the brilliantly leaping gazelle

People who are a lot cleverer than me and whom I would hate to get seated next to at a dinner party or sat next to on flight to Australia, have for a long time suggested that the existence of parallel worlds isn’y science fiction but science fact. A world that is the the same as ours, but different.

Its theoretically possible anyway and in the same way that ‘compassionate Conservatism’ is theoretically possible, we just nod our heads and distance ourselves from whoever is making such outlandish claims. But it is a nice fantasy to imagine that all the travails and catastrophes that have beset our time on this planet could simply be erased by creating another earth. A new improved earth, Earth 2.0, the updated version, free from all calamity’s and mistakes of this one. No religion, no wars, no capitalism, no climate crisis.Bliss.

I was thinking of Earth 2.0 this morning and thought ‘what if..’, as I considered the two ‘protesters’ who are currently holding up traffic from crossing the Dartford Crossing for the second day, by scaling 100ft up it and staying there. The police seem incapable of doing anything, other than basically waiting for them to come down and and preventing traffic from using it. Anyone who was ever on a protest up until say 2010, and was either kettled, arrested or charged by baton wielding riot police in full body armour – and at a few I got all three – can’t begin to understand what’s going on with the police these days. They used to say that you were getting older when the police started looking younger than you, but I wasn’t prepared for when the police didn’t act like the police anymore. But I digress.

Back on Earth 2.0, the protesters have scaled up the bridge, but as there’s no climate crisis, they’re protesting about something else. The cancellation of their favourite T.V programme, that a new colour hasn’t been created, or simply that there isn’t anything to protest about. Anyway, they’re up there and whilst everyone agree’s they have a right to protest, everyone also agree’s we have a right to ignore them and simply carry on, which in this case would involve using the crossing to cross something. Of course the police would be on hand to ensure the safe and steady flow of traffic. They’d also direct traffic away from any potential impact site, so if one of the protesters did fall, it’d be on a nice clear patch of bridge, so the camera’s could get a nice clear shot of it.

And if the police let it be known that from here on in, they’d be adopting a rights based policy – yours to protest and ours to ignore you and carry on – then we’d see exactly how many of ‘protesters’ were serious and how many were nothing more than entitled attention seeking Jeremy Hunts.