Now I realise I've been grouching on rather a lot recently about wanting to bugger off to Mars the first chance I get, but you must realise there's been a Royal wedding on and I never voted for the bunch of horse-faced inbred fuggers anyway. As my mother always says, just because their ancestors happened to be a nastier crowd than ours is no bloody reason to respect them today.
So as modern technology has to date still not managed to ship any real human beings across to Mars, let alone bring them back again, I've been doing the next best thing, namely reading about the place and watching programmes on it.
Top of my list of Martian favourites are the classic Futurama episode where the spaceship crew go to visit Amy's family for a barbecue, and Another World.
The latter is one of the many free e-books I have found through Project Gutenberg and the Manybooks website.
It is bloody weird - and really great.
According to the bumph at the beginning, it was written all the way back in 1873 by a person referring to themselves by the pseudonym of 'Hermes', but believed by most sensible scholars to probably be one Benjamin Lumley, the bloke also responsible for introducing the very latest in Italian opera to Covent Garden.
Why on earth would an elegant opera buff like him concern himself with the happenings out in the further reaches of the solar system?
Well, mainly because he was one of the many, many people who fancied penning a utopian fantasy - and to the late nineteenth century intellectual no doubt Mars seemed to be the most scientifically plausible location for it. Apart from this, he might also have been a medium, as he very delicately implies in his introduction to the work that this could have been the means by which he was supplied with the information in the book.
Our trusty narrator starts by explaining that the capital city of Mars is called Montalluyah.
This city is built on and around a very large, high mountain, possibly Olympus Mons, the massive ginormous extinct volcano one that is literally three miles high (yet the Futurama crew managed to climb just as easily as if it were Pendle Hill when they went camping up the top of it. Talk about artistic licence!). In the Montalluyah version of Mars, the mountain is situated several miles inland from a major sea. Over the millennia, the sea has gradually eroded the underside of the mountain away, so that the sea now flows inland quite some way under the summit of the mountain.
Not surprisingly, this has ended up creating a bit of a problem. Over the past few decades, several major rock falls have occurred, burying scores of people and even entire districts under huge piles of rubble.
Our narrator the Dearly Beloved Leader (alias Tootmansyo, in their language) decided he'd better sort the problem out once and for all, before the entire summit of the moutain came crashing back down onto the foothills beneath. So he had a mountain support built.
This triumph of Victorian Martian engineering consists of a colossal structure shaped like a lighthouse, only several miles in height. The sturdy base was built right at the bottom of the moutain, then thrusts all the way up to emerge near the top, thus providing extra support to the half eroded moutain, along with a network of artificially generated magnetic fields. Huge civic store-rooms, observatories and laboratories have been constructed in the interior of the mountain support.
There is also a system of hydraulic lifts, which take you from the top of the mountain to the bottom (or vice versa) in half an hour flat. However, the public is only allowed to use this system in an emergency. Going round the long way means it can take you up to several days to travel right from bottom to top (or vice versa).
Of course, any self-respecting British Victorian industrialist worth their salt would have immediately set up a Moutain Support Transport System and started raking the coins in right, left and centre. However, Montalluyah is something of a socialist utopia.
Here doctors and nurses are revered for preserving the health and happiness of the nation, which means they are paid shedloads of money and all live in exquisite palaces complete with wonderful landscaped gardens that, like all the public parks and squares of the city, can be lit up at night by electricity. (To give you a better idea of what 'luxury' means in Montalluyah, all houses, whether rich or poor, are fitted with unlimited hot and cold running fresh and seawater for their baths.) Teachers are also greatly respected, together with the 'character divers', a type of educational psychologist employed to study children and work out what type of careers they would be best suited to once they have grown up.
Exquisitely clear streams run over miles and miles of white and blue violets. The water is then collected and used in medicines and beverages, but not food, for cooking appears to turn the water black.
As well as violets, hippos live on Mars. They are employed by the Montalluyans in much the same way as we use cattle.
Because the sunlight is much more intense than on our planet, during the summer months they have to retreat to the 'interior city', a series of galleries tunneled right down inside the rock, then decorated every bit as intricately and exquisitely as a Byzantine cathedral in tenth-century downtown Constantinople.
Entertainment is just as baroque. Concerts often involve virtuosos thrumming solos of prog-rock complexity and length on huge electric harps which reach several octaves further up and down the scale than our puny acoustic ones on earth. When the harp hits a particularly plangent note, tiny mechanical birds ornamenting its frame start trilling and waving their little jewelled wings up and down, while miniscule Faberge flowers open and exhale real perfume over the audience.
If you're thinking all this sounds strange enough, just wait till you hear what you have to do to get a date.
Men and women are not allowed to get married until they have been assessed for their suitability by a council of elders (aka a Committee of Public Safety composed of a posse of Hattie Jacques middle-aged matrons swathed in tight maroon plush bustles who like nothing better than disapproving of and freaking out young whippersnappers of either sex). Exactly how this is done never gets explained.
Anyway, once you have finally been passed as suitable, you must publicly announce your intention of getting married should you find the right person. THEN (and only then) are you permitted to go out on a date.
What happens then is that a woman declares that she would like to meet all the men who might be considering marrying her. 75 to 100 suitors dress themselves up in their finest glad rags and hie themselves along to the local meeting hall for the evening. They all sit on comfy red velvet seats in what looks very much like the auditorium of a posh Victorian theatre or music hall. And wait in expectant silence.
Once all the suitors have arrived and sat down, the stage curtains sweep open to reveal the prospective bride.
She too is done up in her very best outfit and hairdo - only she is lounging on a chaise longue, set towards the front of the stage. The stage itself has been decorated to look just like a top-notch Montalluyah parlour (in other words, Oscar Wilde's front room in Tite Street).
For the next three hours or so, she lies there, languidly fanning herself as the men stare up at her in silent adoration and she flutters her eyelashes back, deciding which of them (if any) she likes the look of.
Both woman and suitors have to repeat this performance every single night without fail for the next month.
Finally she tells the council of elders which bloke she would like to marry - whereupon they approach him and ask him if he is okay with that.
If he is, then both of them must make a public declaration that they are now engaged and will definitely be getting married in the future.
If he isn't, then she can suggest two alternative choices of husband.
Should the alternatives not work out either, then the woman is not allowed to put herself forward for marriage again until this time next year. Next year, she will only be permitted to offer herself at the public viewings for three weeks rather than four. The year after that, it would only be two weeks and so on.
The idea behind all this is to prevent men and women from taking a serious committment like marriage frivolously.
Of course there are plenty of canals in Montalluyah too, but when you remember that this book was written all the way back in 1873, maybe we should give old 'Hermes' a bit more of a break.
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