I picked up the October issue of the Fortean Times the other day. For half a century, the magazine has been the go-to place for reports of the wildest conspiracy theories, of UFO sightings and poltergeists and frogs falling from the sky. Created by Bob Rickard, a British disciple of Charles Fort, the American investigator of the paranormal, the magazine has always been perfectly pitched somewhere between The X-Files and a parish council newsletter. I enjoyed a subscription for a while, but haven’t read the magazine for a few years.
Returning to it is a curious experience. In the intervening time, the “rational” news world has invaded traditional Fortean territory. Far from being a niche interest, unhinged conspiracy has become something like the political mainstream. Alongside “I was a teenage alien”, the October magazine contains a report into the theories circulating around the two failed assassination attempts against Donald Trump. It is – notably – about as circumspect as any New York Times editorial, warning against the infectious beliefs of the “lone nut fraternity”. Even the far-fetched, it seems, has gone way too far.
Today’s Great Stink
At the same time last week that bulletins were leading with the floods across the home counties, there was a competing item revealing how Southern Water was making plans to import annual tanker loads of water from Norway – at an initial cost of £70m –to prevent shortages.
It’s three years since Southern Water received a record £90m fine from the regulator and promised again to clean up its act and its rivers. Back then, I spent a week with sewage protesters in Whitstable, which included shivering on shingle with the sea-swimming women of the local Bluetits group, ready to brave not just the iciness of the North Sea, but the regular outflows of raw sewage into the waters. Sally Burtt-Jones, a member of the group and co-founder of SOS Whitstable, can hardly believe they are still fighting the same battles. “According to the Met Office, the 18 months to the end of March 2024 were the wettest since records began,” she said on Friday, “so how on earth has Southern Water identified a need to import water from another country? Could it be because their crumbling infrastructure leaks over 100m litres a day and they’ve sold off their reservoirs?”
The contemporary Great Stink still shows no signs of going away.
Twist of fate
Some novels seem destined to mythologise the atmosphere of their times. A book with claims to that resonance for our own moment will turn out to be Kazuo Ishiguro’s quiet dystopia, Never Let Me Go. The Nobel prize winner’s vision of a boarding school of clones and organ donors run by paternalistic guardians seemed an uncanny channel for contemporary fears about opaque authority and biotechnology and our catastrophic management of the planet.
As a new play version opens this week – attended on the first night by the author – I reread an interview I did with him when the book came out. In it, he seemed to share that sense of wider unexplained anxieties somehow using him as a vehicle for their expression.
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The book’s characters, he suggested, had first surfaced from nowhere in his notes 15 years before.
“I just knew they hung around and argued about books,” he says. “I knew there was this strange fate hanging over them, but I couldn’t work out what it was.”
It was only when he was listening to a radio programme about cloning a decade later that he realised the destiny they had always been preparing for.
