Sam Redlark

image generated by Grok If we dispel from our minds any notions of a Garden of Eden, where God created the animals, who were in turn named by Adam, then we must consign our ancestors to the wilderness. There was never a paradise, nor was there any biblical fall from grace. There was only a bloody uphill struggle; a race to the top of the food chain. Out of necessity, early man would have categorised some animals as potential sources of food and others as dangerous predators; less frequently, he would regard some as allies. In that clouded era of human history, dogs were a presence lurking furtively in the corner of the eye. They were paw prints, pressed into the wet mud at dawn, marking out the perimeters of the earliest human settlements. At night they were silhouettes skulking around on the margins of temporary encampments. Gradually, over the seasons; down through the years, and the decades, and the centuries; across the overlap of the generations, they inched closer to the warmth a...

  image generated by Grok Fishguard Latin was the spoken language of English pirates (and a great many pirates from other nations) between the mid 1400s and the early 1700s. Its rise and fall mirrored the sweeping arc of that disreputable profession's golden age. Despite having common Latin roots, the tongue bears only a fleeting resemblance to its cloistered ancestor. Fishguard is a lively, tonal language where a single word can have wildly different meanings, depending upon cadence and where the emphasis is placed. It is near impossible to speak it without coming across as floridly poetic. Waves become “the flexing sinews of the ocean,” while surf is described as breaking on the shore in “sheering strophes.” Many attempts have been made to produce a written version of the language, which suffers under the restraint of captivity on the printed page, where its bright light dims. The nuance which lies at the heart of Fishguard, is evident in the traditional pirate greeting – a heart...

  image generated by Grok Professor Peter Mayne's essay, The Static Muse , ponders on those innocuous objects that become a source of inspiration for works of art and science. These are prosaic curiosities – some natural, some man-made – that one might walk past everyday without a second glance. It is precisely their unassuming nature – the fact they do not dominate the senses – that allows them to quietly impress themselves in our minds, where they stir the imagination. A pertinent example of Mayne's theory can be found in the English village of Steventon, birthplace of the writer, Jane Austen. The so-called ‘muse of Steventon’ is a short, broken-off sentence painted, in 4-inch-high Fishguard Latin* characters, on the interior plasterwork of the village's 12th century church. If you face in the direction of the altar, on a day when the light is good, you may be able to see this writing on the left hand wall of the chancel, just below the eves of the slanted roof. A few hun...

  image generated by Grok This is a complicated enquiry and the response will vary significantly from person to person. To answer it properly we need to ask ourselves: “What am I made of?” and “At what point does my body stop and the rest of the Universe begin?” In my opinion, the model that provides the best answers to these questions is Signature Field Theory, which is tied in with scientific thought regarding the ontological nature of human of consciousness and personal identity. Placing this theory into a relatable context requires that we travel back in time to a phone call that was made to Nottingham emergency services at 3:03am, on the 15th March, 2005. A man who identified himself as Frans Lloyd-Daley informed the operator that part of him had become trapped inside the Beeston multi-storey car park and had been there for several days. When asked if he required an ambulance the caller became irate and retorted that an ambulance was the last thing he needed. Further questioni...

  image generated by Grok On the 14 th of August, 2013, a man calling himself Peter Koller wrote cryptically in the birthdays section of The Telegraph : “Pavimenti is 125 years old and living proof that the secret of preserving mental acuity in old age lies in a handful of loosely connected words, alluded to in anger.” Pavimenti is not, as is implied by Koller, the oldest surviving person in Great Britain. They are a composite, created during the late 1880s by the seven men who compiled the midweek Highgate Tree Puzzle for the Whitehall Clarion . The newspaper, which still exists, has a solid reputation for foreign correspondence. It was distributed nationally up until 1945. The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a gradual withdrawal from provincial newsagents. Despite its shrinking footprint, it has adhered to a publishing schedule of six daily issues (there is no Saturday edition). It is now sold exclusively for £2 from a single kiosk, located at the halfway...

image by Grok   James Bond's unsuccessful attempt at giving up cigarettes forms a minor plot point in Patrick Redinger's short story – A Matter of Proportion . As a rule the character either smokes, or does not smoke, according to the whims of his handler. At the time of writing this is the author John Evoy (a pro-smoker), thought to be a pseudonym of Douglas Maskey, who is better known for his historical epics set against a backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. As a thought experiment, let us imagine for a moment that we have managed to drug the fictional James Bond, perhaps using a dart coated with a rare South American poison, fired from the tip of a customised umbrella; the kind that is only sold by a small family-run shop in Kiev. Let us assume that, having rendered this version of Bond unconscious, we have the power to set in motion the most extraordinary of all extraordinary renditions, removing him from the pages of the novels that bear his name and transplanting him into th...