A Highly Strange Knock At The Door

What a seemingly benign doorstep conversation revealed about the age we live in.

The eerie weirdness and Kafkaesque nature of the Zeitgeist has been preoccupying my thoughts for a few months now, as regular readers and listeners will be aware. I thought I’d add to my emerging canon of ‘‘High Strangeness’’ by revisiting a curious little interaction I had in midsummer.

On one of the hottest days of this year, which already seem like another epoch, I received a knock at the door. Upon answering the door, I saw a pleasant-looking teenage girl wearing a uniform, it looked to be some sort of medical uniform.

I will admit that I actually despise the intrusive nature of people knocking at the door, primarily because there’s always the chance that it’s the BBC license goon coming to shake me down again. Needless to say, opening the door to see a wholesome teenage girl performing what was probably a civic duty changed my mind immediately.

I opened the door and the conversation went something like this:

Girl: ‘‘Hi, I’m Kelly from St John’s Ambulance, could you spare a minute?’’

Me: ‘‘Well, OK, then I’ll give you two because I’m feeling generous.’’

Kelly: ‘‘Oh hee hee, well….do you know where your nearest defibrillator is by any chance?’’

Me: ‘‘Erm…no, that’s one of those zappers for heart attacks, isn’t it?’’

Kelly: ‘‘Yeah!’’

Me: ‘‘No I haven’t a clue, I assume in the doctors, maybe there’s one in the Post Office, I dunno.’’

Kelly from St John’s Ambulance charity then pulled out an iPhone with some sort of map-app which featured the locations of all the defibrillators in the area, then pointed to where the nearest one was in the real world.

Kelly: ‘‘There (pointing). So St John’s Ambulance are coordinating with the government who want a defibrillator on every street by the end of 2024, as well as having at least one in every school. They want one within 5 minutes of every person. Would you like to contrib…’’

Me: ‘‘Hang-on a minute. The government want to place a defibrillator on every street in the country, and have everyone within 5 minutes of one at all times?’’

Kelly (Nodding): ‘‘Yep, so could I sign you up for a …’’

Me: ‘‘Why do they want that? What’s the emergency?’’

Kelly (looking at her phone): ‘‘Defibrillators reduce mortality, that’s dying, by 70% for heart attack cases.’’

Me: ‘‘But why now? Did something change and lots more people are having heart attacks, it just seems weird to me.’’

Kelly: ‘‘I don’t know about that.’’

Me: ‘‘Maybe the conspiracy theorists on the internet are onto something.’’

Kelly: ‘‘What do you mean?’’

Me: ‘‘They’re saying it’s that vaccine everyone got.’’

Kelly: ‘‘Really?! Oh…’’

Me: ‘‘Did you get it?’’

Kelly: ‘‘No.’’

Me: ‘‘Good!’’

Kelly: ‘‘So anyway, would you like to contribute to the campaign?’’

Me: ‘‘Yeah OK, sign me up for a fiver.’’

I’ve long held the view that a sound metric for measuring the safety of a society is the degree to which its young females can walk around in relative safety, unmolested and preyed upon. By the standards of this metric modern England is a dismal failure, but in this little encounter at least, it was visible. In theory, there’s nothing to worry about at all. A pleasant young girl is out and about assisting the power-structure increase the health of the nation. It’s fine.

The ‘‘strangeness’’ of the situation reveals itself when you put the interaction into a wider context, namely, why have the government embarked on a massive campaign to place defibrillators everywhere immediately after the vaccination campaign?

Let me be clear, campaigns to increase the availability of defibrillators existed prior to 2021. However, they were primarily local and involved mums in community groups. One campaign to increase the amount of defibrillators in schools was 12 years old and the result of a tragic swimming accident involving a young boy.

There was not, however, a ‘‘Big Push’’ which resembled a military campaign by the power-structure. On July 22nd of 2022 the government announced it would be procuring 20,000 defibrillators for deployment in schools across the country.

Heart attacks in children are of course extremely rare, but they do happen, and so there’s no reason not to have devices available to offset the danger of these rare instances becoming fatal. Similarly, heart attacks happen in adults every day, and so it makes sense for there to be defibrillators readily available.

But why then was there no ‘‘Big Push’’ in 2018 or 2015 or 2010 or 2005 or any other year? It isn’t my intention to spread misinformation or to make an argument either way, because I don’t know. And this, essentially, is the cause of the discontent, the feeling that something ‘‘isn’t quite right’’.

There are two possibilities:

1. I live in a nation in which the power-structure and a plethora of institutions care deeply about public health and have deployed a legion of likeable young teens to involve me in an act of public good to decrease the amount of people dying of heart attacks.

2. I live in a nation in which the Government have coerced the population into taking medical treatments they now know are harmful and are now trying to offset the lethality of their blunder.

In truth, I simply do not know which of the above is true, or most likely. It is the not-knowing which gives rise to the paranoia and the unsettling, Kafkaesque nature of life. The British Government and the various intelligence agencies and specialists in online activity would propose that I had become distrustful by consuming too much conspiratorial disinformation online.

The chances that somewhere within the bowels of the bureaucracy there exists a file on me are not negligible. Though I’ll likely be in the box ‘‘disgruntled Gen X reactionary’’ and not in the red-zone inhabited by those deemed an active security risk.

Nevertheless, the regime would prefer that I simply took the blue-pill of scenario 1 as outlined above, rather than entertaining the possibility of scenario number 2. The two scenarios represent narratives, stories which ground my interpretation of the society I live in. However, the narratives are mutually exclusive, either the power-structure is benevolent — something I know for a fact to be untrue on various related issues. Or the power-structure is borderline psychopathic.

It is the uncertainty and disorientation of wandering through a thick fog bank in which the signifiers and touchstones of normality have been obscured and blurred. I, we, exist on the outside of a dome upon which we try and scratch messages on the glass hoping something will transmit to those we care about within. I was unable to reveal to young Kelly exactly what was going through my mind because it would have seemed insane. Instead, the crazy has to be outsourced to a third party, the internet.

There are, then, two narratives, two interpretations, two scenarios and two English people engaged in conversation on a doorstep. We exist within a Zeitgeist which is binary in nature, two worlds, the weirdness and strangeness of the age exists in the no-man’s-land where the two overlap.

Or as Rudyard Kipling put it:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;

The resolution which our masters have arrived at is a synthesis of the two. A literal ‘‘Internet of Bodies’’ built not by anything even remotely resembling a Godly entity, but merely men.