Elon Gation

The air in the Upper Tier of New Colwyn was always scrubbed to a crisp, artificial sweetness. Down below, in the choked concrete canyons of the old council estates, it tasted like diesel and damp ash.

It’s been 15 years since Covid 24 struck—they finally got it right. I say ‘they’ as it wasn’t just the governments, the big corporations were involved too. They finally found a virus that killed the poor. Covid 23 wiped out the gays, the trans, the non-binaries—The Gay Plague some called it. AIDS 2.0 said others. It wasn’t the virus that killed them of course, it was the “vaccination”—I hate using my fingers as inverted commas like some poncy twat, but that’s the only way to describe the “vaccination”. With the NHS in the hands of corporations, a “special” (there I go again!) vaccine was administered to anyone who fell under the Covid 23 remit—plus anyone else the government and big corps found undesirable. Those targeted with the “special” vaccine soon showed symptoms and were quarantined in purpose built Convalescent Homes, each with a crematorium annex.

That’s how the Transglobal Underground was formed—a safe haven for the survivors of Covid 23.

Still, life is good if you’re one of the elite, or you tow the line and fit in. Not so good if you’ve voiced an opinion that differs from theirs.

But Covid 23 was just the beta test. The real masterstroke came with Covid 24, and it wasn’t designed to kill immediately. It was designed to clean up the "demographic deficit."

The corporate-state alliance called it Project Civic Renewal, but on the ground, we just called it the Postal Code Purge. They didn’t need complex DNA sequencing to target the social underclass; they just used the NHS central database and cross-referenced it with postcodes. If your address registered in a rundown estate, a dodgy high-rise, or a regional town the Ministry of Finance had written off a decade ago, your mandatory Covid 24 vaccine batch number started with a 'G'.

The effects were subtle at first. The "chav mummies"—as the Upper Tier tabloids loved to sneer—who already had five or six kids, suddenly found they couldn't conceive another. The real horror, the quiet one, settled in when their teenage kids grew up.

A whole generation of council estate youth, raised on cheap energy drinks and survival instincts, found themselves completely hollowed out. No pregnancies. No sudden scares. The estates, usually deafening with the sounds of screaming toddlers, barking staffies, and tinny music blasting from tinier speakers, began to grow eerily quiet.

The government celebrated it behind closed doors as the ultimate cost-cutting measure. No more child benefits to pay. No more social housing to build. The underclass problem, engineered to vanish within a single generation.

I stood on the balcony of a twenty-storey block in what used to be the Peulwys Estate, watching the sunset bleed a toxic orange across the Great Orme and sea. Below me was the Last Playground—a concrete patch where the paint on the swings had peeled away to rusted iron.

There were no children playing. The youngest person on this estate was eighteen, and he spent his days staring at his hands, knowing his bloodline ended with him.

"They're flattening the houses on Highlands Road tomorrow," a voice said behind me.

It was Llion. He was a survivor of the Covid 23 sweep, smuggled out of a Convalescent Home by the Transglobal Underground before the crematorium chimneys could smoke. He wore a heavy high-vis jacket—the universal uniform of the invisible working class.

"Why?" I asked, not really needing the answer.

"Fewer people means less space needed," Llion spat, sucking on a smuggled, highly illegal vape. "They’re zoning it for luxury smart-flats. For the corporate mid-managers. People with 'approved' genetic and financial profiles."

"They're wiping us out without firing a single bullet, ethnic cleansing" I muttered.

"Then we change the ammunition," Llion said, his eyes reflecting the dying orange light. He pulled a small, silver stasis-vial from his heavy jacket pocket. It gleamed under the shattered balcony light.

The Transglobal Underground wasn't just a network of safe houses anymore; it had become a rogue laboratory. While the government thought they had successfully sterilized the "undesirables," locally, our underground medics—the struck-off doctors and rogue corporate scientists who still had a conscience—had been working in Bryn Elian, the abandoned secondary school. This was the case in major towns and cities across the world.

"Is that the counter-agent?" I whispered.

"The synthesis is complete," Llion nodded, a grim smile touching his lips. "It won’t reverse what they did to the older generation, but for the kids? The eighteen and nineteen-year-olds? It rewrites the corporate blockers in their system. It restores the future they tried to steal."

The plan was simple but incredibly dangerous. We couldn't distribute it via clinics—everything was monitored by biometric scans and corporate AI. We had to contaminate the Upper Tier's exclusive supply lines, or better yet, weaponize the delivery system, introducing the counter-agent into the very water treatment plants that supplied the outer sectors.

The elite wanted a sterile, compliant world where the poor simply ceased to exist, leaving behind just enough automated drones to clean their streets and maintain their servers. They thought they had engineered the perfect corporate utopia.

I looked down at the silent, empty streets of the estate. Tomorrow, the bulldozers would arrive at Highlands Road. But tonight, the Underground was moving.

"Let's go," I said, stepping off the balcony into the dark. "It's time to give this country its noise back."

Shop til you drop

The modern shopping addict does not wander the wilderness gathering berries. They wander the algorithm gathering parcels.

The hunter-gatherer has evolved into the click-and-collector. Same primal thrill, just with next-day delivery and a returns label.

It begins innocently enough, as all great dependencies do. A phone upgrade here. A gym membership there. Something ergonomic for the back. Something decorative for the wall. Something aspirational for the soul. You never say, “I am building a shrine to consumerism.” You say, “I’m just sorting my life out.”

Sorting your life out, it turns out, involves a suspicious amount of cardboard.

The conveyor belt starts early. School, exams, university, job. These aren’t milestones so much as staging areas—holding pens before the real marathon begins: the purchasing. Somewhere between your first payslip and your first panic about pension contributions, the system quietly hands you a script. It is printed on glossy paper and smells faintly of new plastic.

Step one: acquire identity through acquisition.

A relationship is not just companionship; it is the gateway to a shared streaming subscription. A baby is not just a baby; it is a pram ecosystem, a nappy supply chain, a tiny human-shaped portal through which money disappears at light speed. A house is not a home; it is a lifelong handshake with debt, decorated seasonally.

You don’t buy things because you need them. You buy things because your life has chapters, and every chapter requires props.

The tragedy is not that the props exist. The tragedy is how quickly they become invisible. Yesterday’s must-have becomes today’s background noise. The thrill evaporates faster than the packaging can be recycled. Satisfaction has a half-life measured in hours.

So you buy again.

Advertising understands this better than you ever will. It knows you are not purchasing objects. You are purchasing adjectives. Confident. Youthful. Successful. Desirable. Efficient. Organised. Adventurous. The products are merely the nouns required to smuggle those adjectives into your home.

Buy this and become that.

It is the oldest spell in the book, and it still works beautifully.

The slogans chant like a modern liturgy. Because you’re worth it. Just do it. Probably the best in the world. There are some things money can’t buy—so buy everything else just in case. The phrases bounce around your skull until they feel like memories rather than marketing.

You cannot recall the moment the voice in your head stopped being yours.

Social media provides the cathedral where these beliefs are practiced publicly. The ritual is simple: display, compare, upgrade. Your life becomes a shop window in which the mannequins are real people and the price tags are invisible but universally understood.

Someone always has the newer kitchen, the sharper jawline, the more photogenic holiday. You scroll not because you enjoy it, but because hope demands evidence. Proof that the next purchase might finally close the gap between who you are and who you could be if you just tried harder and financed it responsibly.

Comparison is the engine. Envy is the fuel. Free delivery seals the deal.

The irony is that the more choice you have, the less any single choice matters. Shelves stretch to infinity. Infinite cereals. Infinite trainers. Infinite self-improvement. Decision paralysis masquerades as freedom. You stand in the aisle of endless possibility and feel an itch that only a purchase can scratch.

Choice used to mean agency. Now it means obligation.

You must optimise your skincare. Your coffee. Your mattress. Your productivity tools. Your leisure time. Your mental health. Your hydration strategy. Your morning routine. Your evening wind-down routine. Your routine for managing routines.

Life becomes a full-time job with a shopping list attached.

And the punchline? None of it sticks. The gadgets age. The clothes fade. The trends mutate. The apps update. The “must-have” quietly joins the landfill of yesterday’s essentials. Your house fills with artefacts from past versions of yourself—each one purchased by a person who was certain they were about to become someone better.

Every object is a fossil of a former hope.

The system is elegant because it never promises completion. Completion would be catastrophic. Completion would end the buying. Instead, it offers perpetual almost. You are always one purchase away from the life you imagined. Always nearly there. Always improving.

Always paying.

By the end, the receipts outnumber the memories. The boxes outnumber the ambitions. The loft becomes an archive of good intentions and free trial periods that quietly became monthly subscriptions.

And one day, if you’re unlucky enough to notice, a strange question appears uninvited: What was all this for?

The system has no answer. It was never designed to.

It simply refreshes the page and suggests something you might also like.

MAIL ORDER PUNK

Denbigh was a speck on the map, a nowhere town far from the pulse of anything resembling a punk scene, so I became a mail-order rebel, hunting down records like they were contraband. When No Future Records dropped A Country Fit For Heroes 12” compilation EP in January 1982, it was like a suspect device landing in my teenage lap and going off. That record cracked open the world of street punk for me and thousands of other kids stuck in backwaters like mine. Before that, we’d been pogoing at school discos to Angelic Upstarts, UK Subs, Cockney Rejects, the untouchable Crass, and Dead Kennedys—bands that fueled our snotty defiance. But this? This was rawer, grittier, like a boot to the face.

Discharge had already set the blueprint two years earlier with their Realities Of War EP on Clay Records. I saw their ad in Sounds screaming “Pure brickwall punk,” and by fuck, they weren’t lying—those songs hit like a sledgehammer, all distortion and rage. Then there was Vice Squad, fronted by Beki Bondage, who was (and still is) a total punk goddess. Their Last Rockers single on Riot City Records was a snarling anthem that made many a heart race. A year later, GBH upped the ante with their Leather, Bristles, Studs and Acne 12” EP, a title that basically summed up the entire aesthetic of my teenage years (minus the bristles - I was a late developer!).

Those records weren’t just music; they were lifelines, proof that there was a world beyond Denbigh’s dead-end streets. Ordering them felt like joining a secret society, each vinyl slab a middle finger to the boredom and conformity of small-town life. Looking back, I can still feel the thrill of ripping open those packages, the crackle of the needle hitting the groove, and the way those songs made me feel like I could burn the whole world down—or at least spike my hair and try.

Punk was shifting, burrowing deeper underground, a feral pulse thrumming just out of sight. If you knew where to look—back pages of Sounds, dog-eared fanzines like Never Surrender—it was there, raw and ready. Thatcher’s iron grip and the gut-punch of mass unemployment lit a fire under the nation’s youth, and punk was our Molotov cocktail. Angry voices screamed back at her regime, spitting in the face of a system that left people jobless and restless. Labels like No Future, Riot City, Rot Records, and Clay were practically high street in punk’s scrappy ecosystem, but I was chasing the obscure, the stuff so niche it barely existed.

My record collection was my war chest, stacked with every release I could afford from those labels, each one arriving with a fistful of flyers, badges, and patches that I’d sew onto my jacket like battle scars. One gem was a 7” single by the Luddites on Xsentrix Noise Records and Tapes—Strength Of Your Cry, a brooding, slow-burn banger that hit harder than most. Then there was The Human Suffering EP by What Is Oil?, which showed up with a melted hole through the vinyl and a note scrawled by some guy named Dunk: “This is for art’s sake, ask for another, cheers.” That’s peak insanity—torching your own records before mailing them out. I wrote back for a replacement, but it never came. These days, those singles go for £200 a pop, a relic of a time when art was worth more than sense.

Two or three times a week, my doormat was a drop zone for new singles, each one a tiny rebellion I’d spin until the grooves wore thin. Albums? Those were rarer—too pricey for a kid scraping by on pocket money. But the singles were my lifeblood, each one a ‘fuck you’ to the grey monotony of Thatcher’s Britain. Looking back, I can still smell the ink on those fanzines, feel the weight of the vinyl in my hands, and hear the crackle of a needle dropping on a record that felt like it could change the world—or at least my little corner of it in Denbigh.

Check out - Ian Glasper's book - A Country Fit For Heroes PRIMARILY COLLECTING THE STORIES OF OVER 140 UK PUNK BANDS FROM THE EIGHTIES WHO ONLY RELEASED EPS AND DEMOS, OR ONLY APPEARED ON COMPILATION LPS, 'A COUNTRY FIT FOR HEROES: DIY PUNK IN EIGHTIES BRITAIN' IS A CELEBRATION OF THE OBSCURE, A LOVE LETTER TO THE UK'S PUNK UNDERGROUND.