Author: David Bradley

I posted  a fairly simple challenge on Facebook at the weekend:

Make a movie mundane by subtly altering one word in the title. I'll start..."Radiators of the Lost Ark"

I expected a few friends to join in with the fun and for it to fizzle out quite quickly…I watched the first few entries dribble in and then went off and did something completely different. When I came back to Facebook a few hours later there were more than 500 comments, it quickly got to 600 and I added a few more of my own. It’s still going on, at the time of writing 745 comments, which is almost viral for one of my posts. I’d estimate that well over 700 of those are MundaneMovies several been parodied several times and handful have been duplicated, but all in lots and lots of originals.

UPDATE: November 2021, it peaked at well over 800 comments.

I especially liked Dial M for Merthyr, Marmite on the Orient Express, Last Mango in Paris, The Beer Hunter, Aye Claudius (and the sequel set in the North East, Why Aye Claudius), Dainty Dancing and Dirty Prancing, The Lady Varnishes, Chinchillas in the Mist (one of mine of which I was the proudest).

I’m already hearing from some contributors checking into rehab and therapy to try and shake off the urge to post yet more…it could go on for months…or at least until the end of lockdown 3…which could, admittedly, be months.

My good friend, jazz pianist extraordinaire and metrics expert, Hugh Tonks founder of Thymometrics, kindly copy and past the titles from the Facebook thread, ditching a few that didn’t fit the challenge criterion at all. So, here’s the list as it stands:

1 Dalmation
101 Damnations
101 Dull matrons
12 Donkeys
12 Slightly annoyed men
12 Years a Dave
1919
1983
2 Leagues under the sea
20,000 Leagues under the bath-water
2001 – A Spam Odyssey
2002 – A Spare Odyssey
24 Minute Party People
A Bag of Chips Now
A bridge really close by
A Chocolate Orange (2x)
A few decent geezers
A few good pens
A fist full of dog ends
A Night at the Oprah
A rebel without a motorbike
Aldi President’s Men
Alice in not very interesting land
Alice in Sunderland
All The President’s Deserters
American Werewolf in Poundland
Angel Hearth
Animal Fart
Apocalypse in the Past
Apocalypse later
Appointment with Darth
Austin Flowers
Aye Claudius
BT
Back to the Freezer
Back to the Furniture
Back to the Futon
Bakery Wars: The Rise of Sourdough
Bald Runner
Bat shit-crazy
Bay Beauty
Beast of Eden
Beer Hunter (6x)
Ben der
Ben Err
Ben Them
Bend Hur
Bend it Like Geller
Biplane
Bladestroller
Borax
Bored of the Rings
Born to be Mild
Bra Wars
Bravefart
Breakwind at Tiffany’s
Bridge on the River Cam
Bridget Jones’s Dairy
Briefs Encounter
Briefs on Counter
Brighton Rack
Broke the Back of the Ironing Mountain
Brokeback Mound
Broom Service
Broom with a View
Brrring me the hearing aid of Alfredo Garcia
Built up area gump
Bunfight at the OK Corral
Bus Station Zebra
Cakes on a plane
Car Wars
Casino Foil
Casino Peasant
Cassadarker
Catch a Cold
Chariots of Water
Charlie and the opium factory
Charlies Angles
Cheesy Rider
Chinchillas in the Mist
Chitty Chitty Gang Bang
Chunderball
Citizen Ken
Clean dancing
Clockwork Orange
Clockwork Orangutan
Close Encounters of the Turd kind (2x)
Clothes Encounters of the Third Kind
Clothes Horse
Codzilla
Coldfinger
Contacts
Covid park
Crease
Crouching Tiger Hidden Cat Poo
Crouching tiger hidden drag queen
Cuckoo flew over the cuckoo’s nest
Cup!
Curry on Camping
Dad’s Armband
Dainty dancing
Dam butters
Dances with feral pigeons
Dances with Wombats
Dancing with Wives
Davey Crocket, King of the Mild Frontier
Daydream on Elm Street
Deaf in Venice
Deaf Poets Society
Dearth of Stalin
Death on the Pile
Death on the Tyne
Debbie does trump
Desperately Seeking Sanity
Devon’s Gate
Dial M for Merthyr
Dial M for Mother
Diamonds aren’t forever
Dick Soup
Die easy
Diet Hard
Dietary Harry.
Dirty Hankie
Dirty prancing
Dirty Rotten Scourers
Dobbie does Dallas
Don Kirk
Donnie lighto
Dove Actually
Dr. Maybe
Dr. Strangelove or: How I learnt to stop worrying and Love the Bum
Draws
Drizzle man
Dusk till midnight
Easy Briber
Edward Thimblehands
Eggs Royale
Elvis in Dagenham
Enema at the gates
Enter with Drag On
Escape to Victory Way
Escargot to Victory
Expensive willy
Exterminator
Fantastic Feasts and Where to Find Them
Fart Club
Fart club
Farto
Fatman
Ferris Buehler’s Day Job
Ferris Buehler’s Day On
Finding Memo
Finocchio
Fleshdance
Florence of Arabia
Flush Gordon
For your Pies Only
Forest Dump
Forest trump
Forest Trump
Forrest Trump
Four Lines
Four Waddings and a Funfair
Four weddings and a bar mitzvah
Friday the 14th
Fried
From Here to Enfield
From Reigate with Love
Froth on the Nile
Game- i want to play forever
Game of Crones
Gentlemen prefer ponds
Goat with the wind
Gold Fillings of 1933
Golden Arm
Gone with the regular bowel movements
Good Mowing Vietnam
Good Wall Hunting
Good Will Haunting
Greasy
Gregory’s Grill
Gregory’s Gull
Grindrella
Groan with the Wind
Ground Dog Day
Groundnut Day
Groundnut Day
Gums
Gunfight at the UK Corral
Gut Carter
Harriet’s on Fire
Harry Patter
Harry Potter and the Giblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prints
Harry Potter and the Odour of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Pensioner of Azkaban
Home Loan
Home together
Home with everyone
Home with the Entire Family
How the Breast was Won
How the vest was won
Howard’s Blend
Indiana Jones and the last charades
Inglorious Bustards
It’s a wonderful lift
It’s a wonderful loaf.
Its a terrible life
It’s a Wonderful Knife
It’s a Wonderful Lime
It’s a wonderful lime.
Jeepers 600+
Jive and let die
John Thomas Crown Affair
Jungle magazine
Jurassic Carehome
Jurassic Parp
Jurassic Party
K3
Kind Hearts and Castanets
Kitten Park
La La Lamp
Lady Chatterley’s Liver
Lady in the Pan
Lame – I want to limp forever
Larder on the Orient Express
Last Exit to Boston
Last mango in Paris
Last Tanga in Paris
Lawrence of Suburbia
Layer Cave
Leasing Las Vegas
Legally bland
Legends of the Mall
Lidl Shop of Horrors
Life of Pasty
Life of pie
Like Actually.
Littlest Millionaire
Lock stock and two smoking burritos
Logan’s Rug
Look Back in Angers
Lord of the files
Lords of the Rims
Lost Bingo in Paris
Lost in Specsavers
Love handles and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing.
M*U*S*H
Malice in Wonderland
Mardy Poppins
Marmite on the Orient Express
Mary poppers
Mary Pops In
Mary shelleys frankunfurter
Mattresses and broom handles
Mellow submarine
Men in Pink
Midnight Cowpat
Midnight cowshed
Midnight Espresso
Midnight Tesco-Express
Minstrel on 34th Street
Mission Impossible Plague Nation
Monday Night Fever
Monsters Ink
Moulin Blanc
Moulin Rug
Mr Doubtfire
Mr Zhivago
Mrs Certainfire
Mrs Doubtfart
Muddle on the Orient Express
Murder on the 6.30 from Charing Cross
Muriel’s Weeding
Murmur on the Orient Express
My Big Fat Greek Yoghurt
My dog
My Shabby Launderette
Night at a Morrisons
Night Train to Monkseaton
Nightgown on Elm Street
Nightmare on Rooks Street
Nine and a half weeds
Not in Hull
Nowtbreak
O Brother, Where Fart Thou?
Oh What A Lovely Wart
Oklahomo!
Once upon a time in Middlesborough
One flew over a robins nest
Cullercoats harbour
One of our Draconians is missing
One shite day
Our Man in Havant
Out of Paprika
Pack Up Your Roubles
Paws
Paws.
Peaches
Petty Woman
Pilates in the Caribbean – Dead Man’s Vest
Pilates of the Caribbean
Pilots of the Caribbean
Pink street
Piss In Boots
Planes, Trains and National Express
Polite Club.
Pontoon
Prescription, Quorn of the Dessert
Pretty Worm
Princess Kong
Pulp fact
Pup Fiction
Raging Ball
Raging Bulldog
Raiders of the lost houses of parliament
Rebel without a Clause
Rebel without a Clue
Reservoir Cats
Reservoir Frogs
Rhyl with a View
Ricky
Rioters at the Gate
Rocky Horror Picture Shoe
Roman Business Trip
Rosemary’s Bauble
Salmon fishing in the sink
Salmon Fishing with a Lemon
Sandal
Saturday Night Fevertree
Saving Private Godfrey
Saving private parts
Saving Ryan’s Privates
Saving Ryan’s Parfait
Scar Trek
Schindler’s lift
Schindlers lift.
Schindler’s shopping list
Scratch 22
Seats on a plane
Sen
Sense and Insensibility
Seven Broads for Seven Brothers
Seven Years in The Wet
Shakespeare in Hove
Shallow throat
Shaun of the poorly
Shaving private Ryan
Shaving private Ryan
Shred
Shriek
Shrike
Sickly Ballroom
Sid and the argonauts
Silence of the limbs
Singing in the pain
Sinking in the Rain
Sleeping With The Enema
Slightly cold in Alex
Slow and not really agitated
Slumdog Milliner
Snacks on a Plane
Snakes on a menu
Snow white and a couple of old tin miners
Soft edge implement runner
Some Like a Hut
Some Like It Rotten
Some like it Tepid
Some Like it Tepid
Sound of Muesli.
Souper man
Spar wars
Spider dead.
Stand by somebody else
Star Jumps
Star Trek, The Search for Spam
Star Wardrobes
Star Wards
Star Warts
Steamboat Wally
Steve Davis’ Diary
Straight Outta Cornwall
Straight Outta Croydon
Submission impossible
Sunday Night, Monday Morning
Supermac
Swan Flew Over the Cuckoos Next
Tarzan of the Japes
Tax advisor
Taxi Drivel
Tents and Tentativity
Tepid Runnings
Tess of the Baskervilles
Texas toothbrush massacre
The 39 Stops
The 40 Year Old Plusnet
The 40 year old vegan
The 400 Plows
The Andromeda Stain
The Bagel Has Landed
The Balls of St Trinian’s
The Batter of Britain
The Beeching Children
The Beige Brothers
The Best Little Warehouse in Texas
The Best Ordinary Marigold Hotel
The Blair Stitch Project
The Blue Fax
The Bradley Bunch (The Movie)
The Bridge on the River Wye
The Bridge over the River Thames (2x)
The Budgies of Madison County
The Cent of a Woman
The clash of the pathetic whimps
The Colon Purple
The Cool Sea
The Covenant
The covid holiday
The Dampbusters
The day of the hamster.
The Day Of The Jackass
The Day the Hearth Stood Still
The dead poets sobriety
The devil wears primark
The Devil’s Advocaat
The Dogfather
The Door Hunter
The Draftsman’s Tax return
The Dull
The Estuary Buoys
The Exercise
The Extortonist
The fantastic 3&1/2
The Fat and the Furious
The Fifth Elephant
The Fifth Sense
The Flea
The Flirty Dozen
The Found World
The French Concoction
The Fresh Lieutenant’s Woman
The Germinator
The Girl on a Push Bike
The Girl with a Wagon Tattoo
The Gizzard of Oz
The Godmother
The good the bad and the very attractive
The good the bald and the ugly
The Good, the Bad, and the Buggy
The Goolies
The Graduate Cylinder
The Grand Budapest Motel
The Grandfather
The Great Potato
The Great St Trinian’s Tray Robbery
The Green Mime
The Greenstamps Redemption
The Gums of Navarone
The Guns of London
The Habit
The Habit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hamshank Redemption
The Harder They Comb
The Hoarse Whisperer (2x)
The Imitation Gammon
The Irritation Game
The Jingle Book (2x)
The Karate Kit
The king and nobody
The King’s Peach
The Lady and The Trump
The Lady Turns Up
The Lady Varnishes (2x)
The Lambshank Redemption
The Land that Tim forgot
The Land that Time Furloughed
The Lidl Mermaid
The Lime of Brian
The Limitation Game (2x)
The little barmaid
The little shop of cuddly things
The living alive
The Longest Dag
The longest Dave
The Longest Way
The Lost Buoys
The Lunchpack of Notre Dame
The Magnificent Severn
The magnificent six and a half
The Malteser Falcon
The man that went up a hill and came down a marshmallow
The Man Who Shot Liberty Balance
The man with the golden pun
The man with the golden thumb
The Mask
The Mediocre 7
The Middling Exotic Marigold Hotel
The Mildness of King George
The moth effect
The Mudguard
The Night Manger
The not quite so transformed
The Oddfather
The old ones
The Parent Tap
The Pelican Boxer-shorts
The Pelican Briefs
The phantom of the gala bingo
The pirates of the houses of parliament
The Pornshop
The Postgraduate
The Postman Never Rings At All
The Princess in the Fog
The Printer’s Bride
The Quiet Manatee
The Railway Chilblain
The Rocky Horror Picture Shop
The Scent of a Worm
The science of the lambs
The Seven Samovars
The Shallows
The Shiting
The Silence of the Spam
The snickers man
The snooze brothers
The Sound of Mucus
The Sound of Muzak
The sound of nothing (2x)
The spy who hated me
The Staycation
The Talentless Mr Ripley
The Texas Chainstore Massacre
The Texas seesaw massacre
The Thin Red Wine
The Toblerone Triangle
The Truman Shoe
The Turd Man
The Twilight Zoom
The umpire strikes back
The unavegened
The usual cesspits
The very dark rider
The Visible Man
The Way to the Stairs
The Wicker Chair
The Wizard of UK
The Wool of Wall Street
The World Is Enough
The Wrench Connection
There Will Be Food
There’s nothing about Mary (2x)
Things to do in Denver when you’re a Druid
Thora and Lewis
Three Billboards Outside Epping Morrisons
Three days of the pigeon
Three ironing-boards outside Ebbing, Missouri
Three Men and a Booby
Tindrella
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spa
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, SPAD
To Kid a Mockingbird
Toy Tory
Trading Plaices
Training Places
Trains, Planes and Shank’s Pony
Treasure Peninsula
True Grits
Try another day
Try Hard
Twelve Irritated Men
Umbrella (Barbarella)
V for Vienetta
Vanilla Pie
Village of the Dimmed
WD40
West Side Store
When Harry met Derek
When Harry met Salty
When Harry Smote Sally
When Sally met Burt
Where Eagles Undertake a Risk Assessment
Whisky No More!
Who Cooked Roger Rabbit?
Who farmed Roger Rabbit?
Who framed Roger Bannister
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wade?
Wife of Pi
Willy Wonka and the Chalk Factory
Wimp Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Wound Bill
Your Anus
Zorba the Geek

Next up, advance warning for fans of the site: Mash up two or more TV programmes to come up with a new pitch. For example, Richard Osman’s Game of Thrones

I’ll post the call for Telly Mash some time on Friday 22nd January, probably late afternoon UK time.

UPDATE: I’ve sent various iterations of my short stories to a select few friends over the last few weeks. When I’d written Remediators, two of these beta testers (Andrea and Darren) felt that this chapter was actually the prologue to Wave Markers rather than the other way around, which was my intent.

So, with that new logic in mind, I’ve spent a couple of hours working on how that might move better in the opposite direction rather than my trying to make water flow uphill. The story now begins with the fix, we get a twist, and then the future emerges in the latest version here (PDF).

As with all of this writing so far, each component seems to be a standalone short story in itself, but I suspect as it develops and becomes more complex, that will be less and less obvious. At the moment the hybridisation of Wave Markers and Remediators is essentially a 2600-word short story. I’m taking some time, per Darren’s suggestion, to let it simmer gently on the backburner.

Remediators

I fell asleep thinking about a future where we might start withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a sufficient rate that it actually has a serious effect and underdoes some of the problems of decades and decades of burning fossil fuels.

I didn’t sleep well, but in between kept dreaming up bits and pieces of a story about this notion. When I couldn’t get back to sleep, I got up, put the kettle on, and scribbled the story on to a few sides of A4. I’ve just finished typing it up and editing it down.

The story is called Remediators of the Anthropocene. It follows on from the putative prologue – Wave Markers – pulled together from my fenland gothics written at the end of 2020. It’s perhaps Chapter 1 of the book or maybe just another standalone effort…we’ll see.

Remediators of the Anthropocene by David Bradley (PDF)

Elouise Sparrowhawk, Dr Sprawk to her students, was proud of her surname. To her imagination, it told of an ancient ancestry, of woodlands and fens, of wildlife and nature, of a time long before now. It told of woodcutters and woodturners of fenland farmers and drovers. It hinted at a long-forgotten time when things were, to put it bluntly, better. Dr Sprawk hankered after those times. Perhaps it was an unrequited nostalgia for events that never happened, places that were not as they seem, and people who never walked this earth.

Whatever the nature of past reality, Elouise knew that in her laboratory there had been an opportunity to remediate the present. Whoever was to blame for the here and now mattered not to those living the nightmare today. It was Arvane, Arvane Tempor, who first spotted the changes. It was a chance discovery, a contaminant in a reaction flask. The serendipity was not lost on the team although no one who lived through the plastic age would ever have dreamt a solution might be found in this chemistry. They could not have imagined that polythene, the scourge of the Anthropocene, would, with a few almost trivial molecular tweaks, become the panacea.

Tempor was almost done with his Master’s and was on the verge of writing-up, but one last experiment was needed just for completeness. He had been fastidious throughout, dotting every “i”, crossing every “t”. His lab-books were meticulous, not for him their digital descendants. He bathed in the ethereal smell the pages absorbed that would take decades to fade. However, this time, it was late. It was a seemingly unimportant experiment. He rushed a little. Contamination happens. Identifying the contaminant and what went wrong, or as it turns out, right, later would only be possible because of Tempor’s more usual diligence.

Molecular modification followed by chemical correction somehow generated a structure so reactive and so porous that it could literally draw breath. That porosity give it the space, or more technically, the surface. Lay it all out flat, Tempor would tell his colleagues, and a single ounce would cover 400 tennis courts. That fact alone was astonishing, four times the area available for absorption of any previous material. But those earlier molecular sponges mopped up useful gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, for various applications, high-speed reactions, safe storage. This was different. Not so much a useful gas, as a gas of which we could do with a lot less in the air we breathe.

Giving a porous plastic coating to hundreds of tennis courts was not the aim, of course. Once Tempor and Dr Sprawk had figured out the ins and outs of their new material, they were then intent on finding ways to pack it ever tighter into the machine, the remediators.

A lot of raw material was needed to pack the 1000 feet spiral columns that would line Sprawk’s towers. But, there was a lot of it to be had, much of it lying dormant in deep mounds on the outskirts of the old cities. The relative ease with which the plastic could be mined from those countless landfills of the twentieth century made sourcing the feedstock incredibly efficient and ironically enough, almost carbon neutral. Moreover, after all these years in the ground even the plastic bags that would last for centuries had degraded to a suitable form ripe for processing into the green strands for Sparrowhawk’s columns.

The vast woven myriad within the towers would need nothing more than water and sunlight to do their job. The drains below would catch their sickly sweet rain and this could be tapped and trapped, vitrified and buried again. Carbon, locked away for aeons just as its precursors had been in the liquid black gold on which society so wantonly imbibed in those long-lost days.

Thousands of towers were built across the wide tropical belts. They looked out over broken seas from abandoned coastlines. Pharos ruling the waves, Tempor would joke. Location was irrelevant to the swirling atmosphere, but sunlight and water were key ingredients so the polar north and the desert margins were precluded from this work for their lack of one or the other. Exactly how many towers were needed was a moot point, they ran with high efficiency wherever they were built drawing their hot breath deeply. The analysts tapped their devices assuming malfunction, but as the data accumulated, so evidence of remediation sprang from far and wide like so many green shoots showing in a new world spring. The sceptics tapped their thermometers but could not ignore something of a soothing chill in the air.

Ice was crystallising once more at the poles. The fringes of the equatorial deserts moistened subtly. Tiny islands poked algal crowns from beneath the waves and quickly dried, terrestrials arrived to feast on the marine and the wind planted the seeds it couriered from distant dry lands so that shoots would show and plants would bloom digging deep with anything but hesitant roots. Elsewhere, the new fenlands began to dry, the marsh gas to dissipate. Who would have thought, plastic – the ultimate friend of the earth?

Download the PDF of Wave Markers right now.

This is a work in progress and so far it is a hybridisation and expansion of a clutch of short stories I wrote at the end of 2020. The idea of melding them together was suggested by an enthusiastic friend who imagined my short tales morphing into something akin to Cloud Atlas (I wish). And, like a map of the clouds, wave markers could be as ephemeral and imagined…and perhaps as pointless. It’s a kind of Fenland Gothic in the “eco lit” genre, either way.

This short story expands on the journey of Madelief, a Dutch woman, perhaps from a religious order, walking through the natural world of the New Fenlands with a mission in mind, a refuge named on a scrap of bark, hidden in the folds of her clothing, and the idea of a seed in her belly. A seed that might rebuild the world after society is ravaged by disease and ever-higher tides…

You can read the latest iteration of the story Wave Markers in PDF format here for your Kindle etc. This is, at this point (January 2021) either the complete story or simply the prologue for an as yet unwritten proper debut novel from David Bradley, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ve also done some additional writing in a short story entitled Remediators of the Anthropocene, which has also now been subsumed into Wave Markers.

Off-roading — a short story by David Bradley (PDF here)

Never has a hot shower been so refreshing. And, when I say hot, I mean truckstop-scour-off-the-elbow-grease hot. Was it five dollars each? I don’t remember. It was 96 degrees outside and that’s in Fahrenheit, the water inside was closer to 96 degrees on the Centigrade scale. The price, the temperature. None of it mattered. It was, if not a baptism of fire, then a scalding rebirth. It was money well spent.

It was very much a rebirth. We had followed the blue highways west and watched them grow paler as the miles unfurled beneath the seemingly unending froth of the Milky Way, one wrong turn-off, led to another, and before we knew it, it was pitch black and the Pontiac was careering the wrong way past a hairpin and into an embouldered field. It was an hour before we stopped shaking and got the car back on the road. Another hour before we reached the grease-dissolving truckstop and the chance to rinse away soured adrenalin and existential angst.

We’d picked up the car, not from Lemon Rentals, thankfully, and not from Freddie Hachiro with his tri-state limitations. It was a Grand Am, rather than a Firebird, but hey we were on a student-tight budget with only free coffee refills and Salteens to live on. And, although ‘gas’ was cheap, incredibly just about 50 cents a gallon at the time, there were no free refills for an 8000-mile grand tour of a couple of dozen of the fifty states.

Once we crossed the border into Tennessee, we had used up all our cassette tapes and discovered to our chagrin that the car radio had no FM, only AM, and all stations had only two kinds of music for our entertainment — country AND western. The deeper you get into The Bible Belt the more happy-clappy that C&W becomes. One day at a time, sweet Jesus, one day at a time.

The Grand Am took us to The Canyon. It was astonishing, if you could hover at a point directly above The Colorado River but level with its distant upper edges and look down at the raging torrent below, you would be looking down a mile and a half. Pebbles hewn from the rock by that torrent are a billion and a half years old. Those are some amazing numbers befitting an amazing sight. At that time of year, there were few tourists around, it was well after Labor Day, of course, and stepping out on to the first perimeter viewpoint to look across and down made us both draw breath sharply and laugh out loud.

We dismounted in Death Valley, it was fatally hot. There was so little moisture in the air, your cooling sweat evaporated before it even got a chance to form beads on your skin. You could so easily become desiccated in that place. We crawled in the dust, pretending to be stranded air-crash victims simply waiting for the circling buzzards to descend against the thermals and pluck our eyes. We snapped snaps with a pocket film camera, using so many of the precious 36 frames. We even strummed a few chords on the battered guitar that had been riding shotgun since our time in Gore. It was a classic with one fewer than the standard six strings and was wantonly disassembled by us red rock stars in the desert. We cared a lot.

Onwards we rolled, blue highway after blue highway, imagining ourselves some kind of pioneers chasing the gold and fearing that The Big One would stir and shake us when we found San Andreas.

It was nobody’s fault. The road ahead was no road ahead. There were no signs, only a deviation. The boulders were emboldened, the Pontiac not so much. Blood is thicker than water, they say, they don’t tell you just how hot it can run, seeping into the dirt carrying with it the last of our elbow grease.

Yesterday’s gone…tomorrow was never mine to know. Sweet Jesus.

Last Christmas by David Bradley (PDF/Kindle version here)

Funnily enough, it was four years to the day since the fourth variant had emerged. So, it was Christmas Day. Four years since the death toll passed 200 million. What a gift. Four years since the last dying embers of the theory of herd immunity had burned out and even the rich and the beyond-rich were suffering.

Four years. It’s hard to believe. What started as a very localised outbreak, with a mere handful of hospitalisations had quickly thrown the global community into panic and ultimately pandemic. The present that keeps on giving. Each genetic mutation unwrapping new pathogenic characteristics. New biomolecular tools to defeat even the strongest of immune systems let alone those that were compromised from the start. New protein shakes, new genetic twists and turns, they all side-stepped the vaccines, they all resisted the drugs, again and again.

Months and months of lockdowns and curfews, of firebreaks and circuit-breakers, had all seemed to work for a short time, the curves flattened briefly only to take on an exponential uptick within days. The powers-that-be would clamp down, and then release their grip, the bubbles would burst.

The armchair epidemiologists and the conspiracy theorists continued to refer to it all as nothing more than a really bad flu. Influenza with its all-time death toll dwarfed by that of malaria seemed like the walk in the park no one is allowed to take any more. No walks in the park, no trips to the beach, no visiting ancient castles with their riverside walks, no trips anywhere.

Everything is online for those who can still afford the gigaband connections and can still get an annual delivery slot. The uptake had been slow and there had been complaints even at the governmental level from the hedge-funders and the off-shorers that the companies really ought to pay their way. But, needs must. People had to eat. People had to have some kind of entertainment. No more close encounters of any kind, everyone in their place, it was a lonely life even for the loners.

200 million dead. An unbelievable number almost half the world’s population as it stood when it all started. There had been a time when population was counted in the billions. Those kinds of numbers are beyond unbelievable. Unimaginable.

Billions of people. Something had to snap. And snap it certainly had, if an event that lasted more than twenty years can still be called a snap. Summers came and went, hotter and hotter each year, winters were all but a distant childhood memory for the oldest survivors. Some of the rebellious youngsters had shouted about the end of the Anthropocene, the extinction of the plastic age. It had not panned out quite like that, it was a slow burn and wave after wave of serious trouble along the way.

200 million. The population at the time of the very first Christmas, ironically enough. Obviously, exponential growth has a counterpart. As one number doubles every couple of weeks, so the number of the converse halves. 200,000,000 to 100,000,000 to 50,000,000 and so on…

Bubbles burst.

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You can read my previous short stories here.