The City is letting out an almighty yawn, followed by a deep sigh, stretching out its welcoming arms to the sky, and rubbing its eyes in the chill spring sunshine. The City is ready and waiting for a massive pound sterling hug from the chip and pin massive. The City is open to all classes of shoppers. No barriers to commerce here, just contactless where possible please!
Posing like a social media model, the beaming young woman in extravagant technicolour jacket is being fashionably photographed before the background of the hulking iron skeleton of Brighton’s West Pier.
There are many such tourists flocking to the south coast to celebrate the new social freedoms, I ponder, sipping on a flat white in a spanking new uber-restaurant mall on the seafront. People are ordering food and drinks from their laptops, checking in on socials, and scanning barcodes as the digital tills begin to sing megabyte by megabyte.
The restaurant is being bleached and sanitised for business – the front of house, the floors, the waiting staff, the menus, the door handles – all germinated in line with the regs, as the country goes inside to swig pints and chow down burgers in this brave new world.
Outside, the lunatic fringe is braving the biting spring air and stripping off to dip in the shallows. Picnic blankets are unfurled, kids start crying, as the beach beckons the hardcore pleasure seekers. There are no ships on the horizon and the sea rolls on forever to infinity and beyond.
As the seagulls fight for scraps, so the scrap for shopping deals is underway, as I walk through the hallowed doors of the Church Mall. I wander in like a phantom, menaced, alongside my fashion famished, female sidekick.
Squinting under the fake haloed lighting, the three levels of commerce tower before us, floors paved with fool’s gold, where your covid cash only goes so far and the escalators roll on forever.
But the bubble hasn’t burst yet, and over the Church levels, there are bubble branded phones, bubble credit cards, and even novelty bubble teas for the adventurous palate.
In the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse, its business as usual, as masked up retail worker ants busy themselves sanitising clothes rails, security worker ants scan the hallowed corridors for shoplifters of the world, and shopping worker ants pick out designer leopard-print masks for the new world reordering.
Outside now, glinting in the sunshine, unmasked, and taking a deep lungful of breath, the street scene mirrors the consumer carnage scene inside the Church. And I stroll, lost and disorientated, along the streets of this happy dystopian City in the sunshine – past sweat shops selling threads by the suitcase, past sweat shop café’s selling coffee by the bucket-load, and past sweat shop caravans selling bratwurst sausages by the cattle truck.
Waiting outside Mind the Gap store, a washed-out man in a beanie clutching an uber beaker of Costa Lotta coffee starts ranting about rising cases in Bristol, Glasgow, and Bognor, and how he only wants to know about a glass of wine in the sun.
His parting aside is to point to the stencilled graffiti on the coffee shop wall – flowers will grow from the ashes of capitalism – and strolls off swigging on his uber beaker, back into the City that never sleeps.
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