Charles Christian Nonfiction

The Wold Newton Triangle - featured in the Hull Daily Mail

17/11/2015

Haunted by Old Stinker the Werewolf: Yorkshire's Bermuda Triangle

Science Fiction meets Science Fact: Robot Sex

17/11/2015

Is that an Android in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

Folklore: Whatever Happened to Mischief Night?

5/11/2015

When I was growing up in the North of England in the 1950s & 1960s, the "big" event before Bonfire Night was not Halloween but "Mischief Night" on 4th November. Here's a link to a story I recently wrote for the Horror Writers Association about this event – and its strange demise...

Halloween Haunts: Whatever Happened to Mischief Night? by Charles Christian - Horror Writers Association Blog

Urban Legends - or Love Locked Out - Paraphilia Magazine (2013)

23/7/2013

We’re all familiar with the concept of urban legends and urban myths but where do they come from? You sometimes think you know the origin but then when you start digging you realize they are far older than you first imagined.

For example, when I was a kid the Insects in the Beehive Hairdo myth was in full swing. This was in the days of Dusty Springfield, Ronnie Spector & The Ronettes and Brigitte Bardot – not the subsequent beehive revivals by the B52s or the sadly missed Amy Winehouse. The version I heard –from my mother, who heard from her hair-stylist, who had heard it for a fact from a hairdresser in another town – was that a woman kept her beehive teased-up and sprayed with lacquer for so long that eventually insects nested in her hair and began burrowing into scalp. (This is the classic Friend Of A Friend source for an urban myth – which why they are sometimes called FOAFtales or FOAFlore.)

So far so yuk, except this story seemed to emerge simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. (There’s also a variant that has men with long dreadlocks being afflicted with similar insect infestations.) However, go back a little deeper and you find the same legend cropping up throughout history whenever bouffant ‘big hair’ was in fashion, right back to Mediaeval times when “a certain lady of Eynesham in Oxfordshire, who took so long over the adornment of her hair that she used to arrive at church barely before mass” one day died of fright when “the devil descended upon her head in the form of a spider” and only let go when doused in holy water.

On the other hand there are some urban legends, supposedly dating back to ancient times, that turn out to have been invented only a few years ago. Enter the Legend of the Love Lock (or love padlock or wish lock). The concept is simple enough: two lovers celebrate their everlasting devotion and commitment to each other by attaching a padlock to a bridge and then dropping the key into the waters below. Ah, cute!

Anyway love locks can be anything from a commercial padlock that has the lovers’ names felt-tipped on it, through to custom-engraved heart-shaped locks – and if you visit just about any ‘destination’ bridge anywhere in the world today, you’ll spot love locks clinging to the railings like barnacles on a ship’s arse. (You’ll also spot quite a few cycle and motorbike locks as well, though I can’t help think that symbolizes not so much healthy devotion as a possessive obsession. That or the couple are into bondage, come back Bettie Page all is forgiven.)

But, when did love locks begin?

If you look on any of the websites dedicated to love locks (better make that on websites dedicated to selling love locks) you’ll find it all started in Ancient China, when two star-crossed lovers threw themselves off a peak in the Huangshan Mountains rather than be separated by the girl’s forced marriage to an old mandarin (that’s a social rank in Imperial China rather than a small orange, we’re not into auto-erotic games here). Ever afterwards, lovers visiting the mountains would fix padlocks to the guard-chains surrounding the peak to symbolize that their love would also last for all eternity.

Except it didn’t.

Excavate deeper and you discover the first recorded incidents of love locks being padlocked to bridges go back no earlier than 2006. One moment there are no love locks on a bridge, then there are a handful, then there are hundreds and, in some instances, thousands of them attached. In Florence (Italy) the city council hacked 5500 padlocks off the Ponte Vecchio bridge in one clear up, while over in Dublin (Ireland) a spokesman for the city council commented in early 2012 that the fixing of padlocks on the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey “had only started happening in the last few months and we’re asking people not to do it because they are damaging the paintwork.”

Nothing, then in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 the press is full of stories about love locks across Europe, in Asia (even of the Great Wall of China), in South America and in North America – they are even to be found along the Wild Pacific Trail on Vancouver Island.

Enter the Italian author, screenwriter and film director Federico Moccia, whose best known book Ho voglia di te (I want you) was published in 2006 and made into a movie in 2007. As part of the plot a young man (the story’s protagonist) convinces a potential girlfriend of a legend in which lovers wrap a lock and chain around a lamp-post, located on the northside of the Ponte Milvio bridge in Rome, lock it and throw the key into the River Tiber.

“And then?” the girl asks.

And he replies “We’ll never leave each other.” (OK, well perhaps not until the morning after.)

In an interview in the New York Times in August 2007, Signor Moccia explained that he invented the whole ritual because he “liked the idea of tying locks to love”. But then the book sold over one million copies. Then the movie came out. And then life began imitating art (or what folklorists call ostension or legend tripping – the real-life imitation of elements from a well-known story) as locks and chains started appearing on, first, the Ponte Milvio but subsequently on other bridges.

In some parts of the world, local authorities are falling over themselves to remove love locks from bridges whereas in other places, such as the Most Ljubavi bridge in Vrnjacka Banja (Serbia) entire tourist industries have been created out of the love lock myth. And long may it continue although I personally prefer the version of the legend that says if two lovers write their names on cheques and send it to a writer, they will never leave each other.

* The love locks in my picture were photographed on a small bridge over the Certovka canal inPrague (Czech Republic) – this is not the better-known Charles Bridge in Prague (the one Michael Hutchence is seen walking across looking all moody in the 1988 video for the INXS track Never Tear Us Apart) but a smaller one close to the John Lennon Wall. And, if you are wondering about the little figure in the background, near to the old mill wheel, that is a statue of a pipe-smokingwater sprite or vodnik called Kabourek, who is reputed to live in the canal. That is when he’s not drinking beer in the local taverns, with his legs in a bucket of water so he can soak his webbed feet. But this takes us into the realms of European folklore and that’s another story.

Paraphilia Magazine can be found at paraphilia magazine

Modern Law Magazine (2012 onwards)

15/2/2013

Of course much of my freelance writing is still in the legal technology sector – you can find me talking about legal IT every quarter in Modern Law Magazine. I know, be still my beating heart although whenever I deal with the magazine, I hear the David Bowie song Modern Love (from his 1983 album Let's Dance) echoing through the canyons of my mind (copyright Viv Stanshall & the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band).

Latest Ark Special Report (2012)

15/2/2013

Here's the latest Ark Group/Managing Partner special report I've been involved with, which was published in December 2012. I wrote the section on the way the legal IT world is changing. Apparently I was also involved in the 1st edition but that seems to have either fallen through a hole in my archives – or been fatally gnawed by squirrels (sadly both equally possible).

Risk Management - keep it serious (2012)

14/2/2013

Back with the day-job. Now I'll admit risk management is not the sexiest of topics but it is at long last being taken seriously in the professional services sector – hence my involvement writing the foreward for these recent special report from IntApp Inc. Incidentally, if you are a writer, you may want to contemplate the old Latin maxim Caveat Scriptor – Let the Writer Beware. In otherwords, anything you write may come back to bite you on the bum, particularly if it contains factual inaccuracies or – worse – defamatory comments. Fact checking and proof reading are the writer's risk management tools.

Sparks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012

11/2/2013

I'm very happy – and proud – to report that one of my columns Why China and Sherlock are right – has been included in Sparks, A Year In E-Publishing - An Authors Electric Anthology 2011-2012.

Sparks tells a tale of writers seizing new opportunities and refusing to give up in the face of cut-backs and a general unwillingness amongst publishers to take risks with work that doesn’t fit conventional categories. When Carnegie Medal-winning Susan Price and fellow author Katherine Roberts found that their backlist titles were no longer available they decided to republish those books themselves. They were joined by other authors who were determined to write and see published books they believed in, which they knew would never achieve commercial publication. So, in the summer of 2011, Authors Electric was born.

Electronic publishing was initially regarded with suspicion, and self-publishing referred to with contempt. In a daily blog which attracts regular readers in the UK, US and across the world, members of Authors Electric share their thoughts on these issues, and talk about their work and experience as independent writer-publishers There have been struggles, moments of excitement and disillusion and many notable successes. This first anthology of Authors Electric blogposts describes their journey so far.

Special Reports - I've written a few (2008)

10/2/2013

With the day-job hat on, I frequently get asked to write or edit special reports for other publishers and organisations. Here's one I did for the UK's Ark Group in 2008 (don't worry, I'm not going to inflict you with every single report* I've been involved with since 1980). What is interesting is that of the ten sponsors for this report, six have changed ownership (two of them twice) during the intervening five years. * To parphrase Frank Sinatra: Reports, I've written a few, but then again too many to mention...

SF&F on TV Reviews (2006-08)

16/1/2013

One of the jobs I used to do during the era 2006/7/8 was write television previews and reviews for UK SF&F magazines, in particular the BFS (British Fantasy Society) Prism and BSFA (British Science Fiction Association) Matrix titles – neither of which now still exist as independent publications.

And that, sadly, was the problem. Because they were run by volunteers, had limited budgets and had to fit in with other people's mailing priorities, almost inevitably my previews arrived in print about six weeks after the series I'd been writing about had finished its first run on TV. Frustrating or what! Still, I loved the goggle-box logo Tom Hunter at the BSFA created for me!