The Last Man

First published in 1826, and set in 2093, The Last Man by Mary Shelley is an unsettling account of a plague that descends upon earth and wipes out humanity. The novel charts the thoughts and experiences of narrator Lionel Verney, who is left alive when everyone else has died. Just hear this:
"We will fight the enemy to the last. Plague shall not find us a ready prey; we will dispute every inch of ground and, by methodical and inflexible laws, pile invincible barriers to the progress of our foe. Perhaps in no part of the world has she met with so systematic and determined an opposition. Perhaps no country is naturally so well protected against our invader; nor has nature been so well anywhere been assisted by the hand of man. We will not despair. We are neither cowards nor fatalists....remember that cleanliness, sobriety and even good humour and benevolence are our best medicine".
Guh! I wonder what Shelley meant by cleanliness - hand-washing? - and why does she imagine that plague is not of nature, but an unnatural outside force? Scarier still that she published her book almost one hundred years before the 1918 pandemic, and all of the others we had encountered since. However, in the world she created, health and social care did not exist. Whatever, it is a thrilling story, beautifully written and a pleasure to read, filled with rounded characters and cliff-hanging events all the way through. However, the puzzle remains: just why did the story never attain the popularity of Shelley’s earlier novel? In answering this, we have to consider the Victorian psyche. In Frankenstein, the Monster was an outcast from the beginning. Not fully human, a comfortable readership could seize upon the feelings of security that he engendered, a smug thank goodness that I am not like that. No wonder the Monster launched a thousand other similar stories and was ripe for the movie industry when it happened. But Lionel Verney is fully human. He is every man, anywhere, and the majority of readers possibly found it too unsettling to contemplate such an end to humanity. Nor is The Last Man anyway like a techno-thriller of today. There is no pro-activity by a mad scientist here, no dirty bomb, no stray gene. The plague simply descends and annihilates everyone - except Lionel Verney. Like I said - Guh!

A blast from the past through the Time Tunnel...

Ah, bless Horror channel for its revival of that gem from the 1960’s, The Time Tunnel. From the intriguing Saul Bass-type animation as the opening credits roll, to the hypnotic gyrating of that fabulous op-art tunnel, to the plausible control centre with its spinning mainframe cassettes – remember those? - to the crew of quasi-nuclear scientist operators, it strikes me how well this television series has stood the test of, well, time. Already, stars James Darren and Robert Colbert have been on board a sinking Titanic – though I could have told the set designers that the ship’s fourth funnel emitted no smoke – joined a US space flight to Mars, and convinced a remote community that the advent of a comet did not herald the end of the world – and Darren and Colbert have just landed in Japan on December 7, 1941! Here, I add how odd that a very US-definitive piece of programming should adapt a piece of Eastern bloc music, in this instance, the infectuous Sabre Dance by Aram Khachaturian – born in Armenia under Soviet rule – to synch with rolling credits, spinning tunnel, et al – but what’s a Commie or two between ad-breaks? Overall, a glorious trip to the past. I anticipate future episodes already.

The things that matter....

It is the little things, they say, that make life worth living, words that carry great weight at a time when a speck of badly-behaving matter, so minute that only the most powerful electron microscopes can etc, etc, is causing worldwide chaos and ruin. Scaled up to our everyday lives, this same speck is providing store keepers and supermarket chains everywhere with a thorough evaluation of their stocks, a salutatory lesson in what really matters in our lives: soap, toilet roll, nappies, tissues, bread, milk, teabags, fresh produce, frozen produce, in fact, every type of produce. And still sitting pretty, amid the barren wasteland of empty shelves, are a myriad chocolate eggs and chocolate boxes, all packaged glamorously in anticipation of Easter, a lonely and heartbreaking sight. And seldom in a lifetime have the minutest of minor victories meant so much to so many people, like happening upon the last packet of chicken goujons in Aldi, and the third-last bar of Dove soap in Waitrose. I could go on and on, but I have made my point and to finish, I will say that it is a pleasure to hear shoppers telling the lady or gent seated at the checkout to “stay well” and actually mean it – egad! Maybe we are human, after all. Like I said, it is the little things that matter. On that note, I hope all you readers stay well etc, etc…..