20 Questions with Ian

[sam]

Then, one fine day, I was dead for a brief while

?
Did your life flash before your eyes?

What do you expect to see when the credits really do roll?

[finestre]

Sadly not. Nor were there any rotoscoped end credits. Possibly someone, somewhere knew it was just a dress rehearsal and wasn’t yet my time, because I have a request in for end credits. Really slow ones, because I want to read every single name, even the minuscule footed SFX guys and guyettes (guyatrix? this gender thing is harder than they make it seem). I’m hanging on in case there’s an end-credit scene and I’m an aficionado for producer credits. I’m sticking around while they sweep the popcorn from under my feet.


A tiff with a Toyota. I just want to say that I won. I lived, the Toyota went to the scrapyard in the sky (or probably Windham pound) and I didn’t, though I’m told it was touch and go. I’m told. I only remember being airborne and then lying there wet – soaked – and wondering why, because it wasn’t raining, which made no sense and I distinctly remember being quite annoyed by the situation. It seemed very, very wrong to be wet when it’s not even raining. With hindsight that was blood and when it leaks in that volume, your heart stutters and stops, and you brain has to admit ‘that’s all folks.’


I don’t remember anything after that. I know it involved an helicopter because I got the bill and cardiac arrest because my chest hurt more than anything else, and anything and everything else was competing in the hurting olympiad. I was told my heart stopped several times and didn’t restart until they got my volume back up in the hospital. I was lucky, they said. To be honest, if I were lucky, the car wouldn’t have hit me in the first place.


I think there’s supposed to be some profound learnings. I’m obviously infinitely grateful to a bunch of people I never got to thank and to whom saving my life was just a job. I got a reasonable settlement which went to charity and I regretted that for more than a few lean years, but don’t now, and perhaps never really did. I should probably be annoyed by the driver, who was in rush to get home for Monday Night Football, but mostly because it was American football, and come on, if there’s a sport to die over, it’s not that one. I’m not. We all make mistakes and we all do stupid things. If we learn from them, it’s enough.


I did get to scoot around in a wheelchair while I relearned to walk, experience the surly inconvenience of a second-floor apartment, but it wasn’t all bad, having your head held together by 147 pristine bright blue stitches in the best halloween costume ever and I couldn’t have timed it better.


I suppose it left me with a sense that today might always be my last, not in a bad way, or a crazy way that made me want to do stupid shit like bungee jumping. Just an appreciation that we have what we have and how much I would have lost if I’d died that evening.

[sam]

Not having got the memo about the angry sun, or randomly looked out a window at the time, some of us have only bitter memes about aurora b's recent visit.



How about you? Did you catch the show? (And should I have overcome my misgivings about constructing a segue involving going into the light?)

[finestre]

I got the memo, somewhat late on Friday evening, and I did duly venture into the garden, anticipating a sky speckled in colourful sherbet. Some craning of the neck convinced me there was a vague pink and purple tinge to the sky, though that might have just been the distant Cherenkov glow from Croydon centre. I live on the side of a steep valley, in a house hemmed by trees, so have a limited sky to gaze up into, Montana this is not. There’s a better view south down the valley though sullied with the blazing light of an estate in the valley bottom that seems to be competing with Gatwick for the attention of arriving planes and the fifty gigawatt security light that seems to be rehearsing The Rapture on the far side of the valley. So that’s all I saw. I’m counting this as a win, but it wasn’t the heavenly coruscation I’d hoped.


Indeed, do not go into the light Carol Anne. Different sort of light, of course. I’m not sure how the dead communicate with us now there’s no TV static. I mostly use a murder of psychopomic corvids to pass messages back and forth. Slightly more reliable than a Ouija board, though they expect payment in Hobnobs.

[sam]

Does the job of timecop appeal?

You may also choose to answer the following: if you could pick a time to have lived other than the current splendiferous era, when would it be?

[finestre]

I’m a Hans Rosling-esque optimist, in most ways we’re living in the best of times that we’ve known. Which doesn’t mean they’re perfect, but I’m appreciative of the change that has happened in my five decades, and how much progress we’ve made. I started in a town that didn’t have single ‘ethnic’ food outlet, or ethnic anything, where (cryptically, considering the non-white, non-English population numbered zero) racists could meet in the local pub (and advertise ‘National Front’ outside). I’m of the generation that thought we’d agreed to put all those -isms behind us, they’d be eventually buried with our parents. Little did we know the next generations would resurrect every -ism and invent a few -phobias to go with them. I, of course, am a survivor of the era that didn’t have mobile phone and the internet, and do I get a support group? I do not.


So now is a good time, and we’re perhaps on the verge of not such a good time, climate change is real kids, and it probably won’t be kind. But maybe I’m falling prey to negativism there. Still, seems like a good idea to dial bad on the bad stuff because we could live in a better world without breaking a sweat. Or we can live in a terrible world and sweat a lot.


Going back in time, of course, is dangerous, since it might be fun, but it also features plague, consumption, and fairly constant death. I would want to go back to the end of the Roman Empire to be killed by the Alans, for instance (not so sure about the goths either, how they hell they ran through the Thuringian swamps in those big boots is beyond me). There’s Byronic period, which seemed nice if you were rich and didn’t mind consumption. And if the consumption didn’t get you, there were plenty of causes to pick up a gun for, and guarantee that a lot of other people would want to kill you. I guess those weren’t the days you could settle for making your point with a campus protest and a few symbols in your X bio.


Time travel is great if you can pop back and forth, but if it’s a one-way trip, I think I’d go back to the mid-Cambrian period where life was mad, and there weren’t any neighbours to spoil Sunday evenings with their lawnmowers.

[sam]

I’m a Hans Rosling-esque optimist

Hans, who I'll admit thinking was a character from Timecop, was a sword swallower in addition to his public spirited pursuits. That isn't a question, simply an observation that the ability to skewer oneself never gets more literal.

What's your opinion of the new portrait of Charles?

Sorry, I meant this one:

My take is that the butterfly is a reference to Ray Bradbury's short story 'A Sound of Thunder' (you really screwed up this time, LaRue), giving it a menacing dimension beyond the demonic red.

[finestre]

I quite like it. I don't understand the butterfly, but to be fair, butterflies rarely make sense. A giant one once landed on my hand in Malaysia and I was so impressed I didn't notice the monkey that stole my ice cream from the other. Yes, monkeys and butterflies are in cahoots. You read it first here.


The thing about art is that it's the essence of blag. If you express admiration for something with enough confidence you undermine everyone else and they start to reconsider their opinion. This is why the arts are full of posh people and not the spawn of carnies and miners like me, posh people don't have the filter, they've been brought up to think they're right. The worst thing about growing up impecunious is the imposter syndrome, the sense you don't deserve. Five decades and a degree of success and I never misplaced that.


He's quite red though and Finestre is quite literally red on account she's both Queen and CEO of Hell's corporatocracy. She's the sort of fallen angel who has to think hard about her lipstick shades.


As both a data monkey and inveterate optimist, Rosling's work appeals to me. Which I guess, these days, makes me a fascist bigot. I should get t-shirts made.

[sam]

 Unreported: it gave him a splinter

Charles is always getting cool gifts. What's the best one you ever got?

[finestre]

I don't come from a gift-giving family, which marks me as odd, as I don't do birthdays or other annual festivia. I once got a bicycle that was several sizes too large for me for Christmas, because my father wanted me to be taller. I would have needed to be six foot-five to reach the pedals on that thing. I assume he thought my trying to ride it would someour stretch me to the correct proportions. My father wouldn't know known it, but he was a follower of Lysenko. I spent boxing day debunking Lysenko by falling off in ever more spectacular ways until my mother determined it would 'go back' before I ran out of blood. Everything came out of a catalogue back then. The odd thing is that I don't ever remember it getting replaced by anything. There may have been a lesson in that. I have been drinking a bottle of Baby Bio and standing in a sunny room every week since then.


The best gift? I used to travel around the world and experienced the full gamut of gift cultures (and bribe cultures, for that matter). I think the best one was after a presentation in, if I recall, Seoul, when a young lady literally ran up, thrust a box into my hands, said not a word, and ran off apace. I reasonably assumed she'd handed me a bomb, which is extreme criticism I'll admit. Turned out to be a rather nice pen. I have no idea to this day. I also once travelled up and down Vietnam, and every presentation I did seemed to entail a larger and larger ceremonial plaque, the last in Hanoi, I swear was the size of a tombstone (and correctly attributed). I felt bad that I had to leave this pile of expansive perspex in a hotel room because there was no way I could fit it all in my bag.


Some time passed and then one day, back in England, there was a knock on the door. The bloody hotel had boxed it all up and shipped it across the world so we could be reunited. My office is filled with this stuff.