# Your mission, should you choose to imagine it.



## JustRob (Jan 30, 2015)

Real life can be tiresome if one simply sees it as it is, but it can be much more fun if our minds wander a little off the beaten track of hard reality. Here's a genuine story of one such excursion that my mind made some time ago. The real facts presented are all autobiographically true.

A couple of years ago I was browsing through the books on American history in our public library here in Kent when I spotted on a lower shelf one entitled _Vulcan 607_. This turned out to be about the incredible Vulcan mission to bomb the runway at Port Stanley during our Falklands conflict with Argentina, so I decided to borrow it. Our library checkout system is now automated and all books have ID chips in them, so confused senior citizens can be seen at the machines trying to understand how to use them. I sympathise with them as these machines have a unique line in disdainful messages, apparently considering it beneath themselves to explain what they really mean or maybe feeling that they should not reveal all their secrets to the public. My wife and I are gradually learning to interpret their doubletalk, but they always have new tricks to confuse us. I still don't understand how they can claim that "The ID chip in this book needs to be activated" when they quite clearly know that it's there by scanning it with their radio waves, otherwise they wouldn't even notice that the book was included in the heap that we put in the machine. We do now understand that the stern warning "This book cannot be borrowed. Please take it to the service desk," just means that somebody has reserved it and not collected it yet, but _Vulcan 607 _triggered the message "This book may not be borrowed by means of a self service station. Please enquire at the service desk," and not even a passing librarian knew what that meant, having never seen it before.

  My Walter Mitty persona sprang into action to rationalise the situation. On enquiring at the service desk would I be directed to a back room where an elderly spinster librarian would be waiting with her rubber stamp and inkpad? Would she produce that famous tape recorder with the self-destructive message on it and then leave me alone in the room to listen to it? Why had I been singled out just through choosing this particular book? Was there a new situation brewing in Argentina? If this was a recruitment ploy by the intelligence services then they were a bit late in my case, although being a seventy year old man I wouldn't attract much attention if I was needed to go there on some clandestine mission. I certainly had the ideal cover story, my search for my grandfather's birthplace and my German origins rather than the English ones.

Grandfather was a great storyteller or, as my late father always put it, a consummate liar. I never knew grandfather but my sister had told me about the scary man with the gruff accent that she'd known when she was young. He'd talked of his German father and American mother and his birth in Buenos Aires, but also of how he'd jumped ship from an American Navy vessel in London in the nineteenth century. He'd also said that our family name was a good one to have as nobody could tell where he'd come from. Well, if he'd really deserted from the American Navy perhaps that was merely a name that he'd chosen to cover his tracks, totally cutting our branch off the family tree. Genealogists in Buenos Aires have failed to find any record of grandfather's family, so perhaps he was really from North America. Certainly the official records in Britain appear to be merely based on grandfather's own dubious stories. The way that my sister described him he could just as well have been a Klingon who'd jumped ship from a very different vessel. That wouldn't surprise me at all as my mother actually was seven of nine, an observation that's enough to fire up an Oedipus complex in any man, but she was merely one of the youngest in a large family. In desperation I have had my DNA analysed and apparently I am predominately human with ancestry in central Europe, most likely Germany, so my credentials for the mission would be undeniable.

Heavy flooding had been reported in Buenos Aires at the time, but I couldn't see how that could have been blamed on the British. We do have a lot of rain here but it's all for local consumption and we don't export any. _Vulcan 607 _would, when I was permitted to read it, reveal that it took many tanker aircraft just to get one Vulcan bomber to the Falklands, so it was unlikely that it would have been practical to use them to dump our surplus rainwater on Buenos Aires. The Argentinian authorities had been sabre rattling again about the Malvinas, so an election must have been imminent there, and in response Britain had held a sovereignty referendum in the Falklands, a place very similar to the Malvinas. Unsurprisingly the residents had voted almost unanimously to stay British and in the Falklands and not to move to the Malvinas despite it being an easy journey; in fact they're probably more British than most of us here in Britain, so I doubt that they'd want to come here either. Of course the US authorities always stay well out of these disputes, officially that is, as they have too many interests in both camps, although _Vulcan 607 _would tell a slightly different tale, if I ever got to read it.  

I approached the service desk in trepidation with the book in hand to discover the truth, but it was a bit of a comedown really. It had been deleted from the library's catalogue and should have been put in the "For sale" bin. Perhaps that lower shelf had been entirely the wrong one and they couldn't find it when the computer sent them looking. What English librarian would grovel beneath the histories of a former colony to discover a gem about one of our finest moments? Technically I couldn't borrow the book because officially it no longer existed; despite being factual the book itself had become inversely fictional, existing in the real world but not in the computer's imperfect replica. Despite detecting the book inside its own machine inside the library the computer was in denial about its existence there. Using my superior human, nay British indeed, ability to adapt to circumstances I offered to buy the non-existent book for a pound but the librarian, clearly a hard bargainer, negotiated the price down to fifty pence. Even so that trip to the library cost me more than it should have. When I got it home I carefully peeled the electronic ID label out of the back cover so that this record of a remarkable historic achievement was no longer reminded of how it had been scorned by a disdainful library computer. I opened the front cover and to my surprise discovered a hand-written message on the library insert which still bore stamped dates from simpler times.  So had that mystery spinster with her rubber stamp managed to contact me after all? Was the mission still on? No, the message simply read "Sorry, some pictures missing." Well, life's often like that, isn't it?


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## Firemajic (Feb 9, 2015)

You can spin a yarn and keep it going strong. My curiosity was piqued and I was sure this was going to turn into some cloak and dagger saga... Clever ending, sometimes the unexpected mundane can be --well, satisfying...I enjoyed reading this well written story. Peace always...Julia


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## JustRob (Feb 9, 2015)

Firemajic said:


> You can spin a yarn and keep it going strong. My curiosity was piqued and I was sure this was going to turn into some cloak and dagger saga... Clever ending, sometimes the unexpected mundane can be --well, satisfying...I enjoyed reading this well written story. Peace always...Julia



Thank you for your comments. However, not a yarn in the way that my grandfather must have spun them at all. This is just accurate journalism imaginatively written, so I can hardly be credited as the creator of either the plot or other details. I still have the book by me now but have removed the library inset with the message on it and it really did cost me fifty pence, just as my 95 year old mother really had been seven of nine, followed as it happens by twins, a flourish to round off a large family. 

That is something that I find interesting about writing, how the reader may receive one's work differently if they know that it is substantially factual. For example I have seen advice not to include ludicrous coincidences in one's fiction and yet my real life seems to be filled with them, so why shouldn't our fiction reflect reality? Is anything changed just by giving a work the label "autobiography"? Has anyone ever been praised for their writing being so true to life because it was filled with ludicrous coincidences or an accurate autobiography rejected for being implausible? I doubt it. And yet how often do we thank _deus ex machina _that something happened in our lives when we frown upon it if it appears in our fiction? Rebelliously I wrote my novel about a _machina ex deo _and in a later part included an apparent _deus ex machina _to trap critical readers who hadn't yet grasped the full implications of the story. Of course it isn't constructive to include intentional pitfalls for critical readers to fall into as that means that anyone seriously contemplating publishing the story will also soon disappear unless they are very observant, which they most likely don't have time to be. I find the whole industry very peculiar and hope that self-publishing will eventually rationalise it.


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## Courtjester (Dec 17, 2015)

I like this, particularly the first paragraph, which reminds me that I recently disabled the electronic issue-and-return machine in my local library by the crafty move of inserting my plastic card into a slot that was intended to dispense items, not to receive them. Still, at a few days short of seventy-nine, one might be excused the odd aberration. Cj


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## JustRob (Dec 17, 2015)

Thanks for drawing my attention back to this piece. I had entirely forgotten that I wrote it. Having just re-read it I am still quite satisfied with it. One's own work can seem stale when revisited but this still seems fresh to me.

I can understand your confusion over slots and such. My angel and I never try to use those self-service machines in the supermarket as they can be so annoying. One of the failings with many such machines is that they use terms without explaining them. The better ones have big arrows that point at what they're talking about, but others just let you guess where the thingummyjig actually is.  The fact that there is always an assistant waiting to explain how to use them implies that they aren't exactly self-explanatory. 

One of the machines in our library developed an interesting quirk. It asked you whether you wanted a receipt and actually printed one out, but then stuffed it down a crack in the cabinet without giving you the chance to grab it. The result was that the inside of the machine filled up with pieces of paper that it had unintentionally eaten. Apparently when the machine was designed nobody had taken into account the fact that paper on rolls has a curl in it which prevents it from coming out of the machine straight. Probably during tests no roll had got near to the end where the curl is most prominent, so the flaw hadn't been discovered. In my career I did a lot of system testing and one of the rules is to make the test conditions as real as possible. The problem is that reality can sometimes be quite elusive and there aren't always signs indicating where it is.


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 17, 2015)

I love your different way of seeing things. It comes out as surprising, funny, creative, _and _insightful. The best was:



> despite being factual the book itself had become inversely fictional, existing in the real world but not in the computer's imperfect replica. Despite detecting the book inside its own machine inside the library the computer was in denial about its existence there.



Coming in second:




> I have had my DNA analysed and apparently I am predominately human


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## JustRob (Dec 18, 2015)

Thanks Emma, but was the punctuation up to your exacting standards, or didn't you notice? 

The point about this piece that I like is that there is no fiction in it as such. The facts are all true and it is only my perception of them and the way that I have brought them together which has changed their nature. That is the real art of humour, to take everyday facts that the reader can readily accept and turn them into something more bizarre by changing the emphasis. This is exactly why I like to write my fiction very much from within the minds of the characters in it, because that is where the fantasies really exist. Real life is just the same if we allow it to be so occasionally. The writer in us must be alert to these opportunities at all times, not just in those periods that we set aside for writing.


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## EmmaSohan (Dec 20, 2015)

JustRob said:


> Thanks Emma, but was the punctuation up to your exacting standards, or didn't you notice?



I think the hardest part of nonfiction writing, and perhaps the only important part, is having something to say. You succeeded, I enjoyed it, and I really wanted to focus on that.

The rest is just details. (laughing -- a lot of details) I actually don't grade on PaG when I am a judge for the nonfiction contest. But if it hurts the story instead of helping it, that's a problem (both in the story and in grading). For example, I think your story is easier to read if you start a new paragraph after "borrow it." I think you need work on the details -- and I think that's important precisely _because _you have something worth sharing.


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## JustRob (Dec 20, 2015)

EmmaSohan said:


> I actually don't grade on PaG when I am a judge for the nonfiction contest.



You judge contests? It's just as well that I virtually never enter them then. There are limits to my masochism.


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