By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Albie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat. David Nicholls
About This Quote

At the age of fifteen, Albie is now ten years older than me. At fifteen I joined the army and fought in Afghanistan. I saw all kinds of things that no fifteen-year-old should ever see. I saw friends die.

I saw my best friend shot dead by a sniper’s bullet. I saw my platoon destroy everything in sight, regardless of innocent lives lost or consequences that would have to be paid later. And after it was all over, all I wanted to do was hide away from the world so that I wouldn’t have to deal with what I had seen or what it might have made me into.

But Albie has seen nothing like that at his age. He has never known anything but peace. And yet, at this rate, he will never know peace because at his age he will be long gone, or barricaded into his living module with enough rations to see out his days.

By the time Albie is my age I will be long gone, or best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 per cent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepeneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept coktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere down there in that hellish stewing mess of violence poverty and desperation is my son Albie Petersen playing guitar

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