The Beauty of Diversity 2.0

Buried deep within the boiling depths of the earth’s core lies an element so rare and unstable that even if mining equipment capable of boring several thousand miles through the crust existed, the paltry gram or so of the stuff floating around down there would vaporise under the heat of its own radioactivity the instant it was extracted.

So rare is astatine that its existence remained undiscovered until the nineteen forties when scientists, presumably out of a mixture of boredom and over-enthusiastic Benzedrine use, took the curious decision to toss one of the ingredients of Pepto Bismol into a particle accelerator, sand blast it with alpha particles and bung it in a six hundred degree oven to see if anything Nobel Chemistry Prize-y would come out of it. It would later be established that this bizarre substance could, theoretically, occur naturally in tiny quantities. But only when specific elements collided in specific quantities at specific times deep in the obscure nooks and crannies of the molten bowels of the planet.

In short, this highly unstable, short-lived element will never, ever, be seen in the wild by human eyes.

Even with all that taken into consideration, there is still a sight in this world even more elusive than astatine. A shimmering mirage so fleeting and transient that it makes the eruption of Coronae Borealis seem as frequently observed as the twenty two bus into the city centre.

Larkin was on his way to settle a debt.

He was striding rattily up the tube station steps into High Holborn, muttering curses under his breath and wondering to himself what sort of contemptible sub-human would agree to spot a fellow fifty pounds and then have the temerity to actually ask for it back. It struck him as being a bit peevish and middle class.

But Merritt always did have a latent parsimonious streak. The smaller the amount, the more extravagantly he would overreact. Back in ’06 it had got to the point where it had been necessary to drag him away by the ankles from a taxi cab in Budapest during Ashworth-Cobb’s second stag weekend.  A peculiar idea had formed in his mind about the driver taking a couple of bonus laps of the one way system to cheat them out of an extra two thousand forints and he had gone up like a flustered, sexually repressed firework at the chap in full view of several dozen people waiting to board a premium night time river cruise.

Merritt had not yet openly considered physical violence as an option in Larkin’s case, but the writing was on the wall. His determination to retrieve the fifty pounds he’d reluctantly ponied up to tide his friend over in the wake of a tragic gambling accident had become exhausting. Normal communications between the men consisted, in the main, of Larkin inquiry as to whether Merritt fancied slinking off to whichever low brow boozer he happened to be getting sozzled in. Merritt would ordinarily respond in flustered fashion with a hastily typed missive about trying to work up a convincing lie to throw his wife off the scent. These were the uncomplicated, time-honoured parameters of their relationship, unsullied by tedious matters like debt and politics.

But recently, every fancy a pint old chap? had been met with a curt if you have that £50 on you. Every I’m in the Shoemakers’ Arms, fancy sneaking out for a swift one? rebuffed with a Yes, if you’ll let me drag you out into the car park and shake you by your ankles until £50 worth of loose change falls out of your pockets. The unspoken rules of engagement had been torn up.

It was becoming tiresome. More tiresome than a few quid was worth.

He checked his coat pocket for the fifty pound note he was about to foist upon his friend as he neared the glass and steel monstrosity that passed for the headquarters of Midas Zenith Group. To a man like Merritt, the uncommonly large bank note was more of a two fingered salute than a bag containing a thousand fiddly five pence coins. If his wife caught sight of it, she’d assume he’d managed to scurry off to the casino behind her back and make his life a living hell for a couple of days. If he tried to quietly break it up in the supermarket there’d be a terrible fuss involving store managers being summoned to hold it up to the light and a whiff of organised crime clinging to him forever more during the weekly shop.

To really rub salt into the wound, he had formed a half baked idea of strolling into Merritt’s department and ostentatiously handing over the note to the office manager with a wink and a loud request to pass on a message to bell him on the usual number the moment the next consignment arrived from Peru.

However, Midas Zenith Group was very much a key-fob to-get-through-every-door sort of place with turnstiles and security guards and the usual awkward stuff to keep the pointy headed financial people within separated from the hoi polloi. The reception area was as clinical as its exterior, all white marble and yucca plants in white pots with white stones around their trunks. A security guard stared into space as he waited for guests to pass through a metal detector and a few chaps in suits bustled around a row of lift doors beyond.

He sidled up to the reception desk.

‘Name?,’ mumbled a cheerless, severe looking young woman, without taking her eyes off her computer screen.

‘Larkin.’

‘Here to see…?’

‘Mr Merritt. He’s a bigwig in the personal investment management department or something ghastly like that.’

‘One moment.’ She lifted a phone receiver and gestured to a minimalist sofa a few yards away . ‘Just wait over there please, sir.’

There was a brief bout of clipped and inaudible dialogue behind the computer monitor. ‘Someone will be down in a few minutes sir, ‘ said the receptionist, without giving Larkin so much as a glance.

These few minutes turned out to be long ones. The receptionist was not in the mood for inane chatter and Larkin was a man possessed with the uncontrollable urge to fill all of life’s protracted silences with inane wittering. It was an awkward combination.

He was roughly a third of the way through relating an anecdote about how a few of the chaps got together and pumped Dessy Minto’s Jag full of expanding foam on the morning of his daughter’s Christening in retaliation for him spiking the punch at Little Bambo’s fortieth with a vial of pure peyote cactus sap when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t even touched upon the complexities of the ongoing litigation and counter-litigation working its way slowly through the civil courts.

‘Mr Martin? Here to take the diversity training workshop?’ He spun around, expecting it to be Merritt having one of his feeble little stabs at humour.

However, a balding little apology of a man stood before him, stressing and stooping.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I’m Alan Downhill, assistant training procurement manager for the personal investment arm,’ he said, offering a limp handshake. ‘We’ve exchanged emails about the session.’

‘The session?’

‘Yes…the Inclusive Workplace Practices session. You’re down for eleven until lunchtime but you’re a bit early.’

Larkin paused for a moment to thoroughly evaluate the situation and rigorously consider the options laid out before him. He turned over potential consequences, unintended consequences, long term effects, the scope for any possible legal ramifications and most importantly, whether he had anything better to do that morning.

‘Well then Downhill,’ he said, cheerily. ‘Lead the way, there’s no time to lose.’

Larkin was a man whose school report had once contained the ominous phrase ‘highly dangerous when bored’.

Downhill flashed his pass at the security guard, who allowed them to bypass the metal detector. They loitered awkwardly together as the numbers above a set of metal doors slowly counted down from twelve.

Aged fifteen, Larkin had almost been run out of St Paul’s for using an entire packet of fake blood capsules to simulate an explosive bout of tuberculosis, resulting in a Latin master suffering a stroke and being forced to retire at the age of forty six.

‘Did you not bring any materials with you Mr Martin?’ inquired Downhill as they entered the lift.

Larkin cast him a dark glance. ‘Yes, but…erm…a terrible thing happened. My man bag full of diversity training documents was snatched by a one of those Romanian pickpocket gangs on the way over,’ he said.

‘Oh my God. Really? How awful…are you alright? Are you sure you don’t want to postpone?’

‘You know how it is, Downhill. You so much as stop to tie your shoelaces in this city and the next thing you know you’re surrounded by half the occupants of a Bucharest orphanage rifling through your pockets. But don’t worry about me, I suffered worse in that…’ he let out a wistful sigh ‘…Taliban prison.’

In order to prevent his permanent expulsion, Larkin’s father had been forced to cough up five thousand pounds to several of St Paul’s partner charities and sign a legally binding undertaking that his son would honour a lifetime ban from its premises, effective immediately after his final GCSE exam.

The lift let out a jaunty ping and announced in a syrupy synthetic Scottish accent that they had reached the eighth floor.

Larkin stepped out, casting around for a glimpse of Merritt among the sea of frosted glass offices and cubicles. Was this really where he spent his days? It was little wonder he had the demeanor of one of those sad, whipped donkeys you see advertised for sponsorship at Christmas.

‘I was in communication with some kind of middle management flunkey by the name of Merritt,’ he said, casually turning to Downhill. ‘Is he around?’

‘Oh…erm…he’s actually out at client meetings for the rest of the day,’ replied Downhill, nervously. ‘If you’d just like to follow me to the meeting room I’ll let you get set up.’

A few years after the St Paul’s debacle, he was persuaded in the strongest of terms to abandon his degree course in English Literature at Durham and transfer to Exeter following a regrettable incident involving a bottle of tequila, a visit to Northumberland Zoo, a dozen greater rhea, the evacuation of half of Morpeth and a joint operation involving a police armed response unit and the Royal Highland Fusiliers.

A quarter of an hour later, the first of around twenty personal investment wallahs began to reluctantly trickle into the meeting room and assemble themselves sheepishly around a long table.

At its head slouched Larkin, his feet up and a biro in his mouth. Behind him the words You cannot hate other people without hating yourself – Oprah Winfrey had been messily scrawled across a whiteboard.

He sat viewing them disinterestedly for a few minutes as they exchanged the usual subdued greetings and benign gossip whilst trying desperately not to catch his eye.

‘Right. Let’s get started then,’ said Larkin, standing up with a start and rubbing his hands. The hubbub subsided. He flashed a sympathetic look at the bored faces gazing up at him and continued.

‘Look, I know what you’re thinking,’ he began. ‘Another boring diversity session about feeling bad about slavery, not staring too much at transgenders and trying not to mention nine eleven in front of the Muslims in case it sets them off again.’

A few muted, incredulous titters rose from among the arched eyebrows.

‘A lot of gentle social workery group therapy flim flam about how I’m not trying to catch you out or judge you because we’re all here to learn and look inwards at attitudes and prejudices we might not even have known we had and so on and so forth.’

‘Well,’ he continued, with a dramatic pause. ‘We’re not going to do any of that today.’

He grabbed a pen and scribbled aggressively on the whiteboard: ‘Diversity 2.0’

‘And what, you may well ask, is Diversity 2.0?. Well, friends, via a thorough a process of rigorous research and development carried out over several decades, incorporating sophisticated psychometric testing based on data gathered by state-of-the-art digital surveillance, we have discovered that we can pinpoint the exact flavour and severity of any individual’s deep seated bigotry. This minute level of detail allows us to create bespoke de-radicalisation hypnosis sessions for each individual, who on completion of the course graduate to become Diversity 2.0 Ambassa…. ‘

A hand went up. ‘I beg your pardon Mr….’

‘Lar…Martin.’

‘Did you just say state of the art digital surveillance?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, exactly, do you mean by that?’

Larkin spun the office chair around and sat backwards on it. ‘Now, this is going to sound alarming, but I implore you to remain calm. No histrionics, alright?’

He lowered his voice. ‘Some weeks ago I had, with the full permission of the board of directors, a number of data gathering nano-particle drives planted on the internet network in this very office.’

A plume of knee-jerk dismay erupted as three quarters of the participants asked the same frantic question: ‘What does that mean?’

‘Well, it’s quite simple,’ continued Larkin, calmly. ‘Everything you’ve been looking at on your computers, phones, tablets and other internet-enabled devices over the past month or so, every message you have sent, every picture you have taken, has been fed into a five storey supercomputer, which uses a cutting edge algorithm to juggle it all about and analyse it. In time, this churns out a tailor made bigotry profile for each and every one of you.’

The room erupted in wagging fingers and raised voices.

‘That’s a violation of our rights! That’s spying!,’ roared a fat, middle aged management type from under his thick rimmed spectacles.

‘Your name please sir?,’ asked Larkin, fishing a pocket book from his jacket. It was full of betting tips and phone numbers and the names of pubs he was no longer welcome in.

‘Davis. John Davis.’

Larkin thumbed his way through the book slowly and deliberately.

‘Ah, yes. Here we are – Davis, J. You’re the one quietly trying to manage all the gays out of the department so – to quote one of your many digital missives – you don’t have to look at those repellent chutney ferrets for a moment longer.’

The room fell silent but for Davis’ continued explosive spittle-flecked indignation.

‘Setting them up to fail with nigh-on impossible tasks, gerrymandering their appraisals, whispering in the ears of the directors about their shortcomings. You brag about it an awful lot in the WhatsApp group you have going with several other like minded acquaintances you know from the gun club. What is it called again? Ah yes, Straight Normal Hetero Pride.’

‘I knew it!,’ screeched one excitable looking young fellow across the table at Davis. ‘I knew it wasn’t about my work. As soon as I mentioned my husband I saw that look on your face.’

Larkin gestured for calm. ‘Take a breath, everyone. This is the beauty of Diversity 2.0. Now we know the precise nature of Davis’ bigotry, we can help him heal and develop a healthier attitude towards his colleagues from the LGBT…QI…A?…I forget the rest of it…kingdom.’

The row between Davis and his fizzing young underling reignited across the table. Larkin allowed the cacophony to play out for a while until it looked likely that it may cross the Rubicon into physical violence.

‘Okay, okay,’ came the emollient entreaty. ‘Let’s not make this all about Davis, he’s not the only one here with dastardly opinions about misunderstood and unfairly maligned minorities. At least one person here has privately admitted they would sign up to a roving death squad to rid the nation of Irish travellers if the need ever arose.’

He took a few more names. David Connor, Andrew Sykes and Janine Thompson-Ameyaw. He had a faint recollection of Merritt mentioning a Janine, using flowery old fashioned language like fragant and elegant to skirt around the fact that he thought she was a top notch bit of stuff who he’d probably already planned an entire life with in his head on the off chance she had a thing for tightly wound middle aged men with paunches and performance anxiety and asked him to run away with her.

‘One moment…Connor, D…Ah, yes. A lot of messages pinging back and forth between yourself and Sykes about your…rather niche shared interests and pursuits.’

‘I don’t even really know him. I’ve worked here for five years and we’ve barely even said hello,’ protested Sykes.

‘We’re in completely different teams,’ blustered Connor, slouching back with his arms folded. ‘Our paths barely cross in here or anywhere else. Whatever you’re about to come out with is complete and utter fantasy.’

‘In a way you’re correct, Connor,’ sighed Larkin, unflinchingly. ‘It is the fantasies you live out in the company of old Sykesy boy here that got you flagged.’

There was a lot of unintelligible, angry growling and aggressive animation of limbs.

‘We’ll not go into the granular details,’ said Larkin, slowly and loudly, creating a brief lull in the verging upon simian remonstrations. ‘But if you will insist upon playing text tennis about the finer points of your weekly lunchtime visits to that flat above the fried chicken place on Theobalds Road, the digital surveillance thingy is liable to gather it all up and feed it into the giant computer.’

The men began desperately appealing to their colleagues to disregard Larkin’s insinuations, wide eyed and panicked.

‘Aside from the indignity of making her wear rags, clapping her in leg irons and insisting she refer to you both as “massa” for the full half hour,’ continued Larkin, blithely, ‘that girl is in fact a fifteen-year-old war orphan from South Sudan who was captured by militia men after her village was razed to ashes, trafficked here in a crude oil tanker and pimped out by sympathetic ex-pat illegal immigrants here in London to raise money for the People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition landmine fund.’

He paused and took in the wild stares, goldfish mouths and looks of appalled disbelief on the faces of his audience. ‘But what really concerned me was the ongoing chat about kidnapping Janine and locking her up in that storage unit. Benefit of the doubt and all that, it’s probably just fantasy. You probably didn’t go to all the trouble of sound proofing it but you never know, the fantasy stroke reality line can become blurred when a man’s blood is up and I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.’

He paced around a little as the room exploded into another untidy sea of yelling and flailing arms. Again, he let it escalate to the point where Janine was standing up with one of her her impressively lengthy acrylic fingernails an inch from Connor’s eyeball.

‘Not that Janine is entirely above reproach,’ he boomed above the hysteria. That got their attention. ‘Are you, little miss I’m just playing the white man’s corporate game until I’m promoted to a senior enough position to start quietly siphoning cash out of the firm to establish a British version of the Black Panthers?’

He sat back down and put his feet up on the table, watching the straight laced corporate drones tear into each other.

‘I did not say that,’ screeched Janine. ‘It’s outright slander. This man is a liar and a lunatic.’

‘But you were quick enough to glare at me when he came out with all that tripe about trying to run all the homosexualists out of the place,’ roared Davis. ‘For the record, I have a gay cousin. We went to his wedding. We had a lovely time. Splendid catering. The whole thing is a complete and utter fabrication from top to bottom.’

Sykes was busy making a panic-stricken appeal to several sceptical female colleagues about how he was a married man with three daughters who would never dream of paying for sex, Transatlantic slave trade-themed or otherwise. Connor tried to help but contrived to pour petrol on the flames by means of a rambling monologue about how he’d never found black women physically attractive, especially the underage ones.

‘I think we’re getting a little sidetracked here, friends,’ said Larkin. He repeated himself several times before he got their attention. ‘Anger is merely the first stage in processing the truth about the dark, bigoted and in many cases quite seedy truth about what your colleagues say and do when they think nobody is looking or listening. The mandatory de-radicalisation hypnosis sessions you’ll all undergo at a later date won’t just help to iron out your own little peccadillos, they will help you forgive those of others. Perhaps you’ll even come to love and cherish them as friends. Go on holidays together, go to their houses for Christmas and all that. There has been at least one interracial wedding come of this process that I know of so far. That’s the beauty of Diversity 2.0.’

There was still a lot of pronounced stress in the room. Some were still chuntering away in protest, others sat with their heads in their hands. Some openly wept.

‘By the way, before we take a smoke break,’ chirped Larkin. ‘Is there a chap here by the name of Merritt, by any chance?’

A few shook their heads.

‘Oh, pity,’ he tailed off. ‘Never mind.’ This was met by several demands to know why he asked.

‘I shouldn’t say really if he’s not here. Fair’s fair and all that.’ He was pressed further on the matter.

‘Well, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of it,’ he moaned with forced reluctance, ‘but the man has an interest in German Second World War memorabilia that goes way above and beyond the normal parameters of academic interest.’

‘What do you mean by that?,’ grunted Connor, presumably desperate to shift the spotlight.

‘Well, for starters there’s the on-the-lowdown weekend jollies where he and his friends rent out a farm in the middle of nowhere, pull on their Hugo Boss uniforms and reenact, amongst other unsavoury historical events, the Maribor prison massacres.’

He let that sink in for a few moments. ‘And did you know he spent the thick end of seven grand on the personalised number plate “N5D4P” a couple of years back? Most concerning for his colleagues, especially the Jew ones.’

The anger had now dissipated entirely. The room was now home to silence, ashen stares and powerful negative emotions yet to be categorised by psychiatrists.

Larkin slapped his thighs, rose from his chair and made for the door. ‘Right, smoke break,’ he said, glancing at his watch. ‘All back in here for quarter past if you’d be so kind. The next part of Diversity 2.0 is a thing I call The Pear of Anguish. You’ll love it, it’s loosely based on the denunciation rallies they used to hold in Maoist China. Great fun, I promise.’

With that left hanging in the air, he slipped out of the door and made haste for the elevator.

Somewhere on the M40 near Uxbridge, a group of firefighters had finally managed to saw the top off the wreck of a Vauxhall Insignia which had earlier aquaplaned into the central barriers at eighty seven miles per hour, causing tailbacks that could be seen from space. ‘Richard Martin,’ said the police inspector, fishing a licence out of the driver’s wallet. ‘Thirteen Camomile Drive, Ludgershall.’ He shook his head, pitifully surveying the blanket covered stretcher being carefully carried through the smoking debris. ‘Better get onto our friends in Devizes to send someone over to inform the poor bugger’s missus. What a waste.’

The next day, Larkin received a text message from Merritt.

Hello, you don’t happen to be lounging around in a boozer somewhere close at hand do you? Got to work this AM and half the department sent home indefinitely. Computers all ripped out and carted off by police, so kicking about in town with time on my hands for once. Probably just some idiot with his fingers in the till again and the FSA got wind. PS. Thanks for leaving the fifty quid at reception. Much appreciated.
 

© DH 2025