Chapter 11 by Richard Sudlow

“You could say that,” I replied. “It’s a while since we were here,”

“Shall I show you around?” she asked, already out of her seat and walking towards us. It seemed she had already decided.

“It’s very different from how we remember it,” said the taxi driver.

“well if it’s a few years ago, yes it must be quite different,” she replied. “There are still some old people who tell us about this ‘shopping’ that used to happen here. Now we just sustain ourselves. Of course it’s very difficult in the wet and dry seasons.”

“What do you mean? Summer and Winter?” I asked.

“You do talk in strange old language!” she laughed. “No, now we only have two seasons, the wet season where half of the land is underwater, and the dry season, when the reeds get so hot they catch fire.”

“So which are we in now?” I asked, looking around. The ground did look quite wet but I just thought it had been raining.

“This is end of the wet season,” she replied, “which is why you can’t go to the top of the Peninsula at the moment. Just like a lot of the country, it’s become a wetland, with wildlife and birds living there. So when they re-introduced the wolves and lynxes a few years ago, they started going there so they could get some birds to eat.”

“So it’s all gone, the shops, the cinema, the O2?” I asked in disbelief.

“Well of course the O2 is inaccessible because of the water,” she replied. “but the cinema is still there, they show holographic films and hire out headsets.”

“So out of everything that was here, the cinema is the only thing to survive?” I asked incredulously.

“Well nobody has that kind of equipment any more, so they have to go there for entertainment.”

“But what about the shops?” I asked. “where do people get their food from?”

She looked at me blankly. “Well of course we are self-sufficient,” she replied. “Where else would we get it from?” 

Richard Sudlow is a volunteer at the Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park