Collapse Club Conversations

By Brian Jameson

Prophets of doom are not new, but the threat of climate change and global warming creates a whole new realm for concern and worry. Confronted with such possible unpleasantness denial and avoidance are understandable reactions for most people. For a small group of people however the prospect of apocalypse has its attractions. At the Collapse Club people come together to discuss and share ideas on what they see as the most pressing issue of our age, the imminent end of the industrial civilization that began with the Industrial Revolution in the Britain of the late 17th century.

Club members are not downcast and wallowing in the gloom and doom of looming end times. Rather, they chose to meet and explore what it all means and how it may unfold. This short novel assembles a selection of Club members and, in a series of conversations, reveals their thinking and attitudes to what is the existential issue of our age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Jameson
• Release date: Mar 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370633104

Book preview

Collapse Club Conversations

Brian Jameson

First Smashwords Edition 2017

Copyright 2017 by Brain Jameson

Published by Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales are entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part (beyond that copying permitted by U.S. Copyright Law, Section 107, fair use in teaching or research. Section 108, certain library copying, or in published media by reviewers in limited excerpt), without written permission from the publisher.

Cover image courtesy of Nikolaus Thomsen

Cover by Joleene Naylor

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Brief Encounter

Chapter 2: Luton

Chapter 3: Signs and Portents

Chapter 4: Overwhelm

Chapter 5: A Crowded House

Chapter 6: Marsden

Chapter 7: Qantas Lounge

Chapter 8: Hot Air

Chapter 9: On the Buses

Chapter 10: Blaenavon

Chapter 11: Euston

Chapter 12: Luton Revisited

Chapter 13: Consider You May Be Wrong

Preface

This small volume is based on conversations with members of the Collapse Club. I thank all members who allowed their views to be used to explore the existential issue we all face.

I thank artist, Nikolaus Thomsen, for permission to use a photograph of one of his works.

Chapter One: Brief Encounter

Luton is perfect! We meet there on the last Sunday of the month, at 4.00 pm. There is a hard core, Andrew, Richard and Denis and myself invariably attend, and then there are waifs and strays that we see occasionally. Excuse me! Let me rephrase that. I am being misleading and insulting to describe any of the members as waifs and strays – they are good people and valued members, said Brendon.

And where do you meet, I asked.

There is a meeting room we use. It’s at the back of the Anglican Church in Kenilworth Road in Luton. Anglicans are thin on the ground in Luton these days, so they are pleased to get the small fee we contribute through hiring the hall, he replied.

At that moment I was sitting in the "Play on Words" Café, a short walk from Farringdon Tube station talking to Brendon Plowright. As we sipped our cappuccinos Brendon told me about The Collapse Club. The choice of venue for our meeting was Brendon’s. He had nominated that particular café as it was convenient to his job as an IT manager with an international insurance firm in the City of London.

A couple of weeks earlier I had contacted Brendon through the blog site, "Collapse for Dummies in connection with an article I was preparing for New Era Thinker" magazine.

The gist of the message the blog site carried was easy to summarise. It was the Mark 1, standard global catastrophe scenario. In that scenario an event unprecedented in human history is upon us. Abrupt and irreversible climate change is now happening along with massive damage to the planet’s ecosystem. The 250 year experiment with an industrial civilisation based on the use of fossil fuel is nearing its end. The associated overshoot of global population and the profligate use of finite resources is about to trigger widespread global disorder and decay. No political, cultural or technological solution to avert the unfolding catastrophe is possible.

The Collapse for Dummies blog was part of the growing, or rather exploding, catastrophe and collapse sub-culture. That sub-culture has many streams and themes but the general picture, the common core that unites them all, is that catastrophic collapse of our global civilization is imminent.

As a freelance writer I have a fraught existence. I compare it to being a hunter-gatherer. As part of the so-called, precariat I grab work where I find it. Sometimes it’s a case of my suggesting a topic to one of my regular contacts; other times it flows the other way and I am approached by someone with a commission, an idea or a suggestion for a piece of work.

It is all rather uncertain and hand to mouth but somehow I survive. I believe the term for this sort of increasingly common, randomized work life is the gig economy. One of the advantages of what I pretentiously call my ‘vocation’ is that you do come across a range of characters and differing viewpoints. Some instinct told me Brendon Plowright had the makings of an interesting character. I smelt a story. Brendon continued to fill me in on the background to the Club.

"Andrew, that’s Andrew Wells, and I, first met at University and discovered we had something in common, pessimism. After lectures, and over a few pints, our conversations would invariably drift into a rant about the dire state of the world. We enjoyed our shared pessimistic outlook on the future. Maybe the fact that we were both studying economics helped, the dismal science and all that.

We kept in touch after University and, as we both worked in London, met up occasionally to put the world right. I ended up in the insurance world and Andrew now works with a firm of consultants specializing in transport projects doing cost-benefit analysis and that sort of thing."

Brendon continued to explain the genesis of the club. "One early evening sitting is some crap pub on the Euston Road, just after the 2016 US Presidential Election put Donald Trump in the White House, Andrew was in a particularly dark mood. That was the time when he first floated the idea of a Club – as an outlet for people who thought along the same lines as we did.

What he had in mind was a venue where kindred spirits that were into our dystopian way of thinking could meet. Together, we kicked the idea around over the next few sessions we met up. Gradually it dawned on me that Andrew was in earnest. So when he told me one evening that his mind was made up I was less than surprised. Andrew just came out with it and said we should call it The Collapse Club.

Having gone along with Andrew’s premise up to that point, I had no good grounds to contradict the idea.