A Winter Grave

Brodie pushed the glasses up on to his forehead and sighed his frustration. He hated politics. Politicians all told lies. Lies that changed depending on what demographic they were appealing to.

She [Addie, Brodie’s daughter] took a deep breath as if to try and calm the passion that was the cause of her agitation. And she turned further recrimination towards her father.

‘That’s what happens when you don’t fucking listen. That’s the legacy your generation left mine.’

Brodie stood up as he felt anger spike through him. The temper that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘Oh, I was listening. Like everyone else. It was practically all you ever fucking heard about. Climate change. Global warming. How we all had to do our bit. And a lot of us did. But the big boys didn’t, did they? China, India, Russia, America. The economic imperative or something, they called it. The need to keep on sucking fossil fuels from the ground and burning the fucking stuff, because too many people were making too much money doing just that.’ He waved his ice axe towards the heavens. ‘And what could ordinary folk like me or you do about it? Fuck all. It’s like when they tell us we’re going to war. Or they’re going to spent billions on nuclear weapons. Or refuse entry to starving immigrants. Whether we agree with any of it or not.’

‘You could have taken to the streets.’

He breathed his scorn into the wind. ‘Oh, yeah, that works. Disrupt the flow of daily life and people get pissed off with you. Protest in sufficient numbers and the authorities send in the riot police. You get one chance to change things, Addie. Once every four years. You put the other lot in, and it turns out they’re just the same.’ He rammed the point of his ice axe into the snow. ‘In the end, that’s why I stopped listening. Stopped caring. And it doesn’t matter what generation you belong to, nothing changes. It’s the same people abusing the same power, and making the same money?’

[...] There was no real escape in the drink, he knew that. There never had been. He had learned long ago that no matter how much you drank, everything that made you seek refuge in it was still there in the morning, when you woke with a splitting head and a mouth so dry it was an effort to peel your tongue off the roof of it. But as his old history teacher had been fond of saying, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.