GLOBAL WARMING

He quite often got rather hot under the collar. But then Donald would. He’d developed a bad temper. “Got out of bed the wrong side, ” was how his wife Eve described his mood some mornings when Donald was obviously not on top form. “Grumpy old bugger” was what she really thought.

Donald didn’t used to be like that. Circumstances had made him. The wear and tear of life had got to him. The mortgage, the bills, the job, the sodding neighbours, speeding cameras and bloody parking tickets, the crap on the TV, immigration, Iraq, Tony fucking Blair, soft Judges, the lack of local police (“When on earth did you last see one in our street?”) and the price of petrol; everything had just piled up. He couldn’t put his finger on the actual date when things had changed. They had though. Rather like his thinning, grey hair, it had happened gradually. He thought it was somewhere between fifty-four and a half and fifty-six that things had probably really got worse. He didn’t really enjoy sex with his wife anymore and didn’t think about doing it with any body else’s either. His waistline could no longer be pulled in for any length of time and he had become pear shaped in both senses of the word. He looked stupid in jeans and ridiculous on any beach. But by far his biggest worry was climate change.

“Well what can you do about it dear?” said his wife to him when Donald read out aloud anything pertinent to environmental issues reported in the Daily Telegraph.

“We just can’t let the third world do what we did. They can’t be allowed to make the same mistakes.”

“What? You mean we can use their oil, mine their natural resources, but we mustn’t let them drive cars or have dish washers.”

“Something like that,” said Donald.

They liked their holiday’s abroad. Donald spent hours leafing through piles of glossy brochures, putting post-it notes on those pages he thought might be of interest. They’d been to Santorini in the spring, the remneant of a volcano set like pumice stone in the Aegean Sea. They quite liked it but Donald thought that it was being ruined by tourism. In February they chose Zanzibar, the Spice Island.

When their battered mini-bus had been stopped on the bumpy dirt track en route from the airport to their resort hotel, the angry crowd terrified Donald and Eve Global. They were abducted and taken off into the bush by a group of machete wielding natives. The ritualistic way in which they met their end was taken straight off the pages of history. The Acting British Consul in Stonetown had never seen anything like it before. Donald and his wife were boiled alive, each cooked in an old oil drum filled with salt water and heated up on a fire of broken wooden pallets, rubber tyres and old tree stumps.