In the beginning there was something. Nobody
knows what it was, or how much of it there was. All anyone can know is that
something was there. After the beginning most of us think we know roughly what
there was and is, though we really haven’t a clue. After the beginning, the
universe had been created. “This has made a lot of people very angry and been
widely regarded as a bad move,” (this is a quotation from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and begs to be excused).
At this stage, just after the creation of the universe, a lot of very interesting things started to happen. These were all to do with quarks, protons, anti-neutrinos, positrons and a lot of other fascinating elemental particles. This is unfortunate as the only people who actually understand how any of these elemental particles actually behave are astrophysicists, who, sadly, don't seem to be able to explain it to anyone else.
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| Island Swift at anchor in Falmouth June 2013 |
At this stage, just after the creation of the universe, a lot of very interesting things started to happen. These were all to do with quarks, protons, anti-neutrinos, positrons and a lot of other fascinating elemental particles. This is unfortunate as the only people who actually understand how any of these elemental particles actually behave are astrophysicists, who, sadly, don't seem to be able to explain it to anyone else.
This is why we must fast forward quite some
time, a very long time, and I mean a really, really, mind twistingly ginormous very
long time, to a cloud of gas and dust. It was situated in a galaxy which, it
seems, formed some time ago, for no readily apparent reason. In a short space
of time, a very small part of this cloud of gas and dust started to contract
and to spin. It became a star, a very average star, and on one of the rocks
that had formed with the star there came life. This situation is complicated by
the fact that no one seems to know why it came, or even what exactly it is, not
even the astrophysicists.
In the blink of an eye, metaphorically as
there were no eyes to blink at that point, life had spread all through the
planet’s oceans and after a bit longer it started changing very fast. Then it spread
onto land. About half way through the life time of the star there was an
explosion of one species. This explosion happened so fast that the other
species had no time to evolve defense mechanisms to this new predator. Humans spread all over the world, and in the next instant
the whole world was lit up with tiny sparks of light which flickered on and
off, but never at the same time.
It was about this time when a Mum, sitting
at the breakfast table, finished her bowl of porridge. It was just after an ancient
festival that was older than memory and writing could trace, however it had its
roots in the old pagan fertility celebrations, and it was at the time of the
winter solstice. It was already established before Julius Caesar had brought
civilisation, in the form of art, learning, sophistication, Christianity and
science, to the British Isles, again no one seems to be able to agree on why he
did this.
Mum, using a part of her body’s mechanism to
allow oxygen to diffuse into her blood, expelled, along with a puff of carbon
dioxide-laden air, a very specific combination of sonic waves, more commonly
called sound. The information in these vibrations will, to save time, be presented
in a form that is, hopefully, meaningful to the greatest number of people.
“January is going to be awful weather,
let’s pack up and go to Spain for a month”
This was met with general approval by the
rest of us. So we went to Spain.
The year before, we had purchased a boat, a
very nice one. There was a great masterplan behind this, which was to sail to
the Caribbean. The mastermind behind this masterplan was Lochlann, my brother. It
was he, who after we had met two old friends of Mum’s, and sailed on their
beautiful boat, Miracle[1],
had decided, with the aid of his ‘friend and fellow conspirator’[2]
(Mum) and sceptical ally (me) that he would never cut nor comb his hair until
he had succeeded in enveigling Dad to agree to buy a boat. After Lochy had
succeeded in his campaign, and we had bought the boat, we discovered, after
much brushing, that he had a beautiful head of hair. Thereafter we have called
him Lochy Fair Hair. This is a joke that only people who know of Harold Fair Hair
the first king of the ‘Vikings’ can get.
It is now the 7th of July 2014 and we
are going on the adventure in 5 weeks time.
Written by Finbar
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