Cheer you all up, I mean.

It started this morning when I opened my usual fix of the Daily Mail with coffee and read an article by the excellent journalist Max Hastings telling us not to worry about global warming because a nuclear bomb would be far far more likely to get  us long before.

Then my Yahoo News popped up telling me that those who are responsible for these things, and God knows how they get the job, have moved the ARMAGEDDON CLOCK forward a few minutes nearer  to midnight, which is when the Nuclear winter will begin. I don`t know if you knew anything about this clock but I certainly did not. Now I discover it has been ticking away since 1945. Is it a digital clock or an analogue clock or possibly even a cuckoo clock ? Who winds it up ? Where do they keep it ?

Whatever, there it is and we are now nearer Armageddon than we were, thanks to Iran and Iraq North Korea and doubtless Osama Bin Laden too.  Apparently when the Cold War ended they actually moved it back a bit. Ha.

Yes I know I said I was going to cheer you up and I am.

I was writing my first novel when they put the Berlin Wall UP (that`s how old I am..) and there were all sorts of Nuclear Threats. I told a friend I wasn`t going to bother to finish the book as we`d all be blown up any day. He said, and how sensible, that if my parents had thought about it at all, they almost certainly would not have conceived a child at the darkest part of World War 2... I was born in 1942, so work it out. I have remembered that whenever people tell me this is no world into which to bring a child.

He also said that when we found ourselves NOT blown up, I would look pretty silly NOT having finished my book.

So I finished it.

The same thing happened at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis. I was an undergraduate by then and writing both essays  on Chaucer and another book but I just thought, Oh well, and batted on.

There were quite a few hairy moments thereafter but here I still am, here we still are and here are over 35 books.

I think that probably the erecting of the Berlin Wall and the Bay of Pigs confrontation between Kennedy and Kruschev and that little business over Libya back in the early 80s were probably times when we were closer to Armageddon than we are now.

Of course I could be wrong. But meanwhile, I`m carrying on with writing The Battle for Gullywith and if I could have another baby, I would.

But if you want to know what I plan to do about Global Warming..

er.. pass.