People Watching Part 6 - Walking Downtown

Boomtown is a pretty uncompromising place. The ten thousand streets of brutalist architecture provide a backdrop that was never intended to foster the best aspects of the human spirit and the air in the city makes things worse. Boomtown doesn’t have any seasons and under the orange sky, endures a year-round, warm and humid fug that seeps deep into your bones and makes you feel colder than it should. Some say it’s the night air that makes it this way but whatever the cause, it seems to be made worse by fumes from traffic, the abattoir and the Xpelair at the back of the Italian Café. Walk the streets of Boomtown and you can’t escape the smells of cabbage and grey water. It’s not a healthy place to be.

Boomtown’s Doctor has become expert at treating a strange malady that is endemic to Boomtown – ratengitis (see Doctors Notes 1). It’s clear from the annals that it’s been with us for aeons but really, we know very little. The view of the medical profession is that the disease may pre-date the founding of the city, which would make it very ancient indeed, but there’s little archaeological evidence for this. What few records there are in the Boomtown scrolls suggest that the disease has become more prevalent in modern times, as the city’s air quality has deteriorated.

Every so often, ratengitis rears its oh-so-ugly head and forces Boomtown’s residents to go into self-isolation. Not that the enforced staying indoors is driven by government policy – as if the government of Boomtown would care! There are a million stories to be told from these periods of self-enforced quarantine and we’ve probably heard every one of them. Fear steams the place up and only the brave – or foolhardy – walk out, risking arrest if they’re caught.

The official line at these times is to stay in touch with family (and any friends you have) by phone. Boomtown radio carries regular public information pieces - that's my number, why don't you come by some time and you know, dial it up? - encouraging all the good folk to look out for each other. The normally low levels of ambition in Boomtown get subdued even further during these periods and the best most people hope for is to eat well and sleep well. But the threat passes eventually and those citizens who are not tucked up in Boomtown’s hospital wards by that stage, shake off the malaise and rouse themselves from the damp walls and clammy tongues that they’ve had to endure.

Normal life resumes slowly. For the first few weeks after the self-isolation lifts, everyone’s wondering how these things begin but eventually face up to the reality that it'll happen anyway – the last bout of ratengitis wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last! As levels of optimism rise, Boomtown resumes some sense of normality and once again, we’re free to go walking downtown.