Ed: Following on from "Buzzkill", which was written in a frenzy and then left for too long for me to catch the exact stitch in the air I used to step into that universe, I got the urge tonight to expand it, so that I might enter it from another source. Here is that latest effort.
Mum and Dad told me about the day the coalitions started, before the Cataclysm. Ostensibly, and as a fitting metaphor for the days that followed, fortunes on that day were different for both of them, though for similar reasons. Mum was a Forest fan, Dad Blackpool. No-one plays football any more, but the teams are nominally remembered by enough to count as immortal. It depends how you look at it, I suppose. I heard tell that the stadiums, most of them, are even still standing, but it's difficult to check when the fastest form of transport you have is a horse. I blame OPEC, but that's pointless: they're all dead, now. Or gone. Either way, it amounts to the same principle. Anyway, the team of a fresh De Montfort college history grad lost to that of a junior lawyer in Manchester, a capitulation, and on the same day a Scottish man quit the second most important job he could ever hold; relinquishing it to two men, by the names of Camera Man and Clog, if the scraps of annal that remain are to be believed. It kick-started a fairly cruddy time, especially if you were a new or soon-to-be graduate. Even the meeting in the London protests didn't change that. Romance is all very well and good, but (I'm told) it's nicer if you expect to stay alive for more than a week afterwards. They don't tell me, obviously, because, I mean, ugh, just the thought, but I bet it makes the sex more intense. Either way, times were hard, especially with the troubles that started with the environment around that time. Obviously now there are no troubles. I kind of wish there were. But back to topic: you don't get to break a large number of promises in a world where even the most historically oppressed regions on the planet are demanding glasnost and perestroika, and getting it, without any kind of negative consequence for yourself. As such, once we'd hosted the Olympics, it seemed that there was no longer any reason to look forward to anything, and the world had already begun collapsing. Nobody was particularly keen to stir up trouble; as such, we had a Leader of the Opposition who didn't capitalise fantastically well on his opponents' unpopularity (and boy, were they unpopular). In general, after the expenses scandal of '09, politicians in this country were in the shit for a while. In the US, it was kind of the opposite: they got the physical shit. I mean, Hillary Clinton waits for decades to make Bill the First Man, and then November 5, 2016 is the day that the San Andreas Fault disintegrates? Not exactly an election party, especially when the rest of the landscape is so unstable that you have to give your inaugural address from an underground concrete bunker. And Obama thought having to do it behind bullet-proof glass was a necessary evil. But that's beside the point. Cue March 21, 2013, and Coalition Number Two: the Prime Minister is now a caterpillar's head, and the Dutch bloke is still his deputy. Again, I must stress the diasporic nature of the records; I find the circumstance very unlikely. It's also more than likely that the record-keeper was pissed at the time: they pretty much had every excuse to be. Fifty-seat majority or thereabouts; less than the last one; if less divided. Suffice it to say that eventually there's another scandal, and a transition of power: the polarity shifts, and suddenly the Dutch man is lying as low in the polls as his country does in geographical terms. Cue a man, like Obama, disassociated with the status quo, this time of Westminster, and his namesake, likewise disassociated, but by having ruled with a polystyrene hand and a floppy giggle over the place where the building is for a decade or so. There's an old song I like, with a fitting lyric: It sucks you in, it drags you down to where there is no hallowed ground; where holiness is never found... that's what our world was like, even before the Cataclysm. One man had stopped delivering security to go back to delivering letters; another had commanded the unhallowed ground, but was not one of the primary unhallowers. In fact it was even kind of funny; a) to ape the Americans in having namesake premiers, and b) the numerous comparisons to a less haunted Tennant's Doctor and a less evil Simm's Master. Boris, too, seemed just the type to lose his papers down the back of the settee. Or so Mum tells me. Dad's lost much of his interest in politics. It was to be a new dawn, apparently, and sincerity in 21C UK politics for once, and for greater wonder, it was. Of course, now, after the Cataclysm, all politics is serious, but that's another story. The first lot were the No Swearing Arse Party; the third, one would have thought, an amplification. As it turned out, they were each other's rough equivalent; 293 seats each, a majority of 522 against a score of the Dutchman's broken underlings and a score and a half or so of dissidents; cats, little green men and leaping fish or something.
The Cataclysm came, if it were possible, at an unfortunate time. Things were going well for once; it made it very slightly harder to take. That's what the APs say, but then again Mum has a weird sense of humour and Dad drinks a lot. Apparently either way makes it easier.
I have to go soon. I had a few moments spare before Lissa comes back from watch, and Mark from firewood-gathering. We have to move on before dawn, and we only have a few hours. But I want to remember it, the Johnson Partnership; something that worked even in its ludicrosity. Making the ludicrous work these days, you see, is like getting sparks out of a stone: difficult, but just about bloody necessary.
I have to believe it can come back. Sanity. Normalcy. Relative safeness. Whatever.
And I do.
I do.
Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.
Yours, ever faithfully,
Astrid Jennifer Mackay,
Just a girl. Aren't we all (except the boys, of course)?
