Polar Panels

• kateshrewsday

Sometimes, it’s good just to let our minds ramble on.

But for a really top-quality mind ramble, you need to take your cue from someone under ten.

I was driving my son to his football practice. He was chatting away happily: but my mind was on a thousand things and I was in auto-reply mode. I had just issued an automatic “Yep.”

“Do you know, Mum,” he began with an assertive confidence, “that ‘yep’ spelled backwards is ‘pea’?”

I calculated swiftly. “Pey, ” I corrected. “Yep spelled backwards is pey. Which doesn’t mean pay, that you get paid for doing work, or pea, which is the green vegetable you hate with a passion, in fact,” I was becoming quite animated, “it doesn’t really mean anything at all….”

“No,” concurred Felix, with a rock-solid authority, as if he had invented that answer and was just testing me.

There was a short silence. We were still thinking about pey, though, even though it hadn’t achieved the lofty status of an actual word.

“Actually, Mum,” added Felix, sensing that if he were in for a penny he might as well be in for a pound, “if you substitute p for s, the results can be interesting. Instead of getting solar panels, you could get polar panels.”

Clearly this was not so much a short ramble, as a five-mile word association hike.

“Polar panels would be just excellent,” he continued. “Because you would collect all the energy of the sun just the same, but instead of using the panels to make us warm we could use them to send out cold air.”

We drove on in contemplative silence.

By jove, the lad had promise. Polar panels? Free air conditioning? If he could grow up and invent this fast, and move to LA, and sell it to the stars, I could grow old in a granny flat with six bedrooms and a pool.

Polar panels would be perfect for extracting millions from the rich and famous. They wouldn’t inspire us here in Britain quite so much, I thought on as I drove home.

The word polar is not only inhospitable, it is solitary. It inspires awe and sometimes chilling unease. It may have midnight sun, but it also has great vast stretches of darkness.

It pops up now and then in our people’s writings: Mary Shelley chooses it as the backdrop for the finale of her novel about a very modern Prometheus, Frankenstein.

A monster, fashioned  from the dead, rambles too: its creator neglected to include reason in its list of attributes, and it wanders aimlessly to the ends of the earth, to the Northerly most point of the sphere, leaving the rest of humanity far behind .

But that’s not far enough to get away from man who made him. Dr Frankenstein battles regret by hunting it down. Remorse can spur a man on to travel a very long way.

The same journey is made in a modern book: and we have just stumbled across it.

Investing in a new audiobook is a rare event. Our stories are like favourite pillows. We do not invite a new one in lightly, because we listen to them through the night. Our latest choice has not disappointed. It is as masterly and chilling a piece of storytelling as I have heard.

It is called: Dark Matter.

Written from the point of view of a man, its author is actually a woman: Michelle Paver. Set in the late thirties, it follows the story of a young office clerk called Jack Miller, who falls in with an expedition to the Arctic.

Its early scenes, as with all the best ghost stories, are set in the most homely and prosaic of places: a tube station; a London pub.

But we are drawn inexorably away from the familiar. Paver proves herself one of the great storytellers as she introduces us to the unease of the ghostly entity at the icy end of the world through a Norwegian ship’s captain who refuses point-blank to take the young men to their chosen destination; Gruhuken, Spitzbergen.

It is not a place one would choose to spend four months of eternal night.

The other night we drifted off to sleep at the start and I woke to find that Jack had been left alone in this dark icy place where the very windows threaten, and where something faceless and intangible waits malevolently outside the hut he calls home in this wasteland.

Polar suspense works better than one could imagine, faced with little but sheets of ice. Ask Shelley or Paver.

We have rambled from a word that doesn’t exist to the Polar wastes, stopping only briefly at Los Angeles to collect a small fortune and buy me a retirement home worthy of Michael Jackson.

It’s amazing where a ramble can take you.

Image source here

 

 

 

34 thoughts on “Polar Panels”

  5. Polar panels.

    My immediate response when I saw the title was to see a polar bear dancing in a panelled skirt.

    Somehow I don’t think that image will catch on as much as the possiblilty of your panels, though.

    Yep?

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  6. Love it! Isn’t it dangerous, sometimes, when you zone out with your kids… I was up a tree sawing off a branch, saying ‘Yes…. Really…. Is that right’ to the three year old, when I suddenly realised she was saying, ‘Look Mum, this thing looks just like a poo!’ and guess what it was she was squishing between her palms… Dogs. Who’d have em.

    That’s a great advertisement for Dark Matter. I shall keep an eye out for that.

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  8. A thought can lead you miles off track I find, Kate, .. (sometimes furnished by yourself or by a lethal questioning young mind 😉 ) .and I have fun trying to make my way backwards finding how I reached the final thought in a twisting, winding trail of connections.. ( so random, but so amazing.., ) xPenx

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  9. You are the second one to mention Dark Matter in as many days, Kate, and the story sounds provocative. I’ll try to remember the title when next we make our trip up north. I like to drive with audio books, especially when the trek is some 400 miles, and it is sometimes a trick getting something that will appeal to both Tom and me. I think this would do it.

    A good friend’s brother, Alvah Simon, actually wintered-in with his boat, his wife, and a cat named Halifax in the Arctic Circle. He wrote a memoir about it, “North Into the Night”, and, though we know he made it out, it was still a chilling experience to read.

    Polar Panels. Love it.

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  11. I am also waiting for my son to move to LA after he invents his “polar panes”, but for now I am stuck in Michigan and enjoying my conversations with my baby, which is exactly where I want to be at this moment! Thank you for sharing!

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  12. Polar panels! What a killing you could make with those in the states, particularly Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, which absolutely fried this summer. Worst heat in decades. So glad I moved to Colorado.

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  14. i must admit that your rambles have better substance than mine, but I love going with you! And Felix sounds like a mighty bright young man…I’m not at all surprised! i don’t see that you’d have time, but since I can’t browse through your library, might you consider posting a book list of your favorites? You make a very broad mention! And if you ever do make to Los Angeles, I hope to meet you! Debra

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    1. Debra, I’ll put some thought into a booklist. And the moment I’m ensconced in my granny palace I shall be sending out gilt-edged cocktail party invites 😀 Thank you!

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  15. Enjoyed this virtual rambling amble, Kate . . . but I’ll never amble to the polar ice caps in real time. I don’t have the constitution for it.

    Brr . . .

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      3. You never cease to amaze me, Pseu: a light catcher and a hornet with a pigment which turns sunlight into electricity. Marvellous. Wait till I show Felix.

  17. It is indeed amazing, Kate, where your particular rambles take one so cleverly. Fascinating, too – dare I say mesmerizing? 🙂 And what clever children you have in your immediate and extended family. I think the chances for that granny flat in LA are exceedingly good. 😉

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