Test Tube Burgers - Nothing New Under the Sun!

Forty years ago the company I then worked for produced a meat substitute called KESP. It received a considerable amount of publicity at the time including an appearance on the BBC's flagship Tomorrow's World.

The company specialised in the manufacture of synthetic textile fibres and the basic principal behind KESP was that a paste was made using soya flour which was then spun into a fibre in exactly the same way as nylon or polyester fibres are made. This simulated the fibrous nature of meat and the fibres where bonded together to form meaty chunks and even - if my recollection of the Tomorrow's World programme is correct - a whole ham.

This article in the New Scientist describes the 1972 press conference at which the product was launched. The company's employees were able to purchase frozen chicken and beef flavoured chunks and mince from the company shop. These could then be used in stews, curries and Bolognese sauce. In due course the company sold the production technology and the entire pilot plant to a food company. I can find no reference to its continued production and searching for the KESP brand name reveals that it is defunct.

Interestingly a research paper published in 1975 dealing with synthetic meat products reached the following conclusion: in spite of initial resistance, new developments will mean products will very soon resemble best meat in texture and further developments in the flavour and colour to the protein will make it difficult to distinguish real from imitation.

To the best of my knowledge the only product that ever came close to fulfilling that prophecy is Quorn which is produced from a fungus grown as a live culture in vats. This latest development - and here I must confess that I am at a loss as to which of the 625 articles pulled up by Google to link to - uses stem cells from cattle to grow muscle cells in a laboratory so the resulting product really is meat, not a vegetarian substitute.

Incidentally, at the same time they were developing edible spun protein, to give KESP its technical definition, the same company had a team working on synthetic tobacco. I was a smoker back then and tried one of the cigarettes. Actually I was supposed to smoke a whole pack of twenty but one puff was enough! A smoker who has inadvertently lit the wrong end of a tipped cigarette will have some idea of what the version of synthetic tobacco I was given to try tasted like. The rest of you will have to use your imaginations.

Summer Day is finished

I recently completed my second novel which is set on a single day in the summer of 1947 in the place where I grew up. Here is a blow by blow account of how it was done.

The completed work is a whisker under 61,000 words. At times I am convinced it is the best work I have ever done, at others I am terrified that it is really a load of absolute tosh.

 

18th Jan.2012

As soon as I completed the polishing of HonestHearts I began work on my second novel. It is based on a short story I had written a couple of years ago and that is part of the collection Pulse of Life published recently by the Laois Writers' Group. By early January 2012 I had in excess of 57k words written. Having set myself a target of 3,000 words per week I actually achieved a satisfying 3.5k/week from mid-September to the end of 2011. I am now undertaking the polishing process. I want to give the main characters greater depth and to provide much more evocative descriptions of the locale. This time I do not have to rely too heavily on web based research - this second novel is set in the locality in which I grew up and draws on my own childhood memories of the place and its people.

But right now I am trying to take a critical look at each of the episodes I have written and answer some key questions about each: what does this episode contribute to the whole? What does it tell the reader about the place and/or the people involved? Is it consistent with what has gone before and/or needs to be revealed later? Does it have an internal logic that follows some part of the eight point arc and how does it fit within the overall arc of the book?

So far I have covered the first 80% of the book and made a number of minor changes. The most significant development at this point has been the realisation that two key characters were not properly developed; I had no back-story for them. So I spent a considerable amount of time during the week commencing 16th January 2012 working out a scenario for the whole family history going back over a quarter century. That has led to a number of the changes.

I still need to raise the level of the language in the descriptive passages. I want to achieve something that could be described as "lyricism" in those passages. I also need to return to the dialogue sequences and provide more internal monologue. And I need to ensure that the tone both of the dialogues and the internal monologues clearly differentiates the characters and matches their backgrounds.

21st Jan 2012.

The first stage review and revision exercise was completed this morning. Some significant changes were made in the build up to the climax, especially Sam's day. I also began to have a few ideas about improving the climax and resolution by having Henry maybe think about Bible stories and his understanding of religion and an after-life, and by having his mother arrive on the scene of his rescue.

Throughout the process some words were removed and others added. The outcome was a net increase of ca1300 words bringing the length of the finished piece to 58.8k words. Some passages that were removed were saved in a separate file for possible future reinstatement or re-use in a different part of the work.

Next is to begin a second review and revision exercise, this time concentrating on the use of language to evoke a stronger feeling for the place and people.

I can't help thinking that this process is analogous to what happens when I create a painting. I always begin by blocking in the basic shapes and their flat colours and relationships. This is done quickly with fairly broad brush strokes. Then I settle into the process of adding detail, gradually reducing the size of brush used and maybe using other techniques to add texture and to blend colours in order to achieve the right textures and to show the play of light on the surfaces of objects and leaves. Polishing my novel to achieve the desired effect of realism and emotional involvement for the reader is a lot like that.

31st Jan 2012.

This second stage process is now about half complete. As I go through revising each episode in turn I am amending my outline of the structure that I have in a spreadsheet, rearranging the suggested order of the episodes to bring them as close as possible to the real-time chronology of the events they record. I am also converting everything except remembered events into present tense.

Language generally is receiving a critical examination and, where I deem it necessary, is revised so as to develop the mood of each episode. Each episode needs to match the character of the person from whose point of view it is being told and their changing moods as the day progresses. I am not sure I have come close to achieving that yet. I am also having doubts about the relevance of certain episodes.

12th Feb 2012.

I completed the second stage process yesterday. It included the addition of a little under 2k words. But that is only part of the story. The whole thing has been transposed to present tense which I think adds immediacy but also required a considerable amount of re-phrasing. Several paragraphs of the original version were removed and new passages added, including a 250 word exposition of Henry's feelings as the end approaches.

Now I am putting together each character's contribution to the overall work. The aim of this is to check for consistency within each character's telling of his/her part in the day's events. The re-reading involved also provides a further opportunity for copy editing. Each episode, once transposed and revised in the previous stage was re-read and typos corrected on completion so I do not expect this to reveal many errors.

I still have two principle concerns: is the ending told in a sufficiently engaging way and is the use of so many view points (15!) so unconventional as to make it unpublishable? There are certainly a couple of episodes whose presence is questionable in terms of their contribution to the overall plot.

20 Feb 2012.

Final completion was achieved over the weekend. This entailed putting the whole thing together in a single file in the sequence in which it is intended to be read. The first 10,000 words were also saved in a separate file for submission to agents/publishers. I then read the whole thing from start to finish and made some more very minor adjustments and typo corrections. Next I checked out some of the historical background. During the writing I had relied on memory but I know that can be faulty and needed to be sure of some of the detail.

Among other things this revealed that the raising of the school leaving age was implemented in 1947 whereas the NHS did not come about until 1948. As my story has both taking effect in 1948 I had to make some changes. I chose to change the year in which the story is set so as to keep the references to the raising of the school leaving age which has more relevance to the plot than does the availability of free health. In fact, the cost of Jack's treatment now presents another problem for the family adding to the preoccupations that distract them from the search for Henry.

Finally I ran a series of "find" queries to identify repeated use of some verbs and to rephrase the offending passages. The same process was used to ensure that unusual (Welsh!) names were spelled consistently throughout.

An Honourable Tradition of which Ireland can be Proud

Yet more opprobrium is heaped on Enda Kenny as a result of his recent statement to Bloomberg TV. And to some extent it is justified for the man often seems to be telling foreigners things that are out of kilter with what, at least until recently, he has been telling his fellow Irish men and women. But in that he is little different from any other politician and if there is one thing that Irish politicians excel at it is the art of political double speak.

But, as usual, a great deal of the criticism aimed at the Taoseach is concerned with the declared intention to pay off our debts in full. Many Irish people see the debts in question as somehow not their responsibility but instead that of faceless investors who bought bonds in failed banks. It seems to me, in my contrarian way, that in order to investigate the veracity of such a notion it is necessary to examine two straight forward questions: what happened to the money and who are the bond holders?

The €300 grand that you paid for a house that is now worth €120 grand was paid to a developer. Whilst it may be true that the developer buried some of that money in a tax haven along with all the other amounts he received from other buyers, most of it will have been paid to the employees and sub-contractors he engaged to build the house. Some will have gone to the original owner of the land on which your house and all the others are built. Some may have gone to a sales agent although many developers handled their own sales.

The point is that all of these people - with one relatively minor exception which I will come to - spent that money in Ireland and paid the taxes that enabled the government of the day to increase the wages of public sector workers and the social welfare benefits paid to claimants. In short, all that money drove the economy throughout those heady tiger years. It is still visible in all those new houses and apartments, all the luxury cars that were purchased in those years and all the gadgets in the houses. As I pointed out back in November, a lot of this ended up in countries like China - who invested it in Africa. As an aside, this latter fact should make one or two Irishmen - I'm thinking of Messrs Geldof and Bono - happy.

The developers, the sub-contractors and the businesses that boomed from all the money that well paid people in all sectors of the economy had to spend, then went to the banks and said, in effect, "look, my business is booming. Lend me the money to expand and I can do even better." It looked like what, in the vernacular is known as a "no brainer". But when everybody has the house of his and her dreams, what is the point of building more?

That is where it all came to grief. Nobody wanted to buy the third or fourth phase of the development. Marks and Spencer and Debenhams had all the retail space they could handle. Materials were bought, tradesmen paid but no-one wanted to buy. So the money suddenly stopped circulating around the system. People were laid off. Instead of paying taxes they were drawing benefits. Businesses started to go bust. With few house sales there were no development levies or stamp duty to support local and national government which ended up paying out far more than it was receiving.

The exception I mentioned earlier? A significant proportion of the incomes paid to foreign nationals working in Ireland was sent home to support family back in Eastern Europe or Africa. (More delight for the ageing rockers!)

Now consider the bond holders that so many people are eager to see "burned". The conventional view is of a Champaign and caviar scoffing bunch of spivs laughing at the gullible Irish. That is certainly a part of the reality and I am as angry as anyone at the inflated salaries and bonuses these people receive. But they are only the middle men and women in a complex web of transactions. Somewhere, way down the ladder, and forgotten equally by the spivs and by those who would seemingly see them starve, are people who placed their life savings in pension funds and trust funds at a time when government bonds were regarded as the safest places to invest. Returns might not be as good as those obtainable from stocks and shares but the risks were far less. Governments don't go bust. Governments honour their debts.

In the face of so much that has been turned on its head by this current crisis, Mr Kenny and Ireland are to be congratulated, not reviled, for holding fast to this honourable tradition.

Who should pay for your child's communion dress?

I heard an extraordinary thing on Will Faulkner's radio show this morning. Apparently there is in Ireland a social welfare payment especially to cover the cost of children dressing up for their first communion. Will drew attention to a report that the government wants, not to end the payment, but to cut it back. According to the report, published in the Irish Examiner today 2nd February 2012, €3.4 million were distributed in such payments in 2011.

I have blogged previously about the extraordinary excesses of the Irish social welfare system but the discovery that such a payment is available left me spluttering into my porridge. I suppose I should not be surprised. The importance attached to such religious ceremonies within Irish culture is well known. News reports at the height of the "tiger" years claimed that some parents were hiring helicopters to bring their little treasures to Church for confirmation or first communion.

Solemn occasion sullied by materialism

It is at this time of year that such events take place and the shops are presently full of communion dresses. Hotels and restaurants advertise their availability for confirmation celebrations. I have made no secret of my atheism so I hope people will not be too shocked at my reaction. But, growing up in England I never came across any such pomp in the protestant churches I attended. Indeed, such extravagance is generally frowned upon because it is seen as being a long way from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth that are supposed to form the basis of belief for all Christians.

In my mind confirmation and communion should be serious and solemn occasions at which the true Christian affirms his faith in the healing power of his/her Saviour, seeks the forgiveness of his/her sins and promises to lead a better life in the future. It should not be sullied by the materialistic symbolism of dressing up and partying. The idea that tax-payers should be asked to fund such behaviour at all, let alone at a time when the country is being bailed out by its European neighbours is surely beyond reason.

Irish parents are already in receipt of remarkably generous child benefits and those who qualify for this special occasion allowance will already have received a payment toward the cost of school clothing.