Corbyn World 3

Having managed to pay off my credit card debt, I realised that I could very easily save £500 a month in order to buy a car.  I went down to a local car showroom.  I sat in the Mercedes supermini that was on the forecourt outside.
"I like this car," I said to the dealer.  "Could I put a £500 deposit on it and pay for it over the next six months?"
"What are talking about?"
"Sorry, you're a small company.  Maybe you don't do it.  Is there anywhere I could get a good hire purchase deal?"
"To buy a car?"
"Is a cheque acceptable with a cheque guarantee card?"
"No it's not.  What's a cheque guarantee card?"
"I'm a little bit frightened of walking down the street with £2,500 in my pocket in case someone robs me."
"Why would anyone rob you?  You're completely mad.  I suggest you buy your drugs from a pill bar where they have a qualified pharmacist next time.  Don't go to a back street squat where they're selling 2 litre bottles of home brew and tablets that are probably stolen."  

Having made a complete fool of myself at the car showroom, I decided not to return again until 4 months later and with £2000 in my pocket.  The Mercedes supermini was still there.  I opened the door and sat inside.
"I'll give you £1800 for it," I said, taking the money out of the envelope so that he could see it.  "I'll buy it right now."
"Are you trying to be funny?"
"OK.  It's a good car.  It's worth more than that.  £2000.  The car has been standing on the forecourt for months.  £2000, cash in hand, right now."
"It has been standing on my forecourt for months and it will be there until someone can come here and pay me the proper price."  I began to realise that in the Jeremy Corbyn dimension people don't barter.
"I haven't got £2500."
"It's not your lucky day, then, is it?  There's a Renault over there for £1800.  Good condition.  Very low mileage."  It was a tiny Renault and it was 20 years old.  It had excellent bodywork.  I was tempted.
"It's too old."
"You won't know the difference, once you're driving it along the motorway."
"I don't buy anything that old.  You can never be sure.  It might break down."
"It'll last for years."  I wondered if it might be worth the slight risk of a snapped cam timing belt and destroyed engine.  I couldn't be certain the Renault would be a write off.  How much did a new one cost?  There must be a more than 50% chance the car would last a long time and be at least fixable.  But I really wanted the Mercedes.  I imagined it to be a mechanically superior and reliable vehicle, even if it was 10 years old.
"I'll take my credit card to the cashpoint machine and draw out £500," I said.  That left me £1000 on the credit card limit to tax and insure the car.  I returned with the full £2500.
"Return here tomorrow with an insurance certificate and a tax certificate and I'll let you have the car," said the dealer.  I would have to tax and insure the car online and print the certificates.
"I'll bring the money tomorrow as well."  The used car dealer looked hurt.
"Do you really think I'd steal from you?"
"All right, have the money now."
"Bring the money tomorrow if you want.  I just wonder why you're so paranoid.  Don't expect me to walk down the street with £2500 in an envelope, someone might attack me.  I won't leave £2500 with a used car dealer, he might steal it or sell the car to someone else.  Where are you from?"  

The next day I came back and happily drove away in the Mercedes supermini.  It was fantastic.  The performance wasn't disappointing.  It felt like my mother's old mini, that I had once had driving lessons in, but was 3 times as powerful.  I made believe it was a racing mini.  The roads in Brighton seemed quiet.  I noticed there wasn't as much traffic around as I was used to.  I arrived at work.  I had taken the morning off to go to the car showroom.
"I've bought a car," I said.
"Ooh," said Tracey.  "What kind of car is it?"
"It's that little blue Mercedes outside.  I haven't finished paying for it yet."
"What?" said Keith.
"I owe the credit card company £1,000 for it."
"I couldn't sleep at night if I owed the credit card company £1,000," said Keith.
"So you keep saying.  I paid off the last lot of money I owed them.  I'll pay this in 3 months."
"Not many junior people in this company have cars," said John.  "Managers have them.  I have a Russian motorbike."
"I don't drive," said Keith.  "I've got issues with driving." 

That evening I phoned my mother.
"Mum, I've bought a car."
"Oh lovely!  You'll have to take us out somewhere.  We don't have a car."
"You used to."
"No, we've never had a car.  The buses are so cheap, and they run every ten minutes."
"I learnt to drive in your mini."
"I didn't have a mini.  Not many people could afford a car.  You learnt to drive with a professional driving school.  It's against the law to teach someone to drive unless you're a qualified driving instructor."
"Dad needed a car for work when he was a television engineer."
"Malcolm, DER had a pool of vans in the car park.  The vans were shared between 2 different engineers.  You couldn't take them home with you.  Now you've bought a car you'll be able to take us for a ride in it.  I'm excited.  What kind of car is it?"
"A Mercedes."
"Ooh!"
"A little one.  A Mercedes the size of a mini.  It's ten years old but it's fast and a beautiful ride."
"Sounds fantastic.  You could take us out somewhere."
"Waldridge village is nice and handy for the coast.  We could go for a long walk along the sand together."
"Your Dad and me are a little bit old for a long walk along the sand."
"I'll take you to South Shields pier for a short walk and then to the cafe for a cup of tea.  Just as long as I can find somewhere I can park for more than an hour without getting a parking ticket."
"What's a parking ticket?"
"I'll come up on Saturday.  I'll set off at six in the morning and should arrive at lunchtime."
"Ooh, listen Dave.  Malcolm's coming up to give us a ride in his car."  This was one more good moral reason for not using the teleport again.

I drove back home at six on Saturday morning. I reached the M25 in an hour and a half.  It was divided into 4 lanes.  It had a cycle lane, a 30 mile per hour lane for mopeds, a 60 mile per hour lane for buses and lorries and a 70 mile per hour outside lane for cars.  The cycle lane was marked with painted bicycles and the other 3 lanes had the numbers 30, 60 and 70 painted in white circles at regular intervals.  All sorts of strange vehicles were on the motorway.  One man drove a mobility scooter behind a long row of bicycles in the cycle lane.  A tractor shared the 30 mile an hour lane with several brightly coloured plastic fronted mopeds.  There was a huge vintage motorbike behind the tractor that made a tick tock noise and didn't seem to be capable of more than 30 miles per hour.  I did a steady 70 in the outside lane, untroubled by anyone wanting to pass me, taking the precaution of joining the lorries and motor coaches in the inside lane when it began to rain heavily and I slowed down to 60.  The outside lane traffic passed me at not much more than 75.  I guessed the man on the mobility scooter and the people on the two wheeled vehicles were drenched by the downpour.  I passed Heathrow Airport.  There wasn't a queue.  I wondered how many people in this dimension could afford foreign holidays.  I pulled into the motorway services on the M1 to have breakfast.  The car park was divided into areas for bicycles, motorbikes, coaches, lorries and cars.  I wondered where mobility scooters were meant to park.  Then I saw one in the car park, taking up a whole parking bay between two cars.  A metal badge on the back of the mobility scooter said '400 mile lithium battery.  Waterproof to 50 metres.'  Inside the services there were shops and cafes that were like an indoor market built in the 1960s.  Companies like Macdonald's and Burger King hadn't made it this far.  These were small businesses selling cheap meals.  I decided on a hot dog.  I phoned my mother.
"Hi Mam.  I'm at Watford Gap in the car."
"Where's Watford Gap?"
"Just north of London.  The other end of the M1.  I'll be at your house in time for lunch."

My parents came out of the house as I parked the car in the street.  I noticed that the house did not have a garage or a drive.  It had had both in the other dimension.
"Let's have a look," said Mother.
"This is my Mercedes supermini," I said.  I opened the front passenger door.  "Have a sit inside."
"This is wonderful," she said.  "Dave, do you want to have a sit in it as well?"  They took turns to sit in the front passenger seat.  They looked excited.  Sitting in a private car must have been a novelty for them.  We went into the house to have lunch.
"I've never had so much money since I had my state pension," said Father.  The meal was rice with chewy lumps of steak and chunks of chicken from a tin.  "There wasn't much meat when you and your sister were growing up.  The Hippy government encouraged vegatarianism.  Only a few animals could be eaten for food.  Dairy cattle and sheep that were past a certain age, hens that had stopped laying.  If you wanted a pork chop, you had to buy it on the black market."
"Do you remember the seventies?" asked Mother.
"Vaguely," I said.  I remembered a totally different world where my parents had had a car and had lived in a house like this one.
"We used to live in a caravan with gas lamps," said Mother.  I could remember a caravan with gas lamps that we used to take holidays in.  I wondered if, in this dimension, it had actually been our home.
"I remember it.  I remember the smell of the gas."
"It had no electricity," said Father.  "I used to run my own business.  People would bring their radios to the caravan and I would repair them with a gas soldering iron.  £1 for a pocket radio and £3 for a big radio.  I made £20 a week, £5 of which was income tax."
"We had Universal Income Benefit in those days," said Mother.  "That would pay the gas bill and the rent for the caravan, as well as all the other household expenses.  Your dad's wages fed and clothed you."
"The hippies despised wealth," said Father.  "You think Jeremy Corbyn has high income tax?  They kept putting it up all the time and they gave you nothing in return.  The government were rejoicing when the economy collapsed and the World Bank told them they'd get no more money.  'Who needs money?' they asked.  That's easy to say if you're a politician.  When your mother got a part-time job in a shop, that was the only time I had enough money to go to college to train as a television engineer and learn to drive.  They took half the money away from her as income tax.  I paid my own college fees.  High they were, too.  Then I got a job with DER and we moved here.  We could afford to rent a house with the wages I got from DER.  I still used to repair the radios in the evenings.  DER's still there.  It's called Dial for Home Entertainment.  They nationalised it in 1983.  I retired in 2009."
"Where are we going in the car?" asked Mother.
"I'll take you to the pier in South Shields."
"That'll be nice," said Father. 

We drove off to the coast.  I could see my parents in the rear view mirror.  They had a look of excitement on their faces, like people going on an aeroplane for the first time.  The car itself was an experience for them.  The roads were quiet, except for the noticeably increased number of bicycles, mopeds with brightly coloured fibreglass hoods and motorbikes.  I came to the coast road.  I drove to the pier.  I could park anywhere.  No double yellow lines.  No pay and display car parks with annoying one hour limits.
"We only took half an hour to get here," said Father, looking at his watch.  It was a fine day.  We walked along the pier.  The sun shone over the bright blue sea.  We could see Tynemouth in the distance.  After walking the full length of the pier and back, I sensed that my parents, now in their 70s, were tired.
"There's a lovely pub where we can go for a cup of tea," I said.  We sat down in the lounge.  Mother ordered a large pot of tea and some scones.

A few years later I went back into the teleport again.  I had worked for Telcon Engineering for 5 years.  I still couldn't afford a new car.  With the knowledge and experience that I had, I could return to my original dimension and set up my own company.  I would make lots of money and pay 20% tax in Theresa May's world.  I teleported myself to Newcastle, concentrating hard on what I was going to do with my life and how much money I was going to make.  I focused my thoughts hard on the new Nissan Almera I was going to buy.  I could smell it.  A few seconds fading into darkness and then I was at Newcastle Airport.  No armed guards outside.  I turned on my mobile phone.  Who's the Prime Minister?  I read a patriotic article about Labour being the natural government of the country.  It wasn't Theresa May.  I was still in the same dimension.  I went to the hotel bar and took a tablet containing a small therapeutic dose of LSD along with some cloudy lemonade.  I then got the metro to Whitley Bay.  In this dimension it was a thriving town.  No boarded up shops and the ice rink was not a derelict empty building.  Did I really want to go back?  I realised that, in order to transmute to another dimension, you had to have a real sense of injustice, the kind of anger that might make you want to punch God in the face, were that possible.  Only then would the unseen forces of the universe take pity on you.  Now to enter the transporter one more time, thinking of the girl I had met at university who had danced beautifully in the Christian Fellowship, who I had fallen madly in love with, but who hadn't wanted to marry me.  Maybe I could throw in the car as well.