Flash fiction: Another Time

A tear in the fabric

He was unpopular so they gave him Louise.

“She’s pretty weird,” said his boss, Sam. He was on a Microsoft Teams call with the Regional Sales Manager.

The latter glared back through the screen, fiddling with the very small, very expensive earbuds that had arrived that morning and kept falling out of his ear.

“And he’s so dull I am surprised the clients can bear to see him,” he replied. “Total nerd. That Dr Who stuff. And his voice. Listening to a sales pitch from him must be like hearing the Beijing phone directory read by a sedated sloth.”

Delabane/Creative Commons

Sam wondered if Beijing had a phone directory, or sloths. Out loud he said: “Well, maybe they’ll cancel each other out. Either he’ll bore her to death or she’ll have one of her turns and frighten him to death.”

“With luck,” said the Regional Sales Manager. “In fact she sounds rather …worrying. Why is she so damned odd?”

“I don’t know,” said Sam. “I think her mother was French.”

“Oh dear. Well, I shall leave it with you.”

He screwed his earbud back in one last time and his image faded. Sam called Ben in from the outer office.

“We’re giving you Louise for the next few days,” he said.

“Oh,” said Ben. Then: “I think I can manage on my own, actually.”

“Nonsense. You need a sales engineer with you. Clients always ask for something to be sorted while you’re there. Let’s go and find her.”

They saw her from behind, walking up the corridor. Ben didn’t recognise her; she had recently been transferred from the Darenth office, having been moved in quick succession from Eastbourne, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge; strange tales pursued her. She was quite tall, slim, with a long glossy ponytail of blonde hair, and from behind she looked elegant and rather graceful.

“I say, Louise!” called Sam. She stopped, and turned, and Ben took a step backwards, for her eyes were ice-blue, like a glacial lake, and something turned over in his stomach.

*

BEN put her out of his mind that night. His mum made spaghetti bolognaise and he always liked it when she did that, and then he wanted to check and clean his metal detector. He had noticed his route for tomorrow would take him close to the site of a medieval village and hoped he might have a spare half-hour. When he had done that, he took Tardis for a walk then watched the episode of Dr Who he had taped the previous Saturday but could not make head nor tail of it. “It’s gone all funny, hasn’t it,” said his mum. “It’s all since they had a black bloke as Dr Who. It’s woke, that’s what it is.”

“But we don’t really know what colour Dr Who was anyway, do we?” said Ben. “I mean, it’s a bit like Jesus really.” He went out to plug the charger in the car.

The next morning he picked Louise up at seven and they drove to their nine o’clock appointment in the Midlands. He looked at her from the corner of his eye and could see no meat-cleaver concealed about her person; she sat there calmly enough and seemed happy with the morning news on Radio 5 Live. She even gave a little cry of amusement when she saw the little plastic Dalek stuck to the dashboard. Now and then he ventured a remark and she replied politely – in fact, she seemed friendly. But she said little.

At length they turned off the A34 and down a broad approach road to an industrial estate. Ben noticed what looked like a small obelisk at the entrance.

The call went well enough. Carter & Co Wholesale Distribution had been happy with their system but now thought it might need upgrading. Ben and the owner watched as Louise sat down with the IT manager and went through each gremlin. She treated him with an easy warmth. There was no sign of oddness. And the client was very happy to be told that they need not upgrade the system for now and that every issue could be resolved. After a cordial leavetaking, they drove out towards the access road.

“You seemed to deal with everything in your stride,” said Ben. “They were very happy.”

“The problems were very simple,” she replied, and laughed. “They often are with Linux servers. They were just out of space on the disk, you know! I showed him how to monitor disk usage and clean up outdated files, logs and data. He just needs to run ‘du’ from the command prompt.”

“You didn’t make it sound that simple,” he said.

“No. There is often something the client should have done and didn’t but you do not make it sound simple because if you do that you will make him feel like an idiot.” She thought for a minute. “Especially if it is a he. Which it often is.” And she looked at him and gave him a brilliant smile.

There’s nothing wrong with this charming woman, he thought. He steered up the approach road and saw again the small monument, three or four feet at most; behind it was an area of old decayed concrete, grown with shrubs; it looked strange in the anodyne estate.

He was about to remark upon it when he heard a terrible sound, half-scream, half moan; turning, he saw her bent below the level of the dashboard, her head cradled in her arms. He stopped the car. “Are you all right? My dear, are you all right?” he asked, then realised that HR might feel ‘my dear’ was over-familiar. Then she raised her head and he saw that her eyes were wide and staring with horror and then she started to cry.

“What is wrong? Do you need a doctor?” he asked.

She shook her head several times. “I will be fine,” she said, and wiped her eyes. “Please do not worry, Ben. This happens to me sometimes.” Then she said: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And somehow he understood that she wasn’t talking to him.

*

They drove on. She redid her makeup in the vanity mirror, and she took a pill. They spoke little. So it’s true, thought Ben; she’s weird. But by the time they came to the next call she was quite composed, if a little subdued; and she joined Ben in a discussion with the client on the renewal of service-level contract, due shortly. He pushed her ‘turn’ out of his mind. They paused at a Tesco Express to buy lunch; a pasty for him, a plastic bowl of mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes for her. They ate in the car park. Two more calls followed. At four he turned the car for home. The late-summer sky had darkened, and threatened rain.

“There’s an archaeological site I’d like to have a quick look at. Can we stop just for a few minutes?” he asked.

“Do you have your metal detector?” she asked. Her face was rather pale, but she was smiling.

“You know about that?”

“Yes, everyone does, and your collection of Dr Who annuals,” she said. Her eyes laughed and to his surprise she reached out and touched him lightly on the arm. “Of course we can stop, Ben. What is the site?”

“It’s probably a medieval village, abandoned in the 14th century. No-one is quite sure why. Some were deserted because the population rose very high about then and the soil was exhausted, and then there were the Acts of Enclosures.” He had relaxed now, his anxiety for her eased; he prattled on about metal detecting. She listened with evident interest. They drew up in a small gravel car park with a National Trust sign. Beyond a low earthwork was a rough pasture with low striations just visible in the earth; here and there, there was a low mound. They were alone. The sky was a livid grey and the air had become thick and dirty.

They crossed the earthwork and looked around. Louise stood still and her eyes, opened wide, were strange. Then she closed them, hard; she started to breathe heavily, swayed and sank to her knees. She gave the eerie half-scream, half-moan she had made before, then covered her face and bent it to the earth. Then she brought her head back and cried with fierce pain, and once again her ice-blue eyes were wide open, staring, and she had gone quite white. She was sweating, and breathing rapidly.

“Louise! For God’s sake!”

He took her by the arm and raised her up; she took great lungfuls of air as he dragged her across to the car and eased her back into it, and then there was a rumble of thunder and the rain started to fall.

She was bent over again. “Pray for them,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at her then reversed away into the lane. “We’ll get you a hot drink,” he said, desperate. “There’s that Tesco’s. We can stop there.”

She nodded. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I will be all right. I will be all right now.” But she was fighting for breath.

He drove the ten minutes or so to Tesco’s, glancing at her fearfully. Her breathing was still heavy but calmer, and after a few minutes she sat up straight and clipped her seat belt on; the staring expression had gone and he felt somehow that she had come back.

The Tesco car park was next to a fuel station beside a busy main road. It was raining heavily now. He got them cardboard cups of tea with plenty of sugar. Then he got a blanket from the boot and made her wrap herself in it and she looked back at him, her face a bit clammy, her hair a little matted on her forehead, but with the beginnings of a smile.

“What a nice warm blanket,” she said.

“It’s a bit doggy I’m afraid,” he replied. “It’s Tardis’s.”

“Your dog is called Tardis?”

“Well, sometimes he seems to be bigger on the inside than… Yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “I hope the tea is all right.”

“You’re very English, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am.” He smiled back, uncertain. “What happened, Louise? Are you all right?”

“Yes. I am sorry I frightened you,” she said. “Ben, I wouldn’t bother with Dr Who. Or the metal detector. Other worlds are much closer than you think. I don’t know what happens. I suppose human distress burns pockets in the fabric around it and they remain, and sometimes certain of us, we stumble across them and we can feel, see, another time. Do you understand?”

He frowned. “What did you see?”

“The people in that village,” she said. “They never left it. It was the plague. It must have been the Black Death. They were reaching out to me, crying for me to help, and their limbs were disfigured with terrible black swellings that bled and suppurated, and these great waves of horror and pain came over me, and – helplessness – always there’s helplessness, there’s nothing you can do. And when we went to Carter’s, I didn’t feel it at first. But it was an airfield once, wasn’t it? And there was this young man trapped in burning wreckage and he was screaming to me for help in this mixture of English and I think it was Polish and he was so young.” She looked up at him, clutching the blanket around her. “I haven’t told people any of this. They couldn’t take it. Except one. My mother’s family priest at their village in Normandy. He knew us all from childhood and he loved us, and he didn’t think I was mad; he did listen.”

“Well, I suppose the bloke’s in the supernatural business really, isn’t he,” said Ben, a little at a loss.

She chuckled. “Yes, he knows how to run supernatural server routines from the command prompt. Doctors were useless.”

“What did he say?”

“That he did not understand God’s purpose but perhaps He had given me an excess of His compassion, and I must have courage.”

“I suppose that helped a lot, didn’t it,” said Ben with feeling.

“In a way it did.” She reached out and touched him on the arm again. “You didn’t think I was mad either, did you? Everyone else does. That’s why I can’t tell them what happens. But you just seemed frightened for me.”

“Yes. You don’t seem mad. Yes, I was afraid for you.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re a Whovian,” she said. “Because that’s weird too. Although it’s sort of nice.”

They were silent for a minute or so, then she said: “This has been happening to me since I was a child, but it is getting worse. I do not think I shall survive it.”

It was dusk and raining heavily, and the light was very soft and grey. He forgot HR guidelines for a moment and reached over to hug her, and she responded. They stayed together for a minute or two.

Then she said, “You will be late for Dr Who.”

So he drove away. As he steered down the A34, it grew dark. But now and then they entered a lighted stretch and he glanced to his left and saw her, exhausted, curled asleep in the blanket; and he felt fear, love and awe.

Plague pits, St Catherine's Hill, Hampshire

Andy Scott/Creative Commons

More flash fiction from Mike:

Evolution The world is turning

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: Evolution

The world is turning

It wasn’t press night but she could still be late home. Sometimes the Weekly News would send her off on some errand that might not turn up a story at all and she would clatter into the flat at seven or eight in a scratchy, liverish temper and the food he’d kept warm would not be well received. Tonight the downstairs door slammed way past dinnertime and she came up the stairs with more than usual vigour. It’s going to be one of those nights, he thought, and wished it wasn’t as he’d spent his day repairing the inlet manifold on a Vauxhall Corsa that should have been laid to rest three or four MoTs ago. Sometimes he hated having his own workshop, taking as he did every job for fear of missing income.

M.Robbins

“Is that you?” he called.

“No, it’s Putin, you pillock.”

“Oh.” He went on looking at the screen. “I should’ve made borscht then. Next time.”

“You could at least turn the volume down when I come in.”

“Sorry. Third Test from Headingley. They’re following on.” He looked round. “Shall I peel you a grape, dear?”

“Perhaps you’d better.” She slumped down on the sofa. “I had to go to Market Sinking.”

“You mean Market Deeping,” he said.

“No, it’s sunk. It’s like Wisbech but worse. Anyway, I went to interview this old engineer bloke in a care home, he’s a hundred.” She flipped through her notebook. “Had to get his life story. Didn’t understand half of it. I asked how he started off and he said” – she looked at her notes – “in 1938 he was apprenticed at 14 to King’s Lynn Shed, whatever that was, cleaning B12s, whatever they were. Then in the war he was servicing Beaufighters in the western desert, whatever and where that means. Then he mentioned something called sleeve valves which were jolly awkward.”

“The B12 was a steam engine in the eastern region that used to haul trains to Liverpool Street, back then,” he replied. “The Beaufighter was an aeroplane. Its engines had sleeve valves, which go round and round instead of up and down.”

“That’s illuminating,” she said.

He looked at her and sensed an unusual mood. “I fancy a Broadside if you do,” he said.

“I would love a Broadside.” She kicked off her boots, sat back and watched as he went to the fridge and opened two bottles of beer. “He said something that made me think about you,” she called. “About the workshop. He said guys won’t work on engines and things the way he did, soon.”

He handed her a bottle. “No,” he said. “We won’t.”

She looked up.  ”You say that too?”

“Oh yes. I should never have bought the workshop. What did he say exactly, anyway?”

“That everything’s evolving. Hang on, I’ve got the quote here.” Like most young journalists now, she knew no shorthand; but she took out her recorder and wound back the file. “Listen to this.” And he heard her voice say: “How have things changed over the years?” She had kicked herself as she said it; it had seemed so trite. But his voice answered clearly enough, if a little quavery.

“Young lady, tell me how you will start your car when you leave here.”

“Oh. Well, I shan’t,” she said. “They key is in my pocket and it talks to the car. As I come up to it the door handle will come flip out and when I get in and touch the brake, all the systems will turn on.”

The old man looked back at her, smiling, one of his eyes watering a little. ”Now, my first car, I went out and started it with a starting-handle,” he said. “There was a self-starter, but it never worked.” He thought for a minute. “If that car was still with us it’d be 105 years old.”

She laughed.

“Thing is, your car now, it doesn’t even have an engine, does it?” said the old man’s voice. “Just an electric motor. And that’s as it should be. Think about an engine. Each piston begins its cycle by sucking in fuel on a downward stroke, compressing it on the upward stroke, being driven down by combustion on the next stroke and then expelling the waste gases on its exhaust stroke. With four such pistons, there are one hell of a lot of moving surfaces, all going in different directions at any one time. So the cylinders that are moving a large surface area that constantly changes direction, meaning that it must also accelerate and decelerate a great deal of mass. And there are belts or chains from the crankshaft will drive the shafts that open and close the valves at the top of the cylinders, and will also turn the water pump that cools the engine and will drive the alternator.”

“Gosh,” she said on the tape.

“Now, let me tell you,” the old man went on. “Good engineering gets simpler. Not more complicated. But petrol cars are very complicated. The most modern of petrol cars is a demented Heath Robinson device that flies in the face of physics. An incompetent child might make one with a Meccano set.” He paused briefly again, then said: “Things evolve, see? They change. They’re changing now.”

“If you were still a mechanic, would you stay one today?” she asked.

“Bless you, no,” he said, and she remembered his smile. Then he had fallen asleep.

She stopped the playback and looked at her partner. He nodded.

“I wanted my own workshop so badly,” he said.

“I know.” She took a gulp of beer. ”But the world is changing, isn’t it? We got to change with it. I will, too. The Weekly News is nearly dead. People post their own news online now.”

“I guess we’d better evolve then,” he said. They were silent for a few minutes, then he glanced at the screen; he’d muted it. “Been a crap season for England,” he said.

“Well some things don’t change, do they.”

He laughed, then frowned. “I’ll sell the workshop,” he said. “We’ll do some thinking, you and I. We’ll be all right.”

“’Course we will.”

He didn’t turn the sound back up; instead they sat there in the quiet as it grew dark. They felt oddly happy.

More flash fiction from Mike:

Another Time A tear in the fabric

When Time Stands Still A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

Parallel Worlds Heat pumps and lentils. And a nice glass of Marsala

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Flash fiction: When Time Stands Still

 A hurricane lashes Pershing Square

That night I went to meet Cara, it was October and it was raining. October is great in New York City; the humid heat of summer is gone, fall’s not here in strength yet and the sun and skies are mellow. But now and then in September and October there’s a tropical storm or a hurricane in the Caribbean and it moves up through the Mid-Atlantic states and on to New England. That’s where hurricanes go to die sometimes. But they’ll lash out, full of spite, one last time on the way and it’s us that catch that.

M.Robbins

So I walked from my office to the cocktail bar at Pershing Square, right opposite Grand Central. The rain was like horizontal and the wind whipped at  my umbrella, it was one of those small ones you buy for four bucks at the newsstands, and it blew inside out and of course I couldn’t get it straight again.

I do love Cara. I always did. I met her in the eighth grade. I was little, short, nerdy. She’d grown fast and was adult height and strong and all the boys were after her already for her deep grey broad-set eyes and high cheekbones and even then she moved like a dancer. I guess I was always dazzled, always in awe.

But she’d be rough sometimes.

That was how I got to know her. She’d never seemed to notice me but then Gina the class animal had me in a corner and was stealing my Metro card and I was going to have to walk home, and it wasn’t the first time and I guess Cara must have noticed because she came over and she pinned Gina against the lockers and spoke to her very quietly and I didn’t hear what she said but Gina had this look on her face like she was just about to be dragged down to hell. She never laid a finger on me after that. Cara didn’t say much then but I sort of felt she was always there and as we grew older we became friends. But she was out of my class. Just such looks and charisma. The guys clustered round her like flies and she loved that, and she was always full of attitude. Me, I just got nerdier by the month. The boys passed me by.

But she had time for me somehow. Not always. She was a people magnet. But now and then she’d shake everyone off and find me in whatever quiet corner I was in and just hang out. She’d ask me how I was doing. When we were in sophomore year at high school I was confused and upset and desperate and I knew she was already having sex and I asked what I should do and she said “Nothing till it happens. You do you”, and hugged me.

Now and then she came round to our place on the Upper East Side and my parents always liked her and said how pretty she was, but she never said much when she was there. I knew where her folks lived, between Amsterdam and Columbus around 100th St on the West Side. I never went there. She never asked me. And now and then I sensed a hole in her armor but I never searched it out, why would I. People do that, don’t they? They search out each other’s weak points, even when they love them. I do that. But I’d look at her and remember that animal Gina backed up against the lockers, her eyes open wide as she stared at the demon that was about to disembowel her, and I’d think no, this one’s on my side.

Then we graduated high school and I went off to Wellesley. Mom and Dad were pleased I suppose, though they didn’t really say so. Not proud or anything, they just sort of felt that going to Wellesley was what one did. Hillary Clinton went there, and Madeleine Albright, and Nora Ephron. Good for the strong Democrat woman they’d brought me up to be. Then I got this job with the Senator. Cara went off to a college somewhere in the Midwest, dropped out and came back to work in sales. She moved into real estate and did OK. Not great, but OK. But she was always in some scrape or other, often with someone else’s husband. I can’t blame them I guess. She got more and more beautiful as she reached 30. And somehow her life got more and more chaotic.

Anyway, that wet night I got the wait staff to put me by a window. She was late and I looked out at the sheets of rain blowing under the Park Avenue underpass. I got stuck into a margarita, and then a second. I’d sort of drifted away when suddenly she sat down opposite me. Then she half-rose and leant over to kiss me. She leaned back and I saw she’d tinted her hair, a mild mauve on top and green down the sides where it fell on her shoulders, and her skin was a perfect ivory and her mouth strong and funny and her eyes seemed bigger and greyer than ever though there were slight creases at their corners that I hadn’t seen before. She asked for a glass of red wine.

“You want small, medium or large?” the waitress asked.

“Enormous,” she said.

“You got it.”

We made small talk for a minute or two, but there was something on her mind. She looked at me. “I just got fired,” she said.

“Oh God, again? What for?”

“Bringing my employers into disrepute,” she said. Her wine arrived quickly and she took a big slug.

“Oh Cara. What have you done this time?”

“I had sex with a client, his wife found the pictures, she put them on Porn Hub and sent the link to the other clients,” she said.

“Oh God,” I said.

Fact was, Cara sucked at life.

“Cara,” I said, "you suck at life.”

“I suck at life,” she said.

We looked at each other and started laughing. She drained her wine. The waitress reappeared. “You want another big one?” she asked.

“Humungous, please,” said Cara.

“Sure,” said the waitress. “You want I use a fire hose?”

“I hope the pictures were good,” I said.

“They were epic,” she said, and laughed. And then she didn’t.

“You loved me for something good I’d done,” she said. And her face sort of froze, and she put her glass down, and she looked at me and that mouth was out of shape and that’s when time stood still as I wondered if she would get a grip, not caring about anything, as she never did; or if something was different this time. It was different. I suppose we stared at least other for thirty seconds max but it felt much longer, and then she was all right.

“You should worry. No-one would put me on Porn Hub,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” she said. And we both laughed but we knew we were different now, and she needed me.

M.Robbins

More flash fiction from Mike:

Another Time A tear in the fabric

Evolution The world is turning

A Man For All Seasons Net zero.The Stranger's Bar. And a three-line whip

A History Lesson Why do we study it?

The Creatives Meeting a tech bro

Homecoming A sort of love story

Solitude A Cold War memory

Rhodri Hactonby's Maps A question of social geography

Hiraeth A yearning…

Strange Places A spirit in the sky 

A Sideways Journey Things might have been different

Displaced Encounter on E94th Street

Belonging Do you? Where?
Leaving Home A house has memories

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

There’s Green. And there’s Green

Two very different ways to see climate action

I have known the bare facts about climate change for a very long time but for years it was unreal, something that I knew was happening but did not think of in the way I would of (say) impending war. Even when I started researching my PhD on climate and agriculture in 2003, I felt oddly dispassionate although we knew by then that we might be in serious trouble.

I can remember when it did first chill me to the bone. It took me by surprise. It was 2007 and I was in Bangkok; the British Council had flown five of us 6,000 miles to discuss climate change. We had just finished a day with colleagues at Chulalongkorn University and colleague Matt and I were on our way to buy Thai presents for our respective partners.

“I’m getting frightened,” I said, quite suddenly. “The climate, I mean.” I waved vaguely at the street. “What’s going to happen? To all this?” – I waved vaguely at the street – “to us?”

Matt was briefly taken aback, but he recovered. “There’s no point in thinking like that,” he said firmly. “Do something about it.”

Mike Robbins

He was right of course. And I’ve just read two books by people who really want to do something. Both are Green Party members; one is a former party leader, while the other has twice stood for Parliament as a Green candidate. They are both good books, but they present – unintentionally, I think – two very different ways of being green. The contrast has made me wonder what kind of environmentalist I am, and has crystallised my own feelings somewhat.

First, Natalie Bennett’s book is titled Change Everything. She is not joking.

*

Bennett was born in Sydney in 1966. She graduated in agricultural science then became a journalist on the Northern Daily Leader in Tamworth, New South Wales. She later served as a volunteer for some time in Thailand before joining the Bangkok Daily Post. In 1999 she moved to Britain, where she had a successful career in Fleet Street, ending up as editor of the Guardian Weekly. In 2012 she decided she’d had enough of journalism and stood for and won the leadership of the Green Party, which she had joined some years earlier. She served two two-year terms, and although not in Parliament, she led the party into the 2015 general election.

I was overseas but remember hearing her interviewed during the campaign and thinking her more sincere, and clear about her beliefs, than the other party leaders; she did not evade a question, and was clearly not in thrall to spin-doctors. But not everyone was as impressed (there was a  notorious interview on LBC that did not go well), and she decided not to seek a third term. Even so, the Green Party had done well under her leadership. She now sits in the Lords, where she is active.  

Change Everything is Bennett’s statement of belief for Britain. She begins by stating simply that our whole moral and economic system is wrong. Green philosophy, she says, “believes in the power of human caring and creativity when freed from the deadening hand of our present oligarchy.” Our system has, she says, ossified; we have been run by a bunch of Oxbridge PPE students who have all read the same political philosophies. …the key ideas that neoliberal and social democratic visions …share in their narrow, so similar, understandings of the world.”

In fact, since the July 2024 election many of these Oxbridge PPE graduates are gone from government. But Labour seems bound by at least some of the same ideas, so Bennett still has a point. She challenges several fallacies, as she sees them: that we must have growth; that everyone must have a ‘job’ in the conventional sense, regardless of its value to society; and that individuals, and nations, must compete with each other.

Her thoughts on work are especially well put. In our system, there are plenty of things that need doing but aren’t done because they don’t pay. But many conventional “jobs” don’t pay anyway, so that people need some sort of income support. Bennett’s answer is Universal Basic Income, or UBI; that is, everyone receives an income that enables a decent life. They can seek work that gives them additional earnings if they wish – or they can rely on UBI and develop their own talents and interests, and/or do work that needs doing in the community.

I am sympathetic to UBI and want to believe it might work, and it might even become an imperative as technology, including AI, displaces existing jobs. But I can’t forget a magazine article I read in about 1970 (yes, I was very young). It assumed that technical progress would give us the time and resources to be everything we wanted. Several random people were invited to try the activities they would pursue; one had a flying lesson, another went hospital visiting. But this future never happened. The magazine assumed the wealth created by new technology would reach everyone but that is not how the world works; the internet and e-commerce have created massive wealth, but it resides with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. UBI is not possible without a redistribution of wealth. Moreover it will mean some people working, others not; the venom already directed at folks on benefits should warn us how this might be taken. I would like to see UBI. But I think Bennett is asking for more than she realises.

There is much more in this book. On education, for instance; Bennett hates the way we bully children with exams, SATS etc. In her view it achieves little and just makes them miserable. I am strongly with her here. (She has recently advanced these views in the Lords while speaking on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.) I also agree with her on government’s insistence on ‘economically useful’ subjects; in recent years we’ve seemed to know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

She rails against wastefulness – in the fashion industry, for example, which generates piles of unwanted clothing, and the commercial horrors of Christmas, which have always grossed me out as well. And in general, she wants some big changes to the way we live and think. She refers to “the key ideas that neoliberal and social democratic visions of society share in their narrow, so similar, understandings of the world.” It is unfair to bracket the social-democratic tradition with neoliberalism in that way. But it’s true that Labour, and its equivalents elsewhere, now share the same ideas of growth and linear progress. Bennett does have a point here. And in general, there is a lot to like about her thinking.

Into the phalanstery?
But I have some misgivings. Bennett has strong views about some things. These include gene editing, which she opposes (again, she has recently spoken on this in the Lords). She is not wrong to have reservations about this; I also do. But the examples she uses in the book, Roundup-ready crops, are not a good example of what crop breeders actually do with molecular markers. And she can be sweeping; the US is, she says, a “white-settler empire” – a brusque dismissal of a complex country of 331 million where I lived for years and have much-loved friends.

More seriously, Bennett’s vision is a little all-encompassing for me. Utopianism has a long and troubling history, from Charles Fourier’s 19th-century phalanstère, or phalanstery – a quite detailed design for a commune – to the collective farms of the Soviet era. In the last century, attempts to impose left- and right-wing utopian visions on populations have had terrible consequences. There is an inherent link between utopianism and authoritarianism, because the utopian seeks to define so many aspects of human activity. There is a sign of this when Bennett talks about advertising of consumer goods that she feels (often rightly) we do not need. “The Green alternative is to clamp down on this unhelpful, stressful bombardment,” she says. “There is no ‘right to advertise’. We can choose what to allow.” Can we? She asks, for instance: “Do we really need ‘smart toasters’?” No, of course not. But if my neighbour wants one, have I the right to stop that – or forbid someone from advertising them?

Mike Robbins

It would be insulting to suggest that Bennett herself is authoritarian. Politically, she wants more freedom, not less; she questions (rightly in my view) whether the UK is really a democracy and sees the urgent need to reform the system. On a deeper level, her ideas on UBI and education are clearly aimed at letting the individual develop in their own way. Moreover smart toasters are a bad example; there are some constraints we might have to accept in future (including on what we eat; more on this in a minute). Even so, it is best not to have too broad a vision of the world you want.

But maybe we do need that green view of the world? If you acknowledge the threat of climate change but want to keep your way of life, you’re in effect saying we can fix climate change with technology. Bennett wants more than this. There is no technology in this book, she says: ”All those things are important and necessary, and there are lots of books about them, but their authors generally have a vision of a business-as-usual society with modern technology. …I mean something far more fundamental and transformative.”

However, one can want a better world, as she does – but still accept that it’s only science and technology that will save us right now, and that for the moment they are the priority. Which brings me onto the second of these books, Chris Goodall’s Possible.

The road to Net Zero
Chris Goodall is a researcher and writer on green technologies and their economics. He runs an interesting, if intermittent, green newsletter, Carbon Commentary. He also lectures, has the odd green business venture and has twice stood as a Green Party candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon (most recently in 2024 against the high-profile LibDem Layla Moran; he did quite well).

I first heard of him in 2016 when he published The Switch, in which he set out the potential for solar power – which he foresaw being our main source of energy by mid-century. I think he might have overestimated solar in relation to wind. Even so, progress since 2016 tends to bear out many of his predictions; for example he saw potential in perovskites, and it looks as if he may have been right. A later book, What We Need to do Now (2020), set out the potential for green hydrogen – Goodall is a hydrogen fan; but, almost as an aside, he doubted that it would be economic for road transport. I thought this odd at the time. But again, he’s turning out to be right.

Now, in Possible: Ways to Net Zero (Profile Books, 2024), he has sketched out just what we need to do to get to net zero by 2050. Goodall is not here to spread impending doom but to show us how it might be avoided. To this end he sets out how the main challenges really can be met, including in hard-to-emit industries like shipping, steel and ceramics. It is an ambitious book but practical and focused, and I found it very encouraging.

Goodall’s basic thesis is simple: To get to net zero we’ll have to electrify pretty much everything, including heavy machinery, so that we can run on renewable energy. But there are three major obstacles. First, we will need one hell of a lot more electricity. Second, intermittency; we’re going to need to store a lot of power to guard against drops in solar and wind energy. And third, we must mitigate emissions from industries that can’t be electrified – because they use processes that require too much heat (steel, ceramics), or because batteries are too heavy (aviation).

On the first point, Goodall says we produce about 27,000 terawatt hours globally a year and that this could rise to as much as 90,000 by 2050 if we are to realise net zero. Given that four-fifths of the world’s energy supply does still come from fossil fuels, is this really possible? He thinks yes, that the current rate of expansion in green energy as documented by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has us on target to get there. Still, in the UK’s case we will need about twice as much electricity as we have now. But Goodall quotes a study that thinks we can do it using solar and wind with hydrogen as storage, and without the need for gas-fired backup. He admits not everyone accepts that (and is not against nuclear if we need it, but doubts if it is economic).

For intermittency, he thinks we will need three basic types of storage: Batteries for very short-term smoothing-out; pumped hydro for slightly longer duration; and stored hydrogen for longer periods. The first of these is working increasingly well in California, so why not in the UK. But pumped hydro involves large construction projects, which will be subject to delays and cost overruns (Australia’s Snowy 2.0 is a warning here). Moreover England’s topography is not great for such schemes, although Scotland’s is better.

As for hydrogen, Goodall thinks the UK needs to store two months’ worth. But this is an awful lot of hydrogen. To put it in perspective, the boss of Centrica, Chris O’Shea, has just (May 2025) said that the UK has about 12 days’ supply of gas – which is easier to handle than hydrogen –  and half of this is in a single place, the Rough storage facility, the future of which is under discussion. Goodall sees the hydrogen being stored underground/undersea, perhaps in what used to be gas storage facilities. He is not being fanciful; large-scale geologic storage of hydrogen is widely seen by scientists as feasible if the geology is right. (In fact Centrica wants to use Rough partly for hydrogen.) Even so, the amount of new storage needed would be huge. And this assumes we can make enough green hydrogen, which will require a lot of green energy.

But Goodall sees nothing insuperable and maybe he is right. What is great about this book is that he is clear about the difficulties faced – then explains how they can be overcome. For example, the third obstacle is hard-to-mitigate industries; Goodall has talked to people who work in these (they include cement, steelmaking, glass and ceramics and shipping) and found that they are pursuing solutions and making them work. One of the most encouraging initiatives he looks at is Sweden’s H2 Green Steel, now renamed Stegra, which is building a steel plant with an integrated electrolyser to make hydrogen in situ, using hydropower. It is not the only initiative of this type.

Equally interesting is his look at shipping, which is one of the most polluting sectors and seen as very hard to mitigate. But ships could be fuelled with e-methanol, which can be made from captured CO2 and green hydrogen; and Maersk have already built a dual-fuel containership that uses methanol. This could also have other uses; not long after reading the book I heard about the Farizon G2M, a Chinese truck that runs on methanol made from captured industrial CO2 emissions.

The caveats
I had the odd doubt when reading this book. Goodall believes that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be necessary on a large scale, involving the capture of CO2 at its point of emission from industrial sites and its storage underground, possibly in depleted oil wells or aquifers. One objection to this (which Goodall acknowledges) is that it can be a disincentive to industry to cut its emissions. In fact there is much controversy over CCS on these grounds, especially in the UK following the 2024 announcement of a £22bn investment in it by the Labour government. And there may be other pitfalls; what about leakage from insecure sites, resulting in unaccounted-for carbon emissions? I have even wondered if this might be dangerous, especially if the CO2 is under pressure; it is, after all, an asphyxiant and about 2,000 people died after a release from Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986.

Goodall would obviously understand these objections but thinks we cannot afford not to include CCS, at least for now. He may be right, but I would rather see any captured emissions turned into useful products – something Goodall alluded to in The Switch but says little about here, although he does discuss e-methanol for shipping. The potential for greater use of CO2 was outlined back in 2019 in a report by the International Energy Agency, Putting CO2 to Use: Creating Value from Emissions. This report did see the difficulties, in particular the amount of hydrogen that might be required to produce fuel from CO2. But Goodall is well aware of this and since the book was published he has argued on Carbon Commentary (January 2025) that CCS might make more economic sense than synthetic fuels, at least for now.

I also questioned some of Goodall’s chapters on food and agriculture. This is an important source of emissions, but some of it can be mitigated. He looks at livestock farming, a source of emissions, and the sequestration of carbon dioxide through agriculture, which is a potential sink. The latter was the subject of my own PhD and I later wrote one of the first books about it (Crops and Carbon, Routledge 2011). Goodall may underestimate the difficulties in getting useful data on the carbon content of a farm; it is not solely about measurement. That presents challenges of its own, but there are also difficult questions around baselines, additionality and especially permanence.

Mike Robbins

But more worrying for me is his approach to livestock farming. Goodall points out, rightly, that our taste for red meat is a major driver for climate change. Cattle and sheep are ruminants, and their digestive processes emit large amounts of methane. Goodall says cattle farming is responsible for about 8% of global emissions. He does not say where he got this figure, but it’s in the ballpark (the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization thinks it’s 7%). We are going to have to confront this.

However, Goodall may not understand the importance of crop-livestock integration in the maintenance of soil fertility, especially in regions where farmers cannot afford N fertiliser (a serious source of emissions in itself). In fact he is quite dismissive, saying many researchers regard rotation with livestock as ‘nonsense’. In fact, it is an important part of many farming systems, and maintaining carbon sinks in agriculture may be difficult without it. He also advocates the use of no-till agriculture to increase soil carbon content; this is not wrong, but it usually involves the use of crop residues and again, in many farming systems these are needed for animal feed. Getting rid of animals is not the answer. They are often essential to the farming system and would not always be replaced by crops – in fact, in large parts of the world this might be disastrous, especially on steppe.

There is also a trap that some Greens seem too ready to walk into: a culture war about eating meat. The fact is, people do. And whether they should or not, they are not going to want to be lectured about it. Or about their choice of toaster.

It’s not easy being green…
But in general, Goodall’s is a pragmatic approach: How do we do this, and save our necks? Bennett by contrast has firm ideas about who we should be. Moreover, although she never says it, she seems somehow to feel that technology shouldn't save us; we should change who we are instead. It would be wrong to see this as a gulf between two individuals; Goodall, like Bennett, is a committed Green, and Bennett does do real-world politics – her record attests to that. In fact they probably know each other. I doubt they would see themselves as having any real ideological difference. Even so, these two books seem to exemplify two very different approaches to being green.

I am happiest with Goodall’s. There are three reasons: Practicality; the dangers of culture wars; and my distrust of utopianism. The last two, in particular, are real threats to the Green movement and they are interrelated.

First, practicality. We are already set to overshoot the 1.5 deg C target agreed at Paris, and this was not random; it was based on what was seen as sustainable. I don’t think we can wait for human beings to become perfectible in nature. We need science and technology to save our sorry ass right now.

Second, renewables have become the subject of a culture war launched by the right. This was predictable. In the UK it’s been spearheaded by Reform, a right-wing political party that gets its funding from sources close to fossil fuels. We are dealing with some quite unpleasant people and we should not hand them sticks to beat us with. I don’t think we’re going to have much luck ordering people to completely change their lifestyles. It’s not a question of whether they should or not; they won’t do it. And telling people whether or not they are allowed a smart toaster, or trying to make them stop eating meat, will be a gift to the other side whether it is justified or not. No-one likes to be approved and disapproved of.

But third, anything that smacks of utopianism should be avoided. Governments must, sometimes, tell people what to do. They must never tell them what to be. Bennett is an exception in some ways, perhaps, because so much of what she wants is profoundly decent, and her concern for individual freedom is clear. In general, though, utopianism has an awful history. Those of us appalled by climate change must work for and with all decent humans, including those with smart toasters. If we don’t, we may one day look just like the fools that have brought us to this.

 

Mike Robbins

Natalie Bennett's website includes updates on her work in the Lords.
Chris Goodall’s Carbon Commentary can be found here and also here.

The pictures in this post were taken by the author at a climate-change demonstration in New York on September 21 2014. More of them here.

Thanks to Neil Monk for taking a look at a draft of this piece.

Mike Robbins's book On the Rim of the Sea is available as a paperback or ebook. More details here. Follow Mike on Bluesky or X or browse his books here.