The Great When

If you are superman, let me be forever animal.

it turns out you can’t find a proper job, there’s always journalism.

it struck him that the London pubs he knew were very much like dogs, each with their own smell, their own friendly growl, their own sharp bark when things had gone too far and their own toilet habits.

It’s complicated reasons these days, in the world that we’ve got now. Everything’s tangled up with every other thing, and it’s all got a million different causes, not just one. And all these complications keep on multiplying until soon the average person won’t be able to keep up, or to make proper sense of anything.

Was this, then, what life was really like? A thing that could plunge suddenly into unfathomable nightmare at a moment’s notice?

the dark lanes and empty byways seemed unnaturally silent. He could hear his every worry.

swept out with the statistics.

Despite the fact she dominated and controlled his life, for all the great slavery she represented, she was all he had. She was his only option, and the sooner he accepted that, the sooner he learned to surrender all hope and ambition to her greater will, the better it would be for him. He made up his mind there and then to drown his dreams in an insensate servitude, happy and willing. He loved Coffin Ada.

And to be fair, society is a lot more equal now. The main proposals in the Beveridge Report have been put into practice, we've been promised full employment, there's Nye Bevan’s health service, there's proper education for walks of life, and even with the rationing we're better fed now as a nation than we've ever been. This new Britannia is looking good, but where I think we're going to have a problem with letting the old Britannia go. It's clear the Empire had its chips, with India ready to abandon ship, but what's the betting that will try to hang onto our status as a grand world power, up there with Russia and the Yanks, despite the fact we’re in debt to her eyeballs? We can have the decent country we've been guaranteed, or we can keep up the illusion that we're still a great one, but I can't see that we'll have the money to do both. And knowing us, we'll probably decide that destitution is not too bad, so long as you can dress it in the Union Jack waistcoat.

Dennis found himself thinking of the countless eggs of iron and fire that had fallen in the last ten years, some of them not yet hatched. Curled metal embryos, they slept beneath the amniotic rubble, saving up their birth wails for an unsuspecting future. This was the whole problem with the past, that is never really over, when the dreadful bricks of yesterday were what tomorrow would be built from. (191)

and if it turns out you can’t find a proper job, there’s always journalism.