The Rules of Life [antikvár]

Strange days indeed! Your narrator, in the year 2004, sits and works at his console within the great portals of the Temple that was once the British Museum, and tries to come to terms with the world, and his life, and the past. Envisage me, if you can, dressed in the white samite, mystic, wonderful, which is worn by the pulp priests of the GNFR, or Great New Fictional Religion: a small elderly male figure, dwarfed by rows upon ranks of the flickering electronic devices which these days bring the voices of the dead to life. The pinner priests, our seniors in the GNFR hierarchy, also wear white samite but theirs is shot with multicoloured phosphorescent thread, the better to impress the not easily impressed. A strange sight indeed, as they crouch by night in every graveyard in the land, their Sony sensors at the ready, pinning down the ghostly emanations of the dear and not so dear departed - or 're-winds' as they have come to be called. I am not as young as I was. I ought, by now, with the wisdom of the GNFR at my command, to have achieved contentment, to have learned to acquiesce in — S —