For the Latest Harvey Duckman Presents anthology, which was released today, I wrote a story set after an apocalypse (as this was the brief given this is a collection of post apocalypse stories) about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world…

Except that is not what the story I wrote was about at all. It is the story I set out to write because after several false starts that never quite seemed right I finally started writing a story for this book after the book had been given a name by its wonderful editor in chief CG Hatton, and so i knew the book was to be called Death+70 based on the conceptual idea of how quickly nature will recover post the end of the world.

If you have ever seen ‘Seven monkey’ and the over grown streets of New York post virus you will get the idea. Just as if you see footage of how fast the wilderness has recovered and thrived around Chernobyl, or regrown over abandoned buildings anywhere. Nature is resilient, the end of our civilization would not bother it in the slightest, no matter how big the bang we go out with. To the trees we are just walking fertilizer that has not gone back into the ground yet. (the trees could well be farming humanity btw, think about it , we breath in oxygen and turn it in to the carbon dioxide they need, and we are basically a sack of carbon and chemicals which are their main food stuff)

The point was the natural world recovers, and as that was the title of the book I thought well if I have a character who was about fifteen at the end of the world, he would be eighty-five seventy years later. Some one with vaccines in there system from before the fall, and who benefited from modern nutrition while they were growing up could go on to live that long. So I came up with an old man climbing a hill to visit the grave of his lost love, seeing the world that regrew after the apocalypse. It fitted with the title of the book and seemed a nice idea.

So as I say I wrote a story about an old man walking up a hill 70 years after the end of the world…

But as I said that is not what the story I wrote at all, it was the story i set out to write, what I wrote instead was an allegory on a different subject. A story about the helplessness of old age, the insidiousness of creeping dementia and ultimately finding some dignity in death. This was not my intention, it is merely what the story became, stories have a habit of doing that, finding ways to be about something other than you intended. To become personal, when you intended them to be otherwise.

Dementia is a subject close to my heart, my mother has been slipping from in degrees for several years. It is a slow death that kills the mind before the body, and you watch your loved ones wither before you. It is also the future I expect will come my way in time, which frankly terrifies me. As I say, sometimes, more often than we perhaps admit, the stories we write become personal in ways we did not intend.

In any regard, I will be donating my ‘fee’ for this story to the charity Dementia UK. I do not actually take a fee from ‘Harvey’ as a rule, so in actuality I am donating the amount my fee would be if i took one. In essence it is the same. The below is from Dementia UK’s website, and more eloquent than I on the subject.

One in two of us will be affected by dementia in our lifetime. Families living with the condition are often left feeling exhausted, overwhelmed and alone. With your support, together we can provide vital specialist dementia nursing services, so more families can access our life-changing support and live as well as possible, for as long as possible. Please donate today and help ensure no one faces dementia alone.

When a new book is released I generally urge people to get a copy and my tale aside it is a wonderful collection of stories and you should get one. Really you should , there are a host of wonderful writers in there, with wonderful stories. Frankly I think it is probably the best collection I have ever been part of. All the stories are amazing and the wealth of imagination that went into them astounds me and I helped curate it. So please buy a copy

But regardless if the book doesn’t appeal to you, or indeed if it does and you do buy a copy (which i hope you do) , please take a few minutes out of your day to visit Dementia UK’s website and read about there work at https://www.dementiauk.org/ If only for the memory of an old man who may one day walk up a hill