Picture the scene, if you will. Aware that too much time spent wandering around by yourself meant you would cease to be an ancestor and become a lunch, you and the first, solo members’ of Homo erectus cautiously gather together (remember, we didn’t say who’s lunch) for your first foray into the world of ‘commune living’, pre-dating the sixties movement by some 70,000 years. Much time is spent nervously sniffing the air and pointing (much as some folk in parts of the UK do today when a train goes by) until one of this assembled shambles (let’s call him 10) bends slowly and plucks a small flower growing just outside of this nervous circle and, with benign expression and soulful eyes, offers it across the void to another member of the meeting opposite.
The man (I use that term in its loosest possible sense) who has been singled out for the honour (let’s call him 11) moves tentatively forward, arm outstretched, brow knotted in quizzical yet trusting eagerness as the proffered fore-runner of Interflora is twitched in beckoning temptation sending ripples along the stem and through the petals of the pink bloom. Gently, slowly, 11 reaches forward and his fingers’ grasp the stalk of the quivering campion, the hairs on the back of his hand flickering and bristling in paroxysms of heightened sensitivity at the closeness, the “almost there”-ness of the moment; indeed, so all consuming is this moment that 11 fails to spot the mastodon knuckle-bone held behind the back of 10 and which now comes crashing down on 11’s skull, pole-axing him in an instant. 10 looks at the devastation that was once 11, then at the surrounding group of shocked proto-primates; he grunts, points at the lifeless corpse in front of them, looks them all in the eye, grunts once more, lifts the mastodon knuckle-bone above his head and nods; my friends, we are witnesses to the first recorded instance of a political manifesto.
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