Bad news. The bassoon is dying out. And the viola, French horn and oboe. Soon, we won’t have any orchestras left. Thank you, successive idiotic governments, for sidelining music in schools. Now look what’s happened. A Save the Bassoon campaign has started, but I’m still beginning to panic.
So many things I like are fading away, all much more important than the paper tax discs I moaned about last week. Now Finland is phasing out cursive writing lessons: America’s been doing it for years, and we always weedily copy them, so it will be us next. And our insects are dying out. Goodbye leaf beetles, various moths and invertebrates, food chain and us.
I know nothing is immutable, but Rosemary and I are determined to cling on to our disappearing world. She still polishes her brown wooden furniture with beeswax and scours obscure shops for Yardley’s lavender products. I search the country for Osmiroid fountain pens, so I can carry on with my joined-up italic writing. We thought being able to do joined-up was a plus, but not anymore.
We’re fighting the machines, but we’re not winning, so I have a plan. In a few years, when we’re really old, we will open our homes as mini-museums, with ourselves as living exhibits. We can charge a modest entrance fee, to supplement our shrunken pensions, so that modern people can watch me dipping a pointy thing into a small pot of dark liquid, and scratching little marks into a notebook, or Rosemary reading stories from a block of paper sheets.
“This is what it was like in ancient times”, the visitors can say, taking selfies with us tottering around indoors, or in our little gardens, staring at the last of the sparrows and the few remaining bees and butterflies fluttering weakly around the buddleias.
And, when we’re dead, they can show their compatriots on various space stations and distant planets, using whatever is the future equivalent of videos, how people here used to scrape and blow at things made of wood, gut and metals, to make lovely noises together, and how much fun it was.