The World without Some of Us

I’ve just finished reading a book called The World Without Us. It’s riveting stuff. Author Alan Weisman imagines everyone just vanishing, a bit like the rest of the family when you say “Time to do the washing up.” Everything is abandoned, just as it is: dirty dishes, nuclear waste dumps, the whole shebang. Left to its own devices nature carries on, casually reclaiming cities and getting rid of poodles. In the blink of an epoch, the Empire State Building becomes the biggest pigeon loft no one will ever see.

I like it.

On reflection, maybe the “us” is a bit much, encompassing “me” as it does. It might be better if the vanishing happened in stages. Perhaps it could start cautiously, maybe with David Beckham. Within moments of his vanishing the posh end of the men’s underwear market would begin to disintegrate. Intimately Beckham fragrances would become, well, intermittent before dissipating entirely. In a few weeks the tabloids and celebrity magazines would shrink to shadows of their former selves, reduced to scavenging for gossip on the fringes of the World Economic Forum. The world without Beckham would be a very scary place, at least for metrosexuals.

Once the aftershocks in the fashion and football worlds had subsided we might imagine something a trifle more ambitious.

Perhaps the makers of TV reality shows could oblige the rest of us by taking a giant leap into non-existence. Even if that didn’t do much in the way of restoring the planet’s natural equilibrium it would at least make way in the broadcasting schedules for more cerebral stuff. That can only be good. Desert islands could resume their role in our consciousness as places of romance and solitude, uncluttered by hordes on unkempt bodies, belching and bitching around the fire about whether to vote off Simon or Samantha. The tribe has spoken – clear off the lot of you. Fat people could lose weight in private and not force the rest of us to endure revolting close-ups of the jelly-like undulations flowing up and over their tent-sized undergarments.

All the Spokespersons in the world could vanish next. At first there would be no discernable difference, of course, but after a few days honesty would begin reclaiming the ravaged landscape of public discourse. Stripped of their anonymity, government leaders and the heads of large corporations would have to start telling the truth, or at least start getting caught out in their own lies. Irresistible winds of genuine accountability would sweep through high offices, undoing the tangled underbrush of deceit and deniability so characteristic of mean-minded human endeavour.

Nature would really be into its stride by then. Self-righteous religious fanatics could follow the Spokespersons onto the oblivion bus, to the accompaniment of a mighty sigh of divine relief. The world would soon be restored to a near pristine moral state where folk don’t assume that God condones mass murder and other assorted perversions. I’m surprised He hasn’t thought of that already, the vanishing thing, I mean. He wouldn’t have had to put up with all those loony prayers from people with straggly beards demanding approval for the latest beheading of some luckless foreign aid worker.

And why stop there. Now that I come to think of it, planet earth would be much better off without my neighbour up the road with the noisy lawnmower and the yapping dog. Let the weeds and the worms reclaim his pristine grassy patch with its irritatingly neat herbaceous border, and let a natural silence settle one more on our benighted suburb. And who needs that woman who keeps writing me rude letters about trivial accounts she claims are overdue. Or those halfwits who write vitriolic stuff for magazines or on the internet, using the opportunity to air their own warped opinions and petty dislikes.

Hang on a minute. That last one sounds vaguely familiar. On second thoughts, maybe...