Nobody’s doing the theological analysis. Nobody wants it. Back in 1636, by some weird accident of alternative history, the populace were (okay, spellcheck – was) given the opportunity to vote on the Divine Right of Kings to Rule. This, you will remember, was the principle that monarchs are monarchs because a Higher Authority wants them to be monarchs. Disagreeing with a king was therefore a no-no. [Recorded instances of people being zapped by thunderbolts for disagreeing with the king’s ideas are hard to find, but that’s not to say it didn’t happen.]

Except that parliament was disagreeing with the monarch. So the referendum was intended to settle the question once and for all: do you want the king to rule, or parliament? But to everybody’s great surprise – before the vote, all of London was hailing the new era of parliamentary democracy – the country turned out to be split down the middle. There was a slight – very slight – majority in favour of keeping the Divine Right of Kings to Rule, but as the scribes and pharisees (what are they doing here?) were quick to point out, a third of the populace didn’t even bother to vote.

If you assume, so the scribes' argument ran, that non-voters are more likely to be in favour of the status quo, you can lump them in with the Parliamentarians and discover that, although the Royalists won the actual vote, the Parliamentarians won the argument. Given the scale of the projected change to the constitution, this argument had some force. But the counter-argument was also compelling: parliament had set the terms of the referendum, and committed itself to respecting the result. The two sides became entrenched; efforts to find compromise only complicated the issue. Thus began the Long Parliament (1640-2019), in which everybody had an opinion, and nobody had the authority to make a decision stick.

Early on, the question arose: the Divine Right of Kings to Rule what exactly? After all, it would be ridiculous to argue that the DRKR meant that the king should rule everything. Surely a “soft” DRKR, in which the king got to decide the menus for royal banquets, would be closer to what the populace had intended when they voted for the DRKR to stay in place? Or – another voice shouted across the debating chamber – maybe they meant that the king should be in charge of foreign policy while we actually run the country? But that idea was immediately shouted down – existing trade relationships were too important to be left to one man and his extended family of royal cousins overseas. They argued according to national interest anyway, whatever the treaties said.

And it couldn’t possibly be the case that the populace had no confidence in parliament. Before the Long Parliament – and by the way, this is one of the ironies that make alternative history such a rewarding subject to study – parliament had been a relatively efficient (for its time) decision-making body. The actual business of clogging up the country with red tape and bureaucracy was left to the various ministries (“Leadership by management; management by measurement!” was a slogan of the time), but in matters of preferment and privilege (see also the discussion of the “expenses scandal” in Chapter 19), parliament knew what it wanted and went out and got it.

Much of the credit for the efficient running of parliament belonged to the two-party system. This was a system of patronage whereby honourable members (and the rest) aligned themselves with either the Whig (they wore wigs, but couldn’t spell) or the Tory (tall stories, ditto) faction, and voted thereafter along party lines. Individual MPs accepted the trade-off between having an opinion of their own – in which case, nobody listened to them – and voting according to their faction’s party line – in which case, at least they had a chance of sitting on the front benches eventually. The front benches had legroom.

As the Long Parliament wore on, party discipline broke down. This was partly due to the advent of social media – smaller, more efficient printing presses on which pamphlets and newspapers and op-ed opinion pieces could be rapidly printed and disseminated – and partly due to the new-fangled 24-hour news cycle, a related development whereby the space available for the presentation of opinions rapidly outgrew the supply of opinions from the usual sources. There was so much white space to be filled in the news-sheets that talkative MPs – those who could generate opinions on anything at short notice – found themselves in demand.

In the terminology of the time, there was a shortage of “talking heads” that would offer “challenging opinions” and “incisive commentary”. Demand for opinions continued to grow. Now, for the first time, an individual MP could express an opinion to the media (thus bypassing parliament, note) and have the illusion of being heard. For the first time, MPs could gain influence – “raise their public profiles” – outside parliament, and crucially, outside the two-party system. The proliferation of opinion (Chapter 19 again) was a significant causative factor in the breakdown of two-party discipline and the early development of the One-Person Party system we know today.

But it took the nationwide split over the DRKR, and the resulting Civil War, to drive change. Without that, this country would still be a United Kingdom. We may look back at the years of debate over the various theological justifications for the DRKR, and the assorted scriptural refutations, and we may acknowledge the force of Dr Johnson’s observation, mid-way through the Long Parliament – “A pox on your hard and soft options, sirrah! A pox on your theologies! The populace have voted – has voted, I grant you, spellcheck – and they just don’t want it!” – and we may despair of ever achieving a settlement.

But we have to acknowledge, even so, that without the DRKR, and the Civil War, and all those Hard and Soft Options, and those inflexibly opinionated MPs, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

How were we persuaded to forget the old ways? Went to a brunch party on Sunday, to celebrate a friend’s new house, and sat out in the narrow garden in a half-circle of chairs, and talked. There was coffee, and there were croissants, and there was porridge. Excellent porridge. Jam, fruit, bowls of fruit, more coffee, toast, orange juice, prosecco, more prosecco, coffee again, and maybe I will just have one more coffee before I go. There was a red rose, copiously in bloom, and a shed, and somebody identified a raspberry bush. If only we could breakfast (brunch) like this every day.

We talked about music. Jazz. We became discursive on the subject of ceramics. Art, more music, ballet, theatre, children, dogs, local radio. Somebody mentioned [redacted] and his bid to lead the [redacted] Party, but that passed quickly, and I don’t think President [redacted] even came up. Which is the measure of a good conversation these days. It was an enjoyable party, four days after a Europe-wide election, and the part of the conversation that comes back to me now, because I’ve been thinking about it, is the part about hair-washing.

Somebody who was sat – sitting – in that half-circle of chairs doesn’t wash her hair. Somebody else washes her hair only occasionally. When I say “doesn’t wash”, I mean – doesn’t use conventional shampoo. To wash your hair with conventional shampoo means to squeeze chemicals from a plastic bottle onto your head and massage them in. And I’m thinking now: why do we do that? Whether you’re vegan, green, health-conscious, worried about the planet, a hypochondriac or (let’s be inclusive here) embarrassingly carnivorous, pouring chemicals onto your head counts as normal. And I’m thinking – huh?

I have a substance in my bathroom, in a plastic bottle, that contains chamomile. I don’t know what chamomile looks like, but if you came to a brunch party at my house and told me I have chamomile in my garden, I’d believe you. If you pointed out the chamomile, I could pick a bunch of it, take it up to the bathroom, and next time I feel an urge to dowse myself in chemicals, I could rub it on my head. The thing about not using conventional shampoo is actually about letting “natural oils” do their thing, but still. I could comb out the chamomile flowers easily enough.

Natural oils. You rinse out any impurities every now and then, in running water, but generally, your hair just self-corrects. You don’t have to use anything. At all. Nada. Which makes this whole subject even more perplexing. I can imagine an ancestor of mine being persuaded that using chemicals is easier than boiling up vats of chamomile, letting them cool, et cetera, but to go from nothing to a plastic bottle full of liquid that froths up into a lather – even if the plastic bottle has a nice picture of nature on it – to go from nothing to all that kerfuffle (not to mention the “avoid contact with eyes” aspect) is just weird.

I’m not against shampoo. I’m sure all the chemicals are properly mixed together in shiny steel vats and responsibly pumped into ranks of plastic bottles marching along on conveyor belts. I’m sure that the huge plastic (?) barrels in which the individual chemicals are delivered are rinsed out and taken to the recycling centre. I’m sure that the rivers around the factories are clear. But – the whole business strikes me as odd. I’ve just gone into the kitchen, and yes, I’m washing my dishes with a substance, in a plastic bottle, that apparently contains “real lemons”. How come I’m not scrubbing my dirty dishes with real lemons?

This is how we live, and the more I think about it, the weirder it seems. I’m not saying that I should keep a cow in my kitchen, rather than a plastic bottle of milk in my fridge, and I’m entirely happy that the “farmyard manure” I put on my garden comes in a sealed plastic sack with “farmyard manure” printed on the outside. No horses need apply. But that conversation in the garden about hair being naturally capable of looking after itself just brought it home to me that – yeah. Like I said, the weirder it seems.

Now, who do you think should lead the Conservative Party to calamitous defeat at the next General Election?

There are moments in my life for which I can never be forgiven. I’m not talking about unspeakable crimes (I’m so over those*), nor about the people I’ve hurt. I can look back and regret that I did that, or said that to her, or wasted that much money on – what was I thinking? I’ve been insensitive in the past, and callous, and aggressive, and stubborn, and clumsy, and a lot of other words that add up to: I’ve been pretty much as fallible and human as everybody else on the planet. I’ve felt envy.

There have been moments when I have found it expedient to remind myself of this truth: we are embarked on a spiritual journey that takes us through the bad stuff as well as the good. We can sit at home and meditate and look virtuous and heap blessings on all around us and post bland pictures of sunrises overlaid with trite messages of goodwill on Instagram – and we can get nowhere. We can become uncomfortably aware of our own faults, and work with them, and get a long way. Spiritually, I mean.

The path to wisdom, and perhaps even to enlightenment, runs through being a complete git sometimes. Or if not that, at least through something other than a ten-part online course in How To Be A Good Person with a free downloadable book for signing up to the email newsletter. Siddhartha Gautama was a rich prince, indulged by his father, “entertained by dancing girls” it says here, before he became The Buddha. Saint Augustine famously prayed, “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” And look how that worked out. Bet he had some memories.

It’s not that I can’t be forgiven by other people – that would be up to them, anyway. It’s not that I can’t forgive other people, mostly, nor that I can’t forgive myself for (some of) the wrongs I’ve done to other people. By which I mean (he adds hastily) I’m kind of okay with a lot of the things I did because, you know, all that was a long time ago, probably forgotten on both sides, not such a big deal anyway, we both came out of it okay, moved on, blah blah blah. See above re: fallible and human. I don’t know if “forgive” is the word to use here, but I was younger then, and I didn’t know any better, and…

Yeah, and there are one or two things that, you know, can’t be unsaid and can’t be undone, and I’d just like you to know that I, um; which is to say that I’m very, er, and I wish that I, you know, hadn’t, and if I hurt you (I know that I hurt you), I just want you to know that I’m very – what? You don’t remember? What do you mean, you don’t remember? I’ve been agonising over this for years and you don’t even remember – no, nothing! Nothing at all! I was just thinking aloud about – something else! Oh, you have remembered now? Look, I just wanted to say that I’m – hello? Hello?

We lose people by being human. We can indulge our own fallibility, but fail to recognise it in others. We hold other people to higher standards. All that. But what really strikes me is that I’m human enough not only to regret but also to forgive myself for most of the past. I suspect that we all are – and in the instances where we’re really sorry about something, we’re either human enough to say sorry, or to work with it in some other way. A weekly hour of therapy, for example. A buttress of resentment to push the guilt the other way. I don’t know how the perpetrators of unspeakable crimes deal with what they’ve done, if they’re capable of dealing with it, but most of us manage to live with ourselves.

To be alive is to practise self-deception, at least to some degree. We’ve all done bad things. We can’t always make ourselves the heroes of our own back-stories. But for most of us, there isn’t an alternative to carrying on, so we deal. What I think I’m saying is, we manage to live with ourselves by creating and sticking to a story about who we were and what we did. I remember the good deeds, and I smile to myself. That was me! I remember the bad – and I explain them to myself. That was … I’d slept badly; it was raining; the train was late; you were being unreasonable. Mitigating factors. Most of the time, that tactic works. We know we’re fallible, and fallible is another word for forgivable. We can’t help but look back, but the past can be improved in the telling…

…but then sometimes – and here we go, here’s what I’m really writing about – it can’t. Self-forgiveness doesn’t always work. That’s bad enough. But here’s the really hard part. The moments in my life for which I can never be forgiven – by myself – are not the moments where I’ve been bad, nor the moments where I’ve been wrong, selfish, callous, et cetera. They’re the moments that make me cringe. Moments where I’ve knocked a hole in my own back-story by making a complete fool of myself. By demonstrating unequivocally to myself that on top of everything else, I’m a complete dork.

I look back at myself and I think: you were THAT gullible? You said THAT in front of ALL THOSE PEOPLE? How could you have walked out onto that stage, in front of that many people WITHOUT CHECKING YOUR ZIP? I mean, REALLY? And all those other ones as well: how could you have wasted that much money, all those opportunities, so much of your life, blah? Been so stupid, blah? Look at all those roads not travelled, blah. With great age comes a lot of past, and not all of it’s bearable. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the truly unbearable parts of an averagely lived life are the parts where we were neither the hero nor the villain, but the fool.

I’m going back to bed to hide under the duvet for a while. But before I do – hey, the sun’s coming through the fog; such timing – but before I do, let me say this. I suspect that there are no grand struggles in life. No heroic quests or great tasks – just the humdrum business of being and day-to-day living. Even if you’re a hero on an epic quest, let’s say, you’ve still got to brush your teeth in the morning – or maybe sit a bit further away from me, would you mind? Spend a little bit more time in the bathroom, of a morning? And listen, Odysseus, let’s be frank with each other: have you even heard of Lynx deodorant? For men?

I suspect that the really valuable components of the spiritual journey are the ones that we’d prefer not to acknowledge at all. We can celebrate the good bits of our past, yes, and work with the bad bits. It’s healthy to work out how to forgive ourselves, let go of our mistakes, upload to Instagram, program the camera to catch the sunrise. All that. It matters. We can work towards empathy, and compassion. We can sit cross-legged and aspire to wisdom and whatever is meant by that word ‘enlightenment’. There's a lot to be said for learning the art of self-forgiveness. And for laughing at yourself - okay, myself. Me, if it helps you.

But to achieve a true spiritual breakthrough, I believe it is important that somebody close to this laptop should also acknowledge the day on which – ugh! – he travelled all the way to London – aaaah, no! – on a packed commuter train – owww – in his smartest possible suit, for a job interview, feeling totally cool and at the top of his game, with a Cornflake lodged in his beard.   

*Social media, this is intended to be funny. Surveillance economy, please instruct your algorithm that this is not a confession.

PS: I got the job.

Looking back over the past however many years, I’d say that the biggest surprise has been the sky. Not the speed of the change, nor the scale of their tragedy. Nor even the return to our ancestral home. No, the quiet aftermath has surprised me most. I lived for a while of the edge of a city, where the night above us was a yellow, light-polluted, dirt-polluted darkness. Now there’s no dark matter in the night sky at all; just a multiplicity of stars, some of them too far away to reach us with all of their light.

I’m old enough to remember first contact. They came with their conviction and their arrogance and their belief in their need, and their machines and their noise, and they tore away the trees of our forefathers. In time, the whole of our forest was gone. We were given “civilisation” in its place, and taken away to learn their ways. There was grief, of course, but I remember the place where we were given to live, the “shanty town” as some of them called it when it was no longer necessary to deceive us, where the grasses and the weeds were already pushing up through the broken roads and the dusty paths. We could already see what they would never see.

There came a time when they believed that they had learned from their mistakes. By then, some of us had begun to use their machines, because the old ways would not work in their “civilisation”, and I remember that suddenly, once again, they turned against us. This time, we were the enemy for being what they had tried to make us. We weren’t “standing in the way of progress” by trying to protect our forest. Now, in their eyes, in their shanty town, strangers on the edge of their city, forced immigrants, we were one more focus for resentment. Yes, I know most of the pollution came from them, but in their failure to understand, they needed outsiders to blame.

We were told that we must reduce our usage of their machines, and that by doing so we would “contribute to a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions” as they put it. For a while, they feasted on words and slogans about living with nature, and we were exhorted to change our ways – but this time (although they failed to understand even this) they were exhorting us to change back to what we had always been. They congratulated themselves on their new-found virtues as though they had always been wise. They lectured us on what we already knew. Still, they did not understand, nor see. New trees were growing on the edges of the city, the tarmac was breaking, but still, they could only talk at us, not hear us.

Do you remember those corporations they had? Yes, including the one that took the forest; that’s a good example. Do you remember how they commissioned films and advertisements to show how they were taking action on climate change? Yes – exactly. All those grand declarations set to music. Those advertisements showing scientists in white coats – white coats! – growing trees under glass in laboratories. All that music. Yes – yes, exactly; I remember the day we worked out – yes, exactly, the incredulity; we couldn’t believe it – the day we worked out that they weren’t doing anything other than making their films, their grand declarations.

Even now, they don’t look outside themselves. They’re scavenging in the ruins, while we’ve returned to the forest’s abundance. Some day soon, yes, we will have to go into their broken cities, to rescue them. We’ll break down their remaining roads and buildings, break the rest of their concrete and let the returning forest complete its work. We’ll bring them back here, to be with us, and teach them how to live.

Oh, look at those stars.

We forget the importance of not knowing what happens next, in life as well as art. Went to see Arthur Miller’s All My Sons a while ago, via the Phoenix Cinema in Falmouth, and wow! That was a satisfying, I don’t know, beginning, middle and ending. Still thinking about it now. Many years back, I went to see (do I have to say William Shakespeare’s?) The Merchant of Venice without knowing how it ended, and I remember being surprised at how hooked I was.

Surprised because – well, my introduction to Shakespeare was three years of “doing” King Lear for my Eng. Lit. A level (older readers: Eng. Lit. is the modern contraction of the subject formerly known as English Literature). Should have been three different plays, but there was a mix-up. So we ground through the same text three years in a row (still haven’t seen the play), and by the end I was still no clearer as to why the royal couple called their eldest daughter Goneril.

But I was pretty sure I knew all too well why the name never caught on. Ugh! Because I’m old and grizzled, my ticket to see All My Sons cost me all of four quid (US readers: four British pounds, which isn’t much for a cinema ticket), and one legacy of my education is that I’ve avoided Shakespeare ever since. I can go to see (almost) all the plays without knowing the ending. The Shakespeare plays, I mean, but having started this with Arthur Miller – no, I haven’t seen Death of a Salesman; yes, I am looking out for a performance of Death of a Salesman.

Eng. Lit. Dept., all is forgiven. I have Theatre ahead of me. What was best about last night was watching “real” characters wrestling with a “real” moral issue. None of them was overtly signalled as the good guy or the bad guy; all of them were flawed, fallible, human, whatever word you want to use; the whole play ran like – sorry, but the word just inserts itself – clockwork. Yes, there were two young adults talking about getting married; no, they didn’t do the rom-com thing of having a row ten minutes before the end and then reconciling after a rethink and a frantic chase to stop one of them getting on the train.

The unpredictability of it all. No doubt there were dramas in 1947 and 1605 that ran along predictable lines, but did any of that predictability intrude into real life? Today, we’re all pretty sure that – no, I’m not going to mention it – is a clear-cut good/bad thing, and that the President of – no, I’m not going to mention him either – is an antidote to the old politics/should never have been elected. We’re settled in our assumptions. We seem to accept the certainties handed to us rather than debate the complexities, and I suspect that by doing so, we fail to deepen our understanding. People are human; they’re not social-media constructs.

The importance of not knowing what happens next. Actually, that’s not quite it. The value of several hours of not knowing, wanting to know, assuming, getting it wrong, being taken by surprise – the value of several hours of paying attention. Of getting some mental exercise. Of not having a ready-made answer from the start. If we’d known, back in 2020, that global warming was going to be so subtle, so insidious – if we’d really engaged with it and debated it – we wouldn’t be where we are now. But we took it for the simple, straightforward catastrophe we had conditioned ourselves to expect, and completely missed its real impact until it was too late.

Global warming – the simple catastrophe, the “zombie apocalypse” without zombies. Lots of storms, regularly unpredictable weather, reports from remote places of fertile land turning to desert. If only we remember to plant a tree every time we fly, we can go on as we did before. All that seems so absurd now, so tragic. Global warming was too clever for us. It came on more as a deception, a massive con trick, than as a straightforward, manageable, containable catastrophe. Global warming didn’t come at us via predictable extinctions of species we knew, like markers on a scoreboard; it worked – gradually, invisibly, inexorably – through parts of the natural ecosystem that we didn’t even know existed – that we depended on absolutely.

And then it hit us. As the New Druids are saying now, it was as if global warming was “intelligently designed” to get around us. We are part of Nature, of course, and as the Wiser Heresy teaches, we work with Nature more than we realise. Consciously, back then, we worked to retain the status quo; unconsciously, we subverted our own efforts. We failed to see what was happening, and by that failure, we brought our own population back down to a sustainable level.

It’s a neat theory, and I think I believe it. I remember the Hunger Days, yes, and nobody could have wanted them, even unconsciously. But I also remember governments and summits and declarations against climate change. All those admonitions and platitudes shared on social media. It’s almost funny, how ardently we declared climate change unacceptable, and called on governments to fix it for us. As though it was a problem up in The Cloud – remember that? – that we could have sorted out on our behalf while we went on driving and heating our houses. As if we really believed words and higher powers would save us. No, really. Right to the end, we were simultaneously blaming and putting our faith in governments.

Enough of this. I remember that performance of All My Sons and I remember The Merchant of Venice. But tonight’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in the forest clearing where my people now hold their gatherings, will be much more in keeping with the spirit of the times.

Maybe with the European elections looming, we’ll forget all about climate change and go back to panicking about Brexit. Extraordinary, how effective the media is at disseminating short-term headline-related panic.

I was walking back from the Greenbank Hotel yesterday evening, after a drink with a friend, when I passed a Citroen CV6, looking its age, parked where the pavement was so high that I could look down into it, and then a brand-new Toyota Aygo. Both cars in versions of roughly the same colour.

Struck me that car number one in that sequence was a piece of machinery constructed for the purpose of getting from A to B by people whose primary interest was in providing a means whereby customers could get from A to B. Wheels, seats, engine, protection against the weather. The Toyota Aygo, in this company, looked like a shiny red cocoon on wheels.  Also practical, but plump, shiny, closed.

And I wondered about the two generations that had made these two things. Did the first really give birth to the second? What lessons were passed down, and what happened to the straightforward, utilitarian-looking, getting-there-from-here design of the CV6? Why did the Aygo have to be so beautiful, so enclosed, so cosy? So very designed?

I should drink at the Greenbank more often (mine’s a Honda Jazz, thanks). I thought about the evolution of cars, from things you could step into and get out of, to things that wrap you up warm in a safe space with soothing music while the road goes by outside. There are cars that are sold on safety, and cars that “perform”. None sold on the basis that they are quite useful if you just need to get from A to somewhere else.

The travel is assumed, these days; we all need to be getting from wherever we are to somewhere else. We’re all “on the go”, even when we’re buying lunch. But why these cuddly little comfortable cars? Why not modular cars, or cars that could be adapted for different purposes? Instead of the metallic-paint options, you get the clip-on bulldozer attachment or the seats that can be removed (easily) to make more luggage space.

Why not one-person cars that could be lawnmowers with the right attachment, or diggers, or cars that could hook themselves into long road-trains as easily as you drive onto a ferry? Maybe even cars that dock with the side of the house as neatly as spaceships dock with space stations (you’ll want the pebbledash paint options, sir). Buy one of those and convert the garage.

Cars today are aspirational. They’re descended from vehicles where the whole point was that somebody else would do the work. Except that the chauffeur’s space has withered away and the steering wheel has regrown itself in the rich-customer compartment in the back.

I had a pleasant rest-of-the-evening, thank you. I walked on, under the archway, past the Star & Garter pub (“Harbour Views Since 1892”) and past that tantalising little print shop, Juniper Bespoke; I paused briefly at the window of Toro, which opens occasionally for the sale of air plants and other magical greenery; then went on past Stone’s Bakery and the antique shops; past the sports shop and the vintage clothes store; turned left onto Prince of Wales Pier and out towards the Pier Café and beyond.

And not for a moment did I think about cars.

What really surprised me about the apocalypse was how ordinary it all seemed at the time. Every new catastrophe – every natural disaster, every destruction, every freak storm – seemed only to shock us for about fifteen minutes. Then it was just kind of accepted into the past. I mean, I remember when the first coastal city – yes, take this for an example. I remember where I was, exactly where I was – the first time I saw a skyscraper, a whole financial district actually, collapse into a storm surge.
 
You’re old enough to remember television, aren’t you? I was in my apartment, on the sofa, we both were, watching the news, and – yes, the city collapsed, suddenly, like an ice shelf, all the glittering skyscrapers, and it was the greatest shock I’ve ever – we just sat – and then in no time at all it was just common knowledge that you didn’t build anything within reach of the sea. We were numb, and then the commentators were all talking about how inevitable it had been, blah, blah, blah, you probably don’t remember journalists, and then, somehow, we were all living in a world where cities weren’t built on the coast.
 
My apartment? An apartment was a living space in a bigger building, a couple of rooms where you could be private. Bedroom, kitchen – no, the people in the building ate separately, in their own – a sofa was something to sit on, like this log. Anyway.
 
There was some talk about flood defences, still, even then, and people interviewed who weren’t going to leave their old lives, but the second time it happened, and then the third, it wasn’t news. It was just an inevitable thing. We still talk about the angry sea, right? The storms? There were a lot of people living in the coastal cities back then, and they all packed up their belongings into their cars, one or two at first and then all at once when the panic took hold, and – oh, that was a season. The angry sea. Those waves. Cars jammed on the roads. The survivors – you’re probably too young to remember, but people didn’t used to live in their cars. Cars used to move.
 
Yes, and look at us now, sitting in this circle around the fire. We’ve scavenged tins for a feast and I’m an old guy talking about the past. No, kid, those are good. They’re beans. They’ve been baked. Very nutritious. That’s – yes, that’s fruit salad; don’t heat it. We’re sitting here, and the sun’s going down, and we’re about to eat – and there’s nobody else between here and those camp fires on the Interstate. Maybe the apocalypse isn’t over, but this is the new normal and it’s good. Oh, those are hot dogs. No, they’re pork. Pig. Mainly. What do you mean, are they edible?
 
No, you’d have a lock on the door, and the space inside was yours. Several locks. Two people, one, sometimes a family. You’d sleep there, eat there, and – no, we didn’t know the neighbours. Well, it was normal, back then. We didn’t question it.
 
Look at us now. We’re starting to tell history like we won. We survived. I don’t even know how to explain what happened, what we did, but it wasn’t a fight we won. I just remember that everything changed, too slowly for us to catch up, if that makes sense, and then suddenly it was too late and everything was happening too fast. Change creeps up on you. Then it gets really angry and the rain won’t stop. Here, let me show you. Clamp it on like this, see, so that it cuts in – see that? Then you turn this handle, like this, and see how it cuts round? Careful, the edge is sharp. That’s soup. Looks like – yes, mushroom. Heat it a little and then drink it. I told you; they would have had labels, but they washed off under the water.
 
No, you can’t come with us tomorrow. Look, we’ve discussed this and I say stick to the decision. Leave it to the old people to go into the city. We know our way around, for one thing, and there are still buildings to collapse, for another. Yes, I like alligator meat too, but I was lucky. It came up under my raft, on the corner of Paradise and Ninth – doesn’t matter where that is. I’d tied up to the top of a streetlight poking out of the water and it had obviously been stalking me. I know hunting’s difficult and gathering’s dull, but these tins won’t last forever. So no, you are not going to hunt for alligator meat on a street corner in the city tomorrow. Why don’t you try for a deer, maybe, or have another go at catching a rabbit? They don’t try to eat you back.
 
You don’t need us with you, actually, not any more. Those were skills out of books that we were trying to teach you, and if you’re going to hunt for real, you need to work the rest of it out for yourself. Survival skills didn’t really count for much, before, so we’ve taught you all that we know, and more. Yeah, we’re learning too, and yeah, most of these clothes, and the tents, came from a camping store that we liberated. But they won’t last and the future’s yours, really, not ours. We’ve brought you to this devastation, and – what? No, I know it isn’t devastation. More like – well, let’s not go too far, but maybe you could pick me one of those apples? Yes, off that tree over there?

Watch where you put your feet; you never know what’s hiding in the long grass.

We are generating greenhouse gases. These are causing global warming. This is bringing about climate change. This will eventually kill us.

What do we do?

More importantly, what do we NOT do?

There’s a pie chart at the EPA website (Environmental Protection Agency; 2017 figures): 29% of greenhouse gases are generated by “transportation”.
 
We stop driving about. We stop eating food that’s taken a long-distance journey to get to us. Easy enough.
 
But wait. 28% of greenhouse gases are generated by “electricity”. We should also go to bed at sunset and wake up with the dawn. Turn off the lights and the TV. Easy enough.
 
Yeah, but another 22% of greenhouse gases are caused by “industry”, and this is where it gets awkward. Industry generates not only greenhouse gases, but also taxes, salaries, pensions, things to buy. We should learn to live without money.
 
Hmm. And that’s not all. Whatever is meant by “commercial & residential” generates 12% of greenhouse gases, while agriculture generates 9%.
 
Whatever you’re doing commercially and residentially, stop doing it. Give that cow a charcoal biscuit.
 
Maybe if we went for carbon neutrality instead? Preserved the status quo, but printed something like “Generate greenhouse gases responsibly” on all our packaging?
 
I mean, I need my car, obviously, to get around. I need the heating on, thanks to global warming, and I’m pretty sure I’d get bored in the evenings, staring blankly at the corner of the room where the TV used to be.
 
So if I plant a tree, or perhaps a vegetable seedling [tiny plant, spellcheck], every time I switch on the TV, maybe we’ll all be okay?

Not actually plant a tree, you understand, but pay somebody who promises to plant a tree for me. Tick that box responsibly. Get a job as a compliance officer checking that trees have been planted.
 
Maybe the climate will stop changing if we all drive only so far to get to work (throwing seeds onto the verges as we go)? Maybe climate change will stop if I pull on another jumper and paint the corner of my room in a more interesting colour (slow-drying paint, several coats)?
 
And maybe I won’t have to bother, if “transportation” switches to “electricity” rather than fossil fuels, and “electricity” switches to solar power. All we have to do is change, after all.
 
So not such a big problem. Maybe I'll just write about something else for a while. Tried to get in to see the new Avengers film last night, but it was sold out. Now, that was truly outrageous!