TADS #26:Finsbury Park to Hampstead (or Down at the Old Bull & Bush).

"In Finsbury Park near a puddle of piss, I'll give you a goodbye kiss" - The Tiger Lilies.

At the end of the TADS 2016 season, and then again at the end of the 2017 TADS season, I'd declared that we'd had our best year of walking so far and only modesty prevented me from making the same claim for 2018's adventures. If you write and curate the walks yourself you'd look a right pompous old oaf if you announced to the throng that these had been the best walks ever. That's for them to decide.

I'd certainly enjoyed them though. From spring strolls along the Wey in Surrey and the Itchen in Hampshire, a Chiltern challenge that took us from Wendover to Berkhamsted, a historical (and A4 heavy) tour of the dreaming spires of Oxford, autumnal excursions that took us from Newhaven to Lewes and from Gravesend to Rochester, and a fairly lengthy yomp over the South Downs from Hassocks to Hove (and not forgetting our aborted two day trek from Wareham to Swanage and then on to some very windy rocks) we'd certainly seen a variety of different terrains, different weathers, different pubs, and different curry houses.

So it was with a sense of sadness that the season was coming to an end. But also a sense of joy. The sun was shining brightly in the November sky and I'd arrived in Finsbury Park with so much time to spare that I could both enjoy a cream cheese bagel from the Happening Bagel Bakery and witness someone getting arrested. 

I lingered outside the Arsenal club store (barely able to recognise any of the players these days) and I was joined by Pam, Shep, Adam, Teresa, Neil, Bee, Eamon, Rachael, Kathy, and new inductee Valia. Kathy and Valia living reasonably locally to the area I was keen that at least some of the sights and stories of the day would be new to them.

Once quorate we wandered out, over Stroud Green Road, on to the wide, grassy, expanses of Finsbury Park as the brown, and fallen, leaves crunched under foot. The boating lake looked autumnal bathed in noon light and I found a spot to address my throng.

Finsbury Park has been the site of gigs by acts as disparate as Jimi Hendrix, The Damned, Madness, The Mission, Bob Dylan,The Sex Pistols, KISS, Pulp, Oasis, New Order (both Kathy & Shep had seen that particular lot at Alexandra Palace the previous evening), Rage Against The Machine, The Stone Roses, Arctic Monkeys, and Queens of the Stone Age.

But its history as one of London's great parks, of course,  goes back further. In 1841 the people of Finsbury in the City of London petitioned for their own green space and twenty-eight years later, in 1869, they got one several miles north. So Finsbury Park the area is named after Finsbury Park the park. A park which might have been called Albert Park (the Victorians seemed to name everything either aftse their queen or her husband) and one which appeared carved out of the large expanse of Hornsey Wood. During WWI Finsbury Park was known as a location for pacifist meetings but by the time of WWII it was being used as a military training ground and hosted anti-aircraft guns.

We crossed the train lines and then picked up the linear Parkland Walk which we'd follow for somewhere between two and a half and three miles along the route of the former railway line between Finsbury Park and Alexandra Palace. It's said to be home to 22 species of butterfly, hedgehogs, foxes, bats, muntjacs, and slowworms but we only saw cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, skate ramps, climbing frames, and a disused railway platform.

Oh, and a spriggan. Or at least a sculpture of one made by Marilyn Collins in 1993 based on the legend of the ghastly 'goat-man' who is said to have haunted the walk in the 70s & 80s and who some say Stephen King's short story 'Crouch End' is based on. Some say the spriggan sculpture inspired the story but as the book appeared thirteen years before the spriggan that seems a little fanciful.

Certainly now, the Parkland Walk seems a much safer place without any goat-men and a great idea that other parts of London and the country could learn a lot from. May not be the safest place to walk alone at night, mind!

On reaching the end of the Parkland Walk we come out into Highgate, past the Boogaloo pub (which appears to still serve Harp), where I used to attend wonderful pub quizzes and once met an unsurprisingly sozzled Shane MacGowan, before we continued uphill towards the rather beautiful Highgate Wood.

This stretch, like that of the Parkland Walk, makes up part of the 75 mile circular route they call the Capital Ring (just half the length of the London LOOP), and it was so pleasant that the Capital Ring may become a future walking project.

Highgate Wood, a place I once went 'foraging', was originally part of the Forest of Middlesex which made up much of north London, Essex, and Hertfordshire and also an area where, thanks to charters granted by Henrys I & II in the 12c, 'citizens' could hunt stags, boars, and bulls. Most of it fell into private ownership but some parts remain. As well as Highgate Wood there is the recently visited Harrow Weald Common, Scratchwood, and St.John's Wood whose names reflects its later ownership by the Catholic military order of St John of Jerusalem/the Knights Hospitalier, based variously in Jerusalem, Malta, St Petersburg, and Rhodes. These walks may all be in SE England but they are often truly international.

We saw a couple of squirrels in Highgate Wood but alas none of the 71 species of bird that have been sighted there, nor any of 7 species of bat, the 12 of butterfly, 180 of moth, or 80 of spider. Passing briefly through suburbia our next point of interest was Cherry Tree Wood. Shep and Valia got coffees in as I regaled the troops of how this area was once known as Dirthouse Wood because that's where they'd deposit the horse manure and 'night soil' (that's a euphemism for human manure) that was left on the streets of London. Less ickily Mutton Brook rises here before flowing in to the Brent and at Brentford, obvs, Old Father Thames.

We were now in the borough of Barnet and we stopped briefly to admire the art deco tube station (one of Charles Holden's, you won't be surprised to read) and to take photos of it (the excellent black'n'white one is one of Pam's and both hers and Bee's have contributed to this blog for which I, as ever, thank them).

Less architecturally impressive, but far more moneyed, is The Bishop's Avenue which we'd follow for a mile or so to the edge of Hampstead Heath. These are houses for the very rich - and, for the most part, the very tasteless. They call it Billionaire's Row and it's considered the wealthiest street in London (residents sneer at Buckingham Palace) and one of the most expensive in the world (only streets in Monaco, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills compare).

There are mansions built in the style of English country houses while others ape Greek, Roman, and Egyptian classical styles. In January 2008 the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev bought the Toprak Mansion for £50,000,000, the House of Saud sold ten houses on the street for £73,000,000 and Heath Hall was put on the market for a cool £100,000,000.

Former residents include the Sultan of Brunei, Richard Desmond, Poju Zabludowicz, Billy Butlin, Gracie Fields, and Heather Mills but, of course, many of the properties sit empty. A travesty as people starve and freeze in cardboard boxes only a mile or two away. Many, too, are registered to tax havens like Curacao, Panama, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands. Have a look at our bright Brexit future and make your decision. Come to The Bishop's Avenue and put a few windows through or choose your cardboard box.

After a brief bout of Class War we finally reached a pub. The Grade II listed Spaniard's Inn is believed to be haunted by various ghosts and crops up in Bram Stoker's Dracula (Van Helsing and his crew rest here after a hard day's vampire hunting on the nearby heath) and Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers. Both Joshua Reynolds and Byron (as well as, according to my friend John Higgins, various Pythons and Pink Floyd members) used to drink in The Spaniard's and Keats wrote Ode to a Nightingale in the garden. I offered to read it but the skies had opened up and we'd decided on a 'two pint mistake', something Adam had 'threatened' earlier to celebrate his new job.

On a clear day, which we were, by now, not enjoying, it's said you can see across to Windsor Castle but The Spaniard's Inn is an impressive enough building in itself. Believed to have been built in 1585 at the entrance of the Bishop of Lanchester's estate with a 1755 boundary stone in the garden and a quaint, yet sturdy, toll house opposite (built 1710 and also listed) which causes the traffic to narrow to one lane.

The rain was not improving, and by all forecasts was not going to improve, so an executive decision was made. We'd had a good day, nobody fancied getting any wetter, and the light was also against us. I ceded control of the walk to Kathy and we cut out the circuit around Hampstead Heath I'd planned (one for another day? Another walk?) and even miss out on The Old Bull & Bush pub which the walk had been named for.

"Come, come, come and make eyes at me down at the Old Bull & Bush. Come, come, have some port wine with me" sang Florrie Forde to holidaying cockneys escaping the smog over a century ago but we wouldn't be drinking port wine in the Old Bull & Bush and nor would we be taking in the views of London from Hampstead Heath, seeing the pergola, or admiring Robert Adam's Kenwood House.

No, we'd be getting wet, slipping over (poor Rachael - I hope she's written the incident up in the TADS accident book) and making haste to the wonderful, and very busy, Holly Bush pub to make like those holidaying cockneys and start drinking like it was already Christmas (most of us anyway, Kathy sensibly abstained - clearly taking her new duties very seriously).

During our first drinks there seemed to be no spot in the pub we could stand where we'd not be in someone's way but, eventually, a table came free and we settled in for what could only be described as a session. A motion was put forward to rename TADS as PTADS (in appreciation of Pam's great achievement of, like Shep and myself, walking every mile of every TADS walk in 2018) and we discussed the best walks, pubs, and curries of the year before the conversation turned to talking absolute bollocks and we headed off to Woodlands for Indian veggie food, bidding a fond adieu to Kathy, Rachael, and Eamon along the way.

Normally I take a photo of the food to complete the blog but such had been the alcohol consumption by this point that I clean forgot. I'd been looking forward to veggie food in this fine establishment which I'd visited before but I can barely comment on what the peshwari naan, tarka daal (shared with Valia), or pilau rice (nicked off Pam) was like as the booze, and assorted 'other nonsense', had ruined my appetite. I can vouch for the fact that the toilets were nice though.

One ruined meal is a small price to pay for a great day out, and a great walk with great friends, though and it was a pleasure to announce that the first TADS walk of 2019 will take us from Gomshall to Dorking via Holmbury St.Mary and will be called, unless I can think of something better, 'Friday Street, I'm In Love'. It'll be in March and it'd be great to see everyone again.

Thanks to all the people who made the 2018 TADS season such fun (that's Shep, Pam, Adam, Teresa, Neil, Eamon,  Bee, Kathy, Rachael, and our debutantes Tina, Colin, and Valia. Thanks too to the car lot (or, indeed, the train lot) who popped out to say hi to us along the way or join us for drinks and food. That'd be Darren, Cheryl, Tommy, Rob, Tony, Alex, Grace, Izzie (all twice), and Susannah, Neil W, Bugsy, Carole, Dylan, Naomi, Maya, Zachary, Stephen, and Jhan.

Here's to 2019.

Eat Y'Self Fitter? Unwell in the World of Wellness.

"You are what you eat" they say, whoever 'they' are, but that's not really true is it? I mean, it affects who you are but so do many many other things and if you spend too much time worrying about your diet, anguishing over nutrition, there's a good chance you're doing yourself far more harm than you are good.

That was the gist of Pixie Turner's Wednesday evening talk for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, the provocatively titled From 'Wellness Wanker' to Wellness Rebel in which Pixie related her own incredible and fascinating story of falling into an Internet rabbit hole of dietary fads, clean eating, veganism, and, for the most part, complete and utter bullshit, as well as how she came to see through the lies and con-tricks and turned her life around to become a fully qualified nutrionist who uses her large social media following to promote common sense and debunk the huge amount of disinformation disseminated online.

Pixie proved to be a great public speaker (not put off by either a crying baby or a barking Staffordshire bull terrier) and she had a very interesting story to relate but what was most remarkable, and best of all, was that her story was one that involved her admitting she was on the wrong path, that she'd been duped, and that she was brave enough to open up about this and change direction. It's a lesson many of us could learn from.

Pixie wasn't the only speaker at the event either. She was joined by Dr Britt Hermes whose story had taken a similar, perhaps even more worrying, arc. Britt had studied naturopathy in Seattle and on graduating had designed something she called 'the Right Detox'. All of which works to give the illusion that naturopaths are doctors but they're not.

Their bedside manner and their simple, but useless, solutions easily entice their 'patients' to part with their money but they don't do anything to improve the same patient's health. So the patient ends up both screwed financially, still ill, and now burdened with a whole load of food anxieties they could do without.

A lot of Britt's talk drilled down on, and exposed as nonsense, things I didn't (and still don't) really understand, stuff like applied kinesiology and IgG food allergy testing, but the focus on food anxiety ties in neatly with the stuff Pixie had been speaking about earlier. In many ways I saw Dr Hermes' talk as a supplementary vitamin to the hearty main meal that Pixie Turner had served up earlier.

The story begun with a nineteen year old Pixie Turner being identified as having an abnormally high cholesterol level. As a teenager she didn't want to start a life long course of statins as her endocrinologist had recommended so she did what many of us do now and employed the services of a particularly untrustworthy quack. Everybody's frenemy, Dr Google.

The first thing she tried was the I Quit Sugar programme by the unqualified Australian Sarah Wilson which unsurprisingly didn't make her feel any better at all, nor improve her cholesterol - which doctors had advised may well be a hereditary condition that she can do nothing about (except take statins) anyway.

So she turned to the wellness bloggers and their alkaline diets, plant based regimes, and anti-gluten missions. People like Madeline Shaw, Natasha Corrett, and (Deliciously) Ella Woodward and then, inspired by these charlatans, went one step further and reinvented herself on Instagram as Plant Based Pixie. There's a picture of her posing with some avocados as if to prove just how much she loves those plants. She soon picked up a sizeable following and it seems likely the fact that she is a blonde, attractive young woman didn't exactly hinder her progress.

First she cut out all animal products. Then she cut out gluten. Refined sugar followed. As did soy. So much had been removed that she needed to start adding things so in came the 'superfoods', wheatgrass, juice cleansers, and Spirulina, a drink so vile that my companion for the night, Vicki, said it made her throw up instantly - and Vicki rarely struggles to get her drinks down!

Because of her huge online following, Pixie was getting all these foods and nutrients for free but she wasn't admitting that online. She was pretending she was paying for them - and that wasn't the only untruth she was peddling. She found the food challenges she was setting for her followers (eat nothing but raw food for a whole month etc;) impossible to complete herself but she was, at that time, happy to lie to Instagram about it.

When she looks back on those days she finds herself particularly repulsed and angered by some of the hastags she used. #eatclean and #detox being particularly ugly, nasty slogans that are essentially meaningless but serve only to increase anxiety in her followers and propagate eating disorders.

She'd host events for like minded people so they could validate and enable each other and, at first, she felt a bit better for her new diet (something she now realises probably had more to do with starting to attend the gym regularly and cutting back on the booze) but, soon enough, her anxiety began to rise exponentially, she was always tired, she suspected she'd developed a B12 deficiency, and she had virtually no social life whatsoever. A fairly upsetting state of affairs for a young woman away from her family and studying at university.

She identifies her condition as being something called 'orthorexia nervosa', a "unhealthy obsession with healthy eating", and she made the case for how the language we use for food ("you are what you eat", "I've been bad, I've eaten chocolate") can be judgemental and plain wrong. You're not what you eat, eating chocolate isn't bad, in fact it's great, and clean eating means very different things to very different people. Mostly it's a term that people use to assert their superiority. If I eat clean I am clean which means you must be dirty which means I am better than you.

On a trip to Australia to luxuriate in the bubble she'd created for herself with other fad diet pushers she heard one single sentence that pulled the blinkers from her eyes:-

"I would never dream of vaccinating my kids".

If her fellow travellers, her friends, could think something as shitty and dangerous as this then might a lot of the other ideas they're proposing and propagating also be absolute rubbish too? Is this all crap? Have I bought into a load of self-serving and very dodgy bullshit?


Pixie Turner started reading skeptical websites, educating herself, and, after a not inconsiderable period of cognitive dissonance (she'd built an online persona on the back of this and by renouncing it she was opening herself up to losing friends, trolling, and, as we sadly know with the Internet, a lot worse), she got a Master's degree in nutrition at UCL.

Now she bases her writing, she's managed to retain a pretty healthy 120,000 Instagram followers, on facts not fear. She enjoys pizzas, burgers, chocolate and she listens to her body. She eats when she's hungry and she stops eating when she's full up. She now views the wellness industry as something not dissimilar to a religious cult. A place where other adherents reinforce your beliefs and behaviour and one where you're ostracised should you dare to lose faith or, worse, became a critic or apostate.

During a heartfelt Q&A session, hosted by both Pixie and Brett (while bouncing her baby to pacify her) we were able to hear some of the personal motivations (anger for Pixie, guilt for Brett who as a former naturopath had told cancer sufferers not to undergo chemotherapy) for the journey they were on. It was enlightening, educational, and emotional. At one point I thought I saw a tear developing in Dr Brett Hermes' eye and at one point there was certainly one in mine. Another great evening from Chris French and Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub.

Thanks to Vicki for joining me for this evening and then joining me for a not inconsiderable debrief in the taverns of Greenwich afterwards - and thanks to Goddard's pie'n'mash shop for providing me with the lovely, tasty, and, yes, healthy food I enjoyed beforehand.

There's a Ghost in my Mouse:How the Occult Informed the Dawning of the Age of the Internet.

"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in" - Anthem, Leonard Cohen.

Tuesday evening I found myself in The Miller pub, the south east London outpost of the London Fortean Society, surrounded by a full house of boffins, geeks, nerds, the plain curious and a man dressed up an elf. My kind of people, for sure, and they were all there to hear Al Robertson deliver the wonderful, weird, and witty talk When the Light Gets In:The Occult Roots of Computing.

It would be a talk that would take in everything from The Grateful Dead to St.Paul's Conversion on the road to Damascus, Antonin Artaud to Brexit, via Steve Jobs to Tron. At times there were so many different strands to it that, like the world of computing itself, it became a little bit difficult to follow exactly where we going but in Robertson we had a more than capable guide who spoke in layman's, rather than technician's, terms and gave the audience plenty of opportunity to ask questions if there was anything they weren't sure about.

Robertson is a proud cyberpunk author, a cyberpunk apologist as  he refers to himself with tongue in cheek at one point, who has published two novels. The first, Crashing Heaven, deals with an accountant of the future, a psychotic virtual ventriloquist's dummy, and the sentient corporations who persecute these protagonists. Its sequel, Waking Hell, focuses on how a dead estate agent is the only hope we have left when the human race is attacked by the past.


So he's an imaginative guy and, during the hour long talk, he gives free rein to that imagination but he's also done ample preparation and, equally important, research. His stated aim, as well as taking us on an unorthodox history lesson and a journey into the souls of the machines we use as much as they use us, is to assert that cyberpunk is "the transcendental wing of science fiction".

The talk was broken into three sections:-

(1) Cyberpunk is digital mysticism

(2) Home computers are engines of transcendence

(3) Science is the magic that works

....but I'll try my best, and this is not a subject I am even close to being an expert on - a keen hobbyist barely suffices, to collate it all in to one whole and give you a feel of the overall sweep of the evening rather than drilling down too hard on any individual points. If you want them buy his books or go and hear him talk.

Robertson was keen to get across that the morality of cyberpunk should always be that it opposes power, and that it never reinforces it. It pokes a stick into the machines and subverts technology so that it can be used against the rich and powerful. Or at least it's supposed to. Now, in the days where the giants of the Internet age, the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Twitters, have more power than small countries it's becoming increasingly difficult to make a case for the Internet as a tool for freedom and liberty.

Antonin Artaud, the French avant-garde theatre director, died in 1948 long before the Internet was a glimmer in Tim Berners-Lee's eye but he was the first to coin a term we now associate with the modern world of computing. Virtual reality was utilised in Artaud's productions to create an alchemical transformation where the real and the virtual, the actors and the audience, undergo a shared 'hallucination'.

Robertson described this as a form of 'contained magic' that we now see in many shows that may not be expressly labelled cyberpunk but, in their essence, very much are. Examples were given:- Star Trek, CSI, The Matrix, and The Lawnmower Man (dismissed/praised as "the best bad film ever"). The Master Contol Programme in the 1982 movie Tron represents, contended our speaker, "the gnostic God of Tron" and it did seem that the roots of computing owed more to gnosticism, a Christian heresy that rose many centuries ago in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, than the occult as such.

In Pat Cadigan's 1991 novel Synners, a character named Virtual Mark uses the Internet to move from the physical realm to the spiritual plane, a similar arc to the storyline of Tron, and in William Gibson's Necromancer we can witness an AI become fully self-aware. There is a growing belief now that our mobile phones are so advanced that they are capable of emotion and feel sad if we don't look at them often enough.

But if, and let's be honest - it's a big if, our phones are becoming human and we are giving huge parts of ourselves over to computers do we need to be aware of what other creatures lurk in the depths of cyberspace. An exploration of other planets, the depths of the oceans, or unchartered jungles would be fraught with danger and so it is, say those who love thinking about this kind of thing, when we go deep inside our computers.

We could meet people like ourselves in there, sure, but we could also come into contact with hugely advanced creatures in this digital realm and some of them may have divine power. It sounds fanciful but it's no crazier than any other religion. During voodoo ceremonies it is said the voodoo gods ride their human hosts like horses and, to use just one of Al Robertson's examples, Facebook too rides us just as a voodoo deity would.

It can be a smooth ride (wish this person a happy birthday, share this memory) or it can be a rough ride (Brexit, Russian interference in the 2016 US election, or the nefarious work of Cambridge Analytica). Philip K.Dick died in 1982 so the Internet as we know it now was still in its incubation period but he still managed to develop a deep distrust for the material world and this was reflected in his writing. His characters could be both real and/or virtual, or even dead and/or alive at the same time. It made for confusing and paranoid prose but it also represented an attempt to break the chains that tie us to our physical forms and liberate our souls.

Donna Haraway, author of 1985's Cyborg Manifesto and the more recent Making Peace with the Cthulhu Scene, took the idea that we have become trapped by our own invented Gods one step further and proposed a theory that we, ourselves, are the collective demiurge and that not only did we create our world and the conditions in it but we are self-destructive gods intent on obliterating our host environment - the planet Earth. Take one look at climate change and our seemingly insatiable desire for weaponry and war and you have to concede she's got a point. At the very least she's using our very real, and very precarious, existence to tell a story that blends the real and the virtual in a manner worthy of the very best of magical realism or, indeed, cyberpunk.

You may be thinking by now this sounds far more like a load of old hippy shit than anything remotely punk - and you'd be right. Most of the pioneers of idealistic computing and of "psychedelic libertarianism" came out of 1960s San Francisco and it was one of them, Douglas Engelbart (born in Portland, Oregon but very much a man of the Bay Area) who invented the first recognisable home computer. One with a mouse, a screen, a keyboard, and even the possibility of hyperlinks. Something you can see I've made good use of!

Although Engelbart was a fairly straight guy, his buddy Stewart Brand was a far more leftfield proposition, he was mates with The Grateful Dead for a start, and the two of them worked together to make computer technology a tool that could enhance people's lives and enable them to live peacefully on communes. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1972) featured product reviews and articles about holistic therapies, self-sufficiency, and ecology and when this finally went online in 1985 as the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) it found a disciple in Steve Jobs thus providing us with a neat linear path from the hippy era to the high-tech era, a path so well trod now that nobody doubts its existence.

The WELL informed not only Steve Jobs but the entire idea of what online communities would look like. Former cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow went so far as to publish A Declaration of the Independence in Cyberspace in 1996. Sixteen short paragraphs which contained this call to arms:-

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather".

Fighting talk for a hippy but what the techno hippies had overlooked was that their idea of freedom was not everyone's idea of freedom. They'd looked around at their friends and fellow travellers, mostly male, mostly white, mostly rich, and created a freedom that worked for them and, probably unintentionally, oppressed others. They certainly left many behind as they set off to explore bold new frontiers.


The French venture capitalist and astronomer Jacques Vallee is credited as being the inventor of the IP address and if being a venture capitalist isn't enough to ring alarm bells then the fact he had also been involved in CIA remote viewing experiments should be. Vallee was another computer pioneer but what he was pioneering wasn't technology as an enabler of a Utopian lifestyle but technology as surveillance.

It's unclear as to how much morality informed his work but he's certainly a fascinating character who I'd like to learn more about. The practice of using remote viewing, or ESP, for militaristic or other purposes is now widely discredited but it gave Vallee the germ of the idea of how IP addresses could help us navigate our way round the then nascent, hazy, and metaphysical space of the Internet.

Vallee saw divine intervention and ufology as, essentially, the same thing and he regarded St Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus as the first recorded example of UFO contact with the human race. Again, it may sound crazy but it makes more sense than a lot of the nonsense in the Bible.

The last section of the talk was pretty much a quick roll call of other historical movers and shakers that blurred the line between technology and the occult/divine/gnostic. We had Jack Parsons (the rocket scientist who pretty much founded NASA but blew himself up in his own garage trying to create a moonchild with L Ron Hubbard, much to the consternation of Aleister Crowley), we had Isaac Newton (in his time considered primarily an alchemist who dabbled in a bit of science), and we had John Dee, described as "a major league wizard" but also, possibly, history's first management consultant. The firm he was consultant to was the court of Elizabeth I and his innovations resulted in the concept of the Royal Navy and, ultimately, the creation of the British Empire.

If a sixteenth century occult philosopher, sorcerer, and lecturer on Euclidean geometry can have played such a pivotal role in creating an empire then surely it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that esoteric beliefs, occult practices, and good old fashioned twaddle have helped inspire the rise of the computers?

Al Robertson is, of course, an author of fiction and there were times when he was exaggerating for comic effect just as there were times when he teased the narrative towards an arc of his own choosing but, despite that, I think he was telling a story he really believes in. I believed some of it and I was skeptical about other sections. But, one thing's for sure, I bloody enjoyed the trip he took me on and, unlike the trips coming out of San Francisco in the late sixties this one only lasted an hour and was fuelled by nothing stronger than two pints of Pilsner Urquell.