"Simon Hawke - Wizard 7 - The Wizard of Camelot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

it
was a fair distance from London, which was the point of the whole thing. The
level of crime and violence in London had become intolerable and I feared for
my
family's safety.

I purchased a house, a small cottage, really, on the outskirts of the town,
but
nevertheless, it came quite dearly and wiped out all my savings. There was,
of
course, no possibility of financing the purchase with a mortgage. No one was
taking any flyers on such things back then. Businesses were failing left and
right, banks and underwriting firms among them, and credit was a nonexistent
thing. One paid with cash or one simply didn't buy at all, and with the
economy
collapsing, prices fluctuated wildly, not only from day to day, but from hour
to
hour

Things grew worse with each passing week, nor was the madness confined to
British soil. The Collapse was a worldwide phenomenon, as everyone knows now,
though few people living today have any firsthand knowledge of what it was
really like. That period has since been greatly romanticized in films,
novels,
and on television, but it's one thing to see the Collapse fancifully depicted
in
a film or television series and quite another to have actually lived through
it.
Modern generations seem to have a great feeling of nostalgia for the past,
somehow perceiving that period as a time of great adventure and derring-do,
but
at the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I must say frankly that young
people today have absolutely no idea what those days were really like. They
simply haven't got a clue.

The Collapse was a bloody nightmare. The most densely populated urban areas
were
hit the hardest, and those were the places where the violence was the most
pronounced. I had wanted to remove my family from the environs of the city at
all costs, and so I bought the house in Loughborough, spending all the money
I
had carefully saved over the years. In retrospect, I still don't think it was
a
bad decision, considering the circumstances. Cash was at a premium and
everyone
was liquidating everything they owned in the way of long-term investments,
fighting for the short-term gain.

The Collapse had changed people's ways of thinking. Money was steadily losing
value, and so such things as homes, savings, and investments were losing