Echo Echo: A poem in 38 minutes

Sometimes you can feel it boiling up inside you… like the certainty of the second-too-many Guinness being due to come back on you. I’m not all that kidding either – in the same way that you get a weird but strong signal that it’s time to get to a toliet, the story engine at the back of my mind will let me know there’s a piece of work on the way.

It starts, of course, with a build-up of ideas that reaches critical mass. In this case it was watching re-runs of the fourth and final season of Blake’s 7. I’d been writing an article about it for UCR, then I decided to sit through the whole thing just for fun. It’s interesting because it was never meant to be made and the production team had destroyed almost everything at the end of season three. Enforced new ships, new characters and new plotlines were assembled with more haste than anyone might have liked. So it’s an exercise in cut-and-shut TV, and fast that it mostly holds together – and its darkness adds a new element to the show is a definite plus.

The wonderful Liberator is gone, replaced with a crock-of-shit Wanderer class planet hopper called Scorpio. (When it arrived on TV in 1981 and I was 9, I thought it was amazing and built a really complex Lego model of it, which I took to school and dropped it. One of the guys who’d bullied me up until then totally felt my pain, helped me pick up the bricks and became a good friend for a while. Ha!0 “Wanderer class” – now that’s interesting. There’s something about trying to enforce a class distinction on someone or something who’s decided not to be defined. I was also struck by how tired the crew must be of constantly ducking and hiding from the evil Federation they came so close to bringing down; there’s an inevitability of losing, and since it was never really their fight in the first place, that must be difficult for the characters.

So you have an eternal inevitability tied with that interesting phrase “Wanderer class.” Those thoughts were flitting around for days (I could hear them sometimes); then I went for a walk one morning because the canal was frozen over and I love that. I followed a path under an aqueduct that led directly to a railway bridge. I saw the word “Listen” scrawled on a wall. It looked nice in the steep sunshine so i took a picture. Then I found the word “Decide” (actually it was “You decide” but I didn’t notice. Next, the word “Echo” on one bridge wall, and the same word repeated on the opposite wall.

Listen. Decide. Echo. Echo. They seemed to suggest an idea of wisdom in that we could probably ALL do with listening more, and being more certain about the decisions that direct our lives. There was also the idea of that expression of wisdom coming from a distance, because of the echo. From space?

I thought of 'Oumuamua, the “first known interstellar object to visit our solar system,” that had kicked out suggestions of a giant spaceship like Arthur C Clarke’s Rama coming to visit Earth. It was almost certainly just a big rock, but don’t let that get in the way of a good story… I now had an idea of something to say, and – most importantly – a character who might say it in 'Oumuamua.