Out-and-out Liars;Of Ice,Fur and Fire, (Chapter 4, Part 7)

 

                                                                                7.

 

 

At the breaking news that the United Kingdom was about to be relinquished to an overseas bidder in the Christies auction and be dismantled and used by its new Saudi owner as a museum and series of studios for costume drama and finally an aircraft carrier, this agitated the already demoralised inhabitants out of their food and poverty sequestration brought on by the over-reaching of basic instincts of the few at the expense of the many; they hit the streets to face the well-prepared crush zones and kettling well rehearsed by an army the Prime minister, in a zeal to be go down in history as Winston Churchill mark 2 at any cost, had irrationally suggested at the last mass outing of the housebound poor.

This was the hapless leader’s vanity project and it had been in the pipe-line for some time; since he was five years old. He was not so much predestined to ruin the country as propelled by a demonic  and sadistic sense of humour stoked and epitomized by George Frazer’s  tales of Flashman a hero whose only quality was a skewed colonial slave-owner’s world-view of egotistical Schadenfreude; a malicious joy at the dire misfortune of others. This misfortune had now peaked along with the uncontainable glee of its arch manipulator.

 

No mercy was shown as the army and police cracked the skulls, broke the limbs of, and tazered grandparents and children alike with a relish hitherto suspected of the armed forces and police but now in full sadist flow. Squashed against the empty Jessops, Comet, Boots, Waterstones, Currys, Thomas Cook, HMV. Superdrug, Tesco, Sainsburys. PoundLand and other defunct franchises, the bloodied and battered staggered into Starbucks to be treated like their American counterparts on September 11^th, near the toppled Twin Towers and charged for bottles of water with which to wash their open wounds.

 

The Prime Minister however was not the only person who had a ringside seat paid for in advance, Plan B was to divert attention from revolution and his own personal and obvious failure by inviting a coalition  of VIP generals and arms dealers from Russia, ‘How can I get more money…before I leave?’. A Doomsday chant then and now, was permanently perched on the Prime Minister's mendacious lips. His dark shadow lurked in the bowls of Westminster, an addict in dragon-form whose greed could not be slaked and whose misery over his hoard was all eyes. Plague would no longer be sufficient to reduce the population, especially a querulous one; medicine had become too good, but there was profit there too; people were always secondary to commerce, (The alcohol industry was already cashing in on politically induced atomized despair; a dragon no Beowulf would step forward to slay this time.) and now another war was what was needed and with the leader at the helm of the most winsome arms contracts; Winston Churchill Mark 2 was within sight.

The Achilles heel in the Prime Minister’s hubris was that the invited invaders were intending to…well, invade anyway. Devoid of the Christian concept of ‘Love thy neighbour’ our Slavic neighbours had been merrily waiting in the wings, watching Europe in general and the United Kingdom in particular; as cut-backs sapped the very thing a country needed to defend itself, and as the basic means by which a people need to...well, basically stand upright became increasingly scarce the jobless, half-starved and dispirited population were sleepwalking into disaster and into the ambush of its Prime Minister’s gigantically myopic Master-plan.

Those who had other countries to return to simply returned. Those who had enough money to leave for more lucrative pastures had long ago left. It is a commonly known fact that the UK landmass is not sufficient to feed the inhabitants of that landmass, and a pact of Russo-Moslem ships surrounded the besieged island, this put a sudden stop to all cooking programs as the prospect of obtaining any of the ingredients on show became a wild fantasy. The adage ‘Don’t kick a man when he’s down’, was being internationally flagrantly violated both figuratively and literally. “Nostradamus predicted this!” shouted a middle-class hippy father of four as he was brutally floored by the butt of a Russian machine gun. The sudden sense of belonging the UK citizens felt with Europe came with the comforting knowledge that those on the continent were being treated to the same annihilation.

 

In the place of a male monarch a short-lived sense of freedom would, dove-like ascend into the sky to be shot down in mid-flight. A huge unexploded bomb stuck out of the MI5 building, street-side, like a huge ice-cream cone. Those inhabitants left alive were treated to the view of a flotilla of enemy ships moored in every available space along the Thames. At gunpoint, the hapless Prime Minister, in shirt sleeves, was made to climb the thirty nine steps to the belfry of Big Ben; his bound feet formed the tip of the third hand of the famous clock face.

 

On the radio the customary bravura of the commentators had crumpled into craven jocularity last heard on the occasion day of the 2008 financial crash; it was hard to tell if the loud bangs heard in the studio were the sound-effects of three Champaigne bottles being opened or a short round of bullets.

 

Will Self was the first of the intellectuals to be arrested; he protested with his usual
dry wit, completely lost on the occupiers as were the philosophical protestations of Alan de Boton. Nicholas Shakespeare, Joanna Trollop and Martin Amis would all witness the end of their respective dynasties at the hands of thugs. In vain and in his prison cell Ian McEwan wished to survive to record the experience in his next novel. The invaders loved J K Rowling and only wanted her autograph for their children, requests to which she gracefully obliged while wishing she had Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility.

To add grist to the apocalyptic mill, China’s five hundred million-strong army of over-confident only-child young men and women also waited in the wings to avenge the already beleaguered land for the Opium Wars with a conflagration the like of which has never been seen. An over-exaggerated karmic come-uppance; gross ingratitude one felt, for China’s narcotic dependency and near demise while Britain talked business over tea.

 

Class being now, as always, the dictate of the occupier the feral middle classes roamed the land in search of…well, the middle classes. Fascist groups and perverts of every stripe, who had escaped the scythe-like radar of the invaders, went on an unbridled spree, raping and brutalizing anyone who had hitherto been protected by political correctness. A veritable Tourette’s Syndrome of racial invectives were heaped upon first and second generation Brits caught in the cross fire between two evils. The Jews, who perpetually lived with a little suitcase packed just in case, had gauged the temperature some months earlier and were now setting up market stalls in New Zealand. Gangsters and criminals stood about dumbstruck gazumped by the general base behaviour on display. The gays, those erstwhile ancient shamanic beings untramelled by natural selection and sent to balance the brutal polarities of the hetrosexual world, were now, once again balancing on the edge of a very long knife indeed.

As a conflagration of opposing fires swept across the country the animals of the zoos had been freed and now roamed about the city. The roar of lions mingled horrifically with the laughter of hyenas and the screams of monkeys. The wet sleek slithering hiss of snakes made the flesh crawl, especially the flesh of Karen Smith as she dreamed of the demise of the country she had just sold at auction. She awoke from her nightmarish dream as a leathery finger passed across her forehead, to find she was in Hyde Park, in the dark with a Macaque Crested Monkey crouching over her and in the background a menagerie of animals recently freed from Harrod’s Exotic Pets Department.