Americana-UK Towers is situated, as you know, in The People’s Republic of Liverpudlia and we thought it might be nice for you folks to know how we have handled the present travails and what we are doing to win the war against this pesky bug.
We first got wind that something was up from our fellow republic The People’s Republic of China. Obviously we discounted the rumours because they are filthy communists or something and they eat food which is not like ours (and therefore cannot be trusted and is most likely to be the cause of the bloody thing). Before long some other countries who were not filthy communists started to report problems so we were forced to take a little (but not much more) note. In any case, we reasoned, if all other countries had gone mad then think of the possibilities that this presented to us. With everyone running around in a panic we at Americana-UK Towers would be free to review all of the CDs, gigs, festivals and other music-related stuff making an absolute killing in the process. We would ‘capitalise’ on their misfortune and become supermen of free to view web content. Admittedly things got slightly hairy when The World Health Organisation rang us up and said “Look chaps this is serious, you really want to be careful about the amount of disposable gloves you people have got” but since they were The WHO and has-been 60’s rock bands are off-genre for us we thought it safest to ignore them.
In this respect, ignoring stuff and literally being ignorant, we figured we had the best policy in place. When things started to get more tricky and more foreigners started dying in their droves (we don’t really like foreigners but that didn’t stop us letting them into The Republic without any sort of checks or questions) it was time to up our game. What we needed, we reasoned, were some scientists upon whom we could lay the blame if things really did go to hell in a hand cart. Unfortunately by this time most of the good ones had been taken. No matter, we had a recruitment drive anyway and got a top team in place. Sadly they were all political scientists or Christian scientists but at least they would do more or less what they were told and we could say that we were following the science.
The next most important thing was to invoke a wartime spirit. The last thing we needed was the bloody hoi-polloi questioning us so we made it absolutely clear that any dissent would be counted as counterproductive and treasonous. In this respect we are lucky to have to media on side – The People’s Republic of Liverpudlia’s Armageddon Times and Advertiser can usually be counted on to hold the side up. They were particularly good when The Editor caught a cold and the coverage they gave to this meant that we could cover up any bad news for a while whilst showing the populace that we were all in this together. Special mention should also be made of our Head of Marketing, Dominance Coming, and his brilliant revelation that those likely to die were the old and already ill, who were a burden on our resources anyway, and that this could be interpreted as a good thing because we wouldn’t waste money that could otherwise be spent restocking the bar.
Eventually it sadly became apparent that the measures we had bothered to put into place weren’t working quite as well as imagined and that we were going to have to come out of our Bunker and do something. Or indeed anything. We decided that one night a week, not poker night or bath night obviously, we would stand on the steps of The Bunker and applaud like mad things the plebians who were doing their best to keep the great unwashed from dying. Obviously this was slightly distasteful to us since we regard these people as expendable and frankly a little irritating but no matter – we had to our bit. Or at least make it look like we were. It was a raging success you’ll be pleased to hear.
And so we progress. We now almost have in place a method of tracking down snotty people and all of those who they have been uncomfortably close to. Almost but not quite. You can’t rush these things. We are actively considering checking people on their way into The Republic but again we don’t want to jump into anything and we certainly don’t want to quarantine them so that they can’t spend their money on our local handicrafts. And of course we might actually get round to testing sufficient numbers of people to make sufficient sense of the madness but without sufficient capacity (we weren’t sufficiently quick in buying the stuff we needed in the first instance) it would silly to make promises that we can’t keep. In the meantime we are alertly taking it on the chin and saving lives. At least we think we are. Someone spilt red wine on our notes and they are difficult to decipher.
