Something strange is happening

Something strange is happening.

While no one was watching Fiction has escaped from its dimension.

Fiction has bent the rules laid down by its creators and is running the ‘Real World.’

Speaking as writer and artist I distill what I see and feel into a more condensed, heightened version of reality. But the world has tipped upside down. Reality has been consumed by Fiction. There is no separation. So Reality gets to use all Fiction’s masks, costumes, dry ice machines, magic boxes, twists of plot, suspense and mystery.

I don’t know if there is some mind-altering drug in the water we’re all drinking. After all, medicines get pissed straight into the water supply. Or perhaps Fiction is wreaking revenge for not being taken seriously since the advent of the Industrial Revolution or even before that. And more recently, Reality Television has been an insult to Fiction. I’m now doubting everything and wondering whether writers and artists aren’t so much creative as fortunetellers. They could simply have always been describing the future. Think of Philip K Dick and Minority Report, or Orwell's 1984. All I know is that while I was absorbed creating paintings and new scenes for my novel, something happened in the world. And when I looked up, I found myself in a Marvel Comic. In this particular Marvel story the villains gather in a place called ‘Trump Towers’ and plot to destroy the planet. We’ve come to the bit where the Joker hypnotizes everyone into believing he is President of the United States. And the people who see through this are in very great danger.

And in another, related Comic book story, on a small series of islands called Brexit, a fictional, icily stern Prime Minister has acquired the secret of time travel. Some people say she learnt the dark art from a Russian stranger. Some say she stole it from a financier. Some say she was born with this talent. But as an act of revenge for being banished to running prisons for many years, she is plotting to take the duped inhabitants of this small island back in time. Her red-tipped finger hovers over the dial. Is it to be the Fifties, Forties, Thirties? The early Nineteen Hundreds? Eenie, meenie, miney, mo…she hasn’t yet decided.

Fiction used to be so much safer when she didn’t run the world. At least you knew how things