WB - 8. A calamity with modern day technology

The sun was high in the sky and the birds were cheeping happily in the trees lining Lavender Boulevard. It was one of those streets in the outer reaches of London that thought it was deep in the country, purely by having the pollution resistant London plane trees spaced out at 35 yard intervals along the pavement. It was high summer so the trees were in full leaf - too early to think of dropping to create the annual slippery, sticky, wet mess that everyone hated. Except, of course, the younger school children who revelled in  kicking around the dry leaves before the inevitable rain.

Charlotte was happy. She was pootling along at 25 mph in her new Ford Fiasco. Julian, her nephew, had spent all weekend showing how to cope with the new fangled equipment that was built-in as standard. She had never met most of the gadgets before as her trusty Hillman had lasted twenty three years before expiry. It hadn't even had power steering so Charlotte had remarkable upper body strength for a lady of her advancing years. One of the things that Julian had told her about and then demonstrated was the automatic navigation, driving and parking system.  She thought she would try it out on her own this morning, so she parked the car, manually. She looked up the post code of the Post Office on the car’s built-in computer - yes, she was computer literate - but in the same way that a giraffe is good at riding a bike. She carefully entered the resulting code into the touch screen, told it to go to that area, find a parking space and …er, park.

Charlie sat back in her seat and tried to relax while her car digested the post code information, sorted through 11,325 possible routes, in 23.5 milliseconds, to get there and  set off on what seemed the best one. She didn’t believe that the route they were following was the best one but gritted her teeth and kept her straying fingers from touching the controls. In spite of her determination to give this technology free rein, she had to shut her eyes, put her fingers in her ears and quietly sing, ‘la, la - la la ‘ to herself to shut out the unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells that were briefly projected through the side windows.

The car slowed and came to a gentle halt, ‘We have reached your destination. Shall I park us now?’ said the car in a voice that sounded like a patronising doctor using the royal ‘we’. Charlotte tapped the ‘accept’ button on the touch screen. The car reversed slowly into a space that she would have found impossible to negotiate. She thought she detected a note of pride in the car’s voice as it grandly announced, ‘I have now parked us, how long a stay would you like me to pay for?’ She tapped the ‘2 hour’ button. The car quickly accessed the London parking control centre via the Internet, negotiated a frequent user discount and paid using the debit card data stored in it’s… somewhere, printed out a two hour parking permit and commanded Charlie to place it where is would be visible from outside the car. The doors unlocked and the car said, ‘ you are now free to disembark the vehicle.’ 

It took Charlotte a few seconds to realise that it meant she could now leave the car. She got out, looked around and saw that she was just outside the Post Office with the car neatly tucked in between two other cars, close to the kerb with only a few inches, front and back, free to the next cars in the busy street. She was impressed although she tried not to be and couldn’t resist saying, ‘thank you’ to the car as she opened the door and stepped out. The car, of course, replied , ‘you’re welcome.’ The software had been written in American. She closed the door and the locks snapped shut.

Her chores in the Post Office took only a few minutes so she spent some time wandering along the High Street, looking at all the ‘bargains’ in the windows. She knew they were bargains because most of them said so, in addition to the deep discounts of up to 85%. ‘If they could afford to sell something at an 85% discount it must mean that there was at least an 85% margin on the original item,’ she calculated. Charlotte resolved to never pay the full asking price for anything again. She would buy her Christmas cards in January, for example when they were discounted by a huge amount - better even the December box offers of,’ buy one and get a second one at the same price.’

Her feet were getting a little sore so she decided it was time to have a sit down and enjoy a nice cup of coffee. A Sunbucks soon appeared in the line of shops so she wandered in to try it and looked up at the coffee menu. Why was coffee on a menu, was’t a coffee a coffee any longer?

‘Name?’ asked the barrister behind the counter in a Latvian accent, scratching his wig. 

‘Err… Charlie’, said Charlotte trying to sound hip and ‘down there’, like a gangsta. It didn’t work as the barrista said, ‘thank you madam, what recipe would you like, as he scrawled ‘Charlie’ on the side of a paper cup. 

‘Milk, water and coffee please,’ she said, a little flustered by all the decisions she had to make. The Latvian flipped his ponytail in annoyance and indicated the ‘menu’ on the wall above his head. She gave in and asked for a petite, ginger, skinny, decaff, latte, macchiato with an extra shot. The Latvian gangster repeated it back to her in an incomprehensible gabble and asked for £5.73. Charlie gasped, 

‘I can get fish and chips for less than that.’ 

‘Not in here, you can’t,’ laughed her new found friend, thrusting out a hand to snatch the shiny new £10 note from her fingers. He apologised that the contactless pay system wasn’t working yet as it had only just been installed. She had no idea what he was talking about. 

He showed no signs of getting her coffee so she asked him where it was - perhaps G4S were coming to escort such a valuable item to her table? No, she had to go down to the end of the counter and humbly stand in line for her masterpiece to be prepared to her ‘recipe.’ A young girl from the Philippines called out ‘Charlie’ twice before she realised it was for her. She was handed a paper bucket of coffee with firm instructions to, ‘enjoy.’

After she collected sugar and a wooden stirring stick, not even a spoon after paying that price, she sat at a window table to do some serious people watching while she  tried to enjoy her coffee as instructed. It was not very nice, not at all like the Nescafe Gold Blend she was used to. She dreamed back to the Italian coffee bars of her youth where you could sit for hours sipping a ‘phroffy coffee’ in a tall glass tumbler, held in a EPNS holder, listening to the juke box in the corner while the Gaggia coffee machine hissed and gurgled omnipotently on the counter.

There was a beep from her smart phone. Looking at the screen she realised that it was a text from her car to say that there was only 15 minuted remaining on her parking permit. She slurped the rest of the foul - tasting sludge from her cup and then walked quickly back to the car. As she neared the car, the locks automatically opened and she was able to open the door. After she was in, comfortable and ready to go, she put her home post code in the touch screen and pressed ‘go’. The car didn’t move. She pressed the ‘help’ button, whereupon the voice told here that there was not enough room for the car to manoeuvre out into the road - she was trapped. Charlie got out of the car again to investigate. There was a white van parked behind her, only about three inches between the two bumpers. 

‘How inconsiderate,’ she thought. ‘All this clever technology and it all gets beaten by a white van man.’ She walked to the front of the van and saw that the driver had his feet up on the dashboard, a sausage roll in his hand and was reading the guardian - well page 3 anyway. Charlie knocked on the window and mimed for him to roll it down. 

‘Could you move back a bit and give me room to get out please?’

‘No, it’s my lunch hour,’ said the young man,’I’ll be finished in about ten minutes and then I’ve got to go to a urgent callout so I’ll be moving off then anyway.’

‘OK,’ said Charlie politely, signalling that he could now wind his window up. She walked toward the back of the van and found a gap of about six feet to the next car that was a new blue åçFord. A plan was coming together in her head as she walked back and got into her own car.

‘Hello car,’ she said

‘’My name is Horatio,’ said the car

‘Sorry, Horatio, I wonder if you could help me with a problem?’

‘I’ll try, of course.

‘Can you talk to another new Ford in this area?’

‘Yes, I am in contact with all new Fords within ten miles.’

‘Could you please ask the nice blue car behind the white van if he could move forward and get as close as possible to the back of the white van.’

‘Yes, but that will mean that the white van won’t be able to…oh I see, consider it done. 

‘Thank you, Horatio, you can go to sleep now while I go to those old fashioned tea rooms across the road and try to get a decent, cheap cup of coffee. I’ll watch the fun from the window.’

‘OK, Charlotte.’

WB - 7. Old book

It wasn’t until my children started asking questions about our family and where we came from that I realised how little I knew about our family history. I said it might take a couple of weeks to sort it out. It has now been nearly twenty years and there are still more questions than answers remaining. One thing that has changed over this time is that there is much more information on line but most of it cannot be relied upon except for pointing you in a direction. For confirmation, it is always advisable to go back to the original sources. This means visits to libraries and record offices and browsing through old books, written sometimes in english, sometimes in Old English and other times, more rarely, in Latin.

My grandfather had died in 1934, before I was born and my father was now no longer with us so I knew very little about the Kefford side of the family. There was no one to ask so I started looking through the microfiche records of Kefford births, marriages and deaths ( BMDs ) from the start of civil registration in 1838 to the present day. Being a methodical sort of bloke, I wrote down all the Keffords I found. There were quite a lot so I put them all into a spreadsheet. I then found I could ‘reconstruct’ families by sorting the spreadsheet for different data such as birth dates, names or places. Once I had found one of ‘my’ Keffords, I sent off for their birth certificate. This gave me information on the previous generation.

I also used the censuses to find out where they were living and their occupations. By these means I slowly traced the Keffords of my family back through Brighton, Brentford to Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire where they were wheelwrights and blacksmiths.

I had also accumulated many other Keffords who were not related to me, as far as I knew so I started putting their families together and this took me further afield, to Australia in six cases. I found contacts in England, Australia, America and Hawaii so there was a lot of letter writing and later, e mail.

I had stopped research on my own family when I reached two William Keffords who were born in the same village in the same quarter of the same year as I was unable to differentiate between them and so could not establish which was ‘mine.’

By this time, I had set a ‘Kefford One Name Study’ and registered it with The Guild of One Name Studies ( GoONS !).

I followed many trails and came across a document in the Cambridge record office that mentioned Keffords and was dated 5th. Eliz. It was on parchment, with a seal and in latin. I had to find out what it said! I found out that Queen Elizabeth was crowned on 7 September 1558 so ‘5th. Eliz. referred to the fifth year of her reign so was 1563.

I managed to find a latin scholar who would translate this document for me. It was a land sale document. John Kefforde, yeoman, bought ‘One close of pasture called The Stewe Pyghtell, including one pond in the Parish of Barley  from James Porter, labourer.’  in Hertfordshire for forty six shillings and eight pence and three bushels of wheat. There is a lot more, of course, in the document and I had to look up some latin that had been translated into Old English to make sense of it all.

I then found John Norden’s survey of England which had been reprinted and the map of Barley showed the land mentioned on it with the name Kefford clearly shown.

Further research showed that there were several Keffords in Barley around that time and some were wheelwrights so they may have been related to ‘my’ Keffords.

As a footnote to this story, the land can still be traced in the village and there is a house built on this land which is called ‘Keffords.’

Now, when I look at my family tree, I agree with Isaac Newton. I feel I am standing on the shoulders of giants. If anyone of my ancestors had not been there, I would not exist so I feel gratitude towards them, not only for their genes but just for their existence.

The same also applies to the future of course, each generation means a doubling of  the number of ancestors required to support the ever growing pyramid.

*****

WB - 6. Chosen words. “Gate, purple, saucepan, phobia and ice.”

She urged Phobia forward towards the gate. He jumped and soared over it with ease, Mozart’s musical joke in her ears. They landed with a momentary slide on a patch of ice. A steward saw the slip and hurried over with a saucepan of hot water to melt away the hazard.

Please excuse the purple prose.

WB - 5. Short story based on a photo

  challenge.wordbohemia.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/week-5-prompt.jpg

The ice cave

Wisps of steam rose gently into the frigid air from between the water worn boulders in the melt water stream bed. Icy fingers hung from the roof, collecting the steam, condensing it, turning it into stalagmite droplets that sparkled in the glittering light of the head torches of the two geologists who were slipping over the boulders.

There was an eery stillness but the vaulted ice above creaked and banged as the stresses in the ice cap moved and eased under the weight of ice. It was snowing hard outside so the weight was changing, increasing, adding to the stresses on the corbal roof of the cave as it supported the immense weight above it. The roof was being weakened by the steam from the flank of Grímsvötn below, melting the arch above.

‘I thing Grímsvötn is waking up,’ said Siggi.

‘The last eruption was in 2004 so another is due this year and by the look of the steam from the fumeroles, it could be sooner, rather than later,’ agreed Arne.

They picked their way carefully through the treacherous stream bed while keeping a careful watch on the roof of the cave. A vast pile of smashed ice nearly blocked their way. It had clearly recently crashed down from the roof. They picked their way around the pile and pushed the route out to where the cave narrowed into tunnel, the roof and side closing in claustrophobically. The noise increased as they climbed further, the melt water crashing and leaping in the stream bed. The creaking and groaning from the roof of the tunnel increased in intensity. The boulders in the stream bed crashed together as they imbricated. There was also the feeling of dread, an underlying sub sonic hum. It felt like Grímsvötn was stretching and intending her muscles, ready to burst a stream of molten lava from the mountain, ready to tackle the melting of the ice cap to start a Jökulhlaup on its way across the Sandur outwash plains to the sea. ‘The land of fire and ice indeed!’

As Arne and Siggi wriggled their way up the tunnel, deeper into the ice, the water flow increased, scouring out the ice to the sides of the tunnel into phantasmagorical shapes, designed by the laws of physics and rheology, crafted by the non-Newtonian Reynolds flow of the water.

Ahead they could just see the molten lava erupting silently from one of the vents ion the floor of the cave directly into the cold rushing water. This instantly cooled the surface of the lava so forming the pillow lavas that can be seen over much of Iceland. SIG and Arne were enthralled by the sight which is probably why they lingered too long in the danger area and were overcome by the sulphurous gasses that were being emitted from the vents as the volcano started to erupt. The temperature in the tunnel started to rise very quickly, melting the base of the ice roof.

The roof started a progressive collapse. Massive volumes of ice quickly changed to liquid phase and added to the considerable flow in the stream, quickly converting it to a river and then shortly to a raging torrent that further undermined the ice resulting in further progressive collapses.

There was now a full Jökulhlaup  in operation. It swept all before it as its flow volume reached that of the Amazon. The flow of course carried out the bodies of the two geologists. They were later found close to the sea, where they had been carried far out on the sandur. Their bodies were not recovered because the A1 road had been swept away and crossing the sandur was impossible in any sort of vehicle.

The eruption lasted only two days but in that time, many cubic kilometres of ice had been melted above Grímsvötn’s crater resulting in a deep depression in the surface of the ice cap, surrounded by many crevasses.

It took a week after the Jökulhlaup flow calmed down to reinstate enough of the road to allow traffic through.

It snowed regularly over the next few weeks, as if nature was covering up her gaping black wound on the ice cap.