Untitled 10

The three gardeners’ slumber was interrupted at the same hour during the night by a vivid dream.
In it, the world’s surface was watched from orbit. The round ball of blue sea and brown earth soon became covered in green creepy ivy, spreading over and blanketing the entire globe. This was then lit up and burnt in a ball of flames.
In the morning, Ray made a note of the dream. The sun had scorched the earth and he’d merely witnessed another interpretation of the end, this time of life on earth, which he assumed would be many millennia after his perceived date that would see the end of capitalism.
Getting up twenty minutes earlier than usual, he added his findings to his pamphlet under the carpet.
Rob grappled with the dream to find a reasonable explanation, but came up with little other than the fact that he’d killed an integral part of the estate’s natural landscape and that Ray had acted wildly in cutting it down.
Terry could made head nor tail of it, the beer having diluted its impact, although he did think it was a very real dream.
At the shed, Rob had just put the kettle on and was busy thinking of what to say to Ray about the worries he had over the killing of the ivy.
Terry, having parked up remarkably well in his little space, wondered whether the postcards depicting the wall on sale in the gift shops would have to be discontinued now that the prized garden ivy was no more, a picture stripped of its beauty.
He imagined the Trust selling pictures of the wall as it stood then, with the ivy half-cut from the bottom up, and smaned to himself.
Terry didn’t like the National Trust much. He detested anything to do with the present system because it had failed him as a matter of course.
That he’d never done anything of value for society, apart from work, never crossed his mind.
He was more in touch with fish than people.
To all purposes, he felt, like many all over the country, that society was the preserve of the rich while reality was portioned off to the masses.
He swept their shit and paid them a wedge of his wages, while they fined him for minor misdemeanours and watched his every public manoeuvre.
Terry saw himself as an innocent man, looked upon only as a potential criminal by those in authority.
As for Rob, he was just grateful to be in his own skin. Now that he wasn’t being strangled to death on a daily basis, he could enjoy each day as it came. The present system didn’t bother him one bit, although he knew it was all wrong.
He held no resentment against government (they were a breeze compared to his childhood governance) and he felt sure that he’d go on and do quite well in an average way under the present system, especially as he neither drank nor smoked.
Ray was much the same as Rob when he was his age; happily naive and innocent, but with deeply embedded hopes and views.
Now in his final quarter of life on earth, his interest in politics had given way to more useful thought, so much so that he had inadvertently become staunchly apolitical.
He hadn’t known who to vote for since Thatcher came to power, believing that Britain would slowly become an altogether untrustworthy place since her arrival.
Even the irresponsible actions of the Tories were easy to bear compared to that which he saw as the real problem.
There was a greedy, conniving and suspicious way about all of Britain’s people, and the especially the well-off. Money was the new god, the thing that everyone seemed hellbent on getting and keeping. Faith was a tool used to oil school-places and other localised preferential treatment.
The sense of community that Ray had enjoyed throughout his early life had slowly vanished in a haze of mass confusion.
As the City started to take over in the eighties, the government pretended to tighten its belt and sold off the country’s assets, not to feed the nation’s exorbitant debt but to re-invest in foolhardy private business and exorbitant public spending.
The free market was born and drugs swept across towns and villages, a blighting smokescreen for the young to make careers from.
As house prices went through the roof in the nineties, everyone hid and chivvied, scrimped and saved, scampering around the house to sell it for a quick profit or increase its value. Those who couldn’t buy a home were forced to pay extortionate rent for mediocre lodgings, which rose and arrested any chance of saving enough for a deposit on a home.
By the time Labour got in, the economy was apparently quite buoyant, more due to house-price increases and inward investment than any good management.
Ray had hoped that Labour would turn things around, but quietly he knew that they were disguised Tories in essence.
The political system had sold its soul to capitalism.
Whoever was in power would have to tow the elite’s line or the elite would make the nation suffer.
From 1997 to now, 2010, Ray witnessed yet more blithering idiocy, the likes of which would have been thrown out in fits of laughter back in his day.
The wars in the Middle East dragged on as if they’d never end and new housing continued to be kept to a bare minimum, strangled in order to prop up house-prices and the economy.
The government inherited its largest ever national debt by gambling the public purse in the City’s global casino, pitting more unemployed people together than at any time in Britain’s peace-time history.
A few years on from Labour’s promise to halve it, child poverty is now at its highest level for sixty years.
The Top Ten Wealthiest People in Britain have seen their fortunes increase by an average of 30% in the last year alone and the biggest-selling books on sale today are by models, TV presenters and cooks. Sausage rolls are the nation’s favourite cheap snack while the Big Mac reigns as the country’s Number One burger.