Laughing Gas - Chapter 1 - A new world - Audiobook

Dobbs is torchered by a vision of seeing Britain leave the EU and then become the Trojan horse to feed Europe into a war against Russia that goes wrong and Britain becomes isolated. Dobbs has become charged with the notion he can stop the war if he can find Ariel, Prospero’s secret weapon against war in Shakespeare’s first play, The Tempest, that was surely inspired by the defeat of the Spanish Armada that was annihilated with not a single loss of life on the English side. The entire Spanish fleet just gone with the wind. An utter miracle.

Who or what is Ariel that is surely the secret Elizabeth I had up her sleeve? So sure was she that we have these stories of Francis Drake, Master and Commander of the fleet, playing bowls when the ships sailed past Plymnouth, on course to France where hundreds of thousands of troops were just waiting to be ferried across the channel to the battlefield.
I first published Laughing Gas back in 2011 as a periodical and then as a finished book in 2012.
I struggled making it an audio book back then as people said there was no chance that we would leave Europe and things wouldn’t get rapidly worse but here we are, Britain walking straight into the same trap the Spanish walked into, or sailed into back in 1588.

And though this is a re-telling of Shakespeare’s Tempest, we must not forget the Merchant of Venice where we saw the Jew, who loses his case against the Christian whose flesh he wants to literally cut a pound in weight, from his torso, clean off the Christian’s torso. The same Christian who won the court case and kind of lost at the same time. As the Jew can cut a pound of flesh from his body but he must cut an exact pound and not spill a drop of blood, which is quite impossible. So now, because the task cannot be completed the Jew must forfit with his own life.

But the Christian takes pity and wants no one to die, who pleads for the Jew's life and asks for the sentence to be rescinded. Thus the judge revokes the death sentence and instead renders him forever Christian. It rather leaves one with a feeling that Shakespeare considered a Christian to be a Jewish slave which could also be synonymous to Shakespeare’s Ariel.

This book was all conceived back in 2006 and now is the only time it can be heard as here we are at the exact juncture described in this book and the only path out of the problem.