British Dystopia

There’s something rather wonderful about the modern British dystopia. It’s less a boot stamping on your face forever and more waking up in a field with an Oxford lightly but insistently pressed on your head.

The earth smells loamy with that vague hint of manure you sometimes get. There’s a light drizzle just the wrong side of warm, like a cup of tea you’ve neglected for just too long and you expect the field will get increasingly muddy as time passes. The drizzle conspires with the shoe to drip intermittently down your neck but you know you can’t move and you don’t try.

As you’re lying there you come to the realisation that every moment of your life was leading to this point, it was inescapable, and that what is going to happen in the future was similarly preordained. You let out a sigh of such post-empire world weariness that it could express the resignation of entire parliaments.

And then the Oxford presses slightly harder, as you knew it would and as it was always going to…

Qv. The Machine, Utopia and especially Stephen Rea as Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle in The Honourable Woman.