Calendars

Calendar derives from calends, the Latin name for the first day of the Roman month, signifying the start of a new lunar phase. Logically. given that the lunar cycle is twenty-nine days, one might have expected the Roman year to have had twelve or thirteen months (365.25/29 =12.6). But in fact in pre-Julian times they had only ten of them, beginning in spring with March (mensis Martius)and leaving winter as an unspecified number of days between the end of the tenth month (mensis December) and the beginning of the new year on the next calends of March. Oh, and their year wasn't 365.25 days long either.

If you think that's complicated, in addition they didn't number their days forward from the beginning of the month as we do (April 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th et cetera). They fixed the key dates in each month, calends (new moon), nones (first half moon) and ides (full moon) and then named the other days by counting down (backwards) inclusively e.g. fifth day before the calends, third day before the ides. No wonder Julius Caesar came along in the first century BC and reformed the calendar altogether, as well as inventing the Caesar salad. (OK, I lied about that last bit. The salad was first created by an Italian, Caesar Cartini, at his restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico in 1924.)  

If after that your head is spinning and you're seeing stars, then you're in about the right frame of mind to enjoy the centrepiece of today's blog, which takes the form of a short piece of fiction that came to me recently in a dream.

There was considerable excitement in the control centre of the National Space Programme on the nones of April 2025 as the rocket carrying the NERO satellite blasted off spectacularly from Piltdown. Hours later, after successful separation of boosters and then the main load module, NERO settled precisely into its designated high earth orbit with all systems functioning AOK. It was a proud moment for Juvenal Roman, project director at the NSP, and his young wife and lead data analyst, Fion. 

At the launch after-party, much mead was quaffed and venison canapes scoffed, (non-alcoholic and vegan alternatives were on offer), and the exhausted but ecstatic scientists chatted enthusiastically about how their project, ten years in the making, was going to open a watching window on the true state of Earth's well-being. And later still, by the light of  a quarter moon shafting gently in through their own bedroom window, Juvenal and Fion in drunken, happy coupling conceived the child who would become Gaia.

There had been much talk for decades about 'global warming', the 'greenhouse effect' and the need to reduce the planet's 'carbon footprint'. Many scientists had warned of the dire consequences of rapid deforestation and a continued reliance on burning fossil fuels. They were continually challenged by the climate change deniers, the powerful businesses and their lobbyists who asserted that the scientific hypotheses were alarmist, miscalculated, and that all would be well, just wait and see.

Now NERO, the National Earth Reconnaissance Orbiter, loaded with the latest cutting-edge technology, would be able to monitor one hundred and seventeen different chemical, electrical and physical markers indicating the true state of the planet's eco-systems. Indeed, it would be able to look into the very soul of planet earth itself, and feed back minutely both diagnosis and prognosis to the watching Piltdown men and women charged with receiving and interpreting its datastream.

For months, all went smoothly. The orbiter sent back data that did indeed seem to support the predictions of the climate scientists, that slow but subtle changes in the planet's eco-systems were under way, in the atmosphere and in the oceans in particular, suggesting that the increase in global air and sea temperatures were systemic and that the increase in ice melt, storms and fires were neither random nor cyclical.

First of all, the major autocracies of China, Russia and the USA, brought all their state media to bear on suggesting the information being streamed back from NERO was either faked or was being erroneously interpreted, at which point Piltdown began sharing it widely with universities and scientific institutes in the free world.

Then attempts were made to jam the signals being beamed down to Earth, but the Piltdown scientists, in conjunction with allied faculties in Europe, Australasia and South America under the auspices of UNOOSA (the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs) found ways to stay one step ahead of the jammers.

Meanwhile, in parallel with the project's progress, Fion's pregnancy also moved smoothly forward. The parents-to-be were delighted with embryonic Gaia's development, as were their work colleagues, who regarded the prospective baby as a good omen. Fion was spared the worst of morning sickness. The most notable thing about an otherwise unnoteworthy pregnancy was her summerlong craving for strawberries. She was able to continue leading the data analysis work at NSP control centre right up until the beginning of December.

It was on Christmas Day morning that things started to go wrong. First of all there was the car accident. Some possibly drunken motorist clipped the Romans' car as they were driving to Mass and it ended up in the ditch. The reckless driver was never found. Fortunately, Juvenal and Fion were not seriously injured, but they were badly shaken and therefore taken to the local hospital for a check over. It was while they were there that the sudden shock caused Fion to go into premature labour.

Then there was the collision with a large piece of space junk that caused some serious damage to NERO as it spun around miles overhead. The satellite went 'offline'. The deputy duty officer at the NSP contacted Juvenal as soon as the serious nature of the event became clear and it took some persuading from Fion that he should go to Piltdown at once  to take charge of the situation. There ought never to have been any foreign bodies in the remote orbit of NERO and conspiracy theories were soon rife as the team in the control centre strove to understand and rectify the situation. The satellite was still in its correct orbit but had seemingly gone mute. It was a baffling scenario. Juvenal returned to the hospital.

Baby Gaia was delivered in an extremely distressed condition after a difficult and protracted labour. She only lived for a few hours. Her little life expired at the dead of night, with her heartbroken parents clinging to the incubator in grief and disbelief.

Curiously, it was at almost exactly that same moment (with just a few minutes' delay, as they tallied the events later) that NERO's comms channels suddenly burst into life again. Only what was being sent back was no longer a 'real time' feed of data and images. Over the next hours and days Piltdown was in receipt of a flow of future-stamped information and pictures, a flood of data and images similar to the time-lapse photography and fast-forwarding calendars that are tricks of the movie trade. 

Somehow NERO was racing through the rest of the 2020s and into the 2030s and 2040s at the rate of a decade a day, streaming data about spiralling temperatures, rising sea levels, extensive droughts, devastating floods, global storms the like of which hadn't been seen before. If the data were alarming, the visual images of a planet in crisis were even more frightening. How was this even possible? There could be no credible scientific explanation for the phenomenon of NERO going into prophetic mode as the team started calling it. Fion and Juvenal were back in the control centre by now, trying to assess what exactly was happening. It helped them to cope with their tragic loss to have something so baffling and portentous to figure out.

NERO was in one-way mode, sending masses of future data, unresponsive to all attempts from Piltdown to reset and return to its real time mission. The scientists at NSP could only monitor in amazement as the satellite streamed information and pictures purporting to be from twenty, thirty, forty years into the future. This bizarre and frightening newsreel came to an end with horrific statistics and images from October 2066. Someone observed that would be a thousand years since the Norman Conquest, though it may not have had any relevance. The last pictures NERO sent before shutting down again (this time for ever) were of planet Earth consumed by firestorms after days of cataclysmic nuclear war.

Baby Gaia was laid to rest on New Year's Day 2026. The NSP was closed for the occasion apart from its security detail, for NERO was silent now. All of the scientific staff attended the little girl's funeral. It was the hottest January day on record.

I've not written a new poem this week. Instead, as a cheering musical bonus, have a listen to the excellent Coral with Calendars and Clocks from their debut album of 2002. (Just click on the song title.)

Thanks for reading, and have a good week. S ;-)

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Concrete

Every school project on The Romans taught us that famously they built using concrete. This is true, from about 300 B.C. onwards. It is also true that they introduced the making and use of concrete to Britain in the wake of their conquest of and 400-year dominion over our green and pleasant island. They gave it the name we use today (from the Latin concretus, meaning compact or condensed) and they were certainly the most prolific users of concrete across their vast empire. But it didn't begin with them. Its origins were much earlier, back in primitive times.

Nabatean Bedouin enclaves in southern Syria developed the use of concrete for flooring and for rendering external walls, several thousand years before the Romans. That knowledge and practice then spread chronologically to the Egyptian and Greek civilisations. Pyramids from before 2,000 B.C and Greek palaces built around 1200 B.C. made extensive use of the material, and by 700 B.C. concrete construction was common practice around the Mediterranean and Middle East. Coincidentally, it was discovered quite separately in the Americas by the Mayan civilisation at about the same time as its use by the Romans (from 200 B.C. onwards).

It surprised me to learn that concrete is the most widely used building material, in tonnage per year exceeding aluminium, plastics, steel and wood combined. Apparently it is also the second most used substance in the world, after water, So what exactly is concrete? It's a man-made composite material consisting of fine and coarse aggregates (limestone, gravel, sand et cetera) bonded together with a fluid cement, that hardens and cures over time and can be as strong as rock. Certainly elements of the concrete constructs of Nabatean, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Mayan builders have proved its durability. 

In slightly less primitive times - I'm thinking early 20th century here - parts of the coastline of England that faced Europe were adorned with a series of strange concrete devices (see example below) whose purpose was to 'listen' for the sound of approaching enemy aircraft. They were known colloquially as 'ears'. Their more technical name was parabolic acoustic mirrors.

Before the invention of radar and all of the other sophisticated surveillance techniques that have been developed from World War II onwards, it was hoped that these early warning devices would pick up and amplify the soundwaves of German aircraft approaching Britain from across the North Sea before the planes became visible to the naked eye, thus affording our defences something of an early warning. 

Of course these listening posts had to be manned, but to their credit, they actually worked and were truly the fore-runners of the immense observatory dishes that capture and amplify signals from deep space radio sources today.

Early Warnings, the latest poem from the imaginarium, backs up one-and-a-half millennia and conjectures fancifully on how the Romans might have employed such concrete amplification devices to warn of the impending invasion of Britain by marauding squadrons of Germanic tribes in the 5th century A.D. I'm referring to those  Jutes, Angles and Saxons who eventually made us largely what we are today, an island that is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, (though overlain with Danes and Normans, and not forgetting the devolved Celtic fringes).

In reality, although Britain still nominally had a Roman provincial governor, Rome had largely given up on the territory by 400 A.D. (in order to deal with trouble from the Goths and Vandals nearer home), and the Germanic arrival was creeping and gradual, spread over a century or more, but I'm compressing the action for poetic effect and not letting the brute truth of history get in the way of a good conceit.

"Engle and Seaxe upp becomon, of[v]er brad brimu Britene sohton..." (Angles and Saxons came up over the broad sea. Britain they sought...)

Early Warnings
Juvenal is reciting Ovid lovingly to his girl, 

but she listens with merely half a pretty ear, 

for laying prone in that grassy sweet spot 

where far-off sounds converge and amplify, 

she also strains to hear the things she dreads:

the crumbling of a distant empire, the menace

of warlike oars racing toward her native shore,

early warnings of a dark wave breaking.

Fion knows, as certain as summer ends, he'll go

with his father back to Rome, intuits also,

without a seer, it doesn't augur well for them,

this romance of a senator's son and his slave-girl.

When he finishes reciting, she returns his smile,

they share their picnic of soft fruits, wheat bread,

a flagon of palm wine, their wistful kisses already 

intimations of a dark leave-taking.

That's it, so far, though it may eventually be joined by a third verse that is forming somewhere just out of earshot. Thanks for reading. Stay tuned, S ;-)

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