Population Dynamics

Terra Informa

22 June 2020

The Past is a Foreign Country

and it is invading us.

The first time I saw the statues was on a march down Park Lane in early 2020.They were incredibly realistic, but there had been a fashion in London for some years for municipal street art commissioned to excellent sculptures, hence the cast iron table tennis players outside Paddington station, and the bronze Window Cleaner near by. So I, and thousands of other protestors like me, walked by unperturbed. Even the massed media failed to cover this, though of course a few days later, the pundits would be poring over past footage and user contributed video on social media, trying to find the earliest occurrence in this, and many other countries.

It became apparent that the phenomenon was much more complex, exhibiting itself with very different symptoms in different nations and cultures. The other place with which I was most familiar was, of course, Greece, where it was far more rare, but in some ways, far sadder. Rather than direct fossilisation, it seemed that victims would suddenly become their parents. And to make space, their parents would become grandparents until the grave decimated a generation.

By May, the streets of England were crowded with immobile figures of stone and quartz, with the remnant of the citizens still able to move, having to wind they way through the maze of bodies. Even on the public transport vehicles, seated and standing, holding on to the leather straps of chrome handles, they held their ground firmly. There were not enough of the woke to move them out of the way, and where would we put them.

Scientists and theologians were trying to piece together an explanation for the plague and its strange and high variable forms. Eventually, the Archbishops’ ecologists came up with the best explanation that they could.

Many years earlier, when I first visited the Greek island of φως (light, later known as water for the lack of same, probably renamed by some Englishman with their lack of subtle irony the locals possessed), we used to admire the fishermen in the one and only port, bringing ashore their catch of urchins and sponges. No more of them now.

We were staying in Kamini, a short walk out of the port, with Natalie and Sergei, and we did what young people did in those days on an Island with poor beaches, and no cars (well, the Mayor had a beaten up old Rolls Royce, but that was now only used to carry stones up the windy streets behind the port to help build new or repair old houses).

Of course, we did have water. All the traditional white houses were built over a big cistern, which was filled with rainwater in the water and spring and lasted if you were careful through most the summer. There was no electricity, so cooking was done by the Bakers. We would buy our meat (lamb, goat) and take it there, and they would walk it through the town on huge trays, delivering cooked meals to people. One day, we got  great sea bream from one of the fishermen and the soup and baked fish fed a taverna full of people.

Every morning, the Mania express docked to take still drunken Athenians home to Piraeus, while the Dolphin arrived with its hydrofoils furling, delivering the next load. Towards the end of summer, a huge rusty old tanker, deck barely above the waterline, would dock, and deliver fresh water to houses who had foolishly over used their cisterns.

Occasionally, I would play music in a taverna, although never sing, despite encouragement from the hipster Canadian poet and his cronies.

In some ways, we were lucky not to have been there at the start of this year, four decades later - I could easily have become like this.

The priests and scientists have agreed that the punishments visited on us are in proportion to the damage done to our land. Hence in England, where the dancing bears and fighting cocks, and the linnet and the bee, and the noble  fish eagle, and water vole are no more, wolves haunt us only in our dreams, things are much more severe than in Greece, where the numbers of the unnaturally aged are at least only is in the hundreds. London alone has been visited upon to the extent that we now have a hundred thousand new monuments to our appalling past.

When I think of my poor friends in America and Brasil, where the change took its most horrific forms, I have to sit down and pause for breath. At least in China, the change was almost honourable. After all, the dragon is revered there.