Customs Means Cock-Up

It's been some time since I revved up the blog and the crystal ball, so here's a farce from the future...

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June 7th, 2058...

Prime Minister Theresa May, aged 101 3/4, has been in office for 42 years. The Tories promised to get rid of her after the 2017 general election, but only after she had implemented Brexit. Well, she's still at it, so her MPs concede that she's safe.

During a press conference at Downing Street, the Prime Minister announces her latest customs proposal. In her pocket, Mrs May holds a tattered old piece of card. She brings it out to show the waiting journalists, known as Murdoctors since Sky bought the news in 2040. It is a telegram from King William V, of the sort the monarch sends senior citizens on their 100th birthday. Given that the population is around 80 million and life expectancy has risen to 95, the king doesn't have time to do much other than sign telegrams these days. Mrs May kept hers. She kept it for its sentimental value, but in recent weeks she has found that it is just the right size to accommodate all the ideas she still has.

"Customs means customs. I'm clear that it is this government's expectation that a comprehensive customs partnership should be concluded with the EU24 by December 2061. Nothing has changed."

A hamster wheel rolls through the door behind the PM. The Murdoctors are momentarily distracted, but lose interest as soon as they realise that it is not a hamster wheel; it is merely the electrolytically animated head of the Brexit Secretary, David Davis. He died 15 years ago but insisted on keeping his job because he was the most lively Cabinet minister left. He doesn't say much, and all sides are agreed that he has produced some of his best work yet. Every so often, the electrolyte sparks, causing Davis's lips to lift at the edges in that mildly constipated smile he popularised in his pomp.

The not-too-distant past...

The UK officially left the EU in March 2019 and entered a transition period lasting until December 2020, when everything stayed the same except we had no say. This was followed by the backstop lasting until December 2021, when everything stayed the same except we had no say. This was followed by the backstop transition lasting until December 2024, when everything stayed the same except we had no say. This was followed by a backstop backstop lasting until June 2027, when everything stayed the same except we had no say. The following implementation backstop partnership, when everything stayed the same except we had no say, was negotiated to last until the 2029 EU Parliament election, but everyone forgot about it when Michel Barnier got bored. Nobody quite knows when that was, but some historians contend that it was when the government of Saudi Arabia offered him a permanent role negotiating a trade deal with Hezbollah. He figured he had a better chance with them and promptly moved into a flatshare with a Shi'ite drag queen in Beirut. That was in June 2028, 12 years after the referendum.

Germany quit the EU when Tony Blair became the Commission President. President Blair announced that God told him Norway was harbouring herrings of mass destruction and that he should invade, which was the final straw for the pacifist Germans They were followed out the door by Greece and Italy who figured they didn't have anyone to pay any more.

Before the beginning of each new phase of quasi-membership, the Prime Minister expressed her grand vision for an expectation that the broad outline of a deep and comprehensive partnership with EU partners in the EU should be roughly known by the end of the next "implementation period". And the lapse of each new "implementation period" was met by the confident assertion that "nothing has changed". Thus, for the last 30 years, the UK has been in stasis as a satellite state of the EU, quietly fulfilling all the obligations just like it did before, except we have no say.

Now, Mrs May is sure that this time will be different...

The Murdoctors have a question. It is a good question about the progress of talks with the Commission. "Prime Minister, how do you think your latest proposals will square with the EU's rules on preserving the single market?"

The Murdoctors nod in approval of their question. It certainly is a good question. But it is not an unexpected question. It seems entirely in keeping with the theme of this Brexit briefing that the PM should be asked a question about Brexit. But Mrs May is entirely stunned, as though she had just been caught ambling leisurely through a field of wheat. She has no idea why anybody would ask such a question. Anyway, her mind is not as sharp as it once was, and her usually formidable decisiveness has been replaced by a kind of optimistic dithering.

"Brexit means Brexit" seems too absolutist an answer. Nevertheless, she knows it is her duty to deliver the will of the people. She responds: "This government is delivering a 50 shades of beige Brexit, and we're going to deliver Brexit, which we are delivering."

She doesn't quite remember what it used to be like, but she is as sure as she can be about one thing: "Nothing has changed."

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

8th June 2018

Make America Narrate Again

I haven't written a post since returning from Singapore, over three months ago, so I thought I'd better crack on before you all started to think I had shown mercy. So here it is, the first one back in the UK, and the first of 2018, also.

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I signed up for one of them Lifelong Learning courses with the university. Even the name makes your skin crawl, doesn't it? These days, I refuse to learn unless paid to do so...or tempted with biscuits at the very least. Learning for life and paying for the privilege is a Kafkaesque kind of terror. I felt like an undergrad again, handing over money I haven't got to "The Man" who only carries on pleading poverty anyway. Then again, it was only £90 for 12 hours' teaching, and there ain't no undergrad this side of Scotland that's going to get 12 kicks in the teeth for that price (in Scotland, of course, they'll kick you all over for free). It's a course on creative writing. As it's getting near crunch-time-thesis-writing-time, I thought I'd sure need a bit of advice on writing believable fiction!

In fact, I have spent the last few weeks working on a journal article. And I have found that writing science is much nicer than doing science, especially if there's hardly anything to say. Around the time I started writing the paper, I discovered this course buried away in an e-mail. I jumped at it for the chance to flex my puny muscles on something other than dreary, terse statements about tube furnaces. When I have been writing science, I have found time passing by serenely, often to the detriment of terseness, and to the scientist type, this is bad. But that's what rekindled my interest in writing. Thus, we come to the happy accident of this course.

The title of the course is, 'Made to be Broken: Writing Experimental Fiction'. Now, apparently, one type of experimental fiction, which the class will learn about soon, is the concept of the unreliable narrator. Think of Donald Trump if he ever became President of the United States. Fortunately, Americans are notoriously easy to reason with, so there isn't a writer in the world who could make that sound convincing, is there?

This whole thing has got me thinking: why do they get PhD candidates to write their own theses? Surely that is the definition of propaganda! It should be written by a neutral observer, a disinterested (and quite possibly uninterested) party. It should be written by someone who has absolutely nothing to gain or lose regardless of what happens. Some furtive and nondescript person who blends in to the background, noticed by nobody. Trouble is, I don't think there are enough Liberal Democrats to go around for all of us.

Anyway, when my fellow experimentalists and I arrived at the first class this evening, we discovered that none of us had been able to access the online lecture notes. It turned out that the lecturer had given us the wrong course code in the enrolment email. And I thought that was wonderful because she has now become the living embodiment of her course, the unreliable narrator made flesh. What devotion to the art! The Daniel Day-Lewis of Portswood. It was then I realised that this course was going to be just fine.

At the end of the first lesson, we were challenged to expand on the opening paragraphs of some famous works by dead literary sorts, but to give them all various experimental twists. Having read them back, I now know what it feels like to be on LSD. I think that when the lecturer told us to give them an experimental twist, she should have specified that most stories have more traditional fillers too…

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By:

The Imperial Orange,

15th January 2018