I don't often cook meals late in the day but last night it occured to me I hadn't eaten much and sure enough an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation was making itself felt in my belly. Okay, lets see what I've got in the cupboards... What's this?... A beef and ale pie?... Hey, I'd forgotten I had this and I'm in the mood. Bang that in the oven for thirty minutes at 230deg and prepare myself a feast.

What I hadn't realised was that my antiquaited cooker is in fact nuclear powered. It cooked my pie so efficiently that it was fusing elements together and creating carbon. I cottoned on when I noticed what a smokey atmosphere had developed as I watched tv with eight minutes left to go. In haste I rushed to the cooker - We've all done this at some point, yes? - and I pulled my blackened pie from the hellish conditions I had subjected it to. It sat there on a baking tray with a plum of grey smoke spewing from a hole in the pastry..

Despite my careless and inept cookery the pie was edible and actually very tasty. That was a close run thing.

National Poetry Day Last Entry

Okay, who forgot to tell me it was National Poetry Day yesterday? Thanks a lot guys, my life is ruined. But I shall not be put down by this reverse, no, I will persevere and produce my latest work of art for the edification and delight of the entire Caldrail-reading world. Here goes....

The Man On The Door

I wandered lonely on the dole

to visit my local library

But as much as I cajole

The guard is still contrary

So instead I search the shelves

And find a book to read

He leaves us all to please ourselves

It'll do no good to plead

Book of the Week

The door to the library remains shut until precisely 9:30am. The security guard is nothing if not pedantic. Yesterday he closed the exit and told everyone to use another way out. A part of me wonders if he does this purely to look important. Anyhow, with ten minutes to waste, I perused the collection of best-sellers on display in the foyer. It didn't take me long to find an absolute peach of a book.

Civilisation One (The World Is Not What You Thought It Was) - Christopher Knight & Alan Butler. Books like this turn up occaisionally. They mix and match whatever number juggling they can think of and try to illustrate ancient monuments as proof of a super-civilisation long forgotten. Not quite so super then, were they? This sort of book has been popular for decades. The entire genre was spawned by stories of the lost city of Atlantis, an enduring myth that some take so seriously as to form their own religion.

In particular, the writers draw attention to the 'Megalithic Yard', a system of measurement so precise that it is accurate to the width of a human hair. Have these people seen a megalithic site? The stones may have been well-fitted (there were skilled craftsmen in previous ages too) but they can hardly be described as accurate to a hairs-breadth.

As for Atlantis, I do actually believe it existed. No seriously. However I depart from Plato's description somewhat. His image of an island-continent bigger than Libya and beyond the Pillars of Hercules was nothing more than a literary construct to tell a tale of human folly. It was a story. Like King Arthur, Robin Hood, El Dorado, the Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail, or whatever 'conspiracy' and 'hidden truth' you prefer, Instead, I see Atlantis as based on something smaller, grubbier, and ultimately less impressive. My own feeling is that the city that spawned the legend was a Minoan port on a volcanic cone in the center of Santorini, an unforunate place to build a harbour as volcanoes and seawater are uncomfortable neighbours. But that's merely my view.

It seems the 'Golden Age' is something human beings dearly love. We look back to the legend of Atlantis. The Middle Ages looked back to the glory of the Roman Empire. The Romans looked back to their greek and home-grown immortal ancestors. Our distant ancestors looked back to a time of spirit beings. It's a familiar theme. Christianity is built on this foundation for instance, in the sense we look back at Jesus and assign him divine properties. It seems we all want there to have been a world in the distant past that was better, cleaner, more desirable than the mundane reality we're responsible for.

"Any readers who feel unable to opern their minds right up at this point should close the book now" say the writers in Chapter One. Thanks for the advice. But for that timely reminder, I might have wasted a few hours on this. I think I might write a book - Civilisation - The World Is Exactly What It Appears So Deal With It