QUORN OF THE DAD

The day the Quorn died was the day imagination lost a battle to fact. Facts being malleable; invention demands a structure tighter than polite belief in the annotated reality of picture books. 

'Look Dad. Quorns!'

'They're not Quorn. They're mountain goats out of context.'

Unlimited cross-breeding of ideas is to be discouraged in favour of mere accuracy; the defeat of imagination worth more than the readiness to absorb facts & figures, and the conventional black lies that kill, murder and assault our humanity daily.

En masse, like never before, the distracted production of self-generated photography detracts and destroys memory. Though the photos show their truth, total recall relies on imagination not jpegs.

'But you said Quorns had horns.'

'Only because of the rhyme. Poetic licence.'

The picture book first exposed the hamster to young eyes; a badly drawn toy version that, once named, actually looked like what it self-evidently was: a monkey-bear. It pained to explain what it was meant to be, and yes, sea horses, zebra fish, and hybrids of dog-goats exist online, but the cuddly Koala cornered the monkey-bear market some time ago.

The boy was cagey about the quorn. The monkey-bears were clearly real - even if misrepresented as furry rodents kept in domestic prisons by small children with a sketchy grasp on the concept of mortality. The adult mind meanwhile pines for the curse of knowledge to abandon its contents all over the Buffet Car, leaving a blank to be filled in afresh.  The hamster replacement service departs from platform 3.

'Horns you said. Like the Gruffalo... I think there are no Quorns!'

'Quorn not Quorns. They're not countable.'

The decline in mental libido has led a lament for child-like pre-history, when the unknown excited and the unnamed prompted poetry. Now, unfortunately, all is known - or worse still, all is knowable. Offline realism is like radio with the sound down low, because the rhubarbed mumble of the over-paid presenter is preferable to your own silence.

'Why don't they count?’

'Reasons of grammar. They're like sheep.'

As the Information Age comes of age, views from privatized trains vie with portals to mindfulness. Picking off scabs, the be-pimpled teenager mourns the passing of the Quorn momentarily, before searching out fresh distractions, so that all may be categorized, catalogued and contained compulsively.

'They're like sheep? But you said they were more like goats!'

In an earlier frame, out of the window, the kid scanned the lowlands, intent on Quornspotting, a precursor to substance use and acne prevention in a matrix of austerity, instagramification and applied peer pressure: at a maximum of 60 instants per minute - any more may well expose the systemic exploitation of minors. The other miners can go to hell. Far too much trouble.

'I think I will never see a Quorn as long as I live.' 

'Don't worry, son. One day you won't care.'

That day has been and gone. And now he inhabits the generalized irony of the knowledge age, where he no longer believes in imaginary meat-free livestock, any more than he has faith in the flesh-devouring capacities of gluten-intolerant vegan Zombies.

The meat product, as the news, is just fake enough to be palatable.

Quorn of the dead. Long live the quorn!