An old man stares into wormholes

I have been folding the space-time continuum again. Do all old men do this?

The southern winter is waning. So, I took to traveling through space and time while sitting in the sun in our Canberra garden. Giving a break to my screen-weary eyes.

Pic: quantum origami mechanics by Science Teacher Stuff

I'm writing a ghost story. There are many facts I need to check.

It's real history. I add the made-up bits.

I have been reading online the remarkable Ph. D. thesis of the late Professor Christina Jessy Larner: Scottish Demonology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and its Theological Background. It's available to download and read from the University of Edinburgh Research Archive. But you really need to be interested in the nuances of Scotland's Calvinism.

[SPOILER ALERT -- There are NO NUANCES in Scotland's Calvinism!]

Dr. Larner received her Doctorate in 1962. Hold onto that date.

The typed manuscript (no word processors then, no auto-correct, no spell-checking) takes a reader back (to a space-time condition I've never known). It evokes a sense -- a hint more like -- of what it might have felt like to be a twenty-something postgraduate woman submitting her thesis to one of the great seats of learning of Scotland's male dominated Academy.

The 'swinging sixties' had not yet earned their name. No one had yet put flowers in their hair and set out for San Francisco. But up pops a confident student with a thesis on witch-hunting in the hometown of Miss Jean Brodie. Centre of the Presbyterian Empire of Doom.

The thesis takes us further back, of course, through brilliant, erudite, rigorous and yet compassionate research into a shameful period of Scottish history. We are transported to an era when powerful men -- exclusively and intentionally men -- used every instrument of their ruling class -- the state, the church, their ideology and patriarchal power -- to terrorise, incarcerate and frequently execute a vilified and marginalised group.

So-called witches. Overwhelmingly poor, older peasant women.

Twenty years later, Christina Larner published a ground-breaking book that further and more fully exposed the horrors of the Scottish witch hunts. Dr. Larner added that the witch hunts could just as easily be named, 'women hunts' because 95% of the witches hunted were ... you guessed it ... women.

The "Scold's Bridle"

In the introduction to the later book, Christina Larner wrote of an abuse of power that still resonates today, regrettably. The witch hunts of the Scottish, English, European 16th and 17th Centuries remind us, the writer observed in 1982, of

"a process whereby the politically powerful pursue a group of persons selected for their beliefs or supposed attributes rather than for anything they have done."

Trump's America. The current plight of migrants and refugees almost everywhere. The civilians in Gaza. Take your pick of our own harsh time's 21st Century scapegoats.

Anyway, I needed a break from my screens. So, I took myself out to our garden.

There was a light dusting of snow on the Brindabella Hills to the south and west of the city.

From a Pic by Terry Cunningham: the Brindabella Hills in late August 2025

In our garden, spring was much more evident.

Spike's Garden begins to awaken

The sun was out. At 15 degrees, it was the first warm(er) day for weeks. Three months from now we'll knock on the door of 40 degrees. I shall long for frost again, fickle man that I am.

But for the moment, I was content. I closed my eyes. There was no sound bar birdsong.

I am a lucky man. I live a good, quiet life.

Then I heard the voice inside my head that speaks to me from time to time. It really is a voice. I don't know whose.

It said, "There, on a sliver of land in North West France,"

Nothing more. Unsolicited. Not connected to anything. Except ...

I thought, 'that might be the start of a poem'. So, I finished the sentence inside my head then opened my eyes and my phone (because we are now genetically incapable of not having our phones with us all the time). I wrote down more words.

Back at my desk, a while later, I revised what I'd written in gmail (and sent to myself ... sad creature that I am). And as I look at what's there now, I think (taking care that no one else is present to laugh at my hubris) ... 'It's not actually terrible, Douglas'.

It might be a poem but it's too soon to say. I've packed it away in the folder I think of in this way:

DO NOT READ FOR THREE MONTHS

ON PAIN OF EMOTIONAL DEATH

Then we can assess what I wrote. If I'm fortunate it might still be a poem. It could be rubbish.

Right now, it feels like a poem about ageing and memory and (self-imposed) exile and friendship and loss and time and place. But trust me, it's shorter than it sounds.

There's me and my dead friend Martin Currie on the Quiberon peninsula, a long time ago. Susi took a photo of us from behind, looking out to sea. Us debating the condition of the waters of the Bay of Biscay, I imagine. Like the wise old sea dogs we most definitely were not.

And there's me and the spring flowers in Spike's garden. Plus, a couple of wattle birds sucking the goodness out of the blood-red blossom in an ornamental quince.

And suburbia too, in my 'not-yet-a-poem'. As anyone can see from the picture above.

The suburbia part made me think of Pete Seeger's version of the satirical tune "Little Boxes".

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes all the same.

There's a pink one and a green one

And a blue one and a yellow one,

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

Tom Lehrer was said to have described Little Boxes as “the most sanctimonious song ever written.” But we sang this easy to learn tune when we were kids in the 1960s. My mum and dad had a few folk albums in the house. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, The Corries, Pete Seeger, others.

Maybe Pete Seeger is how we heard it first. I might have been six or seven years old. I may have missed the satire and probably could not have spelled s-a-n-c-t-i-m-o-n-i-o-u-s.

I had no recollection that the song had been written by San Franciscan political activist and singer/songwriter, Malvina Reynolds.

Malvina Reynolds (and fan)

Malvina wrote her song in 1962. The same year Christina Larner was awarded her Ph. D., by Edinburgh University for her thesis about the Scottish witch hunts.

All of which brings me back to folding the space-time continuum while sitting in our garden.

I became something of an expert on Wormholes at an early age. And I sure we're all familiar with the concept of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

I come from the land of Dr. Who. I've watched Jodie Foster's Contact more times than I can count. Interstellar, introduced a Welsh drunk man's poetry to the equation. And who would not have understood immediately that the Bifrost in Thor: Ragnarök is obviously just the brightly decorated Einstein-Rosen Bridge where Idris Elba worked his day job before joining The Wire?

That research, over many years in dark cinemas sucking Maltesers, is virtually a Ph. D. all on its own.

A wormhole visualized as a two-dimensional surface. Route (a) is the shortest path through normal space between points 1 and 2; route (b) is a shorter path through a wormhole. By Mike Run (courtesy of Wiki).

Basically, you put two dots on a big bit of paper (about a million light years apart). You bend the paper back on itself. Space is folded. You take a pencil and pierce the universe-size paper where the dots line up. That takes almost no time at all. Hey Presto. The space-time continuum is bent out of shape.

You find a worm. Follow the worm into the hole. Come out on the other side of the galaxy before you departed.

Simple, really.

Dunno what all the fuss is about.

But ... back in my Canberra garden ... I heard words that no one spoke ... and saw myself in 1993 on a coastal peninsula in northern France ... with my old, dead mate from Edinburgh ... where Agnes Simpson was executed in 1591 for 'being a witch' (which it is impossible to be, by the way) ... about whom I was reading earlier in the day in a thesis ... written by a student who was awarded a Doctorate at that city's university ... in the same year ... 1962 ... that a Californian woman wrote a song I remember from my childhood in Glasgow ... about ticky-tacky boxes ... which I've quoted in the thing that might become a poem ... maybe three months into our future ... as long as it's not actually terrible.

And people say quantum physics is hard?

Try life.