. . . She didn’t hear the click of a lock when he closed the door behind him but she knew she was a prisoner here. Deciding against testing to see how much freedom she really had she lay on the bed to sleep, perhaps to dream, to await as events unfold.
She couldn’t be sure if it were part of dream or if she pulling up memories but sounds of the boys twittering were filling her head. She awoke. Unsure of what had happened or, if, anything had happened but there was the feeling of distant discovery running through her. What can this be? What had happened while she slept? She had been somewhere. She had been somewhere far, far, away – too far away to put a label on it. Too far to touch, to identify, to find again even. Where had she been?
“Come in please,” she said when there was a polite tap on the door. The Air Marshall’s face appeared. “Oh, hello. I had been sleeping. Sorry, I was far away.”
“In that case please excuse my for interrupting your slumber.”
“Oh, no, you are not interrupting – I was awake when you knocked.”
He nodded. “I’d like you to join me for dinner – nearby. There’s an hotel with a half decent restaurant quite nearby. Say fifteen minutes?”
“Oh, please, make it five. I never need more than five minutes.”
“Very well than.” He bowed and left.
“You are fond of Indian food,” he asked as they sat at a table for four with an immaculate white cloth.
“I am, very much so, although I suspect I’m fond of western Indian food – the sort of Indian food I would prepare.”
“That sounds like the best of both worlds. Let’s hope the food here is to your liking.
She had only to eat and to admire the excellent service as it was clear that he had planned the meal carefully, leaving only his probing conversation with which to deal. “Your mother is a friend of the President of India I understand.”
She smiled and nodded.
“Was she was also a friend of the previous President?” She nodded. “And the one before that?” He sat back as she nodded again. “She would be a great age than?”
“Yes,” Meira agreed, “she is – by modern standards.”
“Modern standards being three score and ten?”
“We do a little better than that now. Many live actively into their nineties. Our predecessors – our ancient predecessors, developed lives much longer than currently.”
“How much longer?”
“Six or seven times longer.”
“People lived for six hundred years?”
“Oh yes. Catherine, one of my direct ancestors, was more than seven hundred years old before her body failed her. An amazing woman.”
He thought for a moment of two. “You seem very sure.”
“I am. I’m certain”
“How can you be? Where’s the evidence to support such a view.”
“Oh it’s not a view. It’s a memory. I have much of her memory in my own. That’s what we do, we Matriarchs – we hand down our memories.”
“And archaeological evidence. Where is that to be found?”
“Probably under our feet. This part of the planet was populated by some of the earliest migrants out of the Indus Valley.”
“Surely if it was there it would have been found by now.”
“No. It’ll be far deeper than any archaeologists have ventured. We spend our time counting money – counting costs in monetary terms so the money runs out before the important evidence is revealed. Short term thinking is all we’ve ever done since the cataclysm some twelve thousand years ago.”
“Are you saying that before the cataclysm, before the great floods, there was a more sophisticated society?”
“Oh, yes. Up until that time humans had developed continuously – not linearly you understand – Life has always evolved in fits and starts, but continuously one way or another. We reached the point when the female line began to dominate the leadership around one hundred thousand years ago.” She paused as she read the incredulity passing his eyes.
“At that time,” she continued, “hominids had been in the Indus Valley for eighty thousand years or more – plenty of time to graduate from hunter gatherers to farmers and solar engineers. Much of the apparent mystery surrounding monoliths and megaliths disappears when you realise they were solar devices. They were the earliest attempts to store the heat of the Sun.”
“Cometh the hour; cometh the man,” or woman, is a maxim we British applied when our saviors, Wellington, Churchill . . . pulled us from crisis but, not this time. Great Britain is in need of a visionary leader to be recognized and to address the Brexit problems in an inspirational speech to shake out our moribund parliament but, it seems, there is no one: not this time. This time we are left with only those who choose not to be recognized. This time we are faced with only the mealy mouthed who dare not speak the name of another referendum; of dissolving Parliament; of forgetting the whole idiotic concept . . . We are leader less; we know not which way we are to turn. So what is to be done?
Given that ignorance and ambition brought us to the determination to leave the EU the subsequent failure to complete the job, and the realisation of our woeful ignorance of the matter, might, with a little education, bring us back to firmer ground but, how do we sugar the pill? How do we drag the blindly determined Brexiteers to the table of unalienable facts, to recognize their mistakes and, possibly, enter rehabilitation? How do we save faces and protect reputations while examining our errors and searching for better results?
A trial then – better call it a revue – of the EU and our need to exit should be undertaken in order to be sure we are doing what is best for Great Britain: Not for the ambitions of politicians; not for the profits of strategic companies; not for the rallying cries of the Nationalist or the remains of the anti-Nazis loonies; for Great Britain.
Given all we now know about data collection, its storage and analysis, it’s hard to reconcile our continuing dependence on media hype and the ballot box when electing government yet, we push ever on, making the same mistakes. The decisions of David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, General Allenby . . . in the aftermath of WWI continue to fuel the Middle East atrocities to this day. Baldwin’s misjudgment of Hitler’s manic ambitions in 1938 lead us into a war that spent the lives of 59 million people. The American administration’s misconceptions of communism through the post WWII years brought about numerous wars, the most costly being in Vietnam in the 60’s, but we continue to bow to the opinions of wrong people: of misinformed, biased, people.
A decision, based on a media hyped, ballot box referendum, was made in 2016 to extract the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union: a tree-hugging, freedom loving, phoenix still growing from the ashes of WWII in 1947. Immediately the voters’ choice was known the politically ambitious attention seekers, those who initiated the move, resigned from the administration leaving HMS Great Britain to flounder on the rocks of political stupidity.
During his presidential campaign we learned that Donald Trump was a bigoted, racist, misogynist yet we elected him to be the most powerful person on the planet where he remains, everyday proving us correct in our assessment and idiotic in our choosing.
