Conditions

Whitley Bay, walking among the boarded up sea-front buildings. Something has finished here, we agree. Something is over. But at least they haven't begun the regeneration yet. They're going to turn it into a cultural hub, imagine that! A cultural hub where there was once the funfair and the golden sands.

A search and rescue helicopter hovers over the sea. Someone must have gone missing. Someone's disappeared. As we draw closer, we see an ambulance on the beach, and bodysuited lifeguards running into the water with floats.

We gather with other spectators along the railings at the edge of the beach. A second helicopter has joined the search, following the edge of the shore where the sand gives way to rock. The currents are very strong, the man next to us says. You never know where a body will end up. A teenage boy, head bent down, hand to brow, sits on the steps of the ambulance with a towel around his shoulders.

The whirling blades of the helicopter leave a shadowy impression in the sea. Beneath it, the lifeguards, spread out over a few hundred meters, paddle out on their floats. Sometimes they dive and then reappear. Much higher up, rising at an angle, the second helicopter surveys the whole area. Maybe it has special equipment, a kind of sonar, we speculate.

Two men run out onto the beach and take off their clothes. They're drunk, we can see that. They splash out into the sea, nude, laughing and shouting, the helicopters hovering above them. But when they turn and see the long line of spectators looking out at them, and realise they are in the midst of the search for a missing swimmer, they become suddenly embarrassed. Shamed. They wade back to the beach, hands cupped over their genitals.

How much time do we have left?, we consider, on the way to the station. You can't tell, says W. The conditions for the disaster are here, they're omnipresent, but when will it actually come? He reads book after book on the oil crisis and the climate crisis. He reads about the credit crunch and the futures market. The conditions for the end are here, but not the end itself, not yet.

But it could come at any time, that's the horror, says W. The end could come tomorrow, or in another thousand years, we have no idea. The time of reality is non-linear, W. says.

Are we part of those conditions?, W. wonders sometimes. Are we part of the conditions of the collapse? He suspects so, he says. In some important way, it's all our fault. – 'The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?', W. says, quoting some Bergman character. 'You', W. says. 'Your stupidity. Your immense ugly face'.