My Personal Brexit Hell Part 1

It's more than 10 years since I left Britain and I'm starting to wonder what's happened to it.

Certainly, Thursday night as the Brexit vote was counted was a stressful one. An exit poll suggested the lunatics would be beaten, albeit more narrowly than one might have wished. Like the vote for Scottish independence a year earlier, common sense would prevail.

Common sense is a British kind of thing, along with the occasional tendency to feel a bit superior. Sure the Brits have voted for extremism in the past. WMargaret Thatcher was a bit of an extreme maniac but at least she had a lot more upstairs than Ronald Reagan.

Of course,  Brits have always been a bit uneasy about the Europeans. We spent much of the last few centuries fighting the French and the Germans and before that the Dutch and the Spanish. Our football fans are still rooted in this mentality and we can't get over the fondness of the French for horse meat. It's a bit hard sometimes to understand this mentality, given that half of the country is probably of French descent post-1066. The Normans themselves were descended from the Vikings from Scandanavia and another quarter of the country was populated by Saxon invaders who were from Germany. The real Britons inhabit one village in Wales with a very long name.

I meandered somewhat from Thursday night but you get the idea. I checked the BBC website for the results and my smugness and belief that common sense would prevail was instantly wiped out. The vote for leaving the EU was ahead. Just about every provincial English town and city was voting for an exit. Only the Scots, a nation whose menfolk once day declared 'it's chilly up here - let's wear skirts,' were doing the sensible thing and voting to remain.

At least Boris is happy - sort of

I woke up to disbelief the next morning on social media. I don't have a single English friend who voted for Brexit. I don't know anyone who doesn't think Boris Johnson is a bit of a dick to put it politely,

Boris looked a bit shellshocked himself as he left his home on Friday and made his way past folks yelling "scum" to a press conference where he looked anything but triumphant. The Prime Minister had just resigned, the pound was bombing and half of the people who had voted to leave the European Union were going online to Google what the EU actually was. Boris looked ready to do a Lord Lucan.

The phrase "here's another fine mess you've gotten me into" which is often attributed to the hapless Laurel and Hardy came to mind, although apparently they never uttered it.

In the space of 24 hours, Britain had lost its coolness and those of us who hold passports has lost the chance to live in lots of pleasant white-washed places by the sea where we could drink good wine all day long.

It also meant we could no longer sneer at Americans. Voting for Donald Trump is no more nonsensical than voting for Brexit and America hasn't elected him as its president yet, to be fair.

A day after the catastrophe I'm still looking for silver linings from Brexit. For one thing, I'll be able to go to Britain without having kittens every time I see my bank statement and it doesn't make living in America seem so bad - at least until next January.

It's also given me a new appreciation of Scottish values. The replies to Trump's idiotic Tweet while in Scotland were a case in point. Comparing Trump to a "dehydrated oompa loompa" was one of the politer ones. Please do visit this site. I think I'll email a few to Hillary - perhaps not.

Not So Fond Memories of Down on the Farm

Facebook can be a strange media that hits you with the modern as well as bits of yesteryear and serves it in one big soup.

So, for example, I have a feed from the first newspaper I worked on. I usually ignore it but from time-to-time something will pique my interest.

When you live in America, you can fall into the trap of thinking Britain is the kind of place where people play cricket all day, ride bicycles with big baskets and say nice things to each other. My feed from the Western Morning News reminds me otherwise.

On the mean streets of Devon and Cornwall, some guy has been busy attacking his wife with a hammer in Painton, while some other guy has been busy goosing his flock of sheep on Dartmoor - that article didn't say if he was sheeping his geese.

Cars on the Tamar Bridge may be killing mussels and the World Dad Dancing Championships are returning to Devon.

It amazes me to think how seriously we used to take these kinds of things when I worked on the newspaper. Maybe old Millennial Me would have had a lot more fun than Back then Me.

Out of curiosity, I read the farming pages. It's a well-known fact that nobody apart from farmers reads the farming pages, that farming correspondents are invariably devoid of all social skills and they smell of manure and no reporter ever liked to do this job.

I still shudder at the thought of being sent one year to the Holsworthy Show to report on farming results. Covering agricultural shows involves a whole different language and it wasn't one that I wanted to learn.

Here's an extract from a recent Western Morning News farming report.

The interbreed terminal sire progeny group championship then went to the Blue Texel group from Rhys Cooke, with the Suffolk trio from Chris Holmes in reserve spot.

In the well supported pig section the interbreed title went to Hampshire Gilt Blewett Precious 76 from J E Sage, with the Large Black leader, Finnington Maltida from Jack Haywood following up in reserve.

Holsworthy

It raises a lot of questions, right? Such as what's a well-supported pig. Is it a pig with a large piggy bank? And who's interbred? The animals or the farmers?

The Holsworthy experience was a thoroughly miserable one. I had to drive for about an hour-and-half on manure-splattered roads in the driving rain to stand in a foul smelling barn wearing my undersized city slicker reporter's mac in deep-in-the-heart-of nowheresville.

When I finally got to interview a farmer he looked at me in a strange way as manure built up on my shiny shoes and my notepad tumbled into the mud.

"So what make of cow is this?"

The farmer looked distinctly unimpressed. I figured he might even  be a breeder but I didn't want to ask.

"Can't you see that's a cross limousin steer, not a cow? You're not from these parts"

At that point, I was rather glad I wasn't from those parts. Had I been from those parts I might also be sized up a prized cow. I had no idea what a limousin steer was, although I was badly in need of a limousine to get me out of the poo.

I had blanked out the ideas of agricultural shows for decades but after reading the report I was left in a state of bewilderment that there are still grizzled old farming correspondents on rural newspapers who are going into work every day to write this slurry.

Gorilla Death Mom Michelle Gregg and The Netizen Bullies

I know I've had periods when I've thought social media was great and it's a component of my job, but I'm beginning to wonder. This isn't a new thing but the downside of social media was reinforced by the story of gorilla death mom.

This is a lot more serious than Chewbacca Mom (see previous post) but another example of how social media is leading to a collective loss of our minds. Gorilla death mom is Michelle Gregg from Ohio whose four-year-old kid climbed into a compound at Cincinnati Zoo and was mauled a bit by a gorilla called Harambe, who was then shot dead by zoo keepers.

The episode has sparked a barrage of online hate, most of it directed at Gregg. Judging by the level of vitriol you would have thought Gregg had shot the beast herself in the manner of Walter Palmer, the friendly neighborhood dentist who killed Cecil the Lion.

People loosely described as netizens took to Twitter, Facebook and the like to suggest, Gregg rather than Harambe should have been shot and to generally denigrate the mother as a low life. There's even a suggestion that the police could bring charges of neglect.

This is all rather disturbing as nearly everyone I know at some time or another has lost their kids.- granted  people without kids are less likely to. I succeeded in losing two kids in the space of as many minutes at Disney. Had the park not employed hyper-vigilant people, they'd probably still be wandering around the Magic Kingdom wondering if the line for Thunder Mountain had subsided.

What's worrying about the Gregg episode is how it illustrates how social media has set the playground bully free in a larger arena. It's a lot easier to say these kinds of things online than to someone's face. A zoo-type feeding frenzy then ensues with the mainsteam, and not so mainstream media, feeding off social media. This Daily Mail article is a case in point. What's the none-so-subtle message here and why is it relevant that the kid's father has a long criminal record? This article is really saying 'hate these people because they are black." Oh and they are overweight too - so that's a double whammy.

You have to wonder if there would be the same chorus of hating if a well-mannered, middle-class white, 70 year-old grandmother had a lapse of attention that led to her kid climbing into the gorilla enclosure.

This story also raises one more obvious rhetorical question to me, namely:

Shouldn't zoos construct enclosures that make it impossible for four-year-old kids to climb in and play papers, scissors, rock with a 450-pound gorilla? Just saying.

The concept of the social media bully would be less frightening if it wasn't so pervasive. Currently one of two candidates who is running for what is nominally the most powerful office in the word has made it this far by name calling on a grand scale. Marcus Rubio became "Little Marco," Ted Cruz was Lyin' Ted," and Hillary Clinton is "Crooked Hillary." It seems a rather long time ago since Donald Trump declared Rosie O'Donnel to be "a pig, a degenerate," back in the good old days when nobody took him seriously.

I always have this image as Trump as the punchy misfit who was bullied himself at school over his tangerine face and dead duck hairstlye and wrecks his revenge in shoes with steel tips behind the bike sheds, yelling "crip. loser, big ears or retard" at his victims.

I'm not saying politics has always been a gentle pursuit. Insults are part and parcel of the whole process.

Abraham Lincon once declared as a rejoinder to Stephen Douglas's arguments in favor of an expansion of slavery that they were "as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death."


Trump is the inheritor of the party that Lincoln brought onto the political scene which is really rather tragic when you think hard about it.

Chewbacca Mom - Really?

Ok I'm not being funny or a miserable old git or anything but I just have three words - ChewbaccaMom - really?

If you have spent the last couple of days in a cardboard box or doing something meaningful you may have missed this phenomenon but the 130 million people who checked her out on Facebook clearly haven't.

So Chewbacca Mom is Candace Payne from Texas. She goes to Kohls to get stretch pants but ends up getting a Chewbacca mask instead and takes a selfie as she laughs hysterically. Errr and that's it.

Still, a couple of days later Payne has become a household name. She's carpooling with Star wars director JJ Abrams and is appearing on Good Morning America.

The Washington Post is writing analytical pieces on her transformative role in society.

Payne's video is a "reminder that life is filled with simple pleasures," it states. "Even with all of the negativity in the world, you can drive to Kohl's, buy a toy under $20 and crack yourself up alone in your car. it's uncomplicated, It's not stressful." the Washington Post states.

I have to say I found myself imagining the newsroom and the conference when some editor asked for volunteers to write about the transformative effects of Chewwy Mom. Suddenly all eyes go to the floor and pencils tap nervously.

Back in the day I recall the news editor lobbing a curveball at my features team when he wanted us to write about Dido's Thank You and how it was doing so well because everybody wanted to be happy and smiley and all that nonsense before he disappeared to the bar to drink himself into an angry stupor.

At least Dido had talent on her side and wasn't just famous for cackling to herself in a car. I guess one clutches at straws for amusement in the age of Donald Trump.

Far Away Footie and Liverpool Blues

One of the worst deprivations I face living in the USA is watching footie from afar. I've never been a big fan of the U.S. version which features more shoulder pads than an episode of Dynasty, a statement that ages me badly, helmets and lots of stopping and standing around while men fondle odd shaped balls.

Football is called soccer in the US. It always pained me to come to terms with the word but a rather ill-fated episode of coaching under 5s last year, reconciled me more to the S word. I'm not sure if I was a great man (or child motivator for that matter). It's never a good thing when you are celebrating the end of the season at Pizza Hut and the kids start asking who you are. It's a long story really. As part of often acrimonious and unnecessarily costly divorce proceedings, I mentioned a time when the ex had resisted putting the 5-year-old into a local soccer club.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Kopp @ notahappybunny.com

The ex later enrolled him and even volunteered to be a head coach. The pressure was on me to coach an opposing team and I agreed. It soon became clear coaching 5-year-olds was not my bag. The sodden fields of Portsmouth, Virginia seemed a world away from the glory nights of long ago when Liverpool pulled off some of their greatest triumphs in the heart of Europe.

I'm not sure why I started supporting Liverpool but I believe it was a reaction to the elementary school bullies who were promising dire consequences for anyone who wouldn't support Manchester United. Withstanding the daily mortar attacks of snot projected across the class on rulers, it was still worth keeping my principles intact.

Supporting Liverpool was exhilarating and ultimately frustrating but never dull, But from the other side of the pond you often walk alone. Even when you can watch matches down the pub, there is little atmosphere and none of the old cheering and tribalism. The closest I came to recreating the mood was the game between England and the USA in 2010 when Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard scored early on, only for a pathetic fumble by the England goalkeeper to level the score. Watching England is usually an exercise in futility. That world cup was no different.

I had a better feeling yesterday when Liverpool squared up to Sevilla in the Europa Cup final after a breathtaking run in. I quickly ran into logistical problems. The game was scheduled for 7.45p.m. in Britain which was 2.45 p.m. in the United States. That's not an easy time to slip out of work. It was apparently possible to view the game on YouTube, I checked it out and received a message that the service is "not available in your country."

There was nothing for it but to 'watch' the game on live updates on BBC and the Guardian's website, although news of Liverpool's first goal was shared first on Facebook.

I started to wonder if I could get to a pub for the glorious second half. That's when things went slightly pear shaped and Sevilla scored three goals. Even with 10 minutes to go, I half expected a trademark Liverpool escape act.

Then a funny thing happened. Nothing happened.

I felt gutted but at least  had not broken out of jail to watch a fiasco. At some time in the night, I checked my phone and read an Egypt Air jet had disappeared. I started to imagine all those families waiting at the airport for a plane that would never land. it put my footie emptiness firmly into perspective.

My Video Blog Debut

It's hard to believe that in all the six years or so that this blog has been going, I am yet to publish a video blog even though those around me are doing it left, right and center.

So here's me making up for it. This video was taken at my kitchen table and it lasts just over a minute. About 20 seconds of prep went into it. If you are looking for words of wisdom, forget it. Still this does seem to be the way the world is going.

If Samuel Pepys were to be walking around with his famous diary today we'd accuse him of being a pompous old windbag.


Instead of waiting for Dickens' next installment, we'd be 'shove it up on YouTube mate.'

I have shot videos for media companies and anyone else who might be prepared to pay me a pittance for some time now. However, I try not to star in them. This one was taken on my iPhone and YouTube wants to do the shaky reduction on it. . All of which makes me wonder whatever happened to Shakin' Stevens and if he suddenly died would anyone notice. He could be dead already - we might not know. I digress.

I also forgot to do the horizontal thing. There's always next time, right.

Well the video was such fun, it was rapidly followed with Date With Dr. Diaper. This may seem like an irreverant chat, but it's actually a conceptual art project....

On Upnor High Street

Walking down that cobbled street, I started to wonder if I had become a cliche of that kind of American who cherishes the historic. What was Upnor High Street in the grand scheme of things? Little more than an obscure lane leading down to the Medway - a couple of old pubs and some homes clad in traditional Kent weatherboarding. The Old Post Office was just that. The days when letters were sorted here were lost in antiquity. We posed for a picture. We put it on Instagram. We moved on.

There was a smart model of a sloop beyond a crumbling window sill. Daffodils were pushing their way out of the earth in the boxes set out in the shady areas beneath the buildings and we could hear subdued laughter from a pub garden, although it was cold to be outside on that April day, cold but stimulating for the spirits. If you listened carefully maybe you would hear the shoots pushing up through the thin soil.

Upnor seemed like a strange place for a family get together. It also seemed as good a place as any. The street was unremarkable compared to Rye, Stamford, Lavenham, Shaftsbury or a host of other places. It only merits a few lines on Wikipedia and its castle is understated. Even so there was a temptation to don a pair of bright green flannel golfing pants and a pair of white sneakers and yell out "Gee this is so quaint."

What do you expect when your leisure hours are haunted by too many strip malls, too much concrete. Functional is ugly but it is the utilitarian future. What use have we for cobbles anymore? The old sea captain's sloop will rot with the windows. The castle will be shunned and its curtain walls quietly closed off from visitors. It had been five long years since I have been back to Britain and the few days I was there opened and closed and now it's as if I never visited.

But there's something reassuring about finding things the way they are. The old people. Still there for now but just older. The same strange but reassuringly familiar oddities. The same family units, intact and at odds with the fragmented ones I have grown used to. I walked slowly down the high street. I breathed in the thin spring air and the fragile flowers and graceful windows and castle towers. And I wanted to hold onto a slice of it, to bottle it up and take it away with me like the most crass of American collectors.

Z is for Zig Zags

There is nothing new under the sun. Although the brief episode known as Mankind may have seemed like an aberration or an experiment, it was not unique. For two million years after the demise of humans, the world buzzed and hummed in a perpetual food chain, but no one species returned to dominance. Then it zig-zagged back again.

The climatic crisis of the 21st Century had been a mere blip in the rise and fall of the earth. It only took a few thousands of years for the carbon to retreat. In the overall history of the planet, it would pale into insignificance compared to the radiation explosions of the sun before its eventual demise that would boil the oceans and waste any flora and fauna that remained. That happy event was still hundreds of millions of years away. The next people to dominate the world were a species of lizard called the Karnika. On the face of it, they were unprepossessing. Their eyes were overlarge and oozed blue gunk night and day. They had four legs but, like man, later stood up. Even this was not a pretty sight because the Karnika had one scaly leg that was longer than the other, making it difficult to escape from their enemies. Due to their vulnerability, they used their cunning to make up for their lack of athleticism.

In a Karnika village on a land mass that was known as South America a long time ago, the return of Boubus, had caused quite a stir. Boubus was the child of the chief who had disappeared into the forest a year ago to 'find himself.' Everyone in the village assumed he would be killed by a big cat or one of the other nefarious creatures that inhabited the forest, but one day he returned.

He had a horse with him and was dragging a cage full of exotic monkeys. But the return of Boubus was less remarkable than the contraption that was carried behind the cart. Wooden slats had been put together in an outlandish spherical design. The contraption rolled behind the horse.

A group of womenfolk gathered in the village square. The return of Boubus made them emotional. There was enough eye oozing going on to create a mound of ooze in the square that Boubus tactfully pulled his cart around.

His family and the elders of the village embraced him and then turned to the contraption.

"Can you see the ease of movement?" he cried. "Imagine how this will revolutionize our village and make it easier to harvest the crops."

His father mounted a rock with his smaller leg on the surface and his other leg on the ground. That way he attained some stature and equilibrium. "I am so proud of my lost son," he told the gathering crowd. "He went away into the jungle and came back with something wonderful. This is progress."

He pushed the cart and it moved forward. The motion caused his lizard nostrils to puff up and emit little squeaks of delight. He pushed it again and giggled..

So that's the A-Z Challenge zipped up for another year. This one was hard due to time constraints. A few posts were late but it wasn't the end of the world...

Y is for Year 2500

Four hundred years after the demise of man, there were few indications that he, or she, had ever walked on the earth.

Modern humans had only been on the planet for just over 200,000 years, although their hairy ancestors had roamed around for six million. The planet was 4.5 billion years old. If the world were compared to a 24-hour clock, man would have arrived one minute before the start of the next day only to last just over 60 seconds. Even the dinosaurs with their vast bodies and tiny brains had hung around for half an hour.

It was an odd testimony to our ancestors that the monuments of the past endured more effectively than the inventions of the 'new age.' In the bleak wastes that bordered the River Nile, three hulking masses still rose from the sand, although dense new growth choked the temples of old Mexico and what was once South East Asia.

There were tropical lagoons today at the site of the metropolis that was once New York City. In the last death throes of man, all that could be burned was set ablaze to warm and provide food for rudimentary societies, In the oxygen depleted climate, the grandest of plants could no longer grow and only the stingiest of weeds and most hardy of parasites prospered. It was a world made mostly of carbon and angry storms invaded its surface, and the seas rose to swallow much of the land. When the last man suffocated as he climbed an Alpine peak in search of fresher air, the world sighed and quickly began to replenish itself.

It was as if the aberration of man had never existed. Free of maintenance, the great skyscrapers of New York City came crashing down in a matter of decades. Had he been alive in 2145, William Van Alen, the architect of the Chrysler Building, may have been amused to see one of the giant metal radiator caps that adorned a high ledge, forming a nest for a family of exotically plumed parrots. A few years earlier, a giant hurricane had ripped the top off of the Empire State building, ensuring its rival was the tallest building in the city for a while. One World Trade Center has been toppled over a decade earlier. Central Park was now a squawking tropical lagoon full of all manner of reptiles and birds.

Nature had not toppled many of the smaller buildings, but it had grown over them and clinging branches had pulled at their sides until New York was little more than a city of rubble under plants. The meticulously planned systems that had made the city run would have been a distant memory if anybody had been there to remember them. New York in the year 2500 was a gigantic food chain and no one species occupied the high places.

X is for X Camp

Freddie had given up thinking about X Camp months ago. He was told it was better than Y Camp where a fire had broken out in one of the concrete blocks and wiped out half of the inmates, but that was as far as it went.

Every morning at 6 a.m. Freddie was woken up by the sirens and ushered to the mess room where he sat for hours on a hard wooden bench and watched the parade as President Jeb Jackson surveyed his military forces below him. Freddie had no idea how recent the footage was or whether any of the elements of government even existed anymore. All he felt was the burning from the hot soup and its thinness as he looked into its depths in vain for any substance.

Life in the camps was a bit like that. There was no point to the overlong days. Freddie felt he had less purpose than battery hens whose role was to lay eggs until the expiration of their sad lives. In the camps even the people who held them appeared to have little purpose. When there was such a thing as society, prisons served a role in keeping the bad guys away from the responsible members of society. Today the bad guys seemed to be the only ones that thrived and they didn't thrive for very long. The responsible people were all in camps.

In X Camp, Freddie had the occasional vivid dream but he usually dreamed in monochrome. Now and again, there would be an exception - his parents waving goodbye at the end of a dirt track with the skies laced with the heavy purple of the storm, the red of Diana's mouth as they kissed and the day she painted her nails every shade of the rainbow.

The only person Freddie encountered in the week who had a sense of purpose was Commander Krall, the senior official at the camp, who would preach to the masses every Friday. Freddie would be ushered into a large hall and made to stand with the other men. The women were segregated in another compound behind the stage. Krall would deliver a long oratory about how a new world order was underway and they represented the brave future of the republic. Freddie would look at the bedraggled men then as they stared at their feet, at the pale windows and in any direction other than Krall's. It was a hollow charade. The commander was either going through the motions or out of his mind.

When the winter came large swathes of snow settled between the holding blocks and on the skirts of the smoke stacks. The cold was more pronounced than in the past and men shivered and passed away before him. Many were removed to the hospital block. Nobody ever returned.

They moved him to a ground floor cell whose occupant had departed to the hospital. For the first time he was able to see the female residents walking around in a vast parade ground below him.

Freddie had lost his interest in details but one woman caught his attention. There was something familiar about the way she moved, an impulsiveness about her that bordered on anger and could not be tamed even in this place. He noticed her swarthy features under her mane of black hair caught by the wind. Suddenly color flooded into his cell. He thought of the ripples of sunlight through stained glass, the currents that moved warm under the skin.

He looked again. It was Diana. There could be no mistake, although she had lost much of her sturdiness. When he looked again she had a ball in her hand. She threw it in an arc and another figure caught it, a small girl who ran toward her. Freddie felt breathless now. He hadn't seen Melissa since the terrible day in the forest but there could be no doubt that it was the child. His mouth moved at the corners in an unfamiliar way. His coughing morphed into a laugh. He raised himself up to the bars and gave out a shrill shout: "Diana."

For a few seconds the woman held the ball and looked up into the sky full of snow flurries. He fancied she saw a look of recognition as she stared at the sky. Then she threw the ball to the child again in a long curving arc.

W is for Washington

When  Estavez Estralla finally saw the Cascades in the distance, he felt that odd sense of triumph mixed with disappointment. Washington State had assumed a life of its own as a promised land for so long, that his heart was weighed down with the certainty that the paradise would be lost.

He had travelled alone for many weeks. The faces of his wife and children and that parting image of them walking into the teeth of the tornado haunted him at night and fist thing in the morning. He tried to keep it at bay during the day by shouting at his feet. He was unrecognizable as the bright, young engineer of Mexico City. Very few people were recognizable as themselves these days.

In Oregon, he had come close to starvation. He had found a village before his legs gave way. For a few days, he had rested up with a widow before heading again into the wilderness. At Crater Lake, he viewed the top of a mountain pushing up from the waters where it had been blasted by a volcano. Today another disaster was going on as all the trees were pulled down and burned on the sides of the mountains. Crater Lake remained vast and impervious to the current troubles, dwarfing those who navigated its rim.

In Washington, Estralla found new lakes that had swallowed up great swathes of the land. The local people told him of the melting of the glaciers up in the Cascades and the night a town was swallowed up in the waters. The sounds of the inhabitants meeting a watery death haunted the hills around.

After trekking for two days, Estralla came across the Mexican camp he was searching for. Forbidding walls of wood, topped with spikes rose from the ground. There were watch towers, wire and men with guns. Within the huts were flimsy but at least the temperatures were cooler.

"We built the palisade after we were attacked under cover of nightfall," said Manuel, one of the members of the camp's council. "It was local people and feds and they wanted to drive the Mexicans out of the state." He played a guitar and sang mournful songs about the Nevado de Toluca, the mountains of his youth. 

"Did many people die?" asked Estralla.

Manuel just shrugged. "They die. It's normal now. Dying is the new living."

"You sound so matter-of-fact."

"Look around my friend. The lakes are swallowing up the land. The trees are going. The people are swallowing up each other. Literally, my friend - they are talking about cannibalism further west."

"So what can we do?"

Manuel paused strumming for a while and pointed up to the evening sky. Already the impressions of stars and the other planets were appearing in the dense atmosphere.

"Well, maybe you can get me up there. There must be another place where everything is plentiful, and people still know how to smile."

Estralla was suddenly overcome with the long road behind him. He wanted to sink into the ground and float off into the sky. He felt his features crack and the smile of an idiot appear on his face.

"See you can do it too my friend. Those facial muscles must hurt. Give in and stop fighting. I think I know just the song."