Deb.