Props to Stormzy for the title. Or, as Prince King Charles might say: ‘Who is this Stormy chap? One’s never heard of him’.

The Fish, while as (dis)interested as anyone in the unravelling of modernity, is ultimately less concerned with the falling crumbs of the crumbling old order than the larger mosaic of which they are fragments. That said, the Fish has been keeping its head down for a while now and swimming along with its mouth closed. This was partly due to a summer affair with covid, partly to overheating and partly due to, well, what can you say really? If anyone still imagines that the wheels are not coming off then they are optimistic indeed.

It’s been one of those summers – the kind that has never happened before, when everything seemed to catch fire or was just one lazy spark away. For the UK it has been one of those weeks in one of those summers, one which ended with a vacuum at the top of the pyramid.

It saw the arrival of a self-serving 2D prime minister and the passing of a monarch, and with it a breaking of the last strand tethering the British identity to the imperial pretensions of their past. It may well have been having to meet Truss and Johnson together last weekend that finally did for the Queen. If you were on your last legs, who would you not want turning up at your hideaway Highland castle? We only need David Attenborough to put on the wooden pyjamas now and we’ll be done for, good and proper – if we’re not already. 

And so here we are. Is this what the fag-end of post-imperial decline looks like? Sadly, probably not. Such is the actively criminal, entitled incompetence of the Conservative governments of the last decade that the UK is now set on a course that it is going to be hard to pull out of now without going perilously near to the edge of some kind of abyss. But like many other nations, perhaps we need a good peep into it before we change our ways.

Where does it go from here? Is it down to the lake I fear? It has to be the question of our times, especially given that no one seems to have any sense of where we are. And if we don’t, how can we hope to take our bearings? We’ve had many warnings but haven’t taken any notice let alone done anything. So, if things are beginning to kick off now we can’t complain.

Let us at least keep in mind that great knowledge holds that we are 320+ years into a 2400 year-long ascending age (Bronze). The 300-year transition from the grim material age to this energy age ended in 1899, but the icy tentacles of the dark ages mindset are indeed tenacious. As we begin to contemplate constructing a new paradigm, or at least the end of the existing one, the resisting grip of the old tightens.

Are we beginning to twitch? We should, because we are staggering towards disaster with our fingers in our ears. So focused are we on the minutiae and – literally – putting out fires that even at this late hour we fail to comprehend the scale of what’s ahead. As the Fish is often wont to say: it’s all going to get better; and it surely will. But quite likely not this side of a coastline-changing rise in sea levels, among other things.

Meanwhile, the UK is looking forward to a cold winter of power cuts, candles and people struggling to make it through. It’s empty at the top and chilly at the bottom. To paraphrase Winston, now is the autumn of our incontinence. Possibly. And as the royal head receives the crown, heavy is the heart that wears a frown.

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