The mahogany tables at The Royal Planetary Club were no longer heavily loaded with expensive silver cigar boxes or cut-crystal decanters of port. Instead, they held cold-pressed wheatgrass infusions and beeswax-wrapped raw almonds. For members only, no exceptions.
Two centuries ago, the ancestors of the men in this room spent their afternoons nursing pale, translucent skin, desperate to show off the delicate tracery of azure veins beneath their wrists. Blue blood was the currency of the realm. It signalled that you had never tilled a field, never felt the coarse bite of the afternoon sun and possessed a lineage so refined it bordered on the fragility of blown Murano glass.
Today, the obsession with blood had returned to the city, though the spectrum had shifted entirely.
‘I simply cannot breathe lately’, Sir Jonathan announced, theatrical in his distress as he slumped into a leather armchair. He coughed twice, a dry, rehearsed wheeze that drew the eyes of few nearby tables. ‘The particulate count near the Parliament is criminal. My chest literally constricts. I had to instruct my driver to cut the engine two streets early and walk the rest of the way in my hemp brogues.’
Across the table, Sir Alistair nodded with practiced solemnity, adjusting the cuff of his unbleached linen jacket.
‘It is the microplastics, Jonathan. They are in the rain now, everywhere. I had my estate’s rainwater tested last fortnight. Devastating numbers. I’ve initiated a complete ban on synthetic fibres across all forty tenant properties.’
Sir Alistair forgot to mention that the tenant properties were currently unheated because he had stripped the gas boilers out six months ago without installing heat pumps, leaving three families with damp walls and shivering children. That detail was irrelevant. What mattered was the plaque outside the estate gates declaring it a Zero-Emissions Sanctuary.
They were the new aristocracy, the nobility of political righteousness. They paraded their green blood through every drawing room and digital feed, loudly agonising over the oceans while ensuring everyone saw them drinking from a flask crafted out of reclaimed ocean copper. They staged elaborate scenes at dinner parties, gasping in horror if a waiter brought a lemon slice that hadn’t been grown locally, making sure their outrage was loud enough to be heard three tables away.
At the end of the long oak table sat Thomas. He wore an old tweed suit that had belonged to his grandfather, patched neatly at the elbows with leather offcuts. He listened quietly, swirling a glass of water.
‘Did you see the campaign on Tuesday, Thomas?’ Sir Jonathan asked, turning his gaze towards him. ‘The rally outside Parliament? We had two hundred people throwing raw seed bombs into the square. Marvellous turnout. We made the front page of the broadsheets.’
‘I saw it,’ Thomas said mildly.
‘You really ought to join us next time,’ Sir Alistair added, his tone dripping with patronising concern. ‘We must present a united front. The planet is bleeding, Thomas. Every single scrap of rubbish must be audited. Just yesterday, I spent forty minutes at the local depot ensuring my compostable packaging was separated from the standard cardboard. One must lead by example.’
‘Of course,’ Thomas replied.
He did not mention the forty minutes Sir Alistair had spent doing that was immediately followed by a short-haul flight to his mountain chalet on a private charter. The plane had emitted more carbon than a small village produced in a month, but Sir Alistair had offset it by buying three acres of saplings in Puerto Rico, so his conscience, and his green blood, remained pristine.
Thomas finished his water, stood up and excused himself. He walked out of the club into the chilly autumn afternoon, pulling his flat cap down against the drizzle.
He took the underground train to his modest home. He didn’t post photos of his journey on social media to prove he was using public transport. He simply used it because it was practical. When he reached his small house, he walked through the kitchen and out into the back garden. It was a dense, messy patch of land, utterly devoid of the manicured lawn aesthetics his neighbours favoured.
In the corner sat a large wooden workbench. Over the last five years, without a single advertisement or press release, Thomas had quietly transformed his small plot. He had built three large compost bins from salvaged pallets found behind a local supermarket. Every scrap of organic waste from his kitchen, alongside fallen leaves from the street, went into those bins, turning over time into rich, dark soil.
He had installed a simple gravity-fed rainwater collector connected to his roof gutters, providing enough water to keep his tomato patches thriving through the driest summers. In the wooden shed, he kept a small cobbler’s kit and a sewing kit. When his boots wore down, he resolved the soles himself. When his shirts tore, he mended them.
None of it was dramatic. None of it made for a good speech at a rally. There were no seed bombs thrown or tearful speeches delivered about the plight of the turtles.
As the rain picked up, Thomas knelt in the damp earth, his hands digging into the dark, sweet-smelling soil to bed down a row of winter cabbage. The earth filled the creases of his palms and lined his fingernails. He looked at his hands, covered in real mud, quiet effort and unsung routine. He didn’t need to shout about saving the world to convince himself he was part of it.
The greenest blood was the kind that never felt the need to prove its colour.
