Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘26
Apparently, Hunter S. Thompson is not dead. He faked his own death and is now living in London. He has previously visited Hastings, where events occurred that were considered significant. Voiced by DR DEREK KHATSKY
I’d been doing some decorating for a friend who wanted to sell a flat he had no intention of living in. The work required modest competence, limited conversation, and no public explanation, which suited me.
During this period, I acquired an elderly Mercedes through one of the online services where a teenager delivers a car to you with the air of someone returning a pair of borrowed headphones. Only afterwards did I discover it had previously belonged to Dr Derek Khatsky, the man responsible for my last visit to Hastings. The coincidence did not immediately appear significant.
Two days later, the phone rang. It was her: the girl from my last coastal adventure.
“Hastings has gone strange again,” she said.
“Again?”
“Stranger than usual. The local elections are coming up and they’ve made everyone go a bit bonkers. Can you come down?”
The roads deteriorated the nearer you got to Hastings. Drivers ahead of me started making lateral movements of unusual commitment. Several cars displayed stickers stating ‘I’m not drunk, I’m avoiding potholes’.
I arrived, and she opened the door. One arm was in a sling.
“What happened?” I said.
“Stupid accident,” she said. “I don’t want to go into it, but it’s properly buggered.”
The street appeared unchanged, except across the road a large, tattered Union flag hung from an upstairs window, moving slightly in the wind.
“It’s been up for a while,” she said. “Keeps falling down. They just put it back up again. Looks worse every time.”
“I used to be quite friendly with them,” she said. “And a couple of others on the street. Since that went up, it’s felt different.”
“People keep assuming I’ve got an opinion on things I don’t have an opinion on,” she said. “You know… given my background. It’s ridiculous. I’ve never even been in a synagogue.”
In the kitchen, a small food waste caddy sat beside the sink.
“I don’t actually mind these new bins,” she said. “A lot of people really hate them. It’s just that everything that comes with them is a bit of a pain. There’s the little one in here, and then the bigger one outside. You’re supposed to empty one into the other.
“I was trying to do it and I knocked over my recycling box. There were tins, cardboard, glass, everything everywhere.
“The councillor turned up while I was still looking at the mess,” she said. “She cleared it all up for me. I think she was relieved to find a problem that she could actually help with.
“She said she’d already been shouted at several times that morning,” she added. “And she’s started to feel a bit frightened going out canvassing.
“She said people were convinced they were going to get fined if they didn’t use them. She kept telling them it wasn’t true, but no one believed her. One man even told her separating food waste was part of a wider global initiative for population control.”
A car passed outside, slowing as it negotiated something in the road.
“I see the potholes remain an active issue.”
“They’re getting worse,” she said. “Someone called it the pothole pandemic, and now that’s what everyone calls it.”
“There’s already conspiracy theories, of course,” she said. “Something about the potholes releasing chemicals into your car through the air conditioning. I stopped listening after that.”
She said there were election posters all over town. I noticed one had been put through her door, so I took a closer look.
“Take back control,” I read.
“Of the buses,” she said.
“How many are there?”
She paused.
“Now I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
We went out for a walk. You don’t normally see many ward-level posters in local elections. One or two, perhaps. Now they were everywhere.
Lots of light blue, red and green. Some brave souls had even put the darker blue ones up.
“They’ve multiplied,” I said.
“People seem very certain,” she said. “About completely different things.”
A couple of camera crews had appeared, hovering at the edges, waiting for something to happen.
A man stood outside a shop speaking with confidence.
“It’s about taking back control,” he said. “That’s what it comes down to.”
“Of what?” he was asked.
“Well,” he said, “everything.”
Further along, a man in paint-splattered trousers was asked what the main issue was.
“I’ve been painting that wall since six this morning, and it’s still not dry.”
We stopped at a pub and went to sit in the garden.
A man at the next table leaned over and asked to borrow the ashtray.
“Bit mad down there today, isn’t it?” he said. “I don’t really understand what’s going on.”
“People seem to be taking an interest in the local elections,” I said.
“I don’t follow that sort of thing,” he said. “Politics. It’s always something.”
“But I’ve heard about the bins. God, people hate them.”
“Bloke next door won’t use his at all. He met a massive badger down the alley one night, and it scared the life out of him. Says he’s not having that coming up to his front door and eating what’s left of his dinner.”
By the time May Day arrived, something felt off.
Everything seemed to be proceeding as normal, but something wasn’t quite right. The processions felt thinner than they should have been, and there were fewer bikers than people expected.
There were still a lot of people, though, and they were all heading in the same direction. We followed.
We heard the music before we saw anything.
By the time we reached the pier, it was clear that this was where everybody was. The crowds were far larger than anything else we had seen that day.
This was the event the light blue party had been promising for weeks, a full-scale free rave with Danny Rampling headlining. Somehow, they had actually pulled it off.
The music got louder. A cheer went up. More people continued to arrive. The flow didn’t stop.
Underfoot, the surface gave a little as the weight shifted. Not suddenly. Not sharply. Just enough to register.
“It’s always done that,” someone said.
The music built again. The crowd responded.
Further along, people were packed more tightly now. The movement became less individual and more collective.
The Coastguard’s boat sat near the pier, its engine idling.
From the water, the pier looked very different: its entire length was shifting now, a slow, uneven sway travelling from one section to another as the crowd moved.
At certain points, it dipped slightly, then rose again.
“Is it supposed to do that?” one man said.
The other man didn’t answer immediately.
“It’s not ideal,” he said.
They stood there in silence.
The structure shifted again.
After a while, one of the men spoke.
“Hang on,” he said. “I’ve got an idea.”
THE END
The full version of this article, and more of Dr Khatsky’s writing, can be found at paradisoalcatraz.substack.com
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