Survivors

In the mid-1970s, in the UK,  there was a television show called Survivors, about a very small population that remains in the English countryside after an airborne virus reduces the world’s population by 99.98%. Some of the shocked survivors settle on farmland they call The Grange, and they begin again timidly, teaching themselves the basics of agriculture and learning to get along with strangers. At least that’s the way I remember it.

Another thing I think I remember is that the countryside where the show was filmed looked very much like that in the photograph above  - lots of untamed long grass but also some footpaths and some rudimentary fences. The whole world looking a bit jaundiced. I’ve wandered these Belle Park meadows a lot the last couple of years, almost always alone, and wondered regularly who, if anyone, might come traipsing up this hill as I make my way down. I’ve been a bit player in my own post-apocalyptic series.

Recently I’ve taken to wondering a lot about just how many of us made it completely unscathed through our own more-than-fatal-enough pandemic. Far fewer than we realise, is my guess, and sometimes I’ll come to a sudden panicked stop, sensing the ground not so much shifting beneath me as simply crumbling away, as if it’s being worked in terminal fashion through some land-wide sieve.