The year is 2117. In an underground bunker, a battered tablet screen flickers in the gloom. On it’s screen are the words “The 2018 Broccoli War”...
A scrawny old man, dressed in tattered clothes enters the room and slumps in a worn chair. Picking up the ancient electronic device, his trembling finger hovers over the screen, before descending on the blinking button bearing the words “Begin lesson”.Prior to 2017, The United Kingdom (as it was then known) was a relatively stable and affluent place. There was concern about a forthcoming “Brexit”, although most were unclear what this actually involved, including the elected government of the day.
The preceding year’s high ‘celebrity’ (see ‘singers’, ‘actors’ and ‘reality TV’) death count, had left the inhabitants of UK on edge, and a seemingly insignificant shortage of courgettes (see ‘watery vegetables’ and ‘middle class food’) early in ’17 was the starting point of a rapid descent into chaos.
Cold and wet weather in Spain (see ‘unbearably hot in July’ and ‘Holiday homes’) and Morocco (see ‘mythical places’) meant a shortage in the supply of many vegetables that the UK climate (see ‘damp’ and ‘misery’) rendered impossible to grow.
Although hard to pinpoint, it is believed that the first riots occurred in the Henley-on-Thames branch of Waitrose (see ‘posh’ and ‘Supermarket’), where a fight over the last Iceberg Lettuce (see ‘tasteless’) escalated into a full-scale riot, with the two factions hurling tins of edamame beans and jars of manuka honey (see ‘how much?!’) at each other, after building barricades between the brioche and hummus sections.
The fighting spread, via social media, and by late in the year, two rival gangs, the ‘Cor Jets’ and the ‘Eyes Bergs’ ruled most of the Home Counties (see ‘expensive houses’).
As desperate allotment holders erected barbed-wire round their plots, and black market aubergines (see ‘inexplicably purple’) exchanged hands for the price of diamonds, the fighting spread.
The healthy eaters were early victims, and power blackouts and a chronic shortage of small tubs of over-priced fruit and veg meant Nutri-bullets (see ‘rubbish lava lamps’) remained empty, and the hungry were forced to burn their spiralizers to stay warm.
By the middle of 2018, the severe lack of vitamins left the scurvy-riddled population longing for the days when you could get cabbage and Brussels sprouts on ration. One final battle, triggered when a rumour spread about the existence on Google Maps of a Broccoli field in Yorkshire (see ‘the foot of our stairs’) saw the exhausted survivors battling to their deaths.
This decisive battle is why we now call this dark period of our history “The Broccoli War”.
Due to their aversion to green fruit and vegetables, many teenagers and the Scottish survived, and this is why emojis are now our national flag, and Irn Bru is consumed on special occasi...
The screen flickers again, and the display suddenly disappears. A tear falls from the old man’s eye. “Rest in peas, friends”, he quietly says, before shuffling out of the room.
This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 17th of February, 2017. You can view the version published on their website here
Wow - this one is weird with knobs on, right? The original plan was to pen a jokey view of what the entirely ridiculous 'Courgette Crisis' could lead to, but it rapidly turned into this... thing... you see above. A strange cross between The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy', a futuristic Wikipedia and some decidedly low budget Sci-Fi movie.
Alarmingly, about two-thirds of the way into the idea I realised it would be massively over-long, so wound it up faster than I would have liked, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Guaranteed obscurity, therefore, awaits. It does make me think, once again, that I could write a book if I wasn't so bleedin' lazy.
Funnily enough, a nice person on Twitter suggested this to me, after a conversation asking if this column, or something similar, had been published before. Turns out they were thinking of this one, which was a futuristic diary entry by a schoolkid, masquerading as a thought-provoking analysis of the downfall of physical retail to online stores. Nearly four years old, I struggled to track it down, so kudos to my reader for remembering!
They also very kindly compared me to John Wyndham. Very flattering indeed - if Wyndham's writing skills are an elephant, I'd be fortunate to be considered a flea by comparison.
(CD A-Z: Alanis Morissette's "So-Called Chaos". I'd tell you the year, but the writing's too small for my ancient eyes.)
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