REVOLUTION BRITAIN – Chapter 1

The Movement begins

 

It was a humid summer afternoon in mid July. The weather was uncharacteristically warm for Britain. Nick was, as usual, battling with his computer to produce yet another insignificant report. These reports were demanded monthly by Nick’s boss, there sole purpose being to justify the boss’s existence. As usual the computer had crashed, and equally as usual Nick had begun thinking.

Nick did a lot of thinking, often at work when his computer did its usual trick of crashing at the most inopportune moments. This used to bother Nick, but he’d got accustomed to it by now and in a way he welcomed the device’s frequent tantrums. They provided him with numerous opportunities to review his life and being blessed with a strong sense of perspective, the lives of everyone else.

Nick sensed a deep frustration from everyone in the land and this feeling had evidenced itself in several of his close friends. The reason for their frustration, Nick perceived, was a combination of dead-end jobs, no particular future and a working environment which was beset by unpleasant and devious small-minded bosses and their equally unscrupulous number twos. The situation seemed to manifest itself everywhere. More disturbingly the media carried constant evidence that this situation had permeated all levels of British society, up to and including the much vaunted and supposedly democratic British political system. A system so old and so famous that other counties had used it as a model for their own systems. What Nick was observing, was the crumbling of any true democratic elements within the English political process. Corruption had become rife. The term ’sleaze’ had become almost as commonplace as the expressions ‘left’ or ‘right’ wing. In fact even these terms had no meaning any more. What sad times we live in, Nick reflected.

Nick had a small collection of close friends and like most people was struggling to keep his job and maintain a reasonable standard of living. He earned an adequate salary had a newish car and was saddled with a mortgage. He was not married, had had a succession of short term relationships with women who always at first appeared to be promising partners and then turned out to be so different from him, that he dumped them at the earliest possible opportunity. At the moment he was not in any relationship and so was not affected by the irritating little worries which they always seemed to produce for him.

Nick was 32 years old and lived and worked in a small and unremarkable town close to London, called Aylesbury. Aylesbury was a typical example of England gone wrong. Socially, it hosted a number of riots throughout the summer months, usually based on cocktail of racial hatred and alcohol. Architecturally, the soul of the town, like so many other English towns, had been destroyed. The guilty parties were the usual enterprising architects and planners, who thought they new best. The main result of this ‘expert’ knowledge, was a large and ugly sky scraper which dominated the poor town and ironically housed another group of experts, the county government. The former beauty of the place had been reduced to a few traces left around an church near the centre. The place was basically depressing and had led to Nick’s frequent trips to London where he could find some solace.

Although life was fairly kind to Nick, he was bored. The monotony and instability of his existence was getting him down. His felt his job was under constant threat, a feeling which was constantly reinforced by his boss who took a perverse pleasure in telling everyone how they could all find themselves out of work, if they did not do well. In an effort to escape from all this, Nick had considered trying to settle down, but the thought of the dull routine of married life scared him more that anything else, even the thought of losing his job pale into insignificance in relation to the idea of trying maintain a marriage. A number of his friends were divorced, which may have caused him to think twice about serious commitments. Although, he liked children and the thought of having a family did appeal to him, and what made him balk more than anything else, was the thought of bringing such innocence into a hard and increasingly unpleasant world. Not a day went by without his hearing yet another forlorn story of just how terribly man could treat his fellows. Was all hope draining from mankind, he wondered.

“Where’s that report, Nick?”, came a voice, which woke him unpleasantly from his ponderings. The proud owner, the boss’s unofficial number two, Jackie. She was renown for having about as much tact as a football hooligan and a mentality to match. Back stabbing was her speciality and she didn’t care who she derided, so long as she continued to keep in with Nick’s slimy boss.

“Sorry, the computer’s still down so I can’t finish it,” Nick mumbled apologetically. The tone in his voice was well practised, as any other inflection would have sent Jackie scurrying into the boss to tell tales. Jackie was quite expert at sneaking up on people, having the capacity to move quickly and quietly. Nick had once compared her to a cross between a Ninja and a snake.

“Oh, well. Try to finish it as soon as you can. You know how important it is,” the snake sneered. “Oh fuck off.” Nick muttered almost imperceptibly as he turned back to his uncooperative labour saving device.

“What’s that?” Jackie enquired rearing up and almost resembling a cobra. She thought she heard him tell her to fuck off, but was not quite sure.

“I said I’ll try to print it off,” said Nick calmly. He liked to play this game and to wind the unpleasant serpent up.

“Oh.,” She said. “I thought you said something else.” And satisfied that she had not been insulted, she slithered off to annoy some other poor soul.

Jackie was one of those people, like Nick’s boss, who always tried to project an air of overwork and conscientiousness. The projection was a transparent as a pane of glass. Everyone knew she had no work to do, and what little she did, she fussed over out of all proportion to its difficulty and complexity. She was a thick as two inch board of pine, but as devious as any fox contemplating the massacre of hens in a farmyard. It was impossible not to fall foul of her at sometime or other, for the spiteful nature which dominated her character delighted in fabricating lies to get other people in trouble, and at the same time increase her standing with the boss.

Thinking of how much he’d like to put his boot up Jackie, Nick attempted to boot-up the computer once more, but was faced with the same error message, stubbornly displaying itself on his VDU. Nick was past caring by now and he knew he was in the clear, the computer system, amateurishly set up by his boss, was always crashing. Nick drifted back into his thoughts, reflecting on how his boss had messed up the system and then tried to hide the fact at every opportunity, but the cover of blaming other people, the usual device for people of his calibre, had stopped working some time back, due to its copious overuse. And there were only a limited number of totally incompetent technicians in the world to sling mud at. The boss had given up calling computer experts, after the last five told him that the system was almost beyond economic repair due to the interference of some idiot. Everyone in the office knew who the idiot was, and the idiot knew they knew and this annoyed him. He had a sneaking suspicion that Nick had been the one who had overheard the technicians and spread their comments around the office. Nick was clever though, and although he was indeed responsible, he knew his boss could never prove it. This thought kept Nick going during his many moments of despondency. Moments which usually resulted from the meddling of his boss or his equally detestable number two, Jackie. Meddling, Nick had decided, was about the only thing ‘Stony Knickers’ and her equally irksome boss were any good at, in fact he noted, they were in indeed not just good, but expert at it. Yet another sad reflection on society, Nick observed.

The company Nick worked for was a major insurance company and he worked in the information technology support section. The company, like so many others of its ilk, was bent on instilling a corporate mentality on all its workforce. This included frequent time wasting training and seminar sessions on such ‘in’ topics as teamwork and time management. Courses, which in the eyes of Nick and many others, tried to make up for the inefficiency which beset the company’s management, who themselves were seldom to be found, because they too were always attending some course, the title of which often began with the word ‘golf’.

The result of these courses was always the same, initial enthusiasm, followed by regression into old ways. Most of the workforce treated these incessant courses as a means of avoiding work, and of relieving the dull routine of their day to day lives. Most of the management treated the courses as an ideal means by which to avoid doing any work and a convenient way of passing the buck when things went wrong in their absence, which they frequently did, due in great part to their total lack of managerial ability. Nick and his colleagues had re-christened the Management By Objectives system as Management By Obnoxious Bastards, much to the annoyance of the bastards concerned.

Nick’s boss had recently been sent on a ‘performance appraisal’ course, the intention of which was to enable the managers involved to appraise the work of those beneath them. The system had been introduced about two years before and due to its complete ineffectiveness was always being revised. Nick had recently been appraised by his boss. The session consisted of a two-hour meeting in which Nick was supposed to analyse his strengths and weaknesses and discuss how he felt he could improve his performance. However, as Nick knew, his boss used these sessions to gather adverse information about his least favourite subordinates, such as himself, and then to use this information to oust those members of staff who refused to say ‘yes’ all the time.

In fact one of Nick’s closest colleagues had made the mistake of being honest during such a session. Six months later, there came a cost cutting drive, and this person had been identified as a surplus member of staff. As far as Nick knew, she was still looking for work, due in part to her age, forty-five. At this ‘grand’ age, she was regarded as being too old and expensive to employ.

Several times while idling away his lunch hour wondering around town, Nick had met the unfortunate woman. Each time she had seemed a little more depressed and he got the impression from their brief conversations that her home life was suffering as well. Feeling sorry for her, he had pushed information about new jobs her way, but up to this point she had not succeeded in finding anything.

The womans state had made Nick keenly aware that, although he was still relatively young, the years had a nasty habit of sprinting away, leaving those around them floundering in the wake of the discovery that ageing was not an entirely slow process. He himself did not wish to be on life’s scrap heap at the age of forty plus. Experience these days, he noted, appeared to be gained from the leaves of a text book, with young (cheaper to employ) graduates being given senior jobs before they had had a chance to learn from the harder more effective teacher known as ‘life’.

Nick was not alone in his state of disillusionment, he knew very well that many other staff in his organisation, competent but unable to lower themselves to the process of grovelling their way to the top, felt the same. Morale seemed to be at an all time and permanent low.

Meanwhile the country in which Nick lived appeared to be spiralling ever faster down a path towards destruction. Fiction and reality were becoming one and the same as many people tried to escape from the drudgery of life by resorting to drugs or ever more dangerous sports.

Drug abuse, Nick considered, was the religion of the latest generation. Just as people in the past had turned to the church as way of escaping the reality of life, now people suffering from the pressure of modern life were turning to drugs as a way of surviving. Far from becoming easier, life was forever becoming more difficult. Modern society, Nick concluded, was indeed slowly and quietly self-destructing.

Britain had just had a recent general election which had been won by the labour party. ‘Future Labour’ as it had christened itself had won the elections by the usual tactic of making as many attractive, but hollow promises as possible. It had also cleverly stated that it would only carry out its promises if the country could afford it. In a grandiose speech on the eve of the election, Labour’s new leader had claimed that he had the countries best interests as heart and would not raise taxes for the next few years. Of course, as Nick observed, no tax increase meant an excuse for having no money, and no money meant another excuse which could be employed to avoid having to comply with all those tiresome pre-election promises. Nick could read the political psyche like an open picture book. What really frustrated him was that he appeared to be the only one who noticed the increasingly devious politics which were being employed by the power mongers to gain and retain power.

Things needed to be changed, and Nick wished he knew how this change could be achieved.

Indeed, it was this wish which served to keep Nick going.