Time Out

The importance of doing fuck all.

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As they seem to be quite popular, I had been toying with doing one of my periodic “what am I listening to” posts, but in truth, it’s been very little recently. I am deep into a cycle of switching off from actively seeking out or listening to any music, which happens from time to time. At some point I’ll switch back to voracious listening, it’ll happen without any warning.

I’ve been reading a fair bit though. I enjoyed Gary Lachman’s Touched By the Presence which documents his journey from bass player with Blondie to becoming a writer focussing on the occult and various other esoteric subjects. I am long time Fortean Times reader and have often noticed Gary’s contributions to a number of articles I’ve enjoyed in the past, so it was interesting to discover more about him, he’s a great writer who can make quite tricky subjects entertaining.

Peter Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds was another recent read I can recommend. It’s all about the amazing life of cephalopods, truly remarkable creatures that possess an intelligence comparable to humans. The book’s a fairly easy read despite diving into evolution, the development of consciousness and the subject of intelligence.

I also sometimes enjoy the books and words of Charles Bukowski, even if the subjects he writes about do get a little repetitive *. Nevertheless this quote:

“This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important.”

..is something I try to bear in mind. The importance of unfocussed time and some completely goal free activities.

I’ve got a lot coming up later in 2026, for which I am very grateful, and more on all that later, so I had already decided a while ago to try and “do nothing” for a week or two prior to things getting going. The plan changed a bit as, for family reasons, I’ve needed to take a trip to Australia, so in between my obligations, I’ve tried to just enjoy the time and have a sort of semi-holiday. Not exactly nothing, but as close as I can get.

Starting off in Perth, somewhere I'd never been to previously, I’ve been lucky enough to find the time to visit a lot of the sights. Rottnest Island, or Wadjemup, to give it it’s indigenous name, was a definite highlight. I took this picture at what seemed the farthest point on Rottnest from the mainland, there’s a lot of ocean heading this direction before you come to any more land. Isolation indeed.

Rottnest is also home to the Quokkas, a small marsupial from whence the island gets it’s European name, as a passing Dutch mariner mistook them for rats, easily done, so naming the island “rat nest island”.

My opinion of these extremely cute looking animals took a nosedive when one jumped up to a table I was sitting at and proceeded to gobble up a load of birdshit right in front of me. Charming.

There’s an interesting fact about Rottnest that illustrates something fascinating about the preservation of human knowledge across many generations. It turns out Aboriginal lore speaks of the way their ancestors walked across from the mainland to Wadjemup (..today a 30 minute ferry ride), and this was ridiculed by the Europeans as an impossibility, until sometime later, when scientists discovered that around 7000 years ago, prior to rising sea levels, there was in fact a land bridge, and walking from the mainland was indeed possible. This knowledge was handed down by the Whadjuk Noongar over many generations and this fact alone gives us present day Europeans a completely different perspective on human time. Deep time** in our part of the world might be considered to go back as far as Stonehenge, which is something like 4500 years, several generations shorter. We still have no definite idea what Stonehenge was, or why it was built or by whom. That particular knowledge was never passed down far enough. With that in mind, how possible would it be for us to communicate to our descendants 700 years into the future, let alone 7000?

This need to communicate to the future is something that we, as in the people of our time, must learn to do. At this point I am going to mention the Human Interference Task Force, which has long fascinated me.

In short, the Human Interference Task Force was attempting to find strategies to warn future humans not to go anywhere near dumps of radioactive nuclear waste which would still be highly dangerous even as far forward as 10,000 years, and after a possible, or perhaps inevitable, societal collapse. Think about this for a moment and it’s clear that “No Entry” or “Keep Out” in large letters would most likely be as indecipherable as Egyptian Hieroglyphics are to us in the distant future, and signs or symbols such as the now universally recognised radiation symbol could very well be just as meaningless to a future human, who might be living in a similar primitive, precarious state as our ancestors.

To create a warning that lasts through the ages, some outside the box thinking was called for, and one of the recommendations was to breed a type of cat which would turn green when exposed to radiation, alongside an “atomic priesthood” which would create an oral folklore tradition around the idea of extreme danger to life whenever anyone observed a cat turning green, as this new breed would when near a radioactive site. The idea being that the folklore would deliver a warning likely to outlive writing, literature, literacy, signage, present day symbols and keep the message of “Danger! keep away from glowing cats” alive across many generations.

Apparently there’s even a song out there already, created by the Human Interference Task Force for this very purpose, but I’ve yet to hear it.

If reading all this sounds like I am just relaxing and totally made up bunch of random nonsense then, I have to confirm, this is all in fact, quite serious. Unable to think of a way to safely store, recycle or dispose of nuclear waste, we get a song about cats instead.

Pelicans never fail to cheer me up, so here’s a picture of a pelican chilling on top of a lamp post to offset that depressing thought.

Anyway, I fully accept this post might be a little random, these are precisely the sort of things that permeate through when you allow yourself a bit of headspace. For now, I have more of nothing to do before some new Fractal Sextet kicks off, Voyage 35 goes on it’s debut tour, O.R.k. tours again and another very unusual quartet project which has been gestating for a while manifests in the real world, I am excited about it all….stay tuned.

Enjoy your holidays!

Best to all,

Colin

*My son recently borrowed my copy of Women and replied, “It’s the same thing all the way through” after I asked him how he got on with it.

** Werner Herzog’s documentary The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is a great watch if you’re interested in deep time related to prehistoric cave paintings and just how old they are.