Not Forgetting The Whale

by John Ironmonger

a commodity

‘This is my husband, the vicar.’ Polly Hocking said. A white-haired man had emerged from a side door of the church to meet them.

the parp of a car horn.

borrow.’ ‘Thanks, but I still need a

‘You dropped out of the rat race …’

‘Yes.’ Jeremy turned to look at him. ‘That’s exactly what I did. Mind you, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds.’

‘Did you know that the barnacle has the longest penis in the animal kingdom?’ ‘Really?’ ‘Up to eight times its body length.’

the Computer Aided Share Selection and Investment Engine,’ Joe said. ‘Hence CASSIE. It fits.’

klaxon.

an electric horn or a similar loud warning device.

Savile Row

Savile Rowis recognized as the world's most sartorial street in Mayfair, central London.Savile Rowis a name synonymous with masculine elegance, time-honored tradition, and discreet luxury.

but his eyes burned like ice.

Great simile

remuneration.

money paid for work or a service.

Easter Island,

It’s the remotest inhabited island in the world.

Lew Kaufmann’s

Kauffman Puts me in mind of Mr Burns in the Simpsons

‘Do you know what wars are about?’ The old banker raised his eyebrows as if imagining a reply. ‘The first real wars were about belief. They were waged to crush and conquer people who believed in a different thing – different gods usually.

Then the next wars were all about power. They were fought to bolster the vanity of leaders who wanted to rule bigger and bigger empires.

But modern wars …’ he raised a finger and pointed at Joe as if in warning, ‘modern wars are about resources....

A leviathan is a monstrous sea creature, but Hobbes used it as a metaphor for the state.

interregnums.

a period when normal government is suspended, especially between successive reigns or regimes.

Self-interest is the energy source for capitalism.

Thomas Hobbes understood this.

Self-interest drives everything we do. And we economists, Joe, we’re used to thinking of this as a positive force. We like self-interest because it leads to innovation, and inve...

‘No one knows what will happen after a collapse, son. No one.

Think Coroavirus

The Day of the Triffids?

How about The Road?

‘Mary Shelley wrote a novel in the 1820s called The Last Man

How many people have to turn violent before we all turn violent,

‘Then I don’t know how far we can trust your forecasts. Everything will depend on how people behave.’

Just a week ago (was it only a week?)

There was no dotted line linking Joe Haak to Piran Sands to a stranded whale to Polly Hocking to an unwise car journey into town.

‘Impetuous?’

What was happening to him when the achingly beautiful sight of a footprint could almost make him weep? ‘I think perhaps

The only thing more powerful than individual self-interest is national self-interest.

If one nation needs help and another looks the other way that can be as decisive as an invasion; be

no country will be able to count any other as its friend or ally. Not when it’s a war about resources.

‘And the word that Cassie came up with, the second great factor that could send us all back to the stone age, that word, Joe, is “flu”.’

OMG presience?

In the Middle Ages the Black Death swept across Europe.

It killed one person in every three, but civilisation was fairly unaffected. That’s how we all imagine it would be if it happened again. Yet when smallpox hit the Romans and did much the same thing – killed about a third of the population – the empire never recovered. It

‘We have flu epidemics all the time.’ ‘Not really. Not a strain that kills large numbers of people.

If people are too sick or too scared to go to work, then collapse will follow with frightening speed.

Society is only three square meals away from anarchy.

The world burns eighty million barrels of oil a day.

‘The whole of St Piran. All three hundred and eight people.’

gamine

pilchards,

He was looking for the whale. Three times he had encountered her now. He was beginning to think of her as a fixture in the landscape – look out to sea and there she would be, her tail raised in salute;

pounds of his savings. It was an ill-conceived enterprise. He knew that now. It was foolhardy, impractical, and preposterous.

minx.

‘We can’t really extrapolate from a sample of twelve, but in Indonesia the rate may already be as high as eighteen per cent. And look at the flu pandemic of 1918. That killed almost twenty per cent of the people who contracted it.’