Цитаты из книги Stark

The problem is called salinization and it means that too much salt is concentrated in the top-soil, attacking the vegetation that grows there. It occurs when the water-table rises, bringing more and more salt to the surface. The water then evaporates, leaving the minerals behind and the land becomes useless. Why is it that the water-table rises? The answer is simple; because all the trees have been cut down. The trees, with their deep roots, used to absorb the water before it could rise, leaving the salt far down below and allowing the water to continue its cycle harmlessly through their leaves hanging high above the ground. Now the trees are gone and Western Australia - like many hot parts of the world where surface evaporation is speedy and the forests have been cleared - faces a terrible problem with the salt of the earth. This is the avalanche factor. Who would have thought that cutting down trees to create agricultural land, would render that land terminally poisoned by salt within a few short years? These days, of course, the cause and effect are wellestablished, but the trees keep falling.

This minor incident, which at the time was entirely overshadowed by the World Cup, concerned the accidental discharge of thirty tonnes of toxic waste into the Rhine. Of course, thirty tonnes doesn't sound that much — the lead singers of heavy metal bands can sometimes weigh as much as that - but the seriousness of a toxic leak depends entirely on how toxic the leak is. Well, in the case of Sandoz, the words 'very, very' spring to mind, and then spring out again as being scarcely adequate. And then spring back again for the want of a better alternative. Put it this way, if the universe is very, very, big, then the Sandoz leak was very, very toxic. That thirty tonnes leaked from one factory, into one river, swept through France, Germany and Holland and killed every single living organism in its path.

This is what gossip pages in newspapers depend on. They suggest that there is a mystical, club-centred world of pop stars and society beauties where a better time is being had. It is a strange theory, after all, there is no reason to presume that you will have a better time simply because you are standing about with a bunch of wankers and paying ten bucks for an orange juice.

But the photos suggest that there is. Those screaming faces that CD had looked at in the Carlo library; fat men, anorexic looking women. Those faces were saying, 'look at us, you'll never enjoy yourself this much'.

The photos do not record the event, they are the event. The photo is what matters, all that matters.

She tossed the junk mail in the bin, unopened. And in doing so, Chrissy unwittingly made a joke and a mockery of the lives, loves and endeavours of countless people whom she would never know. In that casual gesture she trampled upon an awesome human achievement and upon great sacrifices contributed by the natural world. Why didn't she stop to think? Why didn't she dare to care? What a bitch. If only she could have seen them, seen their disappointment as she hurled their creation back in their honest faces. The person who cleared the land to plant the fir trees; the persons who planted and tore up the fir trees every second or third year; the drivers and the ships' captains who got the trees to the mill; the thousands who work in the mills and in the huge pulping plants and paper factories — if only Chrissy could have seen them she would have wept bitter tears of self reproach to have dismissed their lives so casually. The copywriter? Did Chrissy not care that he had spent so many lonely hours trying to think of a tempting way to get her to accept ten days free home perusal of a fifteen volume history of the Wild West? The printer and the four colour offset litho process of which he was so proud — was his life to be just a pointless joke because of Chrissy? The animals and insects that were wiped out when billions of acres of forest and moorland were turned over to single crop, factory, fir tree farming. Did they give their lives in vain?

One can only hope and pray that those involved never discover that after the monumental worldwide effort and the truly awesome consumption of natural resources that went into bringing a piece of junk mail to Chrissy's door, she simply threw it away. Gone, gone, gone; all their hopes and dreams and sacrifices, rejected in that one contemptuous gesture. They must never know, for they would put up their arms in horror (or spindly leggy things in the case of the insects) and say, as Zimmerman would say, 'What is the point!? No, I mean really, what is the point?'

Cockroaches have an extraordinary physical resilience. You can smash one to bits on your living room floor leaving it in numerous cockroachie pieces and a little later when you have steeled yourself to clearing it up, it's gone! It's cleaned itself up! Some say that other cockroaches have simply come and carried it away to have for their dinner but this is not true. Cockroaches are definitely bionic, they can rebuild themselves. If you put the shattered corpse of one in the bin, it will wait until you are gone and then slowly pull itself back together again, gluing on its head with its own horrid goo. Then, when it is ready, a born-again cockie, bigger, scarier and somehow managing to have more legs than it started off with, it will scuttle out, refreshed, from a mound of potato peelings making obscene gestures at you with its little cockroach fist.

Just about every cat in Carlo shat in Walt and Zimm's garden. Walter thought it was OK because cats are clean shitters. They are always very careful to dig a shallow toilet and fill it in again afterwards. The problem obviously comes when the land has been so overcrapped that the surface is 100 per cent cat crap, which means the cat digs a hole in the crap, craps in it and then carefully pushes crap on top of it. A soul-destroying activity and one calculated to make any cat lower its personal standards.