Our parents protect us from the lines down

The ancestors that trickle knowledge, and expression in our face, they talk it to us straight, we are just people, we all face challenges, life’s love and desire is hardly ever satisfied, aspirations, they tell us, shadow and regret clouding their features, are actually naïve. You would be forgiven for disbelieving this, therefore, if you have been brought up without any parents. In the face of an institution that functions, faultlessly with immense power to achieve all it sets out. However small the work its large hands fumble with, whichever of its sinews of left unstrained, dark at the back, waiting, like we feel like we are. I was brought up with many complexes of self worth and dark fears that do not feature in other people’s lives; however, I believe that my orphan status was an indispensable advantage. 
 

Especially when the fall came. I became an adult with an unhindered fascination for life and all its cruel corners, the paths left unturned, the bunches unravelled, I was ready for any disaster and my solitary existence made me excited about anything fatal. I quite simply did not have anyone to loose, and although not reeling for my own exit from the world, I didn’t mind it if it allowed me a short period of extreme discovery. They say in this rationalised, systemised metropolis we’ve constructed around and inside ourselves, that the only things without rules are love and war, I think there are many other things that involve no recompense when lost, award no honour when won, and this vacuum from meritocracy is what I love. I also had no one to leave behind. I actually believe that until I was 29 I did not feel a thing beyond mere embarrassment or polite well wishing for any person; it gave me incredible freedom

It all crumbled as I was sitting on the beach near Landsend, on the sort of blustered day where the wind brings small raindrops and drags them along the ground before it lets them fall, on the sort of day sunshine and gloom are intermissant, you suspect that the weather has ulterior motives, has some anomaly to solve, it was distracted that day, unconcerned with humans when it sometimes is so sympathetic, it missed the day that England fell. I felt the shudder behind me on both sides, circle me, and I saw the stray waves lost in bobbing, lonely, solitary waves make journeys to the shore on their own.

The sky’s white colour carried on and the sparks went into the air, later listening to it on radio in the storeroom, I heard that gun fire had broken out half and hour before that, they’d let the bombs off in Turo at that moment, and by night fall cholera was already spreading. People converted to Christianity and Islam indiscriminately, they reported. Others were clogging the ports and the airports, trying to escape to America, which simultaneously tightened its control on the award of visas for these wretched Britons. I stayed at home, bidding my time, counting the seconds, feeling doubly privileged to be allowed such an interesting perspective.

When it was over, they said thirty thousand had died, and many more, rejected from the over crowded hospitals, were stray, wretched, homeless and had no resilience to pestilence, had no experience of destitution. Six months later all the money had been drained from the Kingdom, the government descended into anarchy and frequent coup attempts miraculously prompted the Queen to take full control of the country and leave it to her family. Censorship laws were imposed, the streets were full of sighs that could not reach further than that person could cry, tears flooded some streets, the resistance rapidly turning, folklore said.