Strategy 2030

Phil Ramsbotham pocketed his mobile and looked out across the flat expanse of open water. A slab of sea hiding the river valley and fertile plain that once connected the Netherlands, where he stood, with his native England across the choppy way. Pull back the waves and the relics remained.
          The breeze blew in from the south-west, Phil’s overlong grey hair streaming out over his right shoulder. Then he turned to continue his walk along the dyke-top and the thin, stringy whip lashed across his nose and chin. Phil pushed the hair from his face and mulled on the call from his son, a voice he hadn’t heard for a good eighteen months. It wasn’t a voice he’d expected to hear today.
          Jimmy got straight to the point, said he was an intern on the River Humber flood defence project. He wanted to know if Phil was interested in composing a soundtrack for the promotional film being shown at the project’s gala launch; a big deal event to hook in the investors.
          ‘Why me?’ Phil asked. A reasonable question for a variety of reasons.
          ‘Don’t think that it was me who put you forward,’ Jimmy replied.
          Phil scoffed.
          Jimmy continued, ‘One of the board is into your stuff from back in the day, saw the name of your latest album, took that to mean you might be sympathetic. And he knows you live on the River Hull, so you’ve an interest.’
          ‘You did tell ‘em I only bought that place cos the land was cheap and your Mum wanted horses, right? And then she left me for a stud breeder out of Malton.’
          ‘Right. But then there’s your band name … Glacial Till …’
          Phil laughed. ‘So named cos I lost my cherry on a geography fieldtrip to Holderness. Chrissake.’
          ‘Yep, you’re a terrible choice. I tried to tell them. But are you interested?’
          ‘Course I am. Good money to be made from soundtracks, I just need an in to the industry. Cheers for that, son.’
          ‘Glad to be of service. I guess. I’ll let them know. Oh, and Dad, don’t think this changes anything.’
Phil started to say he knew, but the line was already dead.

Phil drove down a long, gravelled lane leading to a distant inlet. The superstructure of moored a fishing boat was visible in the distance. He parked the hire car outside a set of large, double gates where a guy with a salon groomed beard stood waiting next to a city-car. Mads Van Baston, a journalist for Dutch metal magazine Aardshock. Mads’ clothing was even less well suited to the flat, windswept marshland than Phil’s designer army surplus clobber. This interview would mark the first Aardshock article on Phil’s band for nearly two decades.
          Phil popped the car door, braced it against the breeze, climbed out on buggered knees and lifted his chin in greeting to the journalist.
          ‘Phil Ramsbotham I guess?’ Mads asked. ‘Who the hell else would be out here in this arse end of nowhere?’
          Phil grunted, nodded. ‘Now then, ‘owt to get me away from the tour bus.’ He gestured towards the gates. ‘Shall we get on with it?’
          ‘Sure.’ Mads pulled out his phone. Waved it. ‘Ok if I …?’
          Phil gestured a whatever and strode through the gateway.
          Mads hurried to catch up, only managed to do so when Phil stopped beside the first of many tall, timber racks to the side of a long driveway. Away down the drive, near the inlet and trawler, stood a delipidated post-war bungalow.
          ‘So Phil, when I asked to talk to you about the new Glacial Till album, The Drowning of Doggerland, you said to meet here. What gives?’
          Phil nodded at the racks stacked with oversized bones, then waved to where the North Sea lay in wait a few miles distant. ‘I read a book a while ago, came across it randomly backstage – occupational hazard for bored rock dinosaurs in search of distraction. Anyway it talked about how for years, trawlers from round here had been dredging up old bones – mammoths, caribou, bison, what have you – from back when there was no North Sea out there, just a series of lakes and rivers between northern Europe and England.
‘Made me think, you know? What better for a band named after glacier-dumped mud, than an album inspired by new land exposed when those glaciers withdrew, and then destroyed when the final meltwater lakes from that self-same ice age burst out of North America and washed Doggerland off the map.’
‘Dramatic stuff!’ Mads said, looking over the piles of gargantuan skulls and limbs. ‘So this is a concept album, yes?’
          Phil laughed. ‘Nah, there’s no prog rock ballads describing ancient herds roaming the plains, but it is an album about change, about being buffeted by events out of your control, about the mistakes you make reacting to that change.’ Fucking amen to that, Phil thought.
          A figure emerged from the bungalow by the inlet, waved to Phil, began to walk down the track towards them.
          ‘So it’s a cautionary tale about climate change then? Deforestation, melting ice caps, leading to sea level rise? And world leaders failing to adapt?’
          Phil almost laughed in Mads face. An hour ago he would have. The irony of Phil Ramsbotham writing songs in support a load of hand-wringing green whingers.
          Instead he looked Mads in the eye. ‘Yeah, that would surprise a lot of people. An old northern rocker like me giving a damn. But look at where I live back in Yorkshire, a virtual island at the top of the River Hull. It wouldn’t take much to wash my house away. And you’ll remember the Hull floods of 2013.’
          Phil pulled out his phone, showed Mads the topographical map of East Yorkshire he’d googled soon after speaking to his son. He played with the slider, demonstrating the vulnerability of low-lying land to the sea, even twenty miles up the River Hull valley.
Phil managed to shock himself still. Amazing what you dredged up if you were willing to plumb the depths.

 

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Bibliography
Blackburn, J. (2019) Time Song, Searching for Doggerland. London: Jonathan Cape.