Rain sniffed the air. Zombies. They could hide well but they could never cover up the scent of fat. There'd been a team on his trail since Newcastle and he knew there were more north of the border. The Royal Mile was about the last place on Earth that anybody would want to be right now. Except Dundee. He'd heard stories about Dundee that would turn a strong man's stomach. Rain had been sick for days after he heard those stories. “Your fault, mate”, interjected his conscience. “If you were a stronger man you wouldn't be praying right now that you make it to the Castle before a pack of cannibals tortures you and eats you.”

“Oh, piss off” grumbled Rain. “I know it's my fault, alright? Christ, do ya think if I thought for one second I'd wind up being hunted by my own bloody zombies I might have made a few different choices in life?”

His conscience remained silent, which was it's way of being a dick. It wasn't even as if the bad choices were all his….

Hail to the Abbotites.
The followers of the one true Abbot.
His negative doctrine and His rejection of social
equity binds all the Abbotites together.

It is believed that the One True Abbot shall rise and
bring salvation to the masses. Therefore let them firm
and ensure that in future the wisdom of the few shall
set a fixed term in the rule of this nation as other
believers have seen fit to enable in distant lands.

Had this been done in the past the One True Abbot would
still rule this day.
and social inequity and fear would still reign.

Thus ends this fable.

Who could ever forget Tony Abbott's line in Liberal Now: 'I love the smell of raw onion in the morning.'

Rain for example. What had his parents been smoking? As it turned out, just grass: which hardly excused a choice of name like 'Rain'. At school there had been relatively little mockery because even children seemed to have an instinctive grasp of the concept that people named 'Glass Houses' should not throw stones. Rain had always felt sorry for 'Rainbow Warrior III', whose father was 'Dave'. But his school years had not been happy ones – his mother had done a whole semester of teaching at uni before she dropped out, and was thus concencussed to run the commune's school. Home schooling with parents who taught maths from astrology books and whose English classes consisted of reading particularly awful poetry were fine if it was just home schooling, but once he'd realised how much he missing out on he felt embarrassed as well as cheated.

When he was 9, Rain and his father rode to town for together on their bicycles for the first time. He wasn't allowed to buy anything because that would have been supporting capitalism and also they didn't have any money. But his father relented enough to let him visit the town library, reasoning that being allowed to read books for free was socialist enough and that it didn't cost money.

Rain was enthralled. He liked the first story he read, about the aristocratic schoolgirl persuaded by the superiority of the socialist system. After that he read Animal Farm and he liked that too, but he didn't really understand it properly.

A few weeks later he rode his bike to the library himself and discovered the non-fiction section. He was amazed to learn that there was more to life than the commune. And that not everybody lived in tents, mud, boredom and more mud. That afternoon he spent with his head in a book about the history of slavery, only pausing once to be sick. The nice librarian blamed it on the heat and gave him a glass of lemonade. But he knew it wasn't the heat, and as soon as he'd stopped reading he started to wonder what could make people be so cruel to other people?

On his third visit to the library he skipped the fiction section entirely, and headed straight for the non-fiction section with the aim of reading the whole encyclopedia to discover what could make people be so cruel to other people. If, on that third and fateful day, he had found the answers he sought, our tale might have a happier ending. But he didn't reckon on how long it takes to read an encyclopedia, and so he didn't. He did, however, discover accountancy, quickly followed by arithmetic, and realised that his parents were idiot peasants.

On his 17th visit to the library he discovered capitalism, and realised that his parents were idiot peasants by choice.

On his 73rd visit to the library he discovered rebellion. It was his last visit to the library.

“My point exactly. You had it good on that commune; you chose to rebel – look where it's got you.''
“Still not helping. Is this what I get before I die? A guilt trip flashing before my eyes?”
“Well, it would serve you right” replied his conscience primly.
“Prick”

><><><><><><><><

Rain travelled the globe to seek his fortune and wound up in Dundee . No job, no prospects and only up to the R's in an outdated encyclopedia. And so he embarked on a business venture tried and tested the world over: selling people in his new homeland exotic food from back home. Unfortunately the folk of Dundee were too canny too fall for such an underhanded trick, and 'Rain McLean's Tofu & Greens Bar' was razed to the ground as soon as the Dundeenites realised that the term 'Bar' was a misnomer.

Not to be dissuaded, Rain soon hit upon a new strategy: selling people in his new homeland the same old crap they're used to.

This was to prove a winning strategy. In fact, almost as soon as he had changed the sign to 'Rain McLean's Burger Chain' (working on the assumption that this would be but the first link in the globe-spanning chain) there were people queuing up for deep-fried tofu and greens; once he had exhausted his old stock and started deep-frying cut potatoes his business improved steadily. By the time he had hit upon his world-famous-but-secret-formula for deep-frying hamburgers, he was ready to open more franchises – or as Rain McLean used to call them – fry-chanches! Oh the humanity.