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Chapter 5

“Look at this,” said Jim, showing the message he’d just received on his stretch. “They have offered me a course of five one-hour lectures to expound on the ideas I shared in my speech at the bookshop.”

“That’s good.”

“But that’s not all. The Northern Assembly is contemplating not re-opening the university in favour of more vocational higher education. Can you believe it?”

“Jim, after the last ten years I can believe anything.”

“And that’s not the last of it. There’s another proposal here, more lectures on the effect of the Unity campaign on scholarship. I had better go into the city today.”

When he arrived at the office building where he had been told to go, Jim found a crowd outside. Jim announced himself to the doorman, who was as coarse with Jim as he was being with the rest of the crowd.

“You’ll be in trouble if you don’t let me in,” Jim snapped.

“I was in a camp,” replied the doorman. “And now I take orders from no-one.”

“Me too,” Jim lied.

“Which camp?” asked the doorman.

Jim realised this was an argument he could not win and slipped away. He read that out of the 5 million immigrants that had been in the UK pre-unity, only 250,000 remained. Could they have replicated these statistics in other developed nations around the world? Could this have been another g******e? Another h*******t?

Will Atkinson saw Jim staring at his stretch and, wondering what he was doing, went over to him.

“Oh, don’t worry about him,” said Atkinson after Jim had explained the run in with the doorman. “We’re always having problems with him. He actually was in a camp but he’s completely unsuitable for his job, but they insist on keeping him, there’s nothing else for him to do. We have to do whatever the assembly tells us to.”

Jim wondered whether the country had just stumbled from one autocracy into another.

“I just came to confirm that you actually want me to lecture on Unity and scholarship,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. One hour.”

Jim wondered how he would fill an hour on the subject because in his opinion you could address the whole subject in a sentence; either one is objective or one is fanatical.

On his way home, he saw that the cinema had reopened and asked Annabel and Olivia if they wanted to go. They did and invited Mark and Sofia so they could get a lift.

They watched a remake of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which Jim thought was not as good as the original. He wondered why filmmakers seemed to have an obsession to ruin excellent films by making them again.

The village had no electricity when they pulled up at Mark and Sophia’s, and the house was cold when they had walked up the lane. The wood stove didn’t seem to be efficient enough to heat the house in the cold spell they were experiencing.