I finished watching The Ipcress File last night after resisting the temptation to binge watch it. I enjoyed it a lot. It took several liberties with the book, but I’m OK with that. And it was perfectly cast. Here’s hoping they keep the same team and follow Len Deighton’s novel sequence. The next in the series – Funeral In Berlin – is probably my favourite Deighton novel.
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Earlier this week, I watched a short documentary on YouTube about the catacombs of Paris. You can find it here. The catacombs were developed when the soil of Cimetière des Saints-Innocents became so oxygen-poor that
proper decomposition of the dead was impossible, meaning that, instead of rotting away, those buried in the cemetery slowly turned into gelatinous mounds of fatty horribleness, known as corpse wax.
Inevitably, I was reminded of the current UK government, of which more later.
I’ve been thinking more about some of the subjects I touched on in my gloomier-than-usual post a couple of nights ago. Specifically, I’ve been musing on society and interconnectedness. This isn’t entirely doom and gloom – it is also relevant to my long-delayed writing in progress and the thematic background to it, so I would have been thinking about it anyway.
All my assumptions about society revolve around interconnectedness. Of course, there is always some degree of connectivity, but how it manifests varies by context. In the extreme case of a society in collapse, the sudden decoherence of the links between the nodes that connect it may be triggered by a relatively small event, akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back. It is generally held that highly connected networks are more prone to (eventual) catastrophic failure then weakly-connected networks. The latter grow increasingly damaged, but are better able to adapt. Our society is highly connected – as we discover when, for example, we attempt to disentangle ourselves, as with Brexit. Be that as it may, my thoughts have been around personal and local ability to respond to catastrophic collapse (this is the core of the inciting event in the writing in progress).
In our daily lives, we assume power, food, water, sewerage, shelter, healthcare and a recognised medium of exchange – though this is not true in many places. Those things are all simultaneously robust and fragile for the same reason – interconnectedness and infrastructure. They work well enough until, one day, they don’t. Throw in sustained acts of violence and your world shifts from calamity to horror. This sits at the heart of my thinking about preparedness: what is reasonable and realistic to prepare for? Survivalists and preppers represent one end of that range of possibilities; ‘keep calm and carry on’ is at the other end.
Why am I thinking in these terms (aside from narrative and plot development)? Because to prepare for collapse, we have to admit the possibility of it into our thinking. This isn’t about catastrophism but about scenario planning. What is the minimum we require? Shelter, fire, food and water.
Kirstin and I went to the supermarket yesterday and bought some of the same basics that we bought at the beginning of lockdown: dried and tinned goods, for example, as well as batteries, etc. These are all things that we’ll use anyway. We got them because supply chains have been abraded and degraded by four things:
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- Brexit
- Covid
- War
- Our gelatinous government
Supply chain robustness is only one aspect of interconnectedness, and buying in some basics isn’t enough, but it’s a start. However, even were we to continue to accumulate ‘stuff’, there are limits, and it’s the limits that interest me in terms of writing and concern me in terms of the state of the world. I was born 14 years after the end of WW2 and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s mindset of the post-war settlement. That mindset has been deliberately and comprehensibly wrecked by successive Tory administrations. Much as I’d like to follow my instincts and assume that there’ll be a safety net to catch us, I can’t do that anymore, even though my sense is that it still lurks in the attitudes of a substantial proportion of the British population.
Anyway, there are no answers here, just questions I never thought I’d have to ask or answer. You might think that I’m over-thinking and over-reacting; I hope you’re right.
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I haven’t had any music here for a while, so here’s Jean Michel Jarre supplying what Cimetière des Saints-Innocents lacked.
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