Yorkshire Writers' Lunch

Ninety-three years ago, it was announced that a new planet had finally been found. Actually, it had been found some weeks earlier, but the Lowell Observatory kept it quiet. The planet had no name, hiding in the dark as if plotting some subterfuge. On the fourteenth of March, Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old from Oxford suggested naming it after the God of the Underworld – Pluto. It was accepted, partly on the grounds that the first two letters were the same as the initials of the Observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell. In astrology, Pluto rules the subconscious, that which is hidden below, but also suggests renewal and rebirth. On the downside, it signifies an obsessive desire for power and control, as well as general destructiveness. So what happened in the decade after Pluto’s discovery? It began with Stock market crashes and general economic depression throughout the world. Unemployment in the UK reached two million, around 18% of the population. This was the time that...

When I was born I crighed. I didn’t know how to spell. When I went to school the big bang was a twinkle in my teacher’s eye. Eternity like the sun would last forever. Electrons and other stuff we couldn’t see didn’t exist except in pictures and never in two places at once especially not in far Australia. A boson was a misspelled shipmate not a particle darkly hidden. Homo Saps was the apex of creation, the cleverest creature on the planet yet. When I went to work I sighed. It made me feel unwell. The humans were buried in computers while tooled-up machines corrected and consumed the Earth by purpose and mistake. Back home, I watch TV. Damn! Eternity no longer means forever. Do we lack the will to save all from destruction, the dumbest creature on the planet yet?