It’s funny isn’t it when people say, “I’ll think about it.”
Really. You don’t say? Who thinks about anything in that way? What we really mean is, “I’ll avoid the question now and hope the next time you ask me I’ll have an answer.” Which is perfectly sensible because even if we don’t know it when we say, “I’ll think about it” what we are saying, truthfully, is, “I’ll let my subconscious process it and hopefully next time you ask me I will open my mouth and the answer will come out.” Which is how life really works, or at least mine anyway.
If I really do intend to think about something, I am forced to write about it. It’s the only way I know.
Like lots of other people, I believe, I write to find out what I think.

Bit of a hate rant coming up…
Tomorrow afternoon, I will subject myself to the indignity of a colonoscopy.  This consists of having an extremely highly-paid gastro-enterologist slide a flexible pipe with a light and tiny lens at its tip up your backside and all the way up your innards to the top of your colon. I do this because Mum died of colon cancer, a heritable tendency, and as long as I remain vigilant I will detect any occurence of this condition in myself early enough for it to be a relatively minor problem.
What do wowsers, that cursed breed, have to do with this?
A sampling of advice from the brochure the clinic gave me and many many websites shows that, as part of the very detailed and fairly unpleasant preparations for this rectal adventure, one must abstain from alcohol. Of course. It almost goes without saying. Doesn’t it? Tell me you’re surprised.
And because it is so utterly expected, I tried and finally succeeded in googling up the answer to that question used by so many three-year-old boys to drive their mothers to the brink of fury: Why? Why Mum? Why?
Apparently, the answer is dehydration. Alcohol can cause dehydration, which I guess is a bad thing when you’re wanting to shove things around inside. Wouldn’t want to scrape or scratch anything.

But hang on. The main thrust of the preparation for colonoscopy is to pour a small lake of special fluids down your gob until you’re so clean and flushed, and every cell in your body so saturated with liquid that any further liquid taken on board comes hosing out the other end in two minutes flat.
Dehydration? You dream of dehydration. Dehydration is Shangri La. Oh, for five minutes of sweet dehydration!

What has happened, of course, is that the wowsers have stuck their oar in again. The Fun Police have seen an opportunity to deny us the comfort of a glass or two of wine as we soak ourselves in this foul solution of caustic salts. In (almost) every brochure or website dispensing advice about the run-up to the stick-up there are authoritative and detailed explanations of why you’re to do this, take that, what effect it will have and how. Except for the alcohol bit. There, it’s just: Don’t.

You see what’s going on now, don’t you. It’s everywhere. They think, because it’s a good piece of general advice, they should spread it around everywhere, every opportunity they get. And because they are so certain they are doing a Good Thing, they pretend that it is a requirement, like drinking the two litres of MoviPrep, or not consuming anything with pips and seeds.  Which is stupid. Spraying unconsidered, unscientific do-good caveats and strictures here there and everywhere they just makes sure they are ignored by anyone with half a brain. 
Which is where the damage is done. Because every now and then the advice is important, really important, even. But it is missed. Because it looks like all the other stuff, and we ignore it, and three or five or X years later we’re looking into the grey, concerned eyes of a doctor who is saying to us – “You didn’t know this?  How could you not realise what this might do to you, and now has? Surely someone told you?”

I have recently started – and scarcely less recently stopped – reading this book.  Cornwell is revered among thriller writers. Kim Hill, if I recall correctly, is a fan. For starters, I suspected the title: ‘Scar’ and ‘Pet’ juxtaposed like that.  Seemed facile.
By page 13 we have a protagonist talking to a Dr Thomas, gender unrevealed, but clearly a psychiatrist.  The presence of a psychiatrist, particularly so early, worries me because psychiatrists in a thriller are often just a cheap trick, a lazy writers’ mechanism for creating a dilemma for a  character. They also allow the writer to dodge the challenge of revealing a character’s motivation and proclivities through words and actions.

That alone would not have led me to snap the book shut at page 22 with a huff of dissatisfaction. I was just tired of trying to piece together the first three or so chapters by guesswork, which we have to do because they are missing. At least, that is how it reads. We are simply thrown into the action when it is already well under way. Person A is fuming about something Person B has done but we have not a clue what that is or why A is upset about it. And so forth. Eventually, of course, we will catch up, cotton on, find our bearings. What has been achieved? Nothing. And since not one character has, by page 22, captured my sympathy or even piqued my curiosity, the book is a gone coon.
Perhaps Cornwell is suffering by unconscious, unintended comparison with Evelyn Waugh, whose ‘Sword of Honour’ I have just finished. Waugh was a miracle worker. He describes almost nothing, or at least nothing physical. Characters go places, say things to each other, events occur, we meet new people, the books just roll on like life and yet somehow they reveal an extraordinary amount. They teach us, entertain us, and in the end we have the illusion of having almost become Guy Crouchback, we know him so well, pity him, admire him, love him. And is if that wasn’t enough we have experienced the English language having been put through its paces like  champion show-jumper achieving a perfect round.

Will we ever see his like again?

Delicious irony du jour: one of the world’s leading environmental criminals has met his end by crashing into the very jungle he was planning to despoil. Yep, Ken Talbot, head of (can you believe it) Sundance Resources (cue projectile vomiting by Robert Redford) and a bunch of his cronies jetting out for a quick gloat over the millions he would make by flattening a few million hectares of the Congo rainforest has instead flattened a rather small patch personally, using the plane he was flying in.
That’s not the really good bit, however. The good bit is, assuming the plane didn’t burn and I’m praying it didn’t, his body and those of his mates will be right now, as I write, providing a feed for the troops of those very monkeys who would have soon been driven from their homes by today’s dinner.
But wait – there’s more… What if those monkeys are poached for their bushmeat and sold into the European bushmeat market?
Then, my friends, the molecules and mitochondria and the fat cells and the protein chains from these robber barons will enter the food chain of some of the very people Talbot and his cronies pushed first into homeless poverty and then into exile. LOL, I say.
Of course it doesn’t stop with monkeys. By night, hordes of vermin, rats, mice, myriad insects take over to carry the work forward. Until, finally, the ants. Millions of them, chewing, snipping away every last molecule of meat until only bone, pure white bone, remains. If we were there, wherever ‘there’ may be, we might perhaps catch a glimpse of white, gleaming in the shaft of light briefly punched by the light plane through the vast unbroken canopy of the rain forest.
Being the contemplative sort, I like to ponder the (up to) half-million dollar watches limply encircling those skeletal radii and ulnae. For the sportsmen like Talbot, perhaps the Ferrari special editor’s edition, going at a snip for yes, one half of one million dollars? (You have to own a Ferrari to buy one, don’t you know?) For the others, perhaps the odd Rolex Aviator certified chronometer, or, slipping ever so slightly down market, a Tag Heuer or two.  Chronometers of course. Goes without saying.
Think of them. Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick…..

PS. Two days later.

Unfortunately for my imagination, they found the plane and retrieved the bodies. Ah well….