invasion of Oxford under way
by uzwi
Just past mid day. Thirteen military helicopters grind over, line astern, west up the river. It’s been bedlam all morning. I phone someone, point the phone into the air & shout, “Can you hear this ? Can you hear it ? Thirteen military helicopters!” I turn on BBC 24 hour news-related fictions at the same time, but it doesn’t say Oxford has been invaded by alien machines that resemble airstream trailers reflected in a circus mirror in Arizona in 1958 etc etc, so I get back to work. Just as I start a new paragraph another helicopter trudges past after the others. It’s grey. It’s piecing up the air. It’s a long way behind but it doesn’t seem to be hurrying to catch up. You see a lot of helicopters when you live in Barnes.
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HMS Illustrious is visiting Greenwich, and there was a 40 helicopter flyby at noon. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8036437.stm
Thanx Mike. Although I sort of prefer the Oxford explanation.
I saw them flying over Golders Green. They were heading east, thirteen of them. I was slightly concerned that I might have missed some.
Personally I was happily inventing a military coup scenario but the 70s German jazz fusion on my headphones didn’t really bear out that hypothesis. Just hope when the worst comes to the worst I’m not listening to something embarrassingly light and insubstantial.
Who’s holding Oxford these days? Is it the same crew as in the Swat Valley?
Hi Tim, I think it’s the accounts department of Procter & Gamble. (Nice Mark Smith material by the way.)
What’s the Brian Aldiss story in which Oxford is invaded like Viet Nam?
If we’ve been occupied it’s news to me. Then again, the Taliban could bring up every tank they’ve got and we wouldn’t know a thing about it until the “Oxford Mail” complained about the sudden lack of parking. And while the first bodies appeared on the lamp-posts, some wag in the “University Gazette” would still be telling us know that “hanging” is actually a gerund, doncha know. Wot larks.
Hi, MarcL: Kit Reed used that idea in “The Village” – “Pleasant Valley Sunday” meets Mai Lai. Aldiss had great fun with Oxford in “Greybeard,” depicting it as a dilapidated gaggle of antique sheds presided over by senile functionaries. Which is nothing like the truth. Obviously.
Helicopters are the scary clowns of the aviation world. Even the ones that are not armed with missiles give you a sense of unease when they pass by.
Planes are like birds, helicopters like insects; spiky, alien things that dart and hover.
MarcL – There’s a 1969 JG Ballard story, “The Killing Ground”, in which the Americans are in the UK, specifically Runnymede, fighting a war that has spread from Vietnam to the entire world. (There’s another, which I had thought was the JGB one, where the US Army is invading Britain, driving in tanks through the countryside setting fire to villages. The soldiers are being interviewed by a TV news team and casually comment about how this is good for the local population, and that the experience is interesting, and that they are hoping to go to college on the GI Bill &c, the kicker being these were verbatim quotes from real soldiers in Vietnam).
I’ll have to dig deeper to track down that story…I thought it was Aldiss but maybe it was merely next to an Aldiss story in some collection or other. I can only dimly recall the decade in which I read it…and the anthology was on a bookshelf near Michael Bishop’s Light Years and Dark in my basement, where it was fairly dark. I’m going to stop now before I dig myself into some kind of hole by saying, oh, it was Aldiss or Ballard or Moorcock or Harrison, somebody like that, you know, all those Brits write alike.
There’s also Lew Shiner’s short story, “The War at Home,” but it’s obviously not set in Oxford. The one I’m thinking of had a scene set inside a military helicopter as it swept in over a campus building…you think you’re reading a Viet Nam invasion story, and gradually you realize it’s England. Well, a memory with no holes in it would be no fun at all.