The yellowed grime on the windows slows the sunlight to a crawl on it’s way into The Monet, which, as far as anyone can tell, has stood upon this site for all eternity. Even the dead bees lying prone upon the windowsills are covered in a fine layer of dust. The air is a toxic fog of ancient cigarette smoke that curls itself around the rafters and dips into the half empty glasses nursed by the old, old men who sit, perched on rickety stools with their cold feet tucked onto the warm, metal table legs. Woodworm in the rafters, Wormwood in the tankards. This the place where people come to forget.

Well... strictly speaking it isn’t. But they do.

This is a refuge of old men. Outside, on the glass roads, in the glass houses, you don’t see many old folks. We like to stick together, linked by a common disinclination to appreciate modern music and a humble fondness for repetitive, simple games.

Old Women too. But in The Monet we don’t see so far as to make judgements.

The young make things happen. Invigorated by the invincibility of youth and the endless, boundless pulse of energy that defines them. To be young, and to be ineffective, it would be the utmost disgrace. It would be ungrateful to the point of heresy. So they rush and the toil and bit by bit they bring us back, or so I hear.

No-one here has that drive. No-one here has that obligation, but it’s quite easy to understand. Youth is not wasted on the young. But it is heaped on them in these times.

The actual targets they strive for and what the counters of history will have to say when, god forbid, they reach their mad goals is beyond me. It’s still almost impossible to believe I’ll be here to see what they do. I’m still not sure any of the drinkers in The Monet are even sure why we are kept around at all.

We hope it’s decency. Or out of respect to our accumulated wisdom.

It’s on that dangerously insubordinate thought that we finish our brain killing round. By rights it should kill us, the amount we drink. But it goes through our pickled old brains like water through a sieve. We’re not just drinking for ourselves after all.

Thorpe, the bartender who defies any description beyond grizzled, shambles over and scoops up our glasses with his routine brusque gruffness. He has one leg. That’s just the kind of place this is. Rumours are he stole his prosthetic from a prototype sentient android, back when he worked for the government. It’s a compelling legend that no-one really believes - Thorpe has a distinctly un-governmental visage, you get the feeling it wouldn’t be allowed - but anyone would swear blind on its truth when they relate the myth to a friend drunk enough to be temporarily gullible. It’s easy to believe when you’ve seen a man carrying a tray of glasses suddenly find that his legs are trying to walk in opposite directions. No-one laughs at it any more. We all know the stories about androids.

It’s hard to tell whether Thorpe finds his work tedious, or if he’s always been that way. He doesn’t speak any more words than it takes to ascertain what we would like next.

‘I’ll have a black whisky with a sprig of sloe and a packet of nuts. And no ice.’

He never holds the ice, no matter how firmly you insist.

‘Just an ochre beer for me,’ says Gwyn.

Gwyn is my oldest and closest friend, and this is our ritual. We sit in The Monet as the flies buzz over our heads in the misguided hope that we will die and rot into delicious, fleshy nurseries, and we nurse our drinks and we talk. We never run dry of things to talk about. Unlikely, but true. And so as it has always been it is now. I creak forward in my chair and I tell him the same story I tell him every day.

The story of how I lost my memories.

______________________________

I’ll begin, as I always do, in a car. A stationary car on a twenty mile bridge, travelling from the North coast of France over silty brown waters to the Southern downs of the United Kingdom, where I was born. Beneath the tarmac, swaying concrete and steel. Beneath the concrete, ships; laden down with cutting-edge electronics or recycled clothes, plough silently on. Any sense of the outside world is obfuscated by the battering of the rain on the windows of the sedan. The car itself is silent. This is not the time to use fuel, if I run out of oil on the bridge it could be be some days before the solar sheet on the bonnet can get me moving again. No-one wants to be the one holding up the endless line.

The other side of the road is equally constipated with cars of all sizes. I wonder to myself how many of them have a real destination, and how many have just elected to the life of a static traveller because they have nowhere else to go. I wonder if I might be one of them, prompting me to dig around in the back for the little certificate of destination. No. I have somewhere to go.

Each human being takes up a square area of land approximately a foot on edge. Some people take up more. Some people take up less. Some people you wish would take up more but seem fully unaware of the boundaries you wish they would transgress. Others by rights take up all too much. We call them Americans. Being British is about knowing, exactly, at all times, where the lines intersect.

That is because Britain is small. And packed full of people. At least, ever since I have known it.

The continental land area of our home planet is in the realm of a hundred and forty-nine million square miles. At the beginning of the twenty-first century that worked out at about fifty square kilometres per person. Of dry land that is. That’s when I was born. Imagine my disappointment then upon the age of thirteen when I was presented with a certificate that declared me to be the proud owner of a charming one metre by one metre square of itchy marsh. In Scotland.

Laird though I was, this certificate irked me. My land was not even a measly percentile of my rightful inheritance! Was not I due my part? I found out that at the time, there were close to three hundred people in each square kilometre of my country. It didn’t take me long to decide that that was too many. I took on a youthful indignance at the corrupt and unjust nature of property. I read up on Marx and wholeheartedly embraced communism with the wide, gangly arms of a thirteen year old. I aced my history exams. Not much more came of it.

To the left of the car a steady trickle of pedestrians carefully ease their way along the the barrier in the centre of the road. Not hikers though. They look like families, some of them. Some of them are a great deal older than myself, cowed against the wind. Or maybe just cowed.

I wonder what draws them? Do they, like me have a golden bastion of entitlement to head for? Or are they merely ignorant of the crowds of Britain? Have old stories of welcome arms not yet died?

The car in front of me inches forward. Movement! But I stay my hand from the thumb-scanner, even as the driver behind me gives her horn a flaccid toot. Her name is Shauna. I found out a few days before. She is heading for South Wales, where the towns in the valleys are even now spilling over their banks onto the mountaintops, occupying every square inch of surface are carved out by the glaciers at the dawn of man. Yesterday she lent me some of her sugar, a welcome act of kindness on the bridge, where the fierce winds and today’s stinging rain keep the cyclists, with their little trailers of essentials, sold at a premium price, from passing more than a few times a week. A respectful business. I love the entrepreneurial spirit of people in times like this, even as the money that we exchange drops in value by the day, they keep coming.

They car in front inches forward again. Now there is a whole metre between us. This is worth revving for.

________________________________

This period, this surreal chapter in the human population boom, was later to be called the Great Migration Press, and though it would be talked about for the following years as an economic issue, it all came about as the result of one important scientific breakthrough: rape. The seed that is. Brassica Napus. Famous now and probably always for the sea of vivid yellow it forms, shivering on a rolling hill in the breeze like the elysium fields of gold.

Which is why they called it the fields of gold. But also because it made a lot of people very rich. Some people took to calling it yellow gold, in the vein of oil or coal - the infamous black golds of the century prior - which always struck me as redundant. Either way, it was realised that rapeseed, mirroring it’s human allies, just loves to multiply. And also like humans, it’s packed with hydrocarbons. Where it differs from humans is that you can run your car, hospital or city by burning Rapeseed, without the United Nations getting involved. Or at least, that’s what everyone thought.

Anyway, some smart and probably well-meaning people, teamed up with some smart and extremely evil-meaning people (I shall name no names) and redesigned Rape for the the 21st century. The thought was, that this hardy, profligately propagated plant could be encouraged to spread naturally across previously un-farmable land. It was resistant to pests, and pesticides, and as it turned out later, herbicides too. And herbivores. And also being cut down and burned. So what happened was huge areas of rough and weak farmland became over the space of in some cases as little as two years, homogenous rape savannahs. It easily out-competed all but the densest of established crops, and while it gamely persevered on desertificated soils, where it touched arable lands it became something not unlike a topographical cancer, stripping nutrients from soil until only it could survive the conditions it had created.
There was, as you may imagine, something of a fuss made afterwards. Because while you can eat Rapeseed, you won’t want to for long. And seeing forty years of careful restoration and humanitarian work in places like Central and Western Africa undone by one plant, well it left a few people riled up the wrong way. And the clever people from before were forced to say sorry. With money. And that’s where it could have become a historical, agricultural footnote. What happened next was what turned it into a global catastrophe. Instead of forcing the enterprises responsible to pay fines or create solutions to the rapeseed menace (which I should mention was at this point already a booming source of fuel and industry for our cars, hospitals e.t.c.) the decision was made that wherever the rapeseed had spread, the corporate entities who owned the patent for the modified genome of said rapeseed would be forced to purchase the cursed lands, and assume financial responsibility for the problem they had created on their own terms. At market prices. Oh poor them. The result was brutal. In some places, short-sighted governments displaced entire populations, selling off mile after square mile of ‘doomed’ land. The fences started to go up, and the farming equipment moved in, and the people moved out. And as the seed continued to spread and grow - because no-one was strictly obligated to stop it - so the land became cheaper, and so the fuel and agricultural companies were ‘forced’ to take it as their responsibility. And lots of people on both sides of the table got very rich. Two billion people lost their homes. And not only their homes, but the land their homes were built on, the towns their homes were in and the dirt their homes were made from. From space, Africa and much of central Asia still photograph as yellow. For a while, a certain type of lazy ethnic joke circulated about China, because of course it did. And then everyone showed up. Looking for a place to live.

And I sold it to them. For a time at least. Standing on the front lines in estate agent’s uniform, on the Mediterranean shores as boat after boat came in and the newly rich and homeless stumbled into the arms of my colleagues and I while around us the tower blocks grew out of the horizon, filling up with life on their completion like beer filling an empty glass.

Who would have thought a scenario like that would turn ugly? Apparently not me. The same me who would be destined to find himself living in his car not a twelve months later. On a bridge. For nine days. As the construction failed to keep up with the influx, I saw the prices of the rent for properties I was hocking rise by a factor of whole digits. Even as the camps and shanty towns began to plaque up on the countryside, I took my commission as normal. Until it was that my boss, by office manager who had for so long told us that selling here, in this sunlit party of culture and panic, would be like s’elling candy to a rich baby’, told us that the office was closing, subject, to a ‘critical housing bubble’ and that incidentally the leases on our ‘incentivatory accommodation’, in short, my beautiful seafront apartment, would expire in 28 days. She then advised us to ‘buy a car’. ‘Bollocks’.
I hadn’t been able to get a mobile home. But I’d done well. The seats fold down into enough of a bed to accommodate a lone traveller, and the car holds a self-driving license, leaving plenty of time to indulge in classic video games and the other pursuits of bored, single men. If I’m flush for fuel (and hey, all that Rapeseed’s gotta go somewhere) I can substitute a weight for my softening body in the driver’s seat, and nap in the back, lulled by the steady jerking movement of the car creeping along. If it’s a nice day, I can even get out and walk alongside, stretching my legs out after sitting in the same place for days on end. Only once was I caught out, when the car spied a shortcut down a winding French sideroad, and abruptly left the main artery to go on it’s own adventure, Pixar style. I caught up with it only when it got caught in a standoff with a very unappreciative tractor and it’s companion, who took a great many euros to placate.

If I learned anything during that time, it’s how easily the mind can accept what was perhaps only a short while ago, unthinkable. My generation was coached in safety, in caution. When I first moved to France I had assumed that the shock of living in another country, away from family and familiarity, might kill me. It did not. When the unthinkable happened, I accepted it without a thought.

I of course, was lucky. I had a holding to my name, spied by chance in its frame at the bottom of a box of keepsakes that would surely have been thrown away to save travelling space had it not been for chance. One square metre of space, that I had never seen or visited, but that was nonetheless mine. And so, making a pledge to email a humorous thank you to my dad that I would not keep, I packed up the contents of my rented flat, stored it’s heavenly ocean views in my mind, along with a few choice events that had happened in it, and left. For Scotland.

By car. In the middle of the greatest mass migration in human history. Foresight may not be my strong suit. It would take me eight months. It sucked.