Disclaimers for the uninitiated.
This is closer to my stand-up writing than my fiction, so the sense of humour here is probably not safe for work.
In order to make this news article feel authentic, I have elected to abandon any hope for journalistic integrity, and have fired my editur as she was hurting my feelinks.
This is a fictional comedy story, based on a JustStopOil stunt.
When I write comedy, I leave my real-world opinions at the door and just focus on trying to tell a silly story. That means pretty much everything will be satirised at some point. Nothing is sacred.
Good mornternoonening.
Today this thing happened.
Student activist Ellie Tyst1 was scrambling through her father’s archaeology papers in an effort to “un-evil them through radical collage” (putting them in a shredder and sticking it to the sliding doors of the big Tesco in town whilst screaming) when she discovered something horrendous:
Climate change has been happening for quite a while. Also, her father cheated on her mother in 1995 when he was in Spain with the ghost of a conquistador, but that’s a story for another time.
Rather than delve into the subtle yet important differences between human-driven climate change and the natural processes of a biosphere (are we not part of that very same biosphere anyway? Is technology not an extension of biology?) Ellie Tyst went instead to her fellow activists, Felicitea Funnyname and Jackson Bollock (who wasn’t born into riches but made his living dragging his paint-covered testicles across canvases and pretending it meant something2) to organise an act of radical rebellion, as opposed to regular, store-bought rebellion.
Ellie had discovered in her research that Neolithic people would sometimes cremate their dead, which is like, really bad for the environment dude. They also picked stones up and moved them without asking the stone if it was cool with that, and this destabilised the natural stone-order and basically put the planet’s chakras out of whack or something.
Ellie also realised that, since the old times were really long ago, Neolithic people’s otherwise relatively harmless emissions were multiplied through the evils of
TIMEMATHS
You see, ancient people had thousands of years of burning and fire pits and digging up metals and stabbing each other and destroying evidence of alien life, and their swords and bones keep showing up in rivers and lakes and that’s basically as bad as shopping trolleys, which Neolithic people probably would have dumped underground if they had invented them first but they’d have had to invent the pound coin to put into them so it’s a whole thing, would have been hard. Lots of admin.
Also, there used to be an ice age, and where’s all the ice now?
Probably gone in rich people’s cocktails in some prehistoric bar where they laugh about poor people and spit crude oil into big metal pans they make poor people mop up with the heads of more poor people.
Sickening if you think about it.3
So, in order to combat this ancient environmental disaster waiting to possibly happen, Ellie Tyst, Jackson Bollock, and Felicitea Funnyname got together to retroactively solve everything and also some other stuff.
The throuple groped their way through Salisbury, yelling at some Pagans for eating expensive pies before spending £11 per head on ‘vintage-styled anticapitalist coffee’ themselves. Fuelled by irony and also those pills they found down the side of the coach seats last week, the three of them scrambled and ambled their way to the henge of stones like a weird flesh crab, chattering and designing eyesore posters along the way.
Their cause was noble.
Their activism silly.
Their public image abyssmal.
Deftly avoiding tourists by unsettling them with an improvised streetside sale of his ‘art’, Jackson Bollock provided a fitting distraction whilst Ellie Tyst cut a hole in the fence. Felicitea Funnyname didn’t do much at all, this is really a two-character story, she’ll be in the next one.
Anyway, Ellie held the fence and Jackson slithered through.
He got to the barrier of Stone Henge and slumped over it like a hot dog sliding off a paper plate. He unsheated two small canisters of paint, ‘Trump Orange’ (there, I’ve done political comedy, can I write for TV now?) that he’d got on discount from a spray tan joint in town. Now he stepped toward the ancient arches of stone (which normal people have the respect to not stumble towards even if they agree we should treat the planet better), and spewed the orange substance against them like a drunk urinating against a pub door. This, more than any policy or opinion or idea he held, would be what he was remembered for in the future when the glowing cockroach-men rule the world from cathedrals made of our irradiated ribcages.
It was at this point the stones began to vibrate. Briefly a temporal portal flickered in the rectangular timevoid between the boulders. This chronohole yawned open, glittering and ancient. A Neolithic family stared out at the modern world, lured through the timehole with the smell of an energy drink which they thought was a sign from their gods that the world was ending.
As the Neolithic family learned about modern marvels such as tiktok and Brazilian butt lifts and tiktoks about Brazilian butt lifts, Ellie Tyst put down her £11 anticapuccino4 (patent pending) and shimmied into the timehole, leaving her friends behind.
At this point she bumped into me. No wait, that’s a Neolithic man. She explained to him that the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel would one day lead to fireworks, which are really bad for the environment.
He threw a wooden chair at her and she grabbed it, fleeing back to the present.
In the present, the Neolithic family had already backed themselves toward the portal, overstimulated by the modern world. Ellie Tyst bungled past them. She was already trying to sell the ancient chair on Vinted (the Hipster’s eBay), but as it wasn’t technically old (having circumvented the intervening eons) it only went for £3 and free postage to someone who “upcycled” it by gluing glitter all over it and whacking it on eBay (the tax-evader’s Vinted) for £300 with £301 postage.
Anyway, the Neolithic family took one look at Mister Bollock, who was still spraying the stones, and slammed the portal shut behind themselves so hard that it destabilised the structure5.
The largest stone tumbled, almost turning Jackson Bollock into a Jackson Pollock. Luckily the sheer force of the spray paint combined with his hollow bones and hollow head meant that he had some seconds ago became a human rocket, and was by the end of this paragraph hurtling through your bedroom window.
The end.
Please comment or share this post to help it get noticed. This is the main way new people learn about my stuff. The comedy writing is often how some of my weirder Sci-Fi stories are born, so I wonder what this might inspire.
There, now I’ve said it in big pink letters.
It’s actually the end. You can go if you like.
But there is some more stuff below, like the $20 bookstore giveaway.
And here is my $20 bookstore gift card giveaway. You’ve still got time to enter.
Bonus material / Footnotes
As I was hunting for images for this post, I rediscovered this really cocky advert I designed in 2022. This was before I split my brand colours between Realphillipcarter and Grumblebricks into pink and orange respectively.
I quite like how eclectic it is, so it might come back. If you click the image you’ll go right to my linktree bookstore, which contains WBTH alongside some other books I’ve published, such as The Cosmic Comedy Collection.
Ellie Tyst, a character whose name I invented for a poem and sketch way back in 2015, and haven’t really used since.
Thinking is not recommended to people over the age of 5. At that point you’re just giving yourself anxiety.
I reckon I just coined this.
Yes, you can slam intertemporal portals.