Wankers. I will tell them nothing. Just then I see a very large black rat (or possibly an agouti) scampering across the straw in a corner of the disused cattle barn we are standing in. It is dragging—no, not a child's red shoe—but the heavy cassock of an East Anglian parish priest, of the sort used between the years 1919 and 1937 (I know, because I once wrote a graduate thesis footnoting this very fact). Here is my chance for a very cinematic escape.

A minute or two later. In a raging downpour. The last I remember you and I were lolling on a local greensward, kissing each other's nether regions, talking of Yahweh and Lilith and their wayward child called Man. In the distance we could hear the changing of the guards outside the queen's summer home. No, it was the drum and bugle corps of the county war veterans. No, it was a child singing in a tree as below him mollydancers cavorted, dressed as bullocks and beefeaters and giant flower-bedecked phalli. Yes, that was definitely the sound I heard as you sank your teeth into my earlobe and tore it clean off. Or seemed to.

And tonight, chère amie, I said, we shall go dancing in the grottoes of the gods the way young childless lovers have always done. We were that happy.

One second later, and they have begun to drop the bombs, the Big Ones. They explode in the air like crimson poppy-flowers and we watch and applaud from our ziggurat—discovering there is a certain recherché artistry in annihilation. As the early Dadaist Francis Pi—I begin to say when you clasp your palm over my mouth.

No, not again. Not at all. Nein! Nyet! Nothing doing. Nononononono. You are blathering, you are tearing your bobtails from their roots.

So, we choose to survive, like the new Adam and the new Eve. It's a changed world, and given half a chance it will become a better one. In time we shall carve our initials in the Parthenon. We shall host a popular daytime television series. We shall dabble in chromatism and fin de siècle theosophism. We shall revive the good old-fashioned murder ballad. We shall run for office. We shall write the children daily. We shall become famous and arrange car-bombings, apartment ransackings, and wiretappings. In the end we shall of course sell out and agree to a movie adaptation for briefcase after briefcase of sweet sweet money. On n'a rien pour rien, which of course means nothing is had for nothing, not even me.