Best not to recollect that once there were any number of options and now there are fewer. That once it might have been possible to drive a car in a city, take a plane to a foreign destination, that once there were green spaces, cinemas, coastal towns, Tube lines, Tube posters for The Phantom of the Opera, cheap rent, cheap fruit, skylights, free health care, beaches, public art, bumblebees, and all the rest of it. The world has a way of erasing its own history. It can be easier to participate in this—to forget that one could once quite easily buy red meat, take the bus, visit certain
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