Hiatus, imagined and ultimate

I’m still waiting for the final go, and it looks like no progress for a week. It’s getting so every time asks me when I’m going I clench a little inside. At this rate I’ll be stuck over for a major birthday and that’s not going to happen.

So Easter will be a hiatus, and time to do some ruthless pruning, in the garden and the wardrobe. Some charity shop is going to do very well this weekend, if their category of success is a few suits and two bin bags of vendor branded clothing.

Ten years of press conferences have led to an astonishing assortment of t-shirts, baseball caps, sweatshirts and even a pair of fingerless leather gloves. I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall in that marketing meeting.

The other real problem is the books. I’ve around 2,000 of the little tyrants hanging around and the move was supposed to be a winnowing, but there’s precious little I really want to get rid of. I’m certainly dumping a box of juvenilia; I doubt there’s really a market for 70s schlock horror and books about 'humorous' graffiti.

There’s a fair few duplications too. There’s a web site V told me about called Bookcrossing where you can print out a form, stick it in the back of the book and then leave it in a public place. They then log onto the site and tell you where it is and what they thought of it, repeat as necessary. The only problem I can see is that in these paranoid times leaving a hardback at an airport might be construed as a security hazard.

The morning’s rather grim task was to write the obit for Arthur C Clarke* . The man was a visionary, and a very humble one. He once said that but for Jules Verne man wouldn’t have stepped onto the moon. But thanks to him we’ve made massive strides and will make many more with any luck.

Clarke’s work opened up science and space to a generation of us, and hopefully more in the future. I can still remember sitting under the blankets in my Scots uncle’s home reading one of his short stories, ‘Summertime in Icarus’ and getting lost in the story and the mechanism behind it. He told cracking yarns, packed with detail and loved the occasional verbal fun, such and ending a story with the punch line “All that is left of the ship is a star-mangled hammer.”

He had his flaws, notably the lack of strong female characters and putting his name to a lot of co-written rubbish in later years. Devoting pages of Imperial Earth to how the rotary dialler for phones would last for millennia must also have made him wince, if a guest had been so rude as to bring it up.

But he spoke of a dream of making space exploration "the moral equivalent of war", a stunning concept. Clarke flowered in the Second World War, helping invent the radar that guides planes to land in bad weather. He knew what could be achieved if a country, or a planet, buckled down and really concentrated, and considered it a far better use of money than, for example, the $300bn Iraq has cost.

When it became clear that the end was nigh he recorded a final goodbye to family and fans in a video message. It is characteristically self-effacing and included three wishes, one of which was for peace in his beloved Sri Lanka.

If you haven’t sampled his stuff I’d recommend Childhood’s End, 2001 (helps finally understand the film), 3001 for closure and The Fountains of Paradise. The latter may prove the most important, since a space elevator is the only way to move equipment into orbit at a profit.

But the job wasn’t all bad, I had a keyboard cleaning moment after logging onto the Popbitch message board that made me love the site again. Clarke was a humanist but it would have been nice for him to chuckle as I did when the news had been posted thus:

“Arthur C Clarke Dead. Suffering breathing problems, apparently. Pretty extreme problems by the sound of it.”

*It stands for Charles – no I didn’t know and neither did anyone else in the office. This sparked one of those search-engine hunting sessions where you find the middle names of other authors. Hunter S Thompson has the improbable Stockton, where as Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald makes me wonder if his parents were deranged.