an excerpt

When the ceremony came it was an excruciating spectacle. The roads through central London were all closed to traffic, as vast parades of mourning Britons staggered lamenting across the rivers of macadam. They wept for the life of this man who they had never known, bundled into intimacy by the persuasive forces of the media, sympathy manipulated by poor syntax and repetition. They left flowers outside Scotland Yard, thousands of pounds worth of rotting memorial wreaths, genetically modified specifically for the occasion, childish poems scrawled in devastated script on the cards provided. Television had created a weird digitised familial bond with the dead fat police commissioner, everyone felt it, civilians weeping as they would never weep for their real flesh and blood families. It was as though the continual broadcasting had forged a closeness unattainable in real relationships, somehow so much more than actual experience, unsullied by the difficulties inherent in first-hand emotional encounters. News cameras captured their faces, sobbing uncontrollably, hyperventilating even. It no longer mattered specifically who was being mourned, and many of the mourners probably didn’t even know who it was they were weeping for, but the flowers piled up to waist, chest, head height in the streets, the commissioner’s face printed onto commemorative Union Jack flags and hung in the windows of private residences, and the awful spoken tributes were spluttered out between dry heaves, the personal reminiscences of a new kind of impersonal twenty-first century relationship, the imagined closeness of distant strangers, tenderly remembering this man they had first met only days before, just minutes after his death behind the sanctuary of widescreen, another pixellated actors face sent to the TVs around which homes had grown, a face that had since been with them forever, a new memory, implanted like a microchip in their lonely malleable minds.