Trouser Farming

                One of the more appealing sights to be seen in the universe would be a farm. Not just any old farm to be found in the outskirts of Northampton or Windsor but a really quite incredible farm to be found in the in-skirts Sol. With so many solar systems cluttering up the galaxy and so many galaxies cluttering up the universe it is difficult not to call anyone who thinks that Earth is the only life sustaining planet in all of existence a bit arrogant. They probably think everyone else is selfish for being ahead of them in the queue at the checkout or for wanting to sit down on the same crowded bus that they want to sit down on. When you get a get a reasonably priced bag of apples from the supermarket and one of them is rotten you must suspect the others to be suffering the same fate, and likewise with a discounted bag of planets like the Milky Way, you've got to be a bit worried that there may be something similar to our own carbon based monkey rot going on in some of them. Steps should likely then be taken to purge these samples from the bag and perhaps even encourage the storage of unaffected specimens in a refrigerator to preserve freshness. Thankfully empty space is pretty chilly, noticeably more so than a commercially available personal fridge, so one may be forgiven for thinking this advice can be disregarded by any exoplanet not currently invading the personal space of a star. However, it takes a packet of meat roughly a day to fully freeze in the freezer at minus 20 degrees Celsius or thereabouts whereas Earth has been a planet in a cold sink of about minus 270 degrees Celsius for about 4.5 billion years and most of it is still pretty cosy, as evidenced by the existence of humanity, the oceans and reasonably priced beach holidays in Majorca.

                In the face of this monumental sanitation crisis, we gather up the various residents (or plagues) from the affected planets and stick them in a farm within our own solar system because we're a) lazy, b) incapable of reliable space travel over large distances and c) probably the nicest hosts who would cater for various differing dietary requirements with a minimum of snide comments. We would be given a window into the nature of life if we could witness its other forms which have evolved under conditions entirely separate to and different from our own. Would they have overcome issues like situational awareness with absorption of electromagnetic emissions and reflections in the same narrow band and detection of longitudinal air vibrations with their ears in the same range as us or make the same unforgivable mistake of adopting pebble dashing as an appropriate method of decorating a homestead exterior? Would they have also suffered mass extinctions and resurgences of life like we did? Space dinosaurs are unquestionably an appealing prospect so I for one hope so. It would be best not to tell any survivors that I hoped for their mass extinction however, it's exactly that kind of thing that causes first impressions to go badly.

                Why a farm and not a zoo or a lab then? Well, when your daughter's dog catches a serious case of "got into the cupboard and subsequently full of bleach" you tell them that he's gone to live on a farm. It comes across like the disappearance of the dog (and stark reduction in the cleanliness of the toilet) is less traumatic because a farm is a wonderful place for the dog to be, with lots of space to run around in, lots of affection from the proprietors of said farm and so much food that trying to eat cleaning supplies is barely an afterthought. Nobody ever tells the little girl that the dog has gone to be gawped at in a zoo and they certainly don't elucidate the child to the lack of canine companionship by telling her it's gone to a lab to be experimented on, tortured a little bit and ultimately dissected by the kind of man who thinks sliding a scalpel through a puppy is an acceptable afternoon occupation. Likewise then if we were to tell the owners of the other worlds we're taking their wildlife (and possibly them too) to a farm just outside Mars then they'll take it far better. The gawping and dissection can happen in the barn -  anything goes when you're in a barn.

A time before trousers

                It was a time like no other, I'm sad to say. Myself and Smythe used to frequent all of the most fashionable gentlemen's clubs in those days. The war stopped all that of course because I had to pretend to be bed ridden to avoid conscription. I'd swallow small shards of glass to cough up blood and fool the doctor which worked wonders for me until I had to pass them through the next day. I learned to sit down carefully back then, I can tell you. I remember one day after lying to the officers, Smythe was being a sport to one of the local urchins and gave him a playful clonk on the noggin with his walking stick. It was most comely and charming but the boy just couldn't take a joke, and rather childishly bled to death through a crack in his cranium. We still laughed however, right up to the night we tossed his defiantly dour body into the canal and spotted a tyre that some inconsiderate vagabond had fly-tipped. That spoilt the evening something rotten as I'm sure you understand.

                We often had our evenings spoilt, Smythe and I. I think it was something to do with the vast amounts of opium we used to consume but one can never be sure. Not of anything once the opium kicked in. There was one occasion when we had just won a sum of money betting on dogs and we celebrated by letting loose some rounds from a hunting rifle into the masonry of a greengrocers. Everyone around us was livid that we'd got brick dust in the artichokes and we would have been arrested if Smythe hadn't had the quick wit and diplomacy to shoot the arresting officer in the shins and make a run for it.

                There was a period of laying low after that. It simply didn't do to embarrass the family by being party to discharging a firearm into a man at so few paces so I elected to spend a few weeks in my rooms, sulking and stamping around until everyone got over it. It was a bloody good sulk too, you just don't see that quality of frowning any more. When I eventually resurfaced into the public eye everyone was more concerned with the coronation so I was able to resume my dealings un-harassed. Quite why a man who was party to shooting an officer in the street was allowed to return to those same streets when the monarch was passing through is something I chose not to question. It would only arouse suspicion and my face was awfully sore from all the previous grumpiness.

                My doctor recommended that perhaps I should sulk more often, since he suspected my facial soreness was simply muscle fatigue rather than permanent damage and it seemed to have cleared up my bloody cough. Thankfully the war was over by then and I was once again found in chairs up and down the country. Smythe was less fortunate however, as he was held in the grips of quite catastrophic haemorrhoids which threatened to rend his very life in twain. We tried to comfort him by saying that standing suited the cut of his suits but it was no use. He cheered up for a week when he discovered the lost art of falling face first into the armchair and contorting his neck around to greet his guests but it made it all the harder to have a glass of brandy and laugh at the poor.

                Eventually Smythe took to wailing over the wireless at all times of night and we were forced to break his front door down and slaughter his house staff. It was the wakeup call he needed in many ways, especially when we pointed out that his house staff seemed to be the monkeys which had been missing from the zoo for the better part of a year. You could tell by the way they gripped the silver service and had the anatomies of chimpanzees. He never did explain how they'd managed to come into his employ, nor how their union had always managed to negotiate so masterfully with him but life has its little mysteries and it's not our place to intrude on them.

                It was, however, our place to intrude on the local by-elections and have Smythe made MP for Prestwick. He was ever so proud of himself and really made a difference to that community. It was almost exclusively negative, his influence, but it was his pet project and he wasn't doing harm to anyone that really mattered so we let him have his fun.

                It all ended in tragedy of course, as with everything one is trying to enjoy. Smythe decided to run for Prime Minister and we couldn't very well let him do that. He'd already led Prestwick into a brief but exceedingly bloody war against Sudan, claiming his divine right to "reclaim the homeland" and if he tried it with the whole country it would disrupt the cricket to no end. In light of this, we had him kidnapped and stripped of all power. When he managed to escape our custody by opening the unlocked door to his cell we let him go about his business uncontested, he couldn't do any serious harm anymore. To this day I still read about small skirmishes in the Sudanese capitol and smile, knowing he's out there and doing just fine.

Do dogs like trousers?

                Imagine a dog. Any kind of dog you like, but it has to be a really good one. I don't want you to be sitting there imagining some kind of low quality, pitiable dog without any sense of right and wrong. It just wouldn't be very nice for you to be put through that. If the dog is sitting down then grand, he or she is comfortable and possibly well behaved to boot. Unless it's sitting on something unpleasant in which case I would call into question why you have placed your mental canine in that kind of situation. If the dog is not sitting down then I suppose the previous couple of sentences bear little relevance to your life and you're free to disregard them.

                There, I'm glad that's out of the way. We are free to get down to the business at hand now. We need not feel captivated or restricted by a lack of imagined dogs in this instance because we have taken steps to do away with such unpleasant, unnatural and crude shackles. You may not have even been aware that such shackles existed but you can now feel reassured in the knowledge that they definitely do not exist any longer, for now at least.

                The lack of shackles can be misconstrued as freedom, but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking we have very much of that. We're bound by our own inadequacies as a species for one thing, needing to pour liquids into ourselves, gorge on mountains of food, sleep for a third of the time we have available, suck in vast quantities of air for a small component of it and exercise ( becoming out of breath as we do so and needing to suck in even greater volumes of air) to stop  the food and liquid that we need from preventing us to move around and exercise in the first place. Also, there are health and beauty concerns to running about a bit, but I mostly enjoy the mobility thing because it sounds more tautological that way.

                These bindings are less unnatural than the dog situation but I'd still like to be rid of them. It's essentially impossible because we've evolved in such a way that these things are vital and going a few days without them will lead to our service being discontinued indefinitely and any unaffected parts being sold for scrap, buried or burned.

                Evolution isn't clever. It's not dumb but it certainly isn't an intelligent process. It blindly stabs around with its mutation stick, clobbering genes in all directions into infinitesimally different shapes then lets the victim get on with its life as best it can. Sometimes the change will be a great success, well reviewed by The Spectator and given a 6 month slot in the west end. Other times it will do less admirably and wind up rotting in a ditch just outside of Birmingham.

                The little changes give certain examples of a species an advantage. They're more adept at eating berries, seeing prey in the dark or designing comfortable yet affordable cottages in the Derby area.  They then have the means to not die horribly and even propagate their own genetic wonders for some new mutation to tinker with and ruin, like some kind of savage using a brandy glass to serve sherry. In other words, they are more fit for the task at hand, namely the task of survival. Survival of the fittest. It's an easy concept but one which seems to elude people as it's treated like a radically complicated theory just because it takes millions of years to see any effect from it. By that logic we should be confused by coastal erosion or internet petitions about how some people in a country very far away are treating other people in a different country slightly further away, over a difference of opinion which couldn't be culturally further away from us if it tried (and if I was a culture, I would certainly distance myself from the kind of people who think that it's a good idea to invent a seven day week and then declare that they should work for 5 of them and only have 2 off).

                You can't make a pair of shorts evolve into trousers, nor can you make a cat evolve into a pie. One requires tailoring and the other baking, with moral issues possibly making themselves known if the cat is not your own and the shorts are being worn by someone at the time. You can however take a moment out to appreciate the gigantic sample of random changes which must have occurred to allow any of your biological faculties to be suitable for the environment in which you live, let alone idealised for it. You're an incredibly complicated series of squishy and hard bits which pump out and suck in goo in order to keep you trundling about, unfathomably interrelated and interdependent, all of which came about by chance at some point down the line and all of which is easily rendered useless by an improperly applied screwdriver.

Trouncing The Trouserial Frontier.

                You're on a ball of rock. A big ball, granted, which has more than just rocks in it but in essence, it's a big old ball of rock hurtling through space. You don't notice it hurtling through space of course, because everything around it is also hurtling through space with it, at a similarly astounding velocity. Whilst doing this it's also winding a merry course around a somewhat ludicrously larger ball of superheated hydrogen fusion and spinning about on an axis at an angle which the general consensus has declared to be satisfyingly jaunty without pushing it too much. Again, you don't notice much of this going on directly, but when it gets dark and cold you'll begin to have an inkling that something is going on and you're not being carbon copied into the emails. Even so, what's more unusual for you and your pet rock, which we'll call terra because that's a nice name and it sounds like terror (which is what you should be experiencing in all this rushing around), is that not only are you zipping through space like you have an important meeting to be late for, but space is hurrying along with you as if to bring you your forgotten sandwiches. In this case we can allow the sandwiches to be the effects of various dark energy components of the universe. The filling can be tuna.

                You may be thinking "Well, I don't seem to have much input in where I'm being taken or what my lunch will be, but that isn't a whole lot different to getting on a commercial flight. At least without the advent of a cosmological flight deck or astronomical child kicking the back of my galactic seat, I am able to see where I am heading." but sadly you're not quite on the ball there either. The metaphorical ball of having the right idea that is, not the ball of rock. The chances are you're still on that one unless you've named yourself curiosity and gone for a bit of a jaunt to a neighbouring rock which is on an analogous journey. No, you can only see a vague impression of where you would have been heading a very, very long time ago if you'd had the foresight to set off for place B rather than sitting in place A pondering on why you didn't like it very much. It's not just the time it took for the light to get to you either, because whilst you are effectively gazing into the past in much the same way as receiving a letter by second class post (the postman in this case is both a wave and a particle so don't be too mean to him, he can't even interact with letters to deliver them), you're also probably going to be seeing a lot of things far too many times in the sky or seeing smeared out versions of what they should look like. Your close friend mass is to blame for that one, bending space-time and making light travel around it when it should collide and stay for tea. It's sort of like heading on a beeline to London then being caught up in the M25 and deflected past it to somewhere on the opposite side. There are some things you won't even be seeing at all because light can't escape them, like the Coventry one-way system.

                So, you're heading blindly through space at a quite alarming speed but these deflecting effects should at least keep you entertained with their pretty light shows and you'll keep getting new scenery the farther you go. Except, you won't. Space is such a dedicated spouse that in its efforts to get your sandwiches to you, its acceleration has had the quite peculiar effect of meaning that in an infinite amount of time, light may only travel a finite distance. Drop this bombshell at the meeting, then everyone will forget about how late you were and continue onto "Any other business". Unless you can't actually get to the meeting because it's beyond even the theoretical reaches of your pocket torch. You may wish to conduct a review of meeting schedules and locations if this presents an issue but at least you'll never be reprimanded for not showing up. Eventually, of course, nothing else will show up either. Not to the meeting, not to London, not even to your generally successful bridge and whist evenings. Space is accelerating away from itself in its frenzy for you to enjoy your delicious lunch and by the time you've failed to get to where it's physically impossible for you to be, you won't even be able to see the pocket torch that you're holding and shining directly into your own face. This of course will make reading to pass the time a struggle beyond even travel sickness.

                It's nothing to worry about though, your solar travel buddy will have long since run out of fuel and collapsed under its own weight causing it to explode, grow in size, and engulf you before you even notice that your socks are odd.