The Power of Dreams: And the Scargill Memorial

By Pyotr Stilovsky

Did you ever wonder how time flies or where dreams come from? Well read on and find out - along with a reworking of Madame Butterfly and how Germany won the war! Originally titled: The Contents of My Waste Bin you will find in this, the author’s eleventh book, a cornucopia of facts, opinion, story lines and even some useful information. Assisted by his co-author, Felix, his revelations on the way time works and associated phenomena in the physical world are potentially earth-shattering! Juxtaposed with a ‘popera’ film script are children’s stories, how to avoid your house flooding, an explanation of why the universe is not expanding and his list of things you should do before (and after?) you die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728355320

Pyotr Stilovsky

Pyotr STILOVSKY has over forty years’ experience in Local Government and the Water Industry. Prior to retirement, his first class education and training resulted in a career which encompassed technical, operational and managerial positions enabling him to make significant contributions to the improvement of service provision within the UK and overseas. After taking early retirement, he worked internationally, teaching the principles of infrastructure asset management in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Employed by donor agencies, he introduced the principles to staff in utilities on short timescales and within limited budgets. He has always worked on the principle that an example is worth a hundred specifications. In this book, he hopes that you will benefit from that experience and continue to keep your customers happy.

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© 2020 Pyotr Stilovsky. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-7283-5531-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5532-0 (e)

DDC 828.92

Published by AuthorHouse 11/13/2020

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Contents

Foreword

First things - Time and Relativity

The Scargill Memorial

How to Play the Game

One Fine Day

Don’t Let the Cat…

Kermitt’s World

The Uncertainty Bird

Of Snakes and Strings

The Power of Dreams

Shiva and Time

Quantum Gravity and Reality

Goodbye Copenhagen

About Time Two

Notes on Recent History

Wogan’s Wonders

Good Karma

Letters

The Gospel According to Noah

Pyotr’s Bucket List

My Favourite Things

Things to do as you get Older

Resume of Health History

Family Photos

Family Tree

Will and PoA

The Will of Eddard Stark

Four Last Things

Pyotr’s Funeral

The Warwickshire Motor Heritage Trail

Home Finances

A Water Grid for England?

Last Thoughts for the Day

By the same authors:

Hoggrills End published December 2017

The Power of Numbers published January 2018

The Power of Names published May 2018

The Power of Notes published September 2018

The Power of Words (1) published December 2018

Power Quiz ’18 published January 2019

Power Quiz ’19 published March 2019

Power Quiz ’17 published July 2019

The Power of Words (2) published March 2020

The Power of Words (3) published May 2020

The Power of Dreams published August 2020

SAMS Simplified Asset Management Systems published December 2020

All available on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle

Illustrations

Arthur Scargill (the mynah bird) by Bill Waldron of The Island Gallery, St Ives

Line drawing of Robertson Hall by Adelle Aldridge

Photo of Robertson Hall by Carol M Highsmith, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Madame Butterfly by Barbara Winfield of The Redditch Art Circle

All other photos and illustrations are by the author

Thanks to Margaret Gabica for proof reading.

The author has asserted his rights under The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Foreword

The sort-of ‘chapters’ in this book each stand on their own so, if you don’t like one, especially the science based chapters, just pass on to the next one which may be more entertaining. Like most people, my life has gone through ‘chapters’ though at different times and in response to things that were going on, especially when working abroad. And my writings reflect this to some extent.

Despite being an engineer, I have spent much of my time writing though usually of a technical nature. In between time, I get ideas come to mind, especially early in the morning after dreaming and sometimes they develop into essays, stories, scripts, letters, papers and any other form of writing that seems appropriate. My one big failure in life is to produce a novel and how this came about is explained in my story Hoggrills End which is contained in my anthology of short stories by that title.

The working title for this book was: The Contents of My Waste Bin and you will soon see why; but then I had second thoughts and named the book after my first film script. After that, I renamed it again as the theme of dreams runs through it. You will notice my preoccupation with ‘time’, both from a practical and a theoretical viewpoint and also a few discrepancies in the views expressed in one chapter against those in another. This is due to my researches and ideas having progressed through – what else – time!

The pseudo-scientific papers are presented from a ‘naïve’ point of view as the formal format and procedures for their production are counter-intuitive to original thinking. Why should it matter what the format is if the ideas therein are original? I have written extensively about why it’s a waste of time (that word again) trying to converse with the scientific establishment as they operate as a closed shop – even worse than the boilermakers in the old days when we had a ship-building industry.

So why bother publishing such a load of tosh? Well, throughout history, anyone with new ideas has been laughed at and scorned by the establishment – even Einstein! If even one of these ‘dreams’ leads to someone thinking laterally and coming up with a new way to do things, then my efforts will not have been in vain. As I said in my short story Don’t let the cat… think on!

If you have noticed some similarities with ‘papers’ by my regular co-author Felix Schrodinger that’s because we think as one. TS Eliot said a cat should have three names and the one he chooses himself is the most special. Felix is ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ and therefore ideally placed to write about particle physics.

Apologies if the chapters seem to be in an illogical order – that’s the nature of dreams. If you like to listen to music while you read – here are some suggestions:

The Impossible Dream by Shirley Bassey

A Million Dreams by Pink

Sweet Dreams (are made of this) – Eurythmics

Dream Lover by Bobby Darin

All I Have to Do is Dream by The Everley Brothers

The River of Dreams by Billy Joel

Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift

Dream a Little Dream of Me by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

Any Dream will Do from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

I Dreamed a Dream by Susan Boyle

Dream On by Aerosmith

In Dreams by Roy Orbison

Day Dream Believer by The Monkees

I Have a Dream by ABBA

Follow that Dream by Elvis Presley

Get Outta My Dreams by Billy Ocean

Sweet Dreams (of You) by Patsy Cline

Teenage Dream by Katy Perry

Sweet Dreams by Beyonce

Electric Dreams by Giorgio Moroder

–-!–-

Dedicated to dreamers everywhere.

Dream 6/12/17-1 intercepted by Kahurangi, interpreted by Guendolinn

Having just attended an event – some sort of reunion – an ‘old boys dinner’ – he has to find his way home but has no transport and everyone else has left except but for one person who he does not like. He refrains from asking for a lift and sets out to walk the thirty miles home. He plots the route in his head and makes slow progress as his walking seems to be sluggish, as if he is in treacle. He makes his way slowly through a number of familiar scenes which are featured in his route to school when in his teens. He regrets not having his Hercules bike with the white drop handlebars but it was stolen some time ago. Each time he makes progress, he comes up against a dead end or an obstacle which features repeatedly in his dreams. Eventually he gives up and appears to wake though still in the dream.

[The frustration that he experiences in these repeated dreams is a mirror of his frustration with those around him in real life. He is always trying to persuade them that there is a better way to do things and is constantly disappointed by their dismissal of his ideas. He wants to ‘put the world to rights’. This is mirrored in his writing and now he has fished out The Contents of His Waste Bin!]

First things - Time and Relativity

Much of my time has been taken up with time so let me explain a theory which I have held for many years.

Time is relative!

Well didn’t the should-be sainted Albert say as much? Yes, but not in this context. He said that the speed of light is a constant but the passage of time varies according to how fast you are travelling. But that means that your appreciation of the rate of time alters, rather than time itself.

Have you ever wondered why the school holidays seemed to last forever but now, spring comes round again so quickly and the summer is gone so fast? Do we appreciate the passage of time in a manner which is proportional to our age? Our first year of life seemed like eternity and the second year seemed to last forever. School holidays went on and on but as we reached adulthood, they seemed shorter. In middle age the years fly by but as nothing to the passage of time as we reach old age. Have you watched Groundhog Day?

Most would agree that this is a phenomenon that we all appreciate but is it a relationship which we could prescribe in the form of an equation? Is the apparent passage of time sixty times as fast for a person who is sixty years old and, if so, what starting point would we adopt as unity – one year old? If you have just been born, do you have any appreciation of time passing? Or at what age does it start to appear to pass?

If we go any further with this, we will get onto another favourite subject for discussion – boundary conditions, but I’m keeping that for another time.

–-!–-

I was working in Pakistan in the late 1990s and lived in the consultant’s guest house. We were so well catered for that I never wanted to eat out. The ‘houseboy’ – actually a man in his forties - had been trained at the British Embassy and learned home cooking in the style of 1950s English cuisine. Mealtimes were just like my childhood days with Eve’s pudding steak and kidney pie, Lancashire hotpot and even blancmange.

The only problem was that there was no beer! The north of Pakistan is dry especially in the capital, Islamabad, though I never experienced any lack of booze when I worked in Karachi. At the airport, after flying in, I was given the opportunity to sign up for a consignment of alcohol which was to be released for the occasion of ‘a religious ceremony’ and any surplus, after completion of ‘the ceremony’, was to be returned to the bonded warehouse from which it was obtained.

After about ten days with no beer, the project manager announced that the big man was coming to see how things were going and we should get some in. We went to the warehouse with my permit and came back with two cases of the local brew which proved different from my usual tastes but palatable. My next task was to teach the junior ‘houseboy’, who was under training, in how to pour beer without getting an enormous frothy head on it. After that, the project went very smoothly from my point of view but I had a growing sense of unease about our role in developing countries. I have written extensively elsewhere, about the waste of public money in supporting foreign water undertakings and came to the view that around half of all of our investments were wasted. In the city was a large overhead water tank which was struggling to serve the population and we were there to upgrade the system and make it appropriate for the city – i.e. a 24/7 service with potable water conforming to WHO standards. As I was concerned with developing an asset management system, I had to visit and log all of the facilities with details of their condition and performance and one particular plant stuck in my memory. It was a large modern pumping station of a somewhat unusual design and contained about a dozen or so clean water pumps of Polish origin. I questioned why it was not operational and a complex explanation was given which involved the lack of suction head to the pumps which meant that they didn’t work properly. This was the result of one or both of the common factors which you come across in overseas work – corruption and stupidity. Either someone had taken a bribe from the supplier of the hardware or, there had been a failure in the design process to link up the stages of the system. Either way the very expensive pump station had never worked properly despite the designer, the builder and the pump supplier all being paid in full.

I found the people that I worked with to be professional and eager to learn (unlike many in other countries but more of that later). I was ‘given’ two young, inexperienced engineers to train in asset management – not stocks and shares but the long-term capital management of infrastructure. The local water utility had many issues concerning their historic investments which had resulted in much of their capital spending being completely wasted. Some of the loss related to corruption issues but the most obvious shortcoming was a predilection to invest in inappropriate technology. If you bring in the latest thing, without the means to maintain it, then two years down the line you just have a white elephant. Local politicians don’t seem to mind this as it’s likely been paid for by the World Bank or some other naive organization like my own country’s DfID or ODA as it was then. Yes, it’s still the same and things haven’t improved.

Being the beneficiary of free long-haul tickets and a per diem, I always sought to make the most of my stay in a distant country by visiting the local attractions. As my dad had served as a signaller, attached to The Royal Artillery, on the North West Frontier between the wars, I asked about a trip to Peshawar and arranged transport. It would be fairly easy to do it in a single day but I was somewhat dismayed to find that the project leader had cancelled my taxi and my trip was off. He explained that Peshawar was not considered safe as there was a group of insurgents who specialized in taking hostages. Whilst not spelled out at the time, I later learned that he was referring to Al-Qaeda. So I didn’t get to go.

Years later, when taking early retirement, I was assigned to a consultant who would advise me on future employment. He was a lovely guy who was clearly of a family from the sub-continent and he enquired about my overseas work with enthusiasm. I told him about my abortive trip to Peshawar and he responded that his father had been the vicar in the Christian church there. The next time I saw him, I took with me my dad’s postcards from his time serving with the Royal Artillery on the Khyber Pass. As he leafed through the album, he suddenly stopped and exclaimed in a loud voice, That’s my father’s church! Amongst the photos of the pass and the town was a picture of the Christian church in Peshawar.

Jumping ahead, there was another issue concerning religion. The two engineers that I worked with, were keen to learn and very good at picking things up. Regularly they suggested improvements to the work we were undertaking and I took some of them on board. However, at the end of the project, having wrapped things up in less than a month, they invited me out for a farewell meal on my last night. I was reluctant to miss out on the home cooking at the guest house but agreed. After some fairly basic restaurant food, with no beer again, they steered the conversation to religion and enquired about my beliefs. At that time, I had adopted an interest in Hinduism but was not prepared to disclose that in a strictly Muslim country.

They soon got into their stride and explained how their friends in England had told them about the forced conversion of the UK to Islam. The bombings and acts of terrorism were largely a distraction as their agenda was to gradually infiltrate society through politics and the education system accompanied by increased immigration. They told me how Sharia Law was now an integral part of the local environment in the capital, West Midlands and the North - schools would gradually changeover and adopt Islam in place of Christianity. I was offered the chance to convert - voluntarily - as this would be to my personal advantage - before it becomes compulsory!

If my fears about the march of Islam were latent before this conversation, then they certainly were pretty solid after it. Some years later we had The Trojan Horse Affair in Birmingham which all fitted in perfectly with what they had told me. Let me add that, if I exhibit symptoms of ‘Islamophobia’ it’s not because I hate Muslims – I don’t. The meaning of the word is ‘fear of Islam’, a very different thing, and its misuse in both politics and the education system is there for all to see.

Getting back to my writing, at the weekend (Friday and Saturday), I would work on my laptop computer with a view out over the garden which was well stocked with plants and shrubs. One day, I heard a violent shrieking and looked out to see a crow attacking a smaller bird which turned out to be an Indian Mynah. It had the smaller bird by the wing and it looked as if it would die, but then a group of adult mynahs attacked the crow which, while keeping hold of the young bird, debated what to do next. I flew (actually ran) outside and shouted at the crow at the top of my voice. It released its captive and flew off, leaving the mynah chick to limp into the bushes where its parents caught up with it.

That evening, I sat and wrote the opening chapter of my first novel though I had no idea where it would lead. I had a beginning but no middle and no concept of an end. The middle came to me a few years later and I wrote up the story of Arthur’s migration with his father and his education at Princeton. This was at a time when Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was very popular and there was widespread interest in particle physics, though strangely, despite the title of the book, there’s not much about time in it.

I decided to address this shortcoming and wrote a number of ‘naive’ papers on the subject before reading Frijof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Inspired by Robert Oppenheimer’s quest to integrate modern particle physics with the ancient Hindu Vedas, he came up with a number of significant links but failed to grasp the fundamental issue – the vacuum energy; what it does and why it’s there.

This gave me the end to my story though I was advised that it would never become commercial. To achieve that, it would have to have the Russian or American military chasing the protagonists to steal or suppress their research – shades of Short Circuit! Yuk!

It started out as a novel but the best laid schemes o mice and men… I decided that a film script served better and that’s what follows. I had intentions to detail the chapter, where Jana is being shown the fundamentals of science, as a means to promote the study of physics amongst the younger generation but then moved on to Kermitt’s World. If it ever makes it to the silver screen then that could still be possible. At the time of writing, Daw Mill was still operating but following serious technical problems, it has now closed.

–-!–-

Dream 7/12/17-1 intercepted by Joaquin, interpreted by Guendolinn

He is working on his laptop computer in some foreign country and looks up to see a bird sitting on the window ledge listening to the radio. It’s a mynah bird and it seems to be interested in the news programmes as it comes regularly to listen. He is disturbed by a racket from the garden outside and goes out to investigate. A crow is attacking a young bird and when he scares it off the youngster escapes into the bushes. The bird speaks and thanks him for his intervention then prays to Lord Shiva.

[This seems to be based on an actual experience, probably when he was in India or Pakistan. It indicates a divergence in his love of animals as he clearly distinguishes between a bird which is ‘worthwhile’ and one which is not. His wife has confirmed this as he was always feeding the birds that visited the garden but would shoot the magpies as they attacked ‘his’ birds.]

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The Scargill Memorial

Logline

Mynah bird discovers the mechanism of time.

Synopsis

Jana Petrovsky is a vivacious public relations consultant. After making