People are asking about my plans and what my next book would be about. 

Next Book

The next book would be the story of what happened directly after the first one: the experience of disappearing into a shed in an orchard for a year, the various events during that period with which I was tied up, and the rollercoaster that followed.

Those episodes, rather than the pilgrimage, turned out to constitute the defining experiences of my life. There’s masses of eyebrow-raising material to write about.

That true story would, in part, be a vehicle for a further reinterpretation of what’s happening on this planet, with all these evolved, imperfect hominids doing these completely unprecedented things. My objective in book two would be for that interpretation to be next-level-down from book one: contextualising the day-to-day events of the world in the framework of the big-picture word view set out on the last page of Part 9, and Part 10, of The Jolly Pilgrim.

However, I will not be disappearing into any more sheds. Once per lifetime was enough. In addition, while I’m confident in my book-construction skills, I’m acutely aware of the time and logistical commitments. So for the time being, all that stays on the drawing board.

Next Steps

The more immediate concern is to push the first book. With the initial marketing complete, that means:

a) getting in front of more people; and

b) putting detail on my proposed world view.

At Speaker's Corner, Hyde Park

A large part of the past few months has involved debating, acquiring further knowledge, making connections, and recording and collating ideas. It’s been an enormously gratifying part of this sabbatical. Given that the time remaining is limited, the most useful things I have to delve into are the live issues which, in my experience, cause people to dispute my optimism, including: environmental degradation, global population, the role of religion and our current economic problems.

One inestimable advantage I have in this is that my bosses at Reed Global are being incredibly supportive (one might say, enlightened) with respect to giving me the freedom to do all this. It does help that they’ve all been good enough to read my book.

Updates

Tom Mansfield kicks in with some H. G. Wells

Shoulder update: The ligaments connecting my right collarbone have torn. I’m now up to three X-rays. The doctors are waiting to see if they’ll heal without surgery. Next appointment in four weeks. I am a torrent of self pity. Tony the Tiger is now on washing-up duty.

Speaking update: Tom Mansfield and I hit Speaker’s Corner, in Hyde Park, on Sunday. We blasted the assembled 117 onlookers with our cosmic narrative, replete with statistics and hard numbers. A full online video will be forthcoming. The professional hecklers present (whom we met during our reconnaissance) held their tongues. We are seeking less forgiving audiences.

‘[Try to] look at the present in a way that the declinist narratives so common in environmental writing disbar;… see today as being in the middle of things, pulled in many directions, not passed down at the end of time.’ – Geoff Carr

Buy the book

When I saw the email informing me that my publishers were going into administration, the first thought through my mind was: ‘At least it’s happened now, when I’ve got the freedom to turn all my energies to dealing with it.’ But it was very bad news.

For years I’d planned my life around publishing and marketing The Jolly Pilgrim, as a platform for the more rational and big-picture world view I’ve made it my mission to articulate (it’s a novel plan, but it’s my plan). I’d worked a long time to arrange the world around me so as to do that. The HotHive were my partners in this endeavour. They’d delivered everything they’d promised. And suddenly, unexpectedly, they were gone.

Worse, an honourable and hard-working group of people – who were my increasingly good friends – were losing their jobs, right before Christmas. Nevertheless, despite their own far more considerable crisis, the HotHive’s staff and directors went well beyond the call of duty to ensure the Jolly Pilgrim project carried on.

Mark Snare was typically unforgiving:

‘THERE IS ALWAYS A WAY FORWARD. FIND IT.’

The critical objectives were to keep the book on sale and ensure the liquidators didn’t get their paws on the literary assets. Time was of the essence.

I started making phone calls, and was plunged into a set of logistical and business challenges about which I had zero previous experience, and had to learn in a hurry, on the hoof, just as the holiday season was closing in.

Tony and the van, pre-crash

One thing the episode taught me was to love Amazon. When I first got my head around book-selling (a year ago) I railed against them for dictating discount rates and exploiting their dominant market position. I now eat those sentiments. Amazon are fantastic: responsive, doing everything they say (quickly), selling lots of books (in bursts, for some reason?) and being accessible across the world (contacts in Sydney inform me that yes, they will sell you my book in Australia).

Most of the problems involved: negotiating with wholesalers, dealing with the guys who do the industry listings, rescuing the master files, and flipping ownership of the ebooks (all the money for pre-January ebook sales was lost, alas). It was not an agreeable matter to have on my mind over Christmas.

In the end, there were only two major hiatuses.

1) The Kindle version was unavailable for about a week.

2) Tony the Tiger reversed the Mercedes Sprinter CDI high-top van (we drove up to collect the books before the liquidators swept in) into a low bridge, crunching the roof and rear doors. Note the phrase ‘high-top’. Thank god we paid the insurance excess.

A month later and I’m up and running again. In the last weeks I’d arranged some signings, sent review copies to the student magazines of the UK’s top universities and prepared our first guerrilla marketing stunt.

Then, yesterday afternoon, riding through the London Cemetery, I crashed my bike, landing hard on my right side. I limped home, and sat dazed and shocked for a while before Tony packed me off to casualty. The ligament joining two of my shoulder bones have torn apart. (The technical name is an ‘Actromioclavicular submlimation’). My right (i.e writing) arm is in a sling. I’ve been given painkillers and ordered to sit still.

As for my strategy for dealing with this latest, trifling, setback: forget ‘man flu’. Think ‘man flu on steroids’.

Three favourite words I’ve learned this week:

• ‘Teleology’: The doctrine that phenomena are guided not only by mechanical forces but that they also move towards certain goals of self-realisation.
• ‘Pantomnesia’: Remembrance of everything ever learned.
• ‘Grammatolatry’: Worship of words

Buy the book

Like the Facebook group (please)

Follow me on Twitter

After years of saying ‘Sorry, I can’t spend time with you because I’m writing a book’ my sabbatical brought the long-awaited delight of visiting the people I’ve been missing. First, my big sister, Ruth, and her family, who are in a seriously happy place in East Yorkshire. Life there is dominated by Polly (eldest niece, five, red head, ancestors were rapacious Viking warlords) and Martha (youngest niece, two, a tub-sized engine of chaos).

Polly and Martha

Then I was off to Lincoln to see my oldest school buddy (and geophysicist big-gun), Dr Quintin Davies, followed by a trip to the west to visit: my uncle Pip and his family (and their menagerie of animals) in the rolling hills of Monmouthshire; my boar-hunting mates, Joanne and Martin Van, in the Forest of Dean; Patrick van Beek and family (see The Jolly Pilgrim, Part 10) in Bristol; an ex-client/new friend (you know who you are, Joh); and Zoe Joyce (The Jolly Pilgrim, Part 6, now pregnant by athlete boyfriend, and my new home-boy, Leggy) in Cardiff.

During that first phase of the sabbatical, I was trying to do everything at once: delivering review copies to publications across London; liaising with journalists; and making the case for my Jolly Pilgrim world view to people around the world. At one point I was holding simultaneous debates with some eco-warriors in Canada, an astrophysicist in Chicago, and the head of a UK-based think tank.

Unfortunately, multitasking was never my strong point, and I was getting bogged down. So I began picking off tasks one-by-one, on the basis that when things are done, they’re done.

I’d written a travel book which required 18,000 words of online appendices. It took three weeks to draft and post them all. Then: caption the photos; realign the website; acquire a literary agent; audition for the Olympics ceremonies; visit bookshops; give a couple of talks; deal with my late mother’s tax affairs (five forms, two letters and a £400 fine); and, finally, sorting out the garden at a house in Essex which I reluctantly manage.

By early December, I’d ruthlessly and systematically sorted out my life. Selling books is very difficult, but sales were ticking along, my marketing and distribution resources were in place, the team at my publisher were fantastic and I finally had the luxury of complete focus. Everything was in order. I was feeling tentatively confident and having tremendously fun. Four days later, the bombshell dropped.

An email from my publishing company, the HotHive.

They were going into liquidation.

A moment of stunned silence.

You are having a giraffe.

Cockney rhyming slang of the day: ‘giraffe’, meaning ‘laugh’.

Buy the book

Like the Facebook group (please)

Follow me on Twitter

My editor, Sid, took me down to St Paul’s Cathedral, where since mid-October there has been a camp of people protesting against capitalism, among other things. It was a grey and overcast day, with occasional drizzle. The camp is a reduced version of what one finds at performing arts festivals – around 10 white, framed gazebos, scattered amongst a hundred two- to four-man dome tents. A bloke with a cart was making a good fist of keeping the place clean. No one seemed to be doing any harm.

In the open space before the cathedral, a born-again Christian, equipped with a megaphone, was talking about how faith had transformed his life from one of drugs, crime and chaos, into one of meaning, structure and love. Another fellow, also with a megaphone, was taunting him about genocide in the Bible.

We walked around looking for someone to talk to, went inside some of the gazebos and hung-out at the tea area. I introduced myself to a few people but, other than the lady manning the info desk (Emily, just helping out for the day), it was difficult to find anyone with anything to say. Most residents wouldn’t even share their names. Were they under surveillance? Or just paranoid?

Lacking engagement, I got stuck into some of the literature. The camp newspaper, The Occupied Times, had articles denouncing attempts to cut government spending (‘… stand up against the cuts which are destroying our lives’), alongside articles bemoaning the fate of Greece – a country in live meltdown because its politicians weren’t brave enough to tackle government spending. On posters, pasted on nearby walls, the prose got darker: diatribes about ‘Zionism’ edged perilously close to straight-out anti-Semitism.

A lot of people were sitting around doing nothing, which is a shame, as in my experience, things get done when people do things, and win battles of ideas by having ideas. There was more intellectual action in the coffee shop adjacent to the camp, where Londoners wearing suits were busy holding meetings and working on laptops.

The only people with interesting things to say that afternoon were the ones I’d arrived with. Sid’s interpretation was thus: there’s a broad spectrum of opinion regarding our current economic problems, and what to do about them. At one end of that spectrum you’ve got the nastiest, more-for-me, recesses of the finance world, inhabited by boring materialists with no social conscience. At the opposite fringe, you’ve got the St Paul’s guys (‘aimless malcontents’ was his exact phrase). Lucy, Sid’s photographer mate, was dismissive of the whole thing (‘I was at Dale Farm. They’re often the same faces’). She’d just come back from north Africa, where ideas actually have changed the world, and was bursting with colourful stories about six-year-olds holding Kalashnikovs and the pictures she’d taken of Muammar Gaddafi’s corpse.

My narrative of the protest is as follows: The people of the democratic West have become comfortable with levels of public expenditure trending above economic growth, and the capacity of their economies to support that expenditure. However, because debt markets (the mechanism by which public spending is smoothed across time) are sufficiently abstract that people don’t generally understand them, governments are incentivized to take unsustainable and irrational actions, such as relentlessly borrowing against future tax receipts to fund immediate consumption.

Now public spending needs to be adjusted, people don’t want to hear it. The manifestations of that unwillingness to engage with economic reality include the proliferation of single-issue groups (to whom any reduction in their pet area of expenditure is outrageous and unthinkable) and groups with a vague sense that life shouldn’t be this complicated, like the one camped at St Paul’s.

Their literature is full of avowals that if some other problem with the world economy could be fixed (tax avoidance, irrationally high pay for executives, poorly designed incentives for banking professionals, systematic risk in the global financial system), long-term public liabilities could endlessly rise above productivity improvements, and the demographic realities implicit to this phase in Western economic history would simply go away.

The hysteria in their language (‘Fight racism. Fight imperialism. Smash Capitalism.’ reads one sign) is telling. We now live in a society where anything outside smooth two and a half per cent growth rates is characterised as a disaster. In the 19^th century they dealt with slavery. In the 20^th century they dealt with two world wars. Our generation has to deal with a few years of stagnant growth in public spending, and everybody freaks out.

It would be helpful if there was more realism about the historical context of all this. Due to a series of poor strategic decisions, growth in Western countries will now stagnate for the next few years. That’s deeply regrettable. But per capita GDP isn’t going to go into reverse. Living standards won’t fall over the long term. The shift in economic power to Asia is a relative, not an absolute, shift: it’s Asia getting richer, not the West getting poorer, and lifting hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty is rather a good thing, overall.

The underlying trends which have driven the incredible improvements in living standards over recent decades (technological progress, a more integrated and networked world, and ever more efficient business practices) haven’t gone away, and the future remains exceedingly bright. The next generation will live longer, healthier lives, in even more enlightened societies, with access to ever more fabulous technology (although they’ll retire later). Over the medium and long term, social programmes will continue to become better and better resourced, just as they have been doing, inexorably, for the past two centuries.

It is irksome that the protesters self-identify as (and then crow about) being an enlightened, justice-seeking majority, then fall back on absurdly simplistic narratives, where our economic problems would disappear if the one per cent of evildoers just stopped being selfish. There’s nothing enlightened about being anti-maths, or proposing that public policy be based on fantasy. That way lies the road to ruin.

A sign on one tent reads ‘[W]e would like to thank you all for your kindness and patience whilst we diligently try to work with you to explore the possibility of a better social contract in this, our wonderful, liberal country.’ Amen to that. I can only admire the spontaneous good intentions of the whole thing, and overall the camp is a noteworthy addendum to the cultural landscape. But it was lamentably wishy-washy and a bit dull. So we decamped to the pub to look at Lucy’s pictures from Libya, where people are looking to the future, not fixating only on the present.

Click here to see Lucy’s website, including those photos of the Colonel. She’s a freelance press photographer working in news, media and events. One of her pictures from Libya has been chosen by The Guardian, G2 for their photographs of the year.

Book-purchase options.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon  

The Jolly Pilgrim is available on all major ebook formats

(more oomph than your usual travel book)

Forty-eight hours after the book launch, I found myself at a fetish party. It was pandemonium: populated by glamorous ladies wearing tight black latex; a couple dressed as vampires (inc. fangs); and a fellow with impressive upper body development, who’d spent 13 years as a stripper, and who explained to me in excruciating detail how cock rings work (!).

Unfortunately, when off the leash, I get very naughty very quickly. The experience kicked-off a short period of post-book decadence.

The rub is that:

• decadence = alcohol
• alcohol = calories
• calories = fat bastard.

Things rapidly snowballed: lunches in the sun, dinner parties, red wine, After Eights, Turkish delight, Moscow mules, rhubarb crumble, pork belly, larger beers, huge racks of barbequed ribs, colossal joints of beef, wrapped in bacon and soaked in fat …

As August grew to a close, the Jolly Pilgrim was packing on the pounds. By mid September, I was as rotund as a big fatty bonbon.

Meanwhile, when The Telegraph extract went live, I got my first dose of internet abuse when some bloke accused me of claiming the EU stopped World War II. A week later, on The Ecologist website, a fellow called Anarcho Ted said he was “sickened by me” and told me to “get out of [my] male reductionist science box”. Nevertheless, ‘Gaia Theory’ (thus far the only major extract we’ve released) was reposted by the Post Carbon Institute, the Gaian Foundation, the Environmental News Network, three newspapers and some eco warriors in the USA. I was happy.

Around me, initial reactions were wildly mixed. ‘Did you really have to do all that drinking and leaping into bed with everyone?’ said my godmother, Janet (me: jaw on the floor). ‘Your all-in-one ending certainly constitutes metaphysics,’ opined Dr Nick Jones, philosophy lecturer at Leeds University (I scribbled that one down, sharpish). ‘I skipped all the philosophy and just read your travel story,’ (me: clutch throat in horror and disbelief). Then there was my favourite scientific pagan, Ash, who nailed it, ‘This big-picture pantheism that is so clearly core to who you are …’

My cousin Donna (glittering career in third-world development and peace-building) reacted by challenging me to get middle-class English people to grasp the difference in magnitude of social issues between third- and first-world societies. I struggle to get 20somethings to understand how much better the teenies are than the 70s. As Jesus said in South Park: I ain’t touching that one with a barge pole.

Tony the Tiger update: after the skin-crawling debacle of Peacefest 2010, Tony was top billing for the 2011 event. The management insisted he open the festival, before his depraved, lead-from-the-front instincts took hold, and all hell broke loose. As he took the stage, clutching his brand new black Fender, a shiver ran down my spine. Would the months of intensive practise pay off? Would Tony drench himself in glory, or was I about to witness another catastrophic episode of crashing and burning; all artistic integrity buried beneath an avalanche of public embarrassment and humiliation?

In the end, he nailed it.

VIDEO ACTION:

Tony’s Peacefest tribute to Jimi Hendrix (SORRY FOR THE EMBARRASING VOICEOVER)

Me performing ‘You Really Got Me’ by The Kinks:

Two clicks to harmony and enlightenment

On the worst night of the London riots, Tony was sanguine, treating the whole thing as sport (‘Wah-hey, it’s kicking off in Ealing now!’). As disorder turned to mayhem, he reminisced about the London jails he’d been locked up in himself over the years (Holborn and South Tottenham, for the record) and the roughings-up he’d received at the hands of the cops (reflecting that it ‘taught him respect’). Then Tony went to bed. I stayed glued to the telly.

With events so out of control, and no one able to offer a coherent narrative, I turned to the internet as a news source. The zodiac of British opinion was on display: people claiming they’d been right all along about something or other (mainly: law and order, immigration or government spending). I pored over the comments sections of the broadsheet websites – full of semi-literate ravings and windows on the collective consciousness – and went back and forth on instant messenger with my filmmaker friend, Isis, freaked out in Haringey.

Late that manic Monday, words of clarity and wisdom finally appeared on the screen before me: #riotcleanup.

I immediately assembled a combat pack: one blanket, one head torch, two A–Zs, two rolls of bin liners, two pairs of gardening gloves, two bottles of water, one first-aid kit, one dictaphone and a copy of The Jolly Pilgrim.

The next morning, I got on my bicycle and headed to the nearest reported hotspots (Bow and Bethnal Green), looking for someone to help. But by midday, the fabric of London society had already bounced right back. I cruised around for a while. Roman Road market was a hive of bustling, multi-ethnic productivity. The pavement cafés were full. Glass-installation companies were doing a brisk trade. I stopped to shake hands with a couple of policemen.

Then, on Mile End Road, I finally found someone who needed me.

A white BMW had pulled up by the side of the road with a flat tyre. A man and a woman, with a baby, were standing beside it. I pulled up, ‘Need help?’ The woman looked at me suspiciously. I offered her a bottle of cold water. She snatched it out of my hand.

‘Yes please,’ said the man.

I jacked the car while he undid the nuts. Obviously, I kept up my happy patter. By the time I was hauling the spent wheel to the boot, the beating sunshine was having its effect on the collective mood, which had turned to jubilation, and the two of them were sharing their story.

Alex and Jennifer were first-generation African immigrants. They lived in Leytonstone. All the cars on their street got thumped the previous night by roaming ferals, but they only noticed the flat when on the road. They’d been feeling got at. Our work done, I unleashed my secret weapon: whipping a copy of The Jolly Pilgrim out of my combat pack and handing it to Alex.

He was classy enough to grasp the significance, ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the cover (NASA, darling) and force me to sign it, right there on the boot of his car. They drove off beeping, waving and shouting about Samaritans.

Alex and Jennifer didn’t really need my help with the tyre. It wouldn’t have taken much longer without me. They just needed some love.

Good Morning Everybody

The reference sections (Appendix II) for The Jolly Pilgrim are now live, so we finally have a complete, internet-supported product. Every number, and most of the facts, are sourced on these pages. If I’ve missed anything, do point it out.

I apologise for the delay in posting these. Getting 18,000 words of supporting material online turned out to be a big job.

I’ve used the opportunity to expand on areas alluded to in the text, including: animal consciousness, astrological ages, killer bees, Carl Sagan, extrasolar planets, happiness, Sappho, Sumer and Gaia’s earthling-dispersal strategy.

Here is the link to the reference page menu.

Also now online:

• An explanation of the Black Saturday bushfires, which in 2009 engulfed the village of Kinglake where I stayed on New Year 2006, as per page 118.
• The essay on space exploration I wrote in 2000, which provided the original funding for the adventure, as per page 156.
• The poetry I wrote cycling across Europe, as per pages 71 and 77 (happy).
• The poetry I wrote in Istanbul, as per page 93 (seedy).

Finally, three months in, it’s apparent that the parts of the book’s thesis many core readers regard as most controversial are the bits about economic history and systems – my view that free and open economies are the most effective way to serve the interests of human (and, ultimately, planetary) welfare. Given current events, this one will clearly run and run, but I’ve seen fit to add a few more thoughts (Part 9, scroll down to ‘Civilisational logistics’).

Stoically

Pete Baker

‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’ – Jeanette Winterson

People keep asking for something to explain the book to their friends. Apparently my explanations are over-complicated, so I’ve lifted three sets of other people’s words (below).

The only thing which matters now is word of mouth. I’d be astoundingly grateful if you’d spread the word, using one of the explanations below, or one of your own.

I also attach a PDF document about the book – feel free to send it to anyone you think is suitable, or everyone you’ve ever met.

Relevant links at the bottom.

Dutifully

Pete

————–

Explaining The Jolly Pilgrim …

1) An attempt at a unified, inclusive theory of humankind’s past, present and future that manages to be both realistic and blazingly positive.

2) A compelling travelogue which takes you on a whirlwind tour round the planet, through all the vicissitudes and jubilation of a 21st-century lifestyle, into an inspiring reflection on the human project.

3) A mind-opening, addictive and insightful tale of humanity: where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s time to think outside the box people, there’s no turning back and there’s no instruction manual.

Click here for purchase some options.

Click below to load the USP document about the book:

The Jolly Pilgrim_USPs

Time for a media update:

East Anglian press feature

Following our extracts in the national and international press, the local papers, in my very own East Anglia, have got in on the act. The Gazette ran a full-page feature under the fat headline ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ on 1 October. The Essex County Standard ran the same story the following week. Click here to see the feature. Huge thanks to Neil D’Arcy Jones for organising.

Further extract in The Ecologist

The Ecologist have run a further extract – it’s the bit in Part 7 where I compare twenty-first century humans to champagne bubbles with stubbornly limited horizons. Click here to see it.

Bermondsey Festival 

I opened the performance stage at the Bermondsey Festival in September by telling everyone to embrace living in an open-ended and infinitely fascinating civilisation. Thanks to Greg Battarbee for organising and Tom Mansfield for helping with the H G Wells. This is my page on the festival’s website.

The Jolly Pilgrim on Mars

Finally, I’m delighted to report that Dr Colin Wilson, a space scientist at Oxford University, has confirmed that something extremely intelligent is clearly scuttling around on the surface of Mars. See the photograph below.

Peace

Pete Baker