Beware the frozen virus of doom!

It has been revealed this week that scientists have successfully defrosted a 30,000 year old virus.

Should we be worried? Hell, yes!

“March the...? Dammit! I don’t even know the day any more..! 2024. It’s over, people. The end of mankind is upon us. Germageddon!

It all seemed so innocent back in 2014. Some scientists found a 30,000 year old virus in the Siberian permafrost, popped it in the microwave for a bit, and before you could say ‘re-animated harbingers of death are upon us’, it had woken up, yawned, and popped off to kill some passing amoebas, just like in the very, very, old days.

As climate change melted more and more of the planet’s ice, other long-buried carriers of disease were soon enjoying a spot of much needed warmth and sunshine, before toddling off to wreak liberal helpings of death on unsuspecting wildlife who had foolishly begun thinking they were safe.

And then they started on us. Our microscopic chilled old-school enemies started off with a few things we thought long gone (Smallpox), then delivered some we didn’t even know existed (Wibblychinitus) before getting bored for a bit.

We thought we’d won. That science had beaten the viralpocalypse. We were wrong. They were just re-grouping.

They were more intelligent that we could ever have reasonably expected. They ignored us, and went for our technology instead.

Anything with a circuit board, microchip or battery (and that was pretty much everything) was suddenly under attack, being melted away into puddles of metal and plastic slush.

True, the ‘Zombie Massacre’ of 2019 wasn’t our finest moment. Who would have guessed that the millions of people shuffling along the streets, with vacant expressions, moaning eerily and oblivious to the world, were all just iPhone users trying to figure out why their screens had gone blank?

With the iPhone generation wiped out, we were suddenly a planet without Marketing Professionals, hipsters, brand-obsessed teenagers and people called Nevs. Which was nice for a while.

But it got steadily worse. Cars wouldn’t work, TVs became blank, pointless, wastes-of-space in the living room (much like Big Brother participants), the transport system collapsed, and then the unthinkable happened. Wifi stopped working.

Those who still had working devices could no longer connect to the internet, meaning we instantly had no idea what to do any more. There was no point in asking someone else – they would have just Googled it anyway. We weren’t even able to take arty photos of our food and post them on Instagram.

With artisan food outlets and coffee franchises shut down, there was panic and anarchy ensued. Soon there were riots as people battled their neighbours for the last packet of HobNobs. As the chilled white wine reserves ran dry, the last vestiges of civilisation trickled away with them.

I’m writing this on paper with a twig, as a warning from history.

Oh God – I think I can hear them at the door...”

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column in the North West Evening Mail on the 7th of March 2014. You can view the edited version used by the paper on their website here 27 words went missing in the edit, but nothing too substantial. You've got the whole, original, version I subbed above.

It would appear that, occasionally, my brain coughs up one of these odd, swirly-wirly-timey-wimey things, as a method of making a faintly disturbing or ludicrous story into a ridiculous paranoid vision of the future. I always worry when I do these if the paper will decide it's just too weird for what is, officially, an opinion column. I'm grateful that they haven't pulled the plug on me. Yet...

(Still on the home-made compilations. This one is from Feb 2005, and features mash-ups by Manriki, Janmix and The Geez. Groovy!)

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

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