Heliospheres and London

Thanks to Purple Dragon, I've been to read the New Scientist article about there being a ripple distortion at the edge of the solar system.

It took them long enough to find it, I must say.

Theres one at the edge of London, too.

See, once upon a time just over a hundred years ago (which is nothing to them and anyway once upon a place would be more correct, as time is conveniently relative and they have long since mastered it), a couple of maverick alien superbeings tiptoed into a West London Planning Office at the dead of night after downing a few beers, and changed the plans for the Western Avenue, so that, as you head east to the city, one small insignificant B road continues on its level path from North to South whilst the larger, newer, heavier Western Avenue travels over the top. The original plans were to build a simple crossing; but no, a page or two of specs and resolutions changed here or there, and Bob's your proverbial. The Western Avenue began its ascent heavenwards, just in this one, very particular place, for no apparently discernible reason.

Half a dozen bored, tired, ageing Councillors on the planning committee needed their memories modified, obviously, but they were easy targets being both soundly asleep and rather vacant (even when awake). Conveniently they suffered the fate of all old buffers on all old committees the Universe over, in as much as they frequently if not constantly pontificated and prevaricated on the pressures and intricacies of their task, but nobody actually ever really listened. Not even (well, particularly not) their wives.

And so it was all done and sorted in record time, well before 2am one frosty morning, with the only possible 'casualty' if he can be called that, being the dazed and confused Greek gentleman from the all night kebab shop in Harrow 100 years later, who couldn't remember what his last two customers looked like even though he felt the need to try really hard, and who woke the next day with a new and pressing urge to live a little, which for him involved switching to the off-licence business for the sake of fewer lingering odours and reduced acne, and signing up to a local lonely hearts agency.

The purpose of this midnight operation was not to initialise the London bubble, not at all. The bubble had existed for a very long time by then and had been around well before the weather forecasters figured it out and quite outrageously tried to claim it as a new invention, much in the same way as John Braxton Hicks discovered and therefore allegedly invented practice contractions. The idea was simply to allow mere mortals to see the edge of the bubble, with their own eyes. In truth the real purpose was nothing more than stage one of a bet, a wager that even if you realigned the horizontal entry point to allow for maximum visual distortion upon entry, humans were still too stupid to work out what they were looking at.

Guess who won.

~~~~

The history of the bubble itself is really quite amusing, if you consider that all those so-called pompous weirdos (think absolutely everybody from Sloane Square, for example) who postulate loudly that London is the centre of the Universe, have actually been perfectly correct all along. The bubble is simply the last, ultra slow moving ripple caused by the droplet of pure potential that hit the space-time continuum in the place now known as London, a microsecond after it achieved its current geographical position (as opposed to being under water or attached to France). The timing was impeccable, 'they' had been watching closely. They still are.

Obviously, although there are other ripples between here and the edge of the solar system, the smooth, circular wave effect is eventually always going to warp and buckle when it hits the sun, which sits there as a (if not 'the') giant and essential rock in the pond of human potential; the earliest and most necessary addition to an otherwise flat area of nothing-much-at-all. Human scientists may think that the interstellar magnetic field is pushing in, and it is, after all it used to own this place and it can get quite funny like that. The fact however remains that it is not pushing any harder in one place than another, merely that the sun is briefly in the way of the sparkle, for lack of a better word, pushing out.

Just as the voyager probes are heading towards a sort of no-mans-land in space, the so-called heliosheath beyond the edge of the heliosphere, which must be traversed before reaching interstellar space, so there is also a broad sheath of oddness between the lip of the London Bubble and normal human life, roughly equivalent to zones three and four on the London Underground map. Once again the edge of this transitional area may be spotted by observing the resultant weather patterns, and you will find that the Council houses at the back edge of Southall, just before Heston, Hayes et al, suffer the most frequent implications of this, where cloud formations seem to sit in one place for longer than normal with the edge invariably coinciding with the rooftops, so that the world can be sunny in the front garden and raining out the back all afternoon; or vice versa.

The houses most affected sit on the same stretch of road as (and just east of) the Grand Union Canal, but then everyone knows that William Jessop, along with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and all the great civil engineers of the 18th and 19th centuries knew a whole lot more than they ever let on. Hanwell Three Bridges, Brunel's creation just up the road, or to be specific just up Jessop's Grand Junction Canal as it was then called, is conveniently close to the insane asylum (fewer questions, see). This edifice, an engineering marvel of its time, mixed things up a bit by deviating from his normal formula, which generally involved starting with the Canal at the bottom and putting both the road and railway over the top. This rearrangement was deliberate, taking account of the same principle of maximum distortion which relied on the horizontal exit point being at just the right height to hit the curving overhead bubble at an angle of optimum disturbance to the human senses. He managed to wangle it so that road users and railway passengers alike got exactly the same effect.

Three Bridges was Brunel's own cheeky attempt to allow others to physically sense the exit from London air (or more precisely wannabe-London air with its heady mix of true but geographically more elusive potential for genius, bogged down by intermarriage to cloying, dullard social climbing middle-management jobsworth types) back into the next, wider ripple zone that we mortals consider to be normal space. It was a remarkably unsubtle plot to those in the know, and cost him his membership to a few secret societies and good London clubs, so it's really rather tragic that the plan never worked. At least, it worked very well, except that nobody other than the initiates fathomed what was going on or why, the normal hoi polloi simply accepted the refreshing sensation of feeling somehow unfettered once they were beyond the bridge; hence the later bet.

~~~

I'm not at liberty to explain this for now, but should you ever wish to experience the stronger, inner phase transition, the one at the point of entry to the bubble pure, then its very easy and best to set off between five and seven p.m. on a weekday. I recommend going by car.

Although you can see the rift point at a distance from the gates of the BBC Scenery Dept, Western Ave, Acton, thats really about as near as its safe to go on foot without being permanently affected. Sometimes, if you stand for any while at the bus stop across the road from the Beeb in an effort to travel away to the suburbs, you can sense the faint hum of temporal distortion. Sometimes, if you stare too keenly at the bridge in hope of a double decker going your way, it feels as though the whole world throbs in time with the blood travelling through your veins. Sometimes the siren call to abandon the bus stop and walk over the bridge on foot, towards London, is tempered only by a deep, embedded almost animal instinct that if you did that, you may just never be seen again in your current spiritual form, and you may not care about it, either.

Closeted in the electrical field produced by a motor vehicle, its just about safe to cross the bubble lip with no lasting after effects. Pick the time given to me, above, and on a clear day you will be struck by the optical illusion as clear as if the bubble were made of soap. The rainbow effect is on another level and only experienced, not seen, but before you will arise an image of the top third of the Post Office Tower, magnified several times over and seemingly parked at the top of the incline. The construction of the tower constituted stage two of the bet, but I am not at liberty to divulge whether Bedford or Yeats, or even Lind, Benn or Butlin were initiates of the secret society and complicit with the plan, or whether our drunken superbrained friends simply adjusted the positioning of available sites and installed the whimsical idea into certain heads, in the first place.

The odd thing is that stage two was never originally imagined and was eventually conceived as a way to underline things. It was a double or nothing addendum to the original bet after the stage one bridge construction was met with gormless silence. However, if the day is foggy or damp, if the sun is uninclined to support this magnificent and startling trick of the light, then the original side effect is still available to your senses if you care to try.

I know this is daring, and a little dangerous, but; you could always pick that time of day to drive from the Western Avenue onto the Westway with the car windows open. Uhuh, I thought that would shock you, but trust me, it can be done, and I have unwittingly managed it myself several times with, I am told, no discernible long term effects. Here's the trick. If you were to listen to music on the car radio, but turn that off just before ascending, you would find that, at the top of the climb, you will not only be surrounded by white noise, but also that within the fizz-buzz audio distortion of entering the bubble pure, your mind will irresistibly pick out the purest, most complicated music from the grey drone of nothingness. It doesn't even matter if you were just listening to the Happy Mondays, as there is every possibility that the top of the incline will play you a full blown Bach concerto. Be alert that after effects may be reduced by a very stiff drink, or six, as soon as you get where you're going.

~~~

Of course many questions remain. Why was the potential-droplet introduced? What does it mean to me? What experiment did it comprise and are they still testing? Do they have any other little side bets going on and how much are they interfering? Are there aliens deliberately messing us about in Westminster, or Alperton? What beer do they prefer and do they rate kebabs higher than fish and chips?

I would love to tell you. I would also need to ask permission, first.

This post was written by and remains the intellectual property of Cheryl aka the Mad Baggage - drop by my blog and see the Creative Commons licence on it. This makes Drink Mixed Top at assholegame.com the blog of a lazy thieving bastard wanker incapable of original thought, IMHO. Just so you know. To repeat that then, it is the opinion of Chery at http://madbaggagerambling.blogspot.com/ that the author/creator/administrator of the site http://assholegame.com/ is a lazy thieving bastard wanker incapable of original thought. Got that?