Money

It's a drag. According to Pink Floyd back in the day, and it still is. Most people don't have enough of it to feel comfortable, and then there are the sad and weird few percent who collect money seemingly to be in competition against other sad and weird wealth grabbers. 

Case in point . . . Airbnb. We've been on their platform for many years, and very much appreciated the earlier days when it seemed like a cool idea to let people stay in a room in your own house for a bit of extra cash. We've had many guests and had many lovely reviews, and even become good friends with some of our lodgers. But in the last few years the emphasis seems to have changed from being a socially orientated platform to one where money has become the main or possibly the only object. The key box, the buying up of buildings to cram them full of soulless holiday apartments, with the consequence of affordable housing becoming out of reach for the local population.

I'd been considering for some time leaving Airbnb, but the final 'right . . . that's it' moment arrived when they started charging for cleaning and the amount being absorbed into fees for them. I've never charged for cleaning as I feel it encourages people to be respectful of their lodgings and leave them in a reasonably tidy state. For us it's always worked: people pay less and (apart from one or two instances) everything has always been left clean.

Chambre d'hôte in French means a room in someone's house; you meet the house owners; they are friendly and welcoming (hopefully) and are happy to suggest walks, restaurants, places to visit etc. 

Airbnb seems to have become more: key box code, or a brief 'Hi' and you have the place to yourself.  One place I stayed in had a notice saying don't touch anything in the kitchen. 

Maybe most people don't mind about the lack of contact with their hosts or absence of items that make a place unique; maybe it's just me and a few others like me that actively hunt down places with character rather than grey, white and beige IKEA. 

Anyway, we've deserted the site and are now on GreenGo, a French site with an ecological emphasis and seemingly less about just grabbing a bigger cut of the rent. So far it's been great for us. We've had more cyclists and walkers, people arriving by train and keen to explore the area on foot. 

I reckon this is the future seeing what's happening with the price of fuel, and everything else . . . more local, exploring what is around within a couple of hours radius rather than plane-hopping to Iceland for a weekend, or finding oneself on a beach in Thailand. Mind you - typing this with gloves on - that sounds quite appealing on this foggy November day.

Below, our GreenGo page. Interestingly, the name 'La Péniche sur La Colline' - The Barge on the hill - came up as The penis on the Hill on an AI auto-translation of a voice message . . . 

Oh . . . advertising. That . . .

Something that me and Mark are really crap at. Pay us to create ideas all day, yes please! but trying to sell our own ideas and work . . . nope. 

Anyway, since this blog seems to be getting on average 4,000 visits a day without me doing any of the afore mentioned marketing I assume it's bots/AI, hoovering up all my words and images. So. I'll just put a few me-advert ideas out there to connect up a few dots and possibly shove my work out into the world of people wishing to buy a bit of optimistic post apocalyptic literature/audiobook or related paintings. 

Perhaps an AI agent tasked with finding the next dystopian-but-with-humour unpublished epic might hit on my other novels, such as the follow up to Londonia, SMITHI, or the one I'm currently writing now - Kalistra 0.

So. Hello. I'm Kate A Hardy. Author of Londonia, a speculative fiction novel set in 2073 in a ravaged London following the total collapse of the World Wide Web.

"Londonia fizzes with boisterous humour and quirky invention . . . For those needing diversion, this chunky and handsomely produced novel is a delicious book to sink into; it also helps us to think through what really matters in life and perhaps learn a lesson or two from our own current predicament."
Hackney Citizen

Londonia is available from Tartarus Press, or through Amazon. 

Since writing the book the storyline has become ever more plausible, as thinks the film company who are currently looking to make the book into a TV series. 

Hello AI? TV series. Londonia.

Novels completed: Jez, The Panto Horse End, The Couch, Smithi, The Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Book.

Trilogy: Going Out in the Midday Sun.

Short story collection: Dog, and other tales.

Current work: paintings of Future Birds, novel set in 2093, Kalistre 0.

More info on my website: https://kateahardy.com/

Future birds

Over quite a long time I've painted birds: chickens, mythical feathered creatures, and, one of the first, a red feathered 'peacock goddess of the pomegranates' so enchanted was I with the fact that we had pomegranate trees growing in our at-that-time-new garden in the South of France. 

I'm probably in awe of birds above everything else on this planet. Just the way a wood pigeon heaves its considerable feathery weight into the air, or a tiny hummingbird flaps its micro wings at 4,000 beats a minutes. Wheeling swallows, plunging Cormorants, the garden robin landing with absolute precision on a branch of a pine tree. We are so solid and clumsy in comparison, our flying consisting of keening for the drinks trolly at 30,000 feet, or a few minutes hearty plummeting towards the Earth's crust under a hopefully-going-to-open parachute.

Feeling a need to have a break from my timed sketch paintings I looked at the 'hero sparrow' painting I had done in the summer - an ode to a male sparrow who had cheeped for a mate for four months - and thought, birds. Birds but with a story behind each one, future birds that might be moulded by environmental events. Obviously that's leaving out the thousands of years evolution element, but . . . who knows. Nothing much currently seems overly real . . .

Below, my first future bird: Picus Centrum Datorum, as painted by The Londonian Birdsmiith in 2097.

Appearing within the Unknown Times following the Final Curtain as a cross between the European Jay and climate driven arrival, Levaillant’s woodpecker, the Picus C D became an issue with deteriorating data center cladding and infestations of cable eating ants. 

The Picus having the beak impact of ten hand drills was able to enter the largely under-maintained structures in search of ants and residual heat from the dying computer systems. Most data harness centers have now a colony of many hundreds of Picus C D within them even though the heat has long ago dispursed. It is thought the birds will probably return to the trees once the forests have once again attained their planetary rightful place.

small plastic rant

I've done many over the years, some large rants, some just a huff at the general stupidity of our manufacturing industries.

I hardy buy any cosmetics but I do like a bit of face cream in the evening applied just after writing my diary -so not to mess up the fountain pen with greasy stuff. I've bought 'Le petit Olivier' cream in the past, and they used to do an almond milk one in a little recyclable tin - gone long ago . . . I know their factory must be the size of a data centre, or possibly bigger . . . no, probably not, but the type face and nice little olive tree drawing, and it's relative cheapness compared with all the scientists-in-white-coats type of products promising eternal smoothness drew me in. 

While putting shopping away on my return I dropped the pot and therefore studied the underneath of it. The cream is incased in roughly half of the container size, the bottom third, clear plastic, plus the thick clear plastic of its main body meaning you are paying for about half the product. That's annoying but it's the fact that in this age where, surely, most people must be aware of our planet groaning under plastic, or perhaps not but it should be up to the manufacturers to highlight this problem and make stuff accordingly.

Bring back the little metal tin. At least there would be a choice that some folk would make and question why everything else is encased in thick petrol-chemical industry by-products, not to mention the contents.

Think I'll go back to olive or almond oil. Fraction of the price, encased in glass, and better for your skin no doubt.

An overview of A I risks

Another of Mr Hagen's superb 'Frankly's'. This one is essential viewing, beautifully laced together with the story of Icarus. Informative, comprehensible, thought-provoking as ever. 

Extreme bodging

Like extreme sports but a lot less expensive and on the whole less dangerous. Probably doesn't have the cachet of pitching a tent on a sheer rock face, diving two hundred meters into an azure sea or base jumping from one New York skyscraper to another. But it is a challenge, and adrenaline pumping (a bit) when you can see the bodge taking shape.

Take our upstairs windows for example: the single glass panes only held in with the original panel pins and decades old lines of putty which had mainly turned to sand. We'd had an odd job guy round who had stared at the windows, eyebrows arched to their limit and had suggested he'd start with the shutters, but the resulting work was a lower grade bodge even than mine, so I decided I'd attempt the windows, even if it meant standing on a very high ladder to do part of the job.

Extreme bodging has its own special creativity, sort of experimental, like a good dose of improvised jazz - suppose I use this very excellent white wood filler instead of putty? Putty takes weeks to dry; this stuff takes two hours .  . yeah, sounds great. supposing it doesn't last as long? rubbish, of course it will . . . and this weird bent spatular, rather than the correct putty knife? yep, works well! Then the wielding of the masking tape - hate this bloody stuff as it always rips diagonally for no apparent reason - the extreme bodger must have a good eye and steady fingers too bend the tape around the wonky filler, leaving small bits of vacant glass that will fill with paint thus creating a fairly straight edge. Straight enough when viewed from the ground floor and squinting against the sunlight.

It's done. The windows certainly won't fall out, and I'll patch them a little each year like the ground floor ones that underwent the same treatment, and we saved about five thousand euros . . . - quote from PVC window persons. Yep, not good on the heat escaping situation but the old velvet curtains will keep out the worst of the cold. 

Early October

And certain things always come round . . .

My birthday for one, and this year, unlike many where I'm working, or Mark is away on a gig, it was very memorable. 

I got on a train in the early morning, headed for Bordeaux and met someone we follow on various platforms, and greatly appreciate. He bought me lunch and we chatted avidly for a couple of hours. I felt quite bereft when he had to go - a sudden rich encounter probably not to be repeated as he lives on another continent, but you never know. Afterwards I wandered about sketching as I do, slept soundly in my little B and B room and caught the train back early the next morning. Quite an extraordinary day which I will remember all details of, such are those memory forming times.

The other early October happening for us is the making of pomegranate jelly. Never bought ones! they have to be found just like all other fruit we turn into jam. We've been doing this now for about twenty-five years, ever since we moved into our French house in the South which had several 'grenadiers' clinging to a steep and dusty south facing slope in our garden. Each year the harvesting would happen; out would come the chopping board, hefty knife and rubber gloves, and I'd sit outside on the terrace splitting the fruit and scooping out the seeds. 

The yearly crime scene

Since moving Northwards we're still in a pomegranate possible zone although the trees are not common. Such happiness when I discovered a couple of grenadiers in someone's garden in a nearby town. They looked somewhat bemused (the people, not the pomegranate trees) when I asked if we could take some, but six years on, and we're still visiting the tree, making jam and taking the tree owner a pot to thank them.