The Human Condition

much food, entertainment, drink and travel costs in expenses as he possibly could. The good of the community had been long forgotten � never completely ignored, but often conveniently overlooked and put to one side. In the space of a single devastating and unimaginable day, however, everything in Cox's world had been turned on its head.

    Working with the council leaders had stood Cox in good stead, both personally and on a business level. When he'd made a few very public mistakes (a couple of years ago now) and had got himself mixed up in an ill-considered and wholly inappropriate business deal, his friends in high places had looked after him. They found him a quiet and modest little office at the far end of a particularly long corridor and gave him responsibility for the borough's tennis courts and football pitches and various other public amenities which tended on the whole to pretty much look after themselves. They made sure that there were enough of their people working with him and around him to make sure he made the right decisions and to keep him out of trouble. All things considered, Cox was happy with the arrangement.

    Full council meetings were, at the very best of times, long, drawn out and tedious affairs which frequently degenerated into huge, overblown debates about the most trivial of issues. He'd sat there for hour upon hour before now listening to the arguments for and against such issues as the politically-correct renaming of school `blackboards' to `chalkboards' and whether or not the frayed and threadbare chairs in the council chambers should be reupholstered with dark blue or light purple material. Cox switched off whilst these pointless debates raged, writing them off as a total waste of time without even bothering to listen. He never contributed to the discussions and he found it hard to hide his disinterest. He'd always felt the same about the Emergency Planning Committee too although, of course, he'd pricked up his ears and listened intently when they'd explained what the counsellors should do in the event of an emergency. He'd even found a reason to go down and check out the bunker on more than one occasion. The committee � or EPC as they were known � were the butt of many private jokes and whispers. A group of fairly senior council members who regularly got together to assemble and maintain detailed plans to coordinate and run the Borough should the unthinkable ever happen. Well now it had.

    Cox had been one of those counsellors who'd thought the EPC an unnecessary and over the top waste of time and money. He just couldn't see the point in it. The council did a pretty bloody poor job of running things at the best of times, how the hell would it cope in the event of a nuclear or chemical attack or similar? And anyway, the cold war was over and, despite the increased number of terrorist threats and attacks that had taken place around the world recently, such an event seemed less likely than ever, certainly here in Taychester anyway. Listening to the committee members discussing the rationing of food, decontamination of the population, the disposal of mass fatalities and the like had seemed pointless and not a little surreal. If the world did come to an end, he thought, then the population would be buggered whatever happened, and no amount of council diplomacy and planning would help. Whenever he thought about the subject he couldn't help remembering an old American public information film he'd seen recently on TV. `Duck and Cover' he thought it was called. In the film a cartoon turtle walked happily though a cartoon forest, only to hide away and cower safely in its shell when a nearby cartoon atomic bomb exploded. What was the point of telling school children to get under their desks in the event of a nuclear strike? As far as Cox was aware very few materials had been discovered that could withstand the pressure, heat and after-effects of a thermonuclear explosion. And he was pretty sure that even if such a material did exist, it wouldn't be the flimsy wood that the desks the children of Taychester sat behind at school were made from. Even if they managed to survive the blast, what was the point? What would be left? Cox believed it would be better not to survive and `Duck and Cover' was an absolute bloody joke as far as he was concerned, as was the Taychester Borough Council EPC and its underground bunker. If it ever did happen, he had long since decided, he wanted to be stood