08 June - animal masks

So many things started in 2020, 

and Animal Masks

So many things started in 2020

It was a sudden thought - the Prime Minister at the time - seemingly on an impulse - offered the Citizens of Hong Kong residence in the UK

He had never been the greatest at sums - Mathematics not his subject - and it was a surprise to him when people started pointing out that 22 million extra people looking for housing would not help the housing crisis that he had promised to solve - also - every day there seemed to be more demands for this that and the other .. public green space for people in flats ... playing fields for fitness to counteract the slide towards diabetes which had proved worrying in the still simmering Covid situation - and of course there were the promises to make the country self-sufficient in food ... and - er PPE , ventilators ... and - well - anything that might be needed in a hurry. 

Oh yes and hadn’t he gone and promised to plant - what was it ? 3 billion trees a year - what was a “billion” anyway - he wasn’t too sure - and there were still three more years to go before he could have an election and hand over the whole kaboodle to somebody else and good luck to them !  And he could go back to writing his column one day a week and having long lunches in the club with his shoes off

This was a pickle and no mistake. Maybe he could send these people to Middlesborough and Sunderland and nobody would notice. Who ever went there anyway ?

Do not worry - said the Hong Kongers - we don’t want to be spread out over Middlesborough and Sunderland - we want to stay together. We will build our own island

Your own island ?

Yes

What of ?

Lots of things. Expanded Polystyrene - we have lots of this 

Everybody has lots of Expanded Polystyrene - everyone who has ever bought a fridge or a washing machine - anything big - it is really difficult to get rid of - it is bulky and it floats. Do you know that it floats? 

Yes. Give it to us - we can use it.

But then ... It will be a floating island ?

Of course

But surely you do not intend to just float around - do you ?

Yes

But you would have no real nationality. Wouldn’t it be better to attach it to a country ? Wouldn’t you feel safer, more secure - being under our protection ??

No

But it will biodegrade

No

In sea water ?

We will vacuum pack it

And that was the beginning of New Hong Kong which is now quite often to be found somewhere around the Azores, under its fluttering flags of freedom - featuring, on an azure backround, the sacred green pangolin.

Animal masks

And what - you may wonder - has any of this to do with animal masks ?

Well - it was not long after the law that masks should be worn in all public places that everyone became very bored with the dreary medical look of them and people began to experiment with a whole lot of new styles- the floral ...the star-burst... and of course the cannabis leaf. It was a matter of weeks before people began to wear animal face masks but there was still the problem of the elastic behind the ears which frankly nobody likes the feeling of and so they started wearing whole heads made out of lightweight material that just lift on and off like a paper lantern as these are not only better protection from an airborne virus but also so much more comfortable to wear and can be folded flat when not in use.

At first people would have a range of heads and one day be a squirrel, another a trout - another a polar bear - usually taking them off at night and choosing a new one for the next day

But this was all a bit exhausting and gradually most people began to settle on a favourite. With perhaps a plainer version for work or going to the supermarket and a more exotic version for nights out and special occasions - a more sombre one for funerals

What wasn’t expected was that people began to become like their chosen animal - or perhaps it was more the other way round and it allowed them to be the person they were all along, it was hard to tell - and then they began to congregate with others of the same chosen species or similar. Often all the children in a family would go to different tribes - in fact it was more often than not - a bit sad maybe but that was the way it was and there was nothing to stop people changing tribe if they wanted and they all kept in touch by the Cloud

Of course - nobody by that time would even think of using animals as food ... And then they hardly remembered that they ever had done. It would be like eating your family ... Just exactly like !

A choir of birds would sit around in trees in the park singing hymns and then songs from musicals by Andrew Lloyd Webber and chattering about what they had done that day while squirrels rushed around everywhere with bags of shopping, showing each other what they had bought and then burying it. A contingent of surly badgers spent the weekends away from the accountancy offices, digging downwards and hollowing out a club house for themselves under the tennis courts 

A small herd of deer jogged around the edge of the railings chased by the park keeper in a bear mask while a pearly unicorn strolled unnoticed through the flowerbeds eating the lilies and roses. A panda meditated quietly under a tree and dreamed of an endless forest of bamboo

This was a time of massive change. The increasing pressure of Climate Chaos causing floods and drought and making life on much of the surface of the Earth increasingly difficult, the Covid pandemic and specifically the Black Lives Matter campaign were causing people in every country of the world to question every old structure and opening their minds to the possibilities of totally different ways of doing things - and even of Being,

People built new communities to live in - some among the trees - some in the sky and some underground - and this is where the research taking place on New Hong Kong island comes in because under the banner of the Green Pangolin they had been studying the Sciences of Life. 

It was, of course, also in 2020 that the bacterium that ate plastic exploded across the world

From an occasionally observed oddity to a tidal wave that munched its way through everything made of plastic and didn’t stop until every CD case, every biro and every plastic bag on the planet had been consumed, digested and returned to its constituent molecules

This initially caused massive problems - and not least in New Hong Kong which - if we remember - was built around a core of expanded polystyrene ... But by the time the plasticophagous bug hit, the Life Scientists of New Hong Kong were developing ways of moving on from those primitive beginnings and were finding ways to activate the potential of bacteria to change one chemical into another at normal temperatures and without the need of factories, foundries or any infrastructure larger than a lettuce ... They also studied the amazing abilities of fungi to break down waste products into their different constituents and then to create a new range of materials and to build structures according to any design. 

Fungi were always good at symbiosis - look at lichen for one thing - and - once an intermediary language for communication had been developed by the New HongKongers who were already fluent in several unrelated languages - they found a way of working with 3D printers. Then the carefully tended fungi created whatever was suggested to them - the more colourful and exotically shaped, the better. That is what fungi like doing.

They made kitchens and cooking pots and chairs and kebabs.

Soon New Hong Kong - or Pangolina as the island had renamed itself to celebrate its independence - had grown sideways from its initial floating core of expanded polystyrene (this had now become a central lake anyway) by means of mats and fringes of woven fronds each kept afloat with its own row of leathery air bubbles - and then much larger air-filled floats grown from a single cell of a cornea.

This was not the only new material they developed - all grown from sunlight and the constituents of waste products broken down and sorted by the newly evolved fungi - and each grown from a single cell from a plant or an animal 

Nothing was invented here - everything new was adapted from the close study of things already existing, it was just a case of figuring how to grow them - and they did. Soon they were showing people all over the world how to create sails with the strength and lightness of flies’ wings, ropes of hair strengthened with spider silk, small boats of sharkskin with masts of horn and cogwheels of tooth

Not wanting to be be caught and blown adrift by the hurricanes and typhoons which they knew only too well from the South China Sea or wanting to compromise their hard-won independence by seeking the shelter of a harbour or a fjord in some landmass, Pangolina kept to the open sea and for housing their people, they didn’t build anything upwards that would catch the wind but built downwards - in long strings of flexible and transparent pods all grown from the first corneal cell that lived and multiplied immortal in the salt water. These long habitation strings were lit by luminescent bacteria and joined by transportation tubes and they trailed behind the island and out along the azure currents of the ocean.

The surfaces of most of the Pangolinas are now surrounded by fringes of mangrove swamps which absorb the shock and the salt of the high seas, leaving the central areas as sheltered gardens of fruit trees, beans, flowers and melons ... Where people of all colours wander in the daylight among iridescent humming birds and shrimp pink flamingos, wading among lilies in a clear lake

It’s not bad.

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Anita Greg 08/06/2020