(Den Sjunde Soptunnan)
Voiceover: A voice reads from the Book of Reclamation:
“And I saw when they opened one of the bins, and I saw and behold a blue bin lid; and in that blue bin was paper, newspaper, magazines, shredded paper, milk cartons, juice cartons, to be sorted and washed and rolled and remade and reused.”
Scene: A small bay on the coast. Daybreak. Waves roll in gently over the pebbles and rocks on the beach. Larger rocks break up the strand, on one of which leans a small man in an even smaller suit. He appears to be gazing into the distance, but he sees nothing. He is deep in thought, trying to ease his troubled mind. A small distance away lies another man, flat on the pebbles, head down, asleep.
A figure in a dark hooded cloak appears. On closer inspection, his cloak is dirty with mud and soil. One would even think that weeds and grass were sprouting from creases and folds in his robes.
“Who are you?” says man
“Jag är Jorden,” says the figure. The pun works better in Swedish. “You have long walked at my side. I have come to ask for your help. Are you ready?”
“Wait a moment! Do you gamble?” says the man as he gets out three dice and rolls them on across a flat rocky outcrop. “I gamble with lives, with the future, with prosperity. I will gamble with you. For your future.”
Jorden smiles and replies, “You gamble with your own future.”
He disappears. The man, left alone, leans back on his rock. This is Filthy Rish, the dear leader of the glorious kingdom. Noble and wise.
The second man, his crude sidekick Anderson, awakes and curses. “____,” he says. He sees Filthy Rish alone gazing unseeingly out to sea, walks over to the rock on which he rests, and gives him a mighty kick.
“Get up you ____ lazy ____!”
Filthy Rish rises and walks into the surf to wash his face. He leans down to cup some water in his hands but realises he is paddling in foul excrement from a sewage discharge flowing into the sea. [This is not metaphor. This is actual UK government policy.]
“You stupid ____,” laughs Anderson. “Noble and wise, my ____!”
They leave the shore and travel onwards. The country is poor, broken through lack of investment, and ravaged by floods and fires. But Filthy Rish and his sidekick do not see this because they travel by helicopter not on horseback. Why waste time and money on hay when you can burn oil?
–——-||———
Scene: a VW camper van parked in a beanfield. There are “Nuclear Power, No Thanks” transfers on the doors and Extinction Rebellion circles on the body. A ragamuffin traveller, who we shall call Runar, strums on a guitar and babbles all manner of hippie nonsense. This is how he earns some of his bread – by busking in various village squares and babbling hippie nonsense. His beautiful, barefooted, fair-haired partner, Gaia, ignores him and feeds their child, who may or may not be called Willow.
The traveller sings:
“Anybody seen a bloke pass this way?
I saw him playing dice with Earth, yesterday
His crusade was a search for votes and they say
It’s been a long time to carry on.”
Filthy Rish and Anderson fly past unseen.
–——-||———
Scene: The inside of a church. An artist is creating images of cartoon characters on the walls. Winnie the Pooh. Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Baloo the bear. Tom and Jerry. Anderson walks in and scoffs.
“____ woke ____,” he cries. “Why always make them happy?” He grabs a thick paintbrush and a large pot of paint and erases the childish pictures. [This is not metaphor. This is actual UK government policy.]
Meanwhile at the back of the church, Filthy Rish is sat in a pew staring ahead. He sees a cloaked figure in the confessional and approaches it.
“I want to confess.” he says. “I am an empty man. I am indifferent to people. I have no principles, no vision, no ideas, just disgust and fear.”
“Perhaps you should try just one meaningful positive act,” says the cloaked figure. “Help me. Perhaps then you would feel something.”
Filthy Rish looks up and recognises that the figure is Jorden.
“Nah,” he says. “Let’s play dice.”
There is a rumble above them. The ceiling cracks and falls in on them all. The church is made of RAAC. [This is not metaphor. This is actual UK government policy.]
–——-||———
Scene: The village square outside the church. Anderson and Filthy Rish walk out into the open, brushing the debris from the church roof off themselves.
They see a young Swedish woman. She is locked in the stocks. Filthy Rish bends down to stare at the girl. She says: “The powerful lock me up because I speak truth to them. The ignorant bully me because I’m neuro diverse.” Filthy Rish ignores her. Anderson kicks her.
–——-||———
Scene: Another village. The houses and shops are boarded up. Whatever that was useful and worthwhile has been privatised and sold off. The rest has been abandoned.
Anderson walks through the ruins looking for food. He meets a figure with a nose like Karl Malden. However, in this movie, Malden isn’t the good guy. He is playing Osborne, the bloke that sold off the village buildings and starved the community. Anderson recognises him. He used to think Osborne was ghastly, but now they are good mates. They agree to meet up later in the story.
–——-||———
Scene: Yet another village. This one is well populated. The traveller and his partner are busking in the village square. They sing an old, old song from their repertoire:
“As I walk through this wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself, ‘Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred and misery?’”
They have attracted quite a crowd. Anderson and Filthy Rish look on. A mechanical Aunt Sally leans against a building. A woman, Truss the Dumb, walks around carrying a sledgehammer breaking things. A would be actor, Johnson the Fake, hams it up next to the stage. Truss and Johnson take it in turn to dance with the Aunt Sally who turns out to be human, but not a dancer. She is May the Vacant.
The performance is interrupted by a parade of refugees being chased, beaten, and whipped by the far right. The crowd kneel and pray while the fascist leader delivers a hate-filled speech blaming the invasion of refugees for the plague, the floods, the fires, the poverty, and all the other ills assailing the kingdom. Filthy Rish and Anderson debate whether to join the fascists and follow them. They have not sunk quite that low yet.
–——-||———
Scene: An inn, “The Stockholm Hotel”. Anderson is looking for a room for himself and Filthy Rish for the night, but the inn is riddled with deadly legionella. [This is not metaphor. This is actual UK government policy.] Anderson and Filthy Rish must continue on their way.
So they all travel together: Filthy Rish, Anderson, Truss, Johnson, May, Runar, Gaia, and their child, as we must all travel together on this journey: the wise and the stupid; the visionary and the benighted; the innocent and the immoral.
Scene: A pasture by the road. Runar, Gaia, Anderson, and Filthy Rish sit on a grass bank. Gaia has collected some wild strawberries. She and Runar eat them.
“This is how we live,” she says. “We live off the land, while treading gently on it. We are the strong. We are the trusted. We live in harmony, sweet harmony.”
She offers the bowl of strawberries to Filthy Rish. Before he has a chance to sample them, Anderson knocks the bowl out of Gaia’s hands and screams: “_____ scroungers, get a proper job.”
Scene: A forest. Many of the trees are dead. The forest is devastated. What hasn’t died has been sold off by Osborne. Runar sings:
“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
Unless some bastard sells it off
To make a tax cut for a toff”
However, the mood is dark. Night approaches ominously. Mist falls. Owls hoot. Ghosts appear. They stop to camp. All are wary. Most are lost in their own thoughts. Anderson talks of portents seen about the land. Tower blocks burning. Rivers flooding. Roads melting with the heat. Storm winds flattening whole towns. UK Government policy.
At the edge of the clearing, Filthy Rish sits playing dice with a hooded figure. Runar is watching. He calls to Gaia in a load whisper. “Gaia, I see something terrible. Something almost unspeakable.”
“What do you see?”
“The seventh deadly bin. So tall and slim. We should have never been with those guys.”
They creep away and climb into the campervan which, handbrake off, rolls silently downhill, away from the others. A storm breaks.
–——-||———
Voiceover: A voice reads from the Book of Reclamation:
“And when they had opened the seventh bin, the grey bin, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.
And I saw that there was nothing useful or reusable in the seventh bin, just the rotten detritus of the world, good only for the fungi and the bacteria and the worms and the dung beetles.”
–——-||———
Scene: The edge of the forest. The dawn is coming. The storm starts to subside and the sun appears. On a green bank, the traveller stops the campervan and gets out to breath in the fine air. He is joined by Gaia and their son. Birds sing. The child laughs. Gaia smiles.
The traveller sees a vision and describes it to Gaia.
“I can see them. Over there. They’re all there. Filthy Rish, Anderson, Truss, Johnson, May, Osborne. And the green god, Jorden, invites them to dance. They hold hands and dance a slow mournful, pitiful dance moving across the hill away from the sun. Jorden leads them on and deposits them with all of the garbage and all of the rubbish, with all of the debris and the dross and the dregs, dumps them all, each one of them, in the seventh bin. The trash bin of history.”
–—————||—————–
With apologies to
- Nick Lowe
- Brian Eno (and the Daily Reckless)
- Spike Milligan
- Scott Walker
and
This is not satire. This is actual UK government policy.
The Ned Wood Archive 