Part 1: My Very Own Kennedy Moment

I came-to that morning, one eye slowly splitting open after the other, with one of the worst hangovers I’d ever experienced - a real WWI artillery-park stonk creeping up behind my eyes. Dell and Sylvie’s wedding the day before had seen some seriously non-responsible drinking going on, there could be no denying that, given the morning’s evidence. None. Not at all.
I swung naked out of my pit, bent double and groaning softly with the pain and rapidly condensing memories of the reception afterwards: the flinching, livid recollections of doing atrociously bad Kareoke while headbutting flying toilet rolls back at the hooting audience of guests made me want to stop thinking even more than the headache did. I tried not to, again: no Joy - by the time I’d made my way, swaying lopsidedly, over to the television, I’d dredged-up the images of me opening the last of the decent bottles of champagne all over my suit and, hours later, passing out on a bench outside a pub miles away from the wedding after a good half hour’s swearing at the traffic going by outside... At least I’d had a good time. I’d have to remember and thank whoever carried me home.

I was too dehydrated to piss, empty stomached, and I could smell parmesan cheese somewhere. It was shaping up to be a really good morning... about 9:30 according to the annoying red LED clock that was lying buzzing to itself on the floor next to a kicked-over ashtray with half an unlit joint and countless roll-up butts scattered all around it like lifeboats fleeing the Titanic. What I needed, of course, was tea and ibuprofen - and fast - but some basic orientation had to be done first to get me there, I had to have human voices and connection with that sunny, overlit world twittering and humming beyond the thick closed drapes that swaddled the room in stale smoke and warm, diagonal dustbeams. I reached out with a far too careful finger and slowly pressed the ON button, gritting my teeth and mentally steeling myself against the inevitable psychedelic onslaught of Sunday morning children’s TV... The picture snicked on and, shocked, I almost fell into the calm, awesome silence and serene vision laid-out before me on one... two... three channels. What the fuck was going on?
Windsor Castle, flags at half mast, microphone silence so complete I had to check the volume... My gods, I thought. The Queen’s dead!

At last, words: the announcer’s voice, so loud it nearly floored me, was soft, low, Received and respectful. This was definitely a Big One...
‘And, of course, we should also remember the family of Dodi al-Fayyad on this day of tragic loss...’
‘Huh?’ I thought. And then, as my brain woke up and took in a job-lot of possible political implications, ‘In one fell swoop, the House of Windsor’s problems...’
‘And for the benefit of anybody who has just switched on their television, last night, in Paris, Lady Diana...’
‘Perfect. Absolutely Perfect.’ I whispered. And then it hit me, as obvious as an Eddie Stobart truck leaping the barrier in front of me in broad daylight - the hotel suite, the sudden flood of weeping, inconsolable daughters bursting through the door after hearing The News...
‘This is really going to piss on Dell and Sylvie’s honeymoon!’

Part 2: Feedback Mechanisms

I finally and unequivocally realised that something very, very strange, profound and pre-medieval was dancing a Tarantella right through our rapidly regressing national collective psyche early one morning, two or three days after The Crash...

... I was daydreaming half-asleep, smoking a furtive cigarette down by the luggage racks on an overcrowded train from Purley to Victoria, making my slow way Up West for a day’s work. I was going to be late as fuck, on a day when every single production company in London was screaming out for tetrabytes of digital storage units, as many as we could physically rent, carry and deliver to them. The Diana Tributes were pouring out of Soho, and business in the little office overlooking Wardour Street was on the point of seizing up through sheer demand; I’d be needed as an extra hand, all right - and I’d have the hangover sweated out of me in no time, once I’d got myself there and Jamie had stopped swearing at me. I’d got the Frantic Work Call the evening before, whilst in the middle of getting drunk at an ex-girlfriend’s house, miles out in the suburbs. She’d never been a big Diana fan, to put it mildly, and her flat had seemed to be about the only sane and cynical refuge from... it, the whole hyperemotional, viciously sentimental mass madness pouring out of the airwaves, shops and mouths of people everywhere that week. I didn’t want any part of it; I’d had a recent and unexpected death in the family myself, and was still feeling rather more than touchy about it. Diana Fever? As far as I was concerned, I’d been vaccinated against it - all I could do was hang back and observe the termites with hate in my heart.

Crack! The noise of the slap shocked me out of my trance on the train, even more than the young child’s startled squawk and her scream of pain and confusion that followed straight behind it. It had been a real nasty, flat-hand crack across the back of the legs by the sound of it, a stressed mother’s pushed-beyond-endurance, hit the final straw whack. Or maybe the mother was just a vicious cow by nature: she certainly sounded like one if the strangle-voiced, incoherent bollocking she was giving her shrieking four or five year-old blonde daughter was anything to go by. She had the child by the shoulder, as if she’d grabbed the girl in the act of running away from her. I would have run, too. Straight to Social Services.

Then, it all pieced itself together: I spotted the huge stuffed toy, almost as large as the little girl herself, lying symbolic, cellophaned, and fought-over on the carriage floor. It looked brand-new, the sort of thing you might win your girlfriend at a funfair or buy at an outdoor market. Oddly, I can’t remember what species the toy was supposed to be, bear, dog, or whatever, but I do remember the yellow ribbon wound round its neck like a satin noose, clumsily hitching it to an eye-poppingly ostentatious “With Condolences” card.

The kid was well upset. Her mother didn’t look too clever, either, more like a Leibfraumilch guzzler who hadn’t slept in three weeks. It was obvious the child was pissed-off and grizzly at being dragged out at this god-awful hour, all this way, in the presence of a brand-new, massive toy that - and this she would never get into her head - just wasn’t for her. The train was still miles from Victoria, let alone Kensington - I’d sussed who the toy was for and where they were heading in one swift, sickening flash of egalitarian bile. Not quite believing what I was seeing, I looked closer at the woman - who was she, where, on the sliding ladder of income brackets, would a sociologist place her and this crazy, semi-feudal behaviour? Right at the bottom of the pit; I knew the smell only too well - cheap detergent and desperation. I doubted if the child even knew what a Diana was, let alone the Facts of Death and why her fucked-up neurotic of a mother would feel the need to drag her halfway across the City to spend god-knows how long in the morbid company of thousands of publicly grieving royalty-gimps and potentially iffy social rejects; probably to give the mother a ‘sense of closure’ or some-such dated socio-babble picked-up from Daytime-TV. Me, I felt like popping her one for her pig-ignorant, unthinking cruelty and the way she’s hit-out at that poor kid for naturally wanting a toy that, by all rights, should have been hers in the first place - she didn’t look too spoiled to me.

The feeling soon passed, to be replaced by more workaday thoughts and a dull, vast hatred of almost everything around me. That incident had really got to me. The awful thing was, for the next couple of weeks, at least, her behaviour would have been seen as almost normal. Even laudable, in some circles.

I have to say, though: the tourists lapped it up. Of course they did: and, for that spellbound week of terminal glamour, almost everybody had became a tourist. It had emptied Soho right out; Kensington was heaving. The pilgrimage industry hadn’t seen such good days since Thomas á Beckett had lost another little fracas with the Establishment. I’d never experienced anything like it. You could sense it, almost halfway across Town:

About two-and-a-half days after it started, all work in the office ground to a halt; not through melt-down, under-cutting, or physical breakdown - there simply weren’t any more drives available, anywhere. We’d sold out. Game over. Time to go down the pub, and wind down. Feeling proud and whacked, as you do when you’ve pulled off a hard bit of successful spur-of-the-moment opportunist graft and got weighed-in for it, the three of us hit the street. Now we weren’t rushing about the streets and alleys humping drives, we could appreciate just how empty and spookily deserted the place had become in the past couple of days. It was if, like the tipping a giant snooker table, the centre of gravity had moved a couple of miles to the West, and sucked all the free-rolling balls into the Kensington Gardens pocket. It seemed like only those who lived, worked, or regularly prowled the place were left behind. Vic the Tobacconist was standing outside his shop like the proprieter of a stranded village store in Devon, waiting for customers or gossip to relieve the off-season doledrums: ‘It hasn’t been like this since the Fifties!’ We decided to go down the Coach and Horses, if only for the novelty of being able to have a quiet lunchtime drink there.

Pints in our hands, leaning against the wall in Romilly Street, we thought we could finally let ourselves relax. That’s when we felt it. ‘Jesus!’ Said Jamie, ‘This is unbelievable...’
Now that someone had pointed it out, I couldn’t but feel it: a susseration, half heard, half sensed from somewhere out beyond Marble Arch, like a dry march of distant locusts. That woman on the train had only been the fanatical vanguard; now rest of them had turned-up.

Part 3: The View from the Street

Thud.
‘I can’t... take... much... more...of... this!!!’
Boot was having a hard time of it. Things had eventually got to him, and he was pure Working-class Royalist, had been for as long as I’d known him. Now he was smashing his forehead against the chipped steering wheel in desperation: here was proof irrefutable - the last seven days had been enough to turn even the most demographically certain of pro-Royals almost suicidal with thoughts of escape. It hadn’t just been me, then.
I slowly pulled myself out of my self-induced daze: I’d been slumped in Boot’s passenger seat, staring through the dashboard and fretting with his budget white Ford Transit’s radio as if sanity itself depended on it since we’d parked-up. A bad move:

I don’t know what they called it, who knocked it together, or where it came from, but I’ve never heard music anything like it before or since. It poured out of the speaker-grilles like deathly treacle - for the past week, wave upon wave of maudlin half-tempo trance beats had been spontaneously swamping the FM dial like virulent wide-band jamming in an American-sponsored war zone... Stars on 16 rpm. I’d been hoping to find something normal, unconnected, or even critical from a pirate station of any persuasion, but no. Everyone was at it. There was no getting away from the universal electronic tide of whipped-up schmaltz - she really had been anybody’s, after all.

I screwed down the volume to a trickle and looked round at Boot with fatigued, red-rimmed eyes. It was quarter to eleven in Morden High Street: another fifteen minutes and all this would be officially over. I was shaking with burnt-out anger, week-long nausea, and an almost homicidal desire to get away from the moated madhouse that Britain had become in those last few days. Anywhere away from here.
‘Christ, Boot,’ I slurred, looking him full in the Armanis, ‘This’s fucking dreadful! S’like Stalin’s sodding funeral!’
Even Boot didn’t seen concerned by that outrageous snap comparison; in fact I think he agreed with me. He just shook his head.

Though at least we’d both had the satisfaction of knowing that we’d been witnessing extraordinary times, in fact nothing less than History congealing all around us: the Western world hadn’t sustained - up until then - such a collective bodyshock since the day Lee Oswald went into work, leaned out the window, and turned his lone-nut theorising into suicidal, skull-splintering praxis. That almost random incident, too, had left nothing behind but an international sense of unquenchable shock and the sneaking feeling we’d witnessed some kind of honour killing. Plus ça change.Now my generation knew what it felt like.

In Britain, it was simultaneously both every Marxist’s wet-dream and every liberal republican’s nightmare. The Broad Masses had stirred and emerged onto the streets all right, but even though they were casting the occasional puzzled and hostile glance towards Windsor castle and bashing up the occasional disrespectful foreigner, they were carrying flags and flowers in their hands, not Molotovs or thermic lances. Nothing changed and everything had changed almost overnight.

When the new Prime Minister emerged from the crisis-huddle to made that “People’s Princess” speech, all he did was pour unction on the fire. He said he shared our grief... and rode out the shockwaves from the sentimental explosion that followed like an old pro. New Labour were In: nobody could doubt it after passing a test like that. It appeared to give popular licence to what had been building up for days, maybe decades; but in the end it was hollow - only a permitted outflood of hysterical mourning for an amplified signal on screen, dots on paper, the telescope’s love for the furthest possible target. Nobody really benefited. All it achieved was an infantile flare-up of conspicuous emotional waste that didn’t even get her a brand-new memorial children’s hospital in the end.
But it still didn’t mean that an awful lot of that grief hadn’t been genuine...

My head was slowly running itself dry with thoughts like these; a situation far from healthy. I took a deep, shuddery breath and mentally resurfaced. Daylight. Outside the cab, Morden High street was a fully functioning ghost-town going about its own business - nothing new about that, only now the rest of the world had caught up with it for a while. Boot and I were plotted-up on the side of the road opposite the Tube station, a couple of yards up-traffic from what was then the End of the Line pub, for the simple reason that, for the next ten minutes at least, there would be nowhere else to go. Our general plan was to wait for 11 o’clock and the world switching itself on again, score half an ounce of bud and some Budvar, link up with some similarly shell-shocked mates of ours, dig Graham’s decks out, and then Party for the same reason that makes small-town Pub Loners bugger-off to Marseilles and join the French Foreign Legion. It was looking to turn out a good one already.

So we sat there and watched the Street go by. Nothing much to see, for us: Morden is (and was even more so, back then in ‘97) a mainly indigenous terminal suburb tenaciously belonging to the kind of Working Class who actually fit that description. It was shut.

Boot moved, which almost made me jump out of the seat with shock. I looked round; all I could see of him was gold-on-black Fred Perry and a pair of blue-tinted lenses pushed on top of long, ponytailed hair.
‘Christ, Steve,’ he croaked, straightening back and pulling his face out of his hands, ‘I just wish they’d hurry up and bury her!’
He looked like a trapped, goaded animal who wanted out. I could more than sympathise.

The great majority of people witnessed that week’s final hour via the Media, together, directly plugged in to the same basic series of images and emotives as everybody else was. For those of you reading this who missed out on what it felt like to be ‘off-line’, so to speak, I can tell you from mine and Boot’s experience; it was incredible; it was awful. It was Götterdammerung, scripted by Barbara Cartland. We could only watch, and wonder.

Then, suddenly, I caught sight of something that made me double-take as violently as if I’d seen a family of Hassidic Jews skipping down Morden High Street eating hot salt-beef bagels. I thought they were Hassidim, at first. Boot didn’t need prodding - he was straight on it:
‘Good god, get on that!’
I already had. It was an entire local family, or most of one. Strangers to us; Mum, Dad, couple of kids and one set of elderly grandparents. Nothing out-of-place about that, except for the purposeful, grouped way they were walking, the hats, and the way they were all dressed, well… as if for a funeral. A very formal one. A Royal funeral, no less. Gods know where they were going to watch it.

Morden’s always been a bit more - on a good day - smart-but-casual than track-suit bottoms and adult baby-grow in style, but this mob stood out like a stand of ravens in a budgie farm: sharp and forbidding in their sleek anachronistic sobriety, not so much a flashback to an earlier, less pampered layer of urban inhabitant as a last rising, a last showing of something very, very deep, London and ancient. The Old Man - obviously the Guvnor - looked like everybody’s Mum’s tales of her poker-bending Elephant and Castle Granddad in his flat cap and muffler. Still as hard as a docker back then, by the look of him. Laugh and he’d deck you, whoever you were. Then the others would take over.

The rest of the family had a strange, unembarrassed cohesion to them, an un-questioning unity of purpose almost alien to modern English eyes. The liberal concept of the Generation-gap never quite filtered this deeply into the Working Classes - fathers and teenage sons still regularly go on the after-work kick-off piss together in this part of London to this day.

‘Paying their respects. Well, bloody hell...’ said Boot.
We watched them disappear into the middle distance and be swallowed up by the future, gone. I can’t remember if either of us actually said ‘We’re never going to see a sight like that again,’ but both of us remember knowing it, in that same instant.

Which left us staring at the street with five minutes to go, bored shitless, and not a traffic warden in sight. They knew better, on this of all days.
My right hand had automatically turned up the all-channel live radio commentary of the funeral for want of something better to do. It droned on, plastering a thin skim of clichés over the banal, deserted street-scene outside.
‘On this, saddest of days.... everybody, united in remembrance.... a nation says farewell to.... The Casket....’
A pair of Teds in a white van suddenly realise the World’s stopped turning.

In a way, it was dignified, moving and restrained; from our vantage you could have inserted a shot of Morden High Street, completely still and empty, into a Cardiff... New York... Leamington Spa... on-the-spot sequence without missing a beat or lessening any drama. Then Peanut turned up.

We both clocked him, shaven headed and in a hurry, turning the corner by the snooker-hall. We sank in our seats, but he still didn’t notice us - Peanut was too concerned with getting into the pub as quickly as possible to notice anything, including the fact that the pub was closed. The discovery bought him up sharp, almost with a bump.
We watched him peer into the murky depths of the boozer then skilfully pick the staff out of the gloom like recalcitrant winkles:
‘OI!’
We heard the blasphemous shout rattle down the empty street like the opening salvo of a coup d’état and grinned at each other like guard-dogs scenting trouble. Talk about impeccable timing - you could only take your hat off to it. All of a sudden the words coming out of the speakers were unimportant to us. This was the real stuff.
No reponse from the boozer. Next move:
‘OPPENUPYOUCUUNTS!’
SMACK!
Peanut’s legendary hammerpunch oscillated the locked doors like a near-by bomb-blast; the noise and effect were phenomenal, considering the circumstances. I was half-appalled and nine-tenths in awe of what I was seeing. I know Boot was impressed as well.
Peanut put the boot in a bit until a nebulous whitish blob hovered a safe distance behind the glass. The one-sided negotiations had started; the barstaff knew Peanut well: they had to, in their job.
‘Come on you cunts, I wanna Stella! You’re all fuckin’ Paddies in there, anyway! Lemme in, for fucksake, I wanna ( FX: SMASH!) beer! It’s Eleven o’clock - The bitch is in the ground... things are back to normal!’

At the time, I thought they were the sanest words I’d heard in almost a week. A truly magical moment.

The spell was broken and we were released. Some street movement - the pub doors reluctantly swung open and Peanut slipped inside for gods knows how many or what. The long, static-free silence on the radio suddenly exploded as Kiss FM kicked in with normal service and dance tunes pounded out again as if nothing had happened and the world still turned on its axis as it had only a week before. It was over.

Boot expelled a deep breath, started the engine, then gave it a second or two to get his bearings back.
‘That’s that, then,’ I mumbled, ‘Like Peanut said, back to normal’. Boot grunted as he swung the van round in a violent U-turn, then started fumbling with the buttons on his mobile as soon as we’d shot the roundabout and the country started to come back to life. Calls to make...
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’

© Stephen Mark Cox 2007

[CUT TO: Sandy standing in front of what looks like an indoor ticker tape parade.]

SANDOZ PFIZER: “Thanks Chase, you know there’s one thing you can say about having six minds. Three’s company sure, but six is a party! Which is in keeping with the spirit of this Encuentro here at the Spare Centre today. I’m having severe trouble at the moment in not lapsing into mahasamadhi as I talk to you, as I am surrounded by some of the top yogis and siddhis from the metaverse. I actually spoke to the organisers about ten minutes before we went on air and they estimate that attendees have come from ten to the power of 38 universes, which puts the Kumbh Mela in the shade I think you’ll agree Chase.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Well Sandoz, if you do decide you want to turn into a ball of light at any moment then just say and we’ll go to a pre-recorded item.”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “I’ll be fine, Chase as I’m grounding myself at the moment with the memory of a bad relationship I had in the 2090’s.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Whatever floats your boat as they say Sandy. Now of these yogis you’ve met, have there been any stand out characters?”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “Well, I was in the hotel bar last night and met Jacques DeMolay, the Astral Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion which was very interesting - he told me some very interesting stuff about Lucifer, Adam Weishaupt and Rudolf Steiner. But what was really far out was that as he spoke, the tone of his voice began to change like it was synthesised or filtered.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Not unusual in this day and age, Sandy. What’s the scoop?”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “As it turned out, Jacques wasn’t in the hotel bar at all. I was talking to a projection of holographic light from another universe in another dimension - an animated stained glass window as he likes to call it. The phasing effect was thermal fluctuations in the phase boundary between our universe and the multidimensional fluid that exists outside it. Jacques now exists in a purely photonic universe and rarely incarnates in any matter-containing universes. The hologram is an avatar that he despatches for social occasions such as this that require his attendence.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Well I certainly never knew that Sandy. What other tidbits have you picked up there?”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “Last night I also bumped into the Real Head of the Illuminati, Robert Anson Wilson. He’s currently standing trial in Belgium on a charge of mindfucking Kerry Thornley into thinking that he was the second Oswald. Bob exclusively revealed to me that the CAI have established the nature of the other Oswalds.

CAI investigators travelled back in time and discovered that the so-called deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper in a plane crash were part of an Operation Midnight Paperclip effort to secure the DNA and physiogomy of talented celebrities. That DNA was used not only to provide gene therapy to the original Oswald and ancilliary patsies, but years later found its way into Britney Spears’ genome. A simple DNA scan will establish whether Thornley has the Nazi genes or not, which Bob believes will get him off the hook.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Well, it sounds like Bob’s opened himself a real can of worms there. Something tells me that this one will run and run.”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “I’d agree with you there, Chase.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “I thank the stars that adherence to all forms of jurisprudence is purely optional these days. Thanks for sharing that with us, Sandy.”

SANDOZ PFIZER: “The pleasure’s all mine, Chase.”

CHASE MANHATTAN: “We’ll go back to Sandoz Pfizer there at the Spare Centre in uptown Luxor later on in the show. But first, let’s take a quick look back at the very first CAI Encuentro, 113 years ago. Ariane Vostok reports on how a ragged group of 2012 survivors created the unique organisation that is the Crunch Authenticity Institute.”

[CUT TO: Caption card reading ‘The Crunch Shall Set You Free’. FADE TO: Ariane Vostok standing in the middle of a meteorite crater.]

ARIANE VOSTOK: “I’m here in Sudbury, Ontario at a crater forged in the white heat of a meteorite impact sixty million years ago. It was here that a disparate groups of artists, musicians, philosophers and fringe scientists came together in an unexpected series of events surrounding the epochal events of 2012 to form what became the Crunch Authenticity Institute or the CAI as it’s known.

[CUT TO: Archive footage of the CAI pioneers.]

ARIANE VOSTOK: “The 21st day of December 2012 had been predicted by the Mayans as the end of one great cycle and the beginning of another. This belief had grown to epic proportions by the year 2012, one which the Archons hoped to capitalise upon by ushering an age of total repression. It is fortunate that they did not bank upon the efforts of a number of misfits with imagination who admittedly did have a little help from some unusual friends. I travelled to Dimension Tetra-Gamma-Sine FF7AC3FF to speak with the offfical spokesperson for the Men In White Hats, Simon Magus.

[CUT TO: Simon Magus sitting in a chair opposite Ariane Vostok.]

ARIANE VOSTOK: “Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to speak with us, Simon.”

SIMON MAGUS: “The pleasure’s all mine, Ariane. Actually, I’m a big fan of Sorry About The Concrete, You Should Be Able To Walk Out Of Your First Floor Window Once It Sets.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “Thank you Simon!”

SIMON MAGUS: “Anytime, Ariane, anytime.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “Now let’s talk about the events leading up to 2012. What was your involvement with the founders of the CAI prior to 2012?”

SIMON MAGUS: “Well, we’d recognised that - if you’ll pardon the pun - 2012 represented Crunch time for that plucky planet called Earth.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “’We’ being?”

SIMON MAGUS: “The Men in White Hats. Humanity stood at a fork in the road. One road led to Ahriman, his Archon acolytes and eternal oppression. The other led to eternal liberation and Lucifer, the chump, thought that he could shepherd humanity down it. As we now know, he was in the thrall of Ahriman all along. This personal failing of Lucifer’s led humanity to unwittingly admit into its dimension those pesky demons now known as Cuckoos. These demons had synergised with the human race - without its knowledge predominantly - to such a degree by the late twentieth century that we knew that the Cuckoos had something truly appalling up their sleeves in order to bring about the triumph of Ahriman. After all, they had completely infiltrated the upper echelons of the United States, which at the end of the twentieth century was the only superpower - a most disturbing turn of events. We had to find that element of humanity that was not in the thrall of the Cuckoos and give them all the assistance we could muster.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “How did you accomplish what would seem in retrospect to be an impossible task?”

SIMON MAGUS: “We surmised there were two kinds of people that we sought. One kind were people who were ttruly awake - real psychics, advanced meditators and so on. If a Cuckoo attempted to invade them, they would simply be able to shrug them off and laugh at them. The other kind were people who had acquired immunity to the Cuckoos, usually through chronic pot smoking or psychedelic usage. For example, we found that people who had consumed a West African rootcalled Eboga all gained immunity. We signed up the Pygmy and the Bwiti at the drop of a hat, especially as they understood exactly what we were.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “Which is?”

SIMON MAGUS: “You’ll have to find out for yourself some time.”

ARIANE VOSTOK: “I’d very much like that. But let’s get back to the CAI. Did you seek out many of its founders before 2012?”

SIMON MAGUS: “All of them. Apart from the Bwiti and the Pygmy, they were the easiest to find because they had encountered the Crunch long before we showed up to tell them about it. Many of them had experienced it in their childhood and as a result were extremely adept. In adult life, they either theorised about it and became philosophers and writers or they attempted to recreate it and became artists, musicians or fringe scientists. These efforts to bring on the Crunch acted as a beacon for us. Once we found them, we gave them what they wanted and needed.”

[CUT TO: Ariane Vostok standing in the meteorite
crater.]

ARIANE VOSTOK: “It was that assistance provided by the Men in White Hats to those individuals who went on to form the CAI that led them to gather at this meteorite crater in Sudbury on the eve of 21st December 2012. It was here that the Maximum of 2012’s Crunch Incursion occurred. The exact order of events is still hazy to this day, but it is certain that they were in exactly the right place at the right time. The morning after, those individuals pledged to ensure liberation for all
and adopted the motto ‘The Crunch Shall Set You Free’. Thus the CAI was formed and the rest, as they say, is history. This is Ariane Vostok for Crunch News Tonight at the birthplace of the CAI.”

[CUT TO: Chase Manhattan atop the Omphalos.]

CHASE MANHATTAN: “Many thanks there to Ariane, who took two days out of her vacation to take the arduous trip to the Tetra Dimensions. You can see her full interview with Simon Magus in tonight’s edition of Sorry About The Concrete at FE:0F Metaversal Time. In a moment, we’ll be returning to Sandoz Pfizer who’s at the Spare Centre here in Luxor with all the gossip and rumours surrounding the 113th CAI Encuentro. That’ll be right after some messages. Stay tuned to me, Chase Manhattan, on Crunch News Tonight.”

But have the seedier elements really left the Parade for good and, if so, where did they go? One possible answer seemed to lie in rumours of a ‘F**ck Parade’, held by the city’s disaffected to coincide with the ‘sell-out’ even. The Planet dispatched 2 of Wapping’s most distinguished reporters, Tammi and Dominic, to investigate the last event. It didn’t take them long to sniff out the rumours’ source at a derelict community center in East Berlin, where the city’s subversives converge. Now, in a Planet TM exclusive, we reveal the truth of the drugs, drink and paranoia that are fuelling the rise of the Love Parade's darker and distinctly un-loving twin...

"The building was not easy to miss, the first 20 feet of it having been blown away by a bomb in the Second World War. We were informed of this fact later by the squat’s current occupants who, far being put off by the condition of the building, seemed to regard it as a 'find' which they proceeded to claim for themselves. The homeless residents of 'The Kopi' (their name for the squat) live there in poverty which forces them to leave the site in a dangerously DIY state of disrepair. Indeed, the building’s war-torn facade seems only to enhance its appeal to the 40-odd inheritors of Berlin's politically turbulent legacy we discovered within.

"Despite the squat's foreboding appearance, my colleague and I ventured past the row of caravans blocking its gate and into the front yard. Off of one gloomy corners of the yard was a room - this was the makeshift bar where beer and wine were sold. We ordered one of each, after quickly deducing that there was no Pimm's & lemonade to be had. As we took our drinks back out to the yard the barman began locking up for the evening, despite it being only 9:00 pm. When we asked why, we learned that it had been open since the previous evening, for a pre-'F**k Parade' party. Bingo!

"We attempted to question the few scruffy-looking youths dotted around the yard, but they clearly didn't speak English because they gave no reply, not even when we showed them our Planet press cards. Eventually we made a contact in the form of a lone American man, who'd come outside looking for beer. After telling him that we wanted to 'skin up' - the street slang for making a cannabis cigarette - he was quick to invite us up into the squat. We were shown to a roof terrace, which passed as their living room, where we joined two other squatters drinking beer on furniture that had seen better days. Dom took a seat next to a homemade greenhouse full of marijuana plants and I noticed him eyeing it warily - or was it hungrily? As joint after joint of the illegal weed was rolled and passed around, Dom and I coaxed the squatters into a discussion about their scene's beliefs.


"We were bombarded with music recalling the worst excesses of the punk era as they detailed a so-called 'recycling conspiracy' involving America, the Indian subcontinent and several top ranking government officials. They also revealed that they collected bottles after festivals ('like the Love Parade' they sneered) and then returned them to the shops for money. That this meant they were taking part in the ‘recycling conspiracy’ themselves did not appear to faze the squatters. As for the “fuck parade” organized by their fellow inmates at the squat, they claimed there was no point in going as there ‘weren't enough empty bottles to be had’. They also cited its 2:00 pm start as a problem for being 'too early'.

"Although his leather jacket was noticeably shiny and un-scuffed, my colleague Dominic quickly won the squatters' trust, and when they began talking at length about a local bar called the Red Rose he offered to buy them a drink there, sensing another good lead. Not only did they enthusiastically accept our offer, but a tray was then produced with lines of speed (amphetamine sulphate) neatly laid out on it. The squatters urged our reporter to partake and paused to watch as he did - some sort of bizarre initiation rite, surely. I only narrowly avoided a similar fate by feigning rhinitis.

"Now sufficiently intoxicated to brave the walk to the pub, the squatters led us down a creaky stairwell and through a door marked 'NOT AN EXIT!' in what was clearly a cynical attempt to foil trespassers. As we passed through the front courtyard Dominic and I dodged rats skulking in the shadows.
'We just throw bricks at them,' the American squatter confided.

“He strode brashly ahead of us, staking out his position at the head of the group. His voice had been rising incrementally ever since the last line of speed and the others seemed awe-struck by his words, allowing him free reign over the conversation. During the course of the walk, he varied the pitch of his voice theatrically, almost as though his various personalities were conversing amongst themselves. The others laughed casually at this performance; apparently, an all-too routine event.

“Could this be the phenomenon known as 'amphetamine psychosis' we were witnessing? Whatever it was, I became increasingly nervous about my colleague’s mental state as he started giggling along with them. However, the sign of the Red Rose was already looming up ahead. Was it here that we would find out where the drugs were coming from? Was the Red Rose the last bastion of Eastern German Communism? Whatever lay in the bar ahead of us, it was now too late to turn back.

"To say the Red Rose had character would be a gross understatement. It was a dimly lit L-shaped affair, hosted by an amiable, if somewhat simple Turkish landlord. Dominic and I had both met some eccentric characters during our long years of investigative journalism, but the Red Rose clientele really took the biscuit! Mostly looking as if they had either been pensioned off or were about to be, they seemed to be a combination of 'alternative' gay men, transvestites and other types, which, in the UK, would have been politely known as being 'in the care of the community'.

"As Dominic sized up the bar he became, to his embarrassment, the object of much attention of a somewhat unsavoury nature from these characters. Ever the professional, he attempted to engage them in something resembling normal conversation, in as much as this was possible with his pre-GCSE German and their even less qualified English. Meanwhile, the squatters and I had become cosily ensconced in one of the American diner-style booths at the back, cheerily toasting one another like the old friends I hoped they had accepted me for.

"Quite far from disliking these ruffians, I was beginning to find the one nearest to me almost attractive. I discovered the reason why when he put his arm around me and whispered, "I put an E in your drink," before nibbling my ear.The fact that the Kopi version of pillow talk left a lot to be desired did nothing to alter my good mood. In fact, my state of inebriation was such that I found myself wanting to spend the night with the urchin, whom Dom and I had nicknamed 'Plasticman' thanks to his thick-rimmed glasses and shaven head. Meanwhile, my fellow reporter was being harangued by the freeform-psychobabble-spouting American and his mates, all of whom were cadging one fag/drink after another off him. What with the mixture of drugs, alcohol and anarchy it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain our cover, but we felt little fear in our chemically-numbed state.

"It wasn’t long before all our euros were spent and any question of returning to our 5 star hotel evaporated; we didn't even have enough for the cab fare. We left the bar with our contacts and didn't ask any questions as they steered us back the same way we'd come. The hospitality extended to us by the squatters seemed entirely innocent as we once again passed beneath the building's shell-shocked façade, but this too proved to be a drug-fuelled illusion which didn't take long to crumble, once inside.

"On my way from the loo to the terrace, I found my compatriot sprawled unconscious on the sole indoor sofa, oblivious to the mice running over him. I sank down next to Plasticman on one of the terrace couches, anticipating some further 'research' into ecstasy's legendary aphrodisiac qualities - but the American had other plans for us yet!

"He must still have been high, because I felt his beady eyes on us as he threw himself down on the couch opposite ours. Without warning, his game-show host-style voice erupted from the dark, jolting me out of my beau’s embrace.
'So, tell us a little bit more about yourself!' it barked. I politely declined, feigning tiredness, but he carried on. His questions about 'who I was', 'why I was there' and 'how I'd found the place' at first sounded like misplaced chitchat, but they quickly became more interrogative. I deflected most of this unwanted attention by humouring the cretin, but he hung on tenaciously. His fevered ramblings gradually became more menacing and I began to fear he might be onto our real reasons for being here.

"As if to confirm this, he ranted, 'You’ve just been sitting here, observing us all night! You think we’re just another tourist attraction, like the Love Parade, don’t you! Well, we're not!!' I tried to laugh off this suggestion but he was having none of it.
'Stop evading the issue!' he shrieked.
Then, leaning unsteadily over one of the couch's wobbly arms, he snarled, 'what is it going to take for me to get the truth out of you?'
'You don’t have to be like that!' I burst out, alarmed. 'I’ve got nothing to hide!'
'Well, if you didn’t come to Berlin for the Love Parade then why did you come here, hm?' You think you’ve fooled us, but you haven’t! You're just a couple of…. tourists!'
Realizing with relief that he was on entirely the wrong track, I decided to play along with this.
'Er, yes, we're tourists - we just came here for the Love Parade like, er, everyone else. Um, is there something wrong with that?"

"Instead of cooling off, the American’s enraged features contorted further still. For a moment I didn’t understand why, but slowly it dawned on me. Not only had Dominic and I partaken in a massive, consumerist, mindless event like Love Parade, but I was shamelessly admitting to having done so. The homicidal look spreading across his face clearly expressed the extent of his feelings about the capitalist system, which we, and Love Parade, represented.

"The American began gesturing wildly, foaming at the mouth. This seemingly trendy young rebel had reverted to a loony of epic proportions before my very eyes. I had inadvertently come face-to-face with one of the genuine, drug-crazed revolutionaries we’d been searching for - a victim of his own paranoid politics – but I couldn’t even get my camera because Dominic was using it as a pillow. And it would have made such a great close up...

'You, you’re the enemy!' the American was muttering feverishly, his eyes fixed on me as he felt blindly about himself for something to ward me off with. I looked to Plasticman imploringly as he withdrew his arm but he feigned sleep. Then I noticed the American was taking aim with a brick and, seeing as sex was definitely off the menu, it seemed a good time to leave.

"Just then, my colleague awoke with a start to a roof full of tension he could have cut with a knife.
'I say, I could murder a cup of tea!' he yawned in a particularly plummy accent. This was the final straw for the American.
'GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!' he exploded.
'Temper, temper,' Dominic chided, dodging the brick. Flicking V-signs, we both dashed to the stairs as our hidden camera crew jumped up from behind the marijuana plants to follow suit.

Running along the remains of the Berlin Wall with our pens and recording equipment clattering in our pockets, I wondered if we shouldn’t somehow feel a little ashamed of ourselves for being such sneaky, sensationalist hacks?
We at the Planet TM prefer to let you, the reader, be the judge of that.

By Alexia and Dave