Dearest Father and genius loci,

I hope you are well. I am writing to you now, to instruct you of what you should do. Write up your prophecies which over consumes you (as the writing has been for me as for you, on the wall, for a long time) in clear and unclear format in order to avoid the ‘I’m Spartacus’ syndrome. Use in particular symbols and numerals which parry, I mean marry (note: I am dyspraxic) with those of the Bible. Please also come to know of what today is known as the Voynich manuscript – a mysterious manuscript said to have been produced by one Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar in the 13th century. This hypothesis however can be contested. In medias res, it is usually considered that space starts where the atmosphere finishes --- which is not true --- the atmosphere just keeps getting thinner and thinner and thinner. The atmosphere extends up to 1000km but up more the density is extremely low. If you imagine yourself inside a space craft, moving through it, you will experience an appreciable drag effect, over long periods of time. Space --- that dark expansiveness, you see at night starts 100 miles up. It is actually closer than say, Bangladesh to many parts of India --- just a matter of going straight up. If you want to go up in space and stay there, you have to acquire orbital velocity, which is a ridiculous speed, which at a particular point in space, calls you to fall around the Earth indefinitely i.e. freefall. You might recall this being illustrated on science programmes via putting a little picture of a cannon on top of a mountain and firing the cannonball off of the mountain. It goes a certain distance and they make the mountain taller and fire the canon again. It goes a bit further this time. After increasing the mountain height, eventually a point is reached whereby the cannonball falls but, never actually lands on the ground because of the Earth’s rotation. It does not sound like a great deal but, people in the twentieth century forget day by day, that the atmosphere does have a weight and it does actually push down on our skins --- at the weight of 14 pounds/inch². This is quite a bit, you know. Using the old thermic barometers, we see that this atmosphere pushing on us, can actually hold up a whole inch of mercury. Humans are of course, born to this atmosphere. They live with it all their lives and so, it is not surprising that they have tended to forget it is there --- never mind it’s weight, right? But the atmosphere does weigh a lot. We have a few kilometers of atmosphere just pushing down. Deep Sea divers feel the effect of their ears hurting because they bave more water above them, instead of air. And because their bodies were not really evolved or designed to survive in that environment, they can feel the density of the water over air. Some of the atmosphere does drift off out, into space but, it gets replenished by volcanoes etc. So generally gravity holds it in. Pro forma, this leads us rather nicely but unfortunately to a subject which is the greatest faux pas this century. Consider this, official. Global warming is to do with certain gases building up in the atmosphere, principally things like carbon dioxide, methane etc, which acts to trap the Sun’s energy in our atmosphere as well as, quite often in our ocean. What happens is a lot of the energy via the sun is bounced back into space. When you have certain gases building up, such as CO2 and CH4, they can act as a heat sink and trap that heat energy allowing the atmosphere to warm up. Now, the consensus is that no-one really knows what is going to be the effect of that except future human beings. There already appears to be a global increase of temperature and sea levels appear to be rising (a little bit of Biblical prophecy, creeping in here) but, it is a lot more complicated than that. You see, we humans have to realize a profound notion: we were never divided by time.

Wishing you all the luck in the world and outside, pulled from a draft, circa 1990 and finalised in 2012.

Claudius Nostradamus Galen aka King Henry V of France, a Bourbon.