Pass the time, please

Life in the village shop runs at a different pace to life elsewhere. I think it is one of these so-called 'Temporal Anomalies', and I suspect it is caused by the postmistress. She uses it to stop her queuing customers from getting frustrated. It has certainly worked on me. I used to have the patience of a crowd of angry wasps, especially with village post-offices, where I fretted as I waited to post off a deliverable, eager to rush back home to get the next piece of work completed.

Standing in the queue today, the conversation seemed to veer ever so smoothly to a topic I have a fascination for, the dead men on the mountain. The gentleman ahead of me had heard that someone this year was climbing Everest wearing similar clothing to that worn by Mallory in 1924, all natural fibres, to prove that, far from being frozen and incapable of sustained effort, Mallory and Irvine were as warm and comfortable as today's climbers who trek to the summit and back in garish shades of pastel pinks and purples.

We switched topic to the theory that the American moon landings had been faked in film studios. It was an easy and a graceful switch, because I had told them that the man making the climb in the replica clothing was a descendant of the climber who in 1924 had loaned his pocket camera to Mallory and Irvine for their summit bid, and Kodak had already said that should the camera ever be recovered, they felt confident they could develop the film. Another gentleman in the queue had met two men who had purchased all of the moon program footage and stills from NASA and analysed them for contradictions. There are, of course, many, because most people don't appreciate how much editing work goes into published materials. My interest in this started when I came across the holocaust denial analysis of the pile of shoes outside several concentration camps.

Sometime in that last few days of World War 2, a photographer took a shot of a mountain of empty shoes near a gas chamber, footwear discarded by the soon-to-die. It was published in a paper. Then, a couple of other papers also published photographs of other concentration camps, also with mountains of empty shoes. Someone with a very keen eye noticed a certain similarity between some of these piles of shoes, and with a little analysis soon realised that the other photographs, taken at camps that didn't happen to have such gripping details ready and waiting for the newsmen, had been embellished by superimposing shots of a mountain of shoes on them. News is big business, and if you also happen to be in the business of supporting the winning side you are allowed a little artistic license with 'the truth', whatever that might be.

For me, the evidence that men did indeed go to the moon is in the details that most people don't bother watching, because it isn't the main story. For instance, vacuum-locking. We came to this because we had just been discussing the problems with using film on the moon where the temperatures can range from icy cold in the shade to roasting hot in the full glare of the sun. I have a memory of a little moment when mission control have just advised the astronauts that although they are getting TV pictures from the camera mounted on one of the landing legs, it is only black and white. "Gosh darn it guys, we go to all this trouble of getting you up there and we aren't going to win an award for best color (sic) footage". An astronaut ambles over to the camera and rests his glove on it. "Can't feel anything," he says. After a pause, mission control replied "Chroma-wheel's not spinning, then. Can you give it a tap?" Almost as a cliche, the astronaut thumps the camera, the wheel starts spinning, and the black and white picture changes to, well, black and white, with just a hint of red and blue where the stars and stripes stand out from a pole. In vacuum, surfaces that will slide freely over each other suddenly stick and start to misbehave.

We had just moved on from moonshots to the astronomical cost of a proposed European satellite system for GPS, when delivery van man came into the shop, most appropriately. You can always tell delivery van man, he looks lost. And he was. He knew where he was, but didn't know how to get to where he was supposed to be. The queue considered his predicament and sent him on his way. I hope they were honest with him, in fact I'm sure they were. But we got back onto satellite navigation systems again. Up till a few years ago, everybody used the American satellite positioning information, which was primarily military, and because of this, the Americans were a little bit aggrieved when they realised that anyone could receive this information for free and start using it. So, they introduced deliberate errors into the information being transmitted back to the ground in order to confound those knavish freeloaders. Of course, they failed to anticipate the obvious response. Someone else set up a receiver in a fixed position, linked to a radio transmitter. This receiver would take the incoming satellite information, work out the position as given, compare it to what it knew it should be, and if it suddenly found it had jumped several miles, broadcast a signal to let other subscribers know that the last transmission from the satellite was one of the dodgy ones and please to ignore it, thank you very much.

We slid smoothly from deliberate errors in GPS information to deliberate errors on Ordnance Survey maps, which apparently have odd little items in them, say for example, a fence line between fields shown instead as a blue line, suggesting a stream, so that anyone copying the map and then attempting to pass it off as their own work could be shown to be a fraud and a mountebank and a person of generally dubious character and questionable virtue. And, of course, we learned, there were certain areas of the maps that just weren't filled out in detail because of the need for military secrecy. We are just on the edge of the army grounds that for years were known for UFO sightings. In fact, two people in particular did very well on books about the Warminster conspiracy, and then moved on to crop circles as these became more prevalent. On of the two authors was debunked by a paper who used the two Welshmen, Doug and Dave, to produce a circle, which the author 'authenticated', and then was gleefully shown the film of the duo thrashing around with ropes and planks the previous night. The sad thing is that, despite being presented with such evidence, there are still people out there who refuse to accept it. One radio show that featured an interview with the circle-makers had listeners phoning in to comment, one of whom said he couldn't accept the program's veracity because "The Welsh, as a race, just aren't clever enough to do things like that."

I made it to the head of the post-office line and sent off my two ebay sales, and then moved back to the end of the queue to hear the rest of the conversation. Then, it was a quick trip to the goodies counter for a jar of crunchy peanut butter; (and I've found out why it made my teeth rot, by the way, I shall post more in time); and a couple of liquorice bars, because I knew when I got home little petal was going to want to know what I had been doing all that time and would need mollifying. To my surprise, when I parked the car and rushed inside, I had only been gone twenty-five minutes, and at least twelve of those minutes had been spent driving.

I think the postmistress has a time-blender under the counter, and switches it on when more than two are gathered together in her area. Certainly I didn't notice any delay today. What I want to know is, where did she get it from? Does she know more about these 'debunked' UFO's than she admits to?