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– that’s not a Narnian dream – enough people will stay interested in – long enough – to keep seeding – the environment with—’
    But he had drifted off to sleep.
    When the supply of traditional-style jobs ran dry, Preach and I fell in together. We travelled, begging couches to sleep upon, or making do with sheds and barnsand abandoned cars. So many abandoned cars! Once people had moved incessantly, long distances, short distances, roads chocka day and night. Children trapped in the back of the car for whole days in conditions no prison would be legally permitted to sanction for its prisoners. Cars were totems, and we loved them. Then we woke up one morning and were all interconnected digitally and didn’t needto travel; and blimps delivered cargo much more cheaply and effectively; and energy shot up in price, and – suddenly – only popstars and billionaires ran cars. There was a year and more during which the police cracked down upon people abandoning their cars in the cities – they’re easily traceable, cars. So folk drove them many miles away into the middle of forests or moorland and abandoned them there.It was expensive and onerous, retrieving these hulks; and they soon became rusted and overgrown and mostly were left where they were. Havens of a sort, in our tramp-life. Especially when it was very cold, or very wet, we could sit in the back of an old Transit, Marmite-brown with rust and decked with streamers of ivy, and peer out into the woodland air as it filled with rain and white noise.We would chew jerky, or wild onions, and drink what firewater we had, and talk about things. Having worked a farm for decades I was accustomed to solitude. Jazon found it harder. He kept an iSlate, and would watch rubbish TV on its foxed screen. In the winter its power would run down before the end of his show, and he would curse in that weirdly half-hearted way he had. Urine had lodged in hisbrain as a more intense profanity than fuck , anus carried much more transgressive potency for him than arse . ‘Come out from the clouds you anus sun!’ he would shout. ‘Charge my urinous iSlate battery!’ In the summer he often fell asleep with the rectangle shimmering with light and inanities coming out of the speaker.
    There were lots of people like us. It’s the late middle-aged, and especiallythe men, who find it hardest to adjust when the whole economy has a conniption fit and barks back into life according to a whole new logic. And – well, is that because they are any less loved? Or is it only the toxicity of pride that makes them misfits? I’m a skilled and experienced executive worker , the Man sayeth. I’ll not take your job at a supermarket checkout! Maybe that’s it. I’m not anglingfor pity. Personally I’ve never seen the point of that kind of pride. But then, I was in a different situation to Preacherman. He had spent decades acquiring computer programming skills, only to find the discipline had metamorphosed out of all recognition in a matter of months. Now a child of ten could top anything he had to offer, pretty much. Moore’s law: the encheapening of processing power.A single cotton bud (two hundred for a euro) could analyse your ear wax and test the integrity of your eardrum, and download a spreadsheet wirelessly to your tab. There was more computing power in a sheet of toilet tissue (lighting up those numbers with cholesterol and likelihood of six common illnesses after you’d wiped your arse with it) than had been available to NASA during the entire Apolloprogramme. Dataseeds were injected into trees to turn each leaf into a weather-and-pollution analyst. When Jen was a baby, non-chipped nappies were actually more expensive than chipped ones (I’ve read the pooh! baby needs spinach! baby needs Calpol!) because demand was so low they had to be made in a specialist facility. When Jazon was young, he’d say bitterly, computing happened on ‘laptops’ thatcost €100 – or more! – some of