notes for 'My Friends & Other Aliens'

brief notes on "My Friends & Other Aliens"

It started when I was small, really small. Before I could speak and before I could move about freely on my own. I was perhaps less than a year old. They were really nice. The big one was like a grandma. That's how she described herself when I eventually asked who they were; who she was to me.*

I began experiencing these night time parties before I had learnt that these kind of experiences were thought to be make believe, so it all seemed to make sense at the time. I asked a lot of questions and their answers were always perfect for the mind of a small boy with limited reference in the real world. I'm sure I grew from these sessions. I wanted to know things like what stars are for and why can't we fly.

The little one was really nervous when we were first introduced and for a long while too. It moved very fast which I always found exhilarating to watch. I later discovered part of the exhilaration I felt was associated with the way it manipulated space time to move around in our physical space. It created a weird energy almost as if it's thoughts and feelings spun around the room when it moved.

The little one was twinned with me somehow. It was like my space buddy. I knew we were both children and we were to learn from each other as we grew. They somehow got our essence to share and it was the cutest little thing a boy could imagine. It was very scared of me which I found frustrating. If I ever reached out to it, it would visibly shake and sometimes almost disappear becoming translucent. We eventually learnt to trust each other through games & touch. We played a kind of hide and seek. I would get excited and laugh, it would cower and hide. When I learnt how sensitive it was, I developed a way of restraining my thoughts so as not to upset it. It was scared by my physicality. It was perhaps one of the most important things I learnt not to do.

I suppose it was like putting a kitten in with a bear cub. I had no intention to hurt it but a clumsy manchild with exuberance was big stuff to a small being of light. I suppose it was like a little sponge. It felt everything all at once. It never spoke to me but communicated with powerful feelings of fear, love, happiness, worry, all distinguishable from my own feelings (externalised in the room). I learned to communicate in this way, by thinking of experience and releasing feelings as energy.

Froglet (so called because of it's resemblance to a young amphibious creature with beautiful glassy wraparound eyes) and I became good friends. Eventually some 3o years later, we met face to face, in an out of body experience and then through lucid dreams.

I grew up with a love of baby animals and became fascinated from aged 3 or four with the study of all things possessing big shiny black eyes. Beetles, bees and ants seemed familiar and I guessed that (they) might have come from an evolutionary line of colony insects.

I later came to know that insects were the real success stories of evolution and had lasted for millions of years on earth so it didn't seem that odd to imagine big space insects had evolved to way beyond our mammalian forms.

They seemed so very magical and when i started school, I heard a description of angels..i thought the teachers were wrong; that i had actually met them and "they don't look like humans with wings at all, instead they looked like insects"..the descriptions I had heard of angels seemed to fit their behaviour and relationship to us. They seemed very spiritual, loving and not quite real.

When I eventually met froglet much later as an adult, I studied (him) very carefully and he had muscles and bones just like us, very elegant and slender, two eyes, a small smiling mouth and tiny nub of a nose. he was white like chalk and seemed to glow with an irridescence, similar to the chromatophores of squid and cuttlefish.. i eventually made a portrait of him in chalk after many unsuccessful drawings in pencil..

As a child, I longed to look through microscopes into tiny unseen worlds and through binoculars, which has become part of my creative artwork as an adult...and deep into the night sky where I now knew millions of suns were home to countless civilisations.

I grew to miss (them) my friends when they weren't there. It was episodic. Periods of contact with long periods of searching for clues to their whereabouts and origins in history books and exhibitions of primitive cultures, in legends and myths, science fiction films & stories of old.

I would eventually become something of an expert about UFO's and their history on earth through my own research. I read all the seminal texts on the subject by all the leading investigators and by cross examination of thousands of stories and repeating articles, found not only that I was not alone in my experiences but which parts of the myriad stories got repeated enough by different people to bear a resemblance what might be true. What was secretly happening on planet earth, hidden from a huge majority of an unsuspecting public who slowly were being acclimatised through sci-fi, while all of this happened in everyday lives.

They seemed to visit in the summer months when the days were long and the air was warm. I came to associate thunder storms with their arrival and would sit in the lilac tree facing the park, watching the sheets of lightning light up the sky, waiting for their arrival with their glowing lights.

*I asked her who she was to me and she said “like a Grandmother loves her children's children, even though they're not her own, it's kind of like that". Her telepathic voice was very human, perhaps that's the wrong word, but funny, patient, full of compassion and empathy a really cool person. She never got angry or frustrated but would often laugh at my innocent questions. We would share humour with learning and her way of explaining complicated things was often accompanied by what appeared to be a projection on my bedroom wall. t.b.c

The Future of Sweets

By the year 2021, nanotechnology had brought about enormous but subtle changes in the way we lived our daily lives from the no-wash fabrics and hyper strong materials, to the super fuels we now used in drops, but no longer burned in our homes and vehicles.

We were happier, had more time on our hands, were healthier and thought more about how life in our children's, children's future might actually be better, more productive than our own, not worse as everyone had imagined in the early years of the new century.

In one important area of life, a whole new era of humanity was ushered in. Food, the everlasting human need was finally captured, tamed and tailored into an art form suiting all and every need imaginable.

Fine neuro-chemical responses of every experience were learned and analysed, synthesised, dissected and re-assembled in search of the ultimate taste sensation. Food was no longer a substance of necessity, human amino acid complexes, originally developed for emergency relief had caught on as a lifestyle choice for the health conscious and lessened the need to eat staple foods considerably, but food was stil an indulgence.

Eating had now become a fine art experience way beyond the ordinary lives of previous generations. Food technologists unlocked the very DNA of flavour, texture & aroma. The rest as they say 'is history'....A generation of scientists, inspired by the literary confectioner extra-ordinaire, Willy Wonka, began to experiment with results nobody imagined.

Sweets branched out into science to become sublime experiences, relegating recreational drugs to the annals of history with immediate and obvious improvements in the improving happiness and function of society everywhere. Sweets became expressions of the soul and the experiences from flavour and texture, aroma and mouth feel could be carefully blended to create a mood for any occasion, without side effects, except for the desired sensations of peace, contentment, excitement or perhaps sorrow, if one had the need for a solemn moment. Funereal sweets, they were known as, often with a subtle undertone of mint flavour, sombre and direct. An experimental spin off and a huge success, oddly enough.

My favourite sweets from the nano-bot factories were the simple ones, improvements to the favoured sweets of my childhood.

In pre-school, the Bunny Tot had ruled the Jelly Tot gang, for their chewy, workable, fruity, crispy cool smooth shell, suck-able and flower sweet, scented fruit flavours in soothing pastel colours. As I got older, all chewy sweets were fair game. Spearmint chews in Grandmas' sweet bowl along with strange banana toffees which were irresistible. I moved on to chocolate éclairs, murray mints and any boiled sweet with a bonus chewy centre. Perhaps the king, a blackcurrant boiled sweet with chewy liquorice faux blackjack centre, which made me feel dizzy and sick at the same time as my saliva glands worked as hard as my jaws to release the exciting flavour.

Whether it was the fruity fruit of a fruit pastille which I eventually mastered the zen art of sucking...or the stick your teeth together natural fruitiness of the fruit gum, a veritable challenge to a small mouth, it was always about the chewing, the way it produced plenty more saliva than simple sucking, I loved gum for that too, not only was it cool and a bit rebellious, Bazooka Joes eye patch, Juicy Fruit's hypnotising smell, or plain spearmint, air fresh, then later Hubba Bubba and blowing world record attempt bubbles with a bubble measuring device, free in next weeks copy of the Dandy comic !

Blackcurrant was always the most coveted flavour in all traditional flavour sweets; the sweetest, most tart and mouth watering, followed by sweet lovely soft strawberry, or raspberry, then zingy wake up friendly orange, closely tied with exotic and complex lime, but never yellow, poor weak imitation left till last, hopefully passed to a friend, but nonetheless still appreciated when nothing else was left. It was like there was a scale of the quality and the concentration of flavour and you always seemed to get more of the weak ones and less of the strong ones, balancing out the packet.

Like all good ideas from the past, I was most interested in the the newly re-visited and perfected nano Chewits, Tutty Fruitis, Fruitellas, Mojo's, Blackjacks & Refreshers of my past. They were a huge nostalgic success and re-imagined the Roald Dahl experience we longed for but never dreamed of as reality.

Most of all, an emotive experience was had, revisiting my one true love, the enduring and endearing (now re-worked like a work of art, the Drum Stick Lollipop) Now transformed from a a once humble and long lived staple of the sweetshop stand; a medium soft taffy, aromatic-elastic chew to a now, almost magical and rich culinary, an explosion in the mouth of the most perfect dessert in a mouthful; a combination of organic butterscotch toffee wrapped around a fudgy alpine strawberry coulis, opening out in the back of the mouth into countering sensations of fire and ice with red bursts of strawberry sour under the tongue topped off with dreamy and heavy notes of fresh caramel and vanilla pod as the juices slip down the back of the throat.

Fine Whiskey ? Who needs it when a sweet is this good. Couldn't possibly eat another, well perhaps just one more...

All of these sweets looked like there were no individual wrappers which meant you never had to guess the flavour, and they always had the most perfect texture and flavour, whatever the temperature. They never cracked when they should have softened up. Small things, seemingly but very clever & surprisingly simple.

No sticky paper. Instead microfilm, a dimensionless substance called graphene, not previously thought even possible. Made from the simple graphite in pencils, 1 atom thick custom-amylase dissolvable graphene wrapping; inert and perfect for preserving all foodstuffs from oxidation, rendering a whole catalogue of European number additives defunct. A beautiful, simple and unanticipated use for this super substance originally developed by the Samsung corporation as a long life durable superconducting layer for touch screen technology in the 3^nd generation of super smart-mobile devices SSMD's.

That was just the beginning. The incredible star fruits given as gifts by the first openly held Extra Terrestrial visitors to Earth in 2027 were not known to humanity and their incredible complexity was subsequently a mesmerising and inspiring experience for people, a perfect complement to the existing flavours of earth, as if secret or unheard of letters were revealed in an unheard alphabet, creating a whole new language, more complex and with more referential meaning than the previous version, ultimately bringing about the most successful range of food ever made, of course a sweet, a chewy one, not on a stick but in singles as packets, very special sweets which make you feel like you were floating on a bed made of the Milky Way itself.

Star Fruits - Experience the Universe was the eventual tag line !

The End..