aka Top of the Charts

Two of my favourite authors are Ray Bradbury and Stephen King. One writes sci-fi; the other horror. Both rely upon a vivid imagination to bring their message to light. Something else they have in common is that each wrote a short story entitled "Here there be tygers".

In Ray Bradbury's story, a spaceship and crew one day encountered a planet that looked rich and inviting, a veritable Paradise, deciding to investigate and perhaps explore a possible new financial asset. To this end, they carried a big auger machine designed to burrow into the dirt. Or slime. Or whatever it was it had to burrow into at that time. Gimme a break, it's 4am and I can't think of anything other than dirt or slime.

This didn't auger well for amicable relations with the patch of slime, or its inhabitants when their natural abilities were so well evolved.

On the surface, all was rosey with every pleasurable whim and scenario imaginable being catered to. But pick the flower and underneath there was a thorn. The men dug with their digger, the planet killed a few of them and chased the rest off; all except one man who snuck back of the ship to stay inside the fantasy the planet gave him.

And as the rest of the crew looked back from space, whilst underneath protecting the man who chose to stay, the planet's visage changed from his Garden of Eden to the Fiery Pits of Hell and so like the maps given mariners of old, these intrepid space mariners could mark their celestial charts with the words "here there be tygers", and it would be true.

I have been lying in bed, listening to my leg burn and thinking about that story, and likening it to living with MS - only the Garden of Eden is on the outside and the Fiery Pits of Hell on the inside. Amongst other analogies.

It's enough to put you right off reading.

Really.