Aspen Writes Poetry

Every November,  we wrap up in thick scarves,  stand in muddy parks,  and watch giant wooden pallets go up in smoke.  We eat scorched jacket potatoes,  wave sputtering sparklers,  and dutifully chant a rhyme about gunpowder and treason that we first learned in primary school.  But somewhere along the line,  the actual story of Guy Fawkes got wrapped up in a bizarre,  romanticised myth: as if he were some kind of anti-establishment folk hero in a fancy cloak. The reality,  of course,  is far less heroic and painfully familiar. When you strip away the historical drama,  Fawkes was essentially the 17th-century prototype for today’s far-right extremist:  an angry man sitting in a dark basement,  consumed by absolute certainty,  plotting to blow up democracy because the modern world didn't align with his narrow,  authoritarian worldview. As we gather around the bonfires this year,  it’s worth remembering wha...

There is a quiet absurdity to modern convenience.  We have reached an era where almost every household item, from the humble kettle to the industrial fridge, comes equipped with Wi-Fi,  an app,  and an IP address. But  as recent events across Europe have starkly demonstrated,  hyper-connectivity comes with a catch. In recent months,  cyberattacks targeting industrial cooling systems and smart refrigeration controllers across France,  Belgium,  and beyond have left supermarkets and suppliers facing catastrophic food waste.  Shadowy actors didn't breach physical security or break through warehouse doors with crowbars; instead,  they accessed exposed web panels and default passwords to remotely turn off the frost.  Thousands of tonnes of produce were left to thaw,  ruin,  and rot overnight. It raises a fundamental question:   Why on earth do we need remote, internet-facing control over an appliance whose sole job is to s...

It is a little-known law of the cosmos, and one frequently ignored by animals who ought to know better, that if you invite a monster into your garden to settle a dispute with your neighbour,  the monster rarely leaves when the dispute is finished.  In fact,  it usually stays,  builds a conservatory,  and renames the garden after itself. The Horse,  who lived in an olive grove that had belonged to his family for three hundred years,  had a problem.  His neighbour,  the Stag,  kept grazing on his grass.  It was a minor,  stubborn disagreement over borders,  the sort of thing that ought to have been settled over tea,  or at least a long,  tedious meeting of the Local Meadow Board. Instead,  the Horse went looking for an ally.  He found the Man. The Man was sitting on a crate,  polishing a very shiny,  very expensive rifle,  and wearing a coat tailored in a distant,  wealthy capital acro...

It is an ancient and widely documented fact across the galaxy that bridges are fundamentally unreasonable places to host an argument. In the  The Municipal Authority’s Very Honest Pocket Dictionary of Civics  a bridge is defined as:   “A clever, engineering-based solution to getting over something damp, which is almost immediately ruined by two idiots who encounter each other in the middle.” The bridge in question was extraordinarily narrow,  spanned a chasm of terrifying proportions,  and was designed to hold exactly one medium-sized goat at a time.  It was not designed to hold two ego-driven,  aggressively opinionated mammalian heavyweights experiencing simultaneous,  acute delusions of absolute omnipotence. From the Western side of the chasm trotted the  Orange Goat . The Orange Goat had a magnificent,  sweeping tuft of golden hair that looked like it had been spun by a confused silk-moth experiencing a panic attack.  He was very...