Prologue:
Concerning habitats

In a hole in the ground there lived a worm. Not a nasty wet and polluted hole with a noisome smell. This was a worm hole, home of the humble worm; the engineer and ecologist of the soil. As observed by Darwin himself, the worm, through its activities of soil building, processing of organic matter, and nurturing of fungi and bacteria, is the sustainer of plants, and thus the organism on which the whole of terrestrial life depends, until, that is, it is poisoned by industrial toxins, made homeless by erosion of the soil through human mismanagement of the landscape, or indeed baked in the soil or drowned by flooding due to the extremes of climate change, whereupon it will cease to perform its natural functions, and all terrestrial life that depends on it, including human, will perish.

“Enough of this trivia!” I hear you say, “We want the finest story available to humanity. We want it here and we want it now!”, and quite right too. The serious matter of petty ambition among the very important egos of a jumped-up provincial university is the topic of the day, for this is the tale of the rise and fall of a very proud and even, in a small way, revered little nonentity, and how he became the focus of quite a bit of attention. He had started from comparatively humble beginnings. His parents, nice, quiet, well-meaning gentle-folk, had wanted more for their son than the rural life they had lived all their lives in the fields and wooded land in the area of Bagshot, Surrey, rather to the manner one might be given to expect from an H.E. Bates novel: everybody out the back drinking cider and discussing butter. The parents of this small boy had inadvertently instilled in him a desire for what they and he perceived as greatness, and we, as observers from outside, can see as rather shallow and silly. At the time of the story, however, those days were long gone, and little Johnny was grown up and had become estranged from the satisfying life he once knew.

Now, tall, broad, wealthy and powerful, he enjoyed the support of many people, including several in comparatively high office, and his rise to prominence, although late in coming, had been rapid. His parents would have been less proud of their son, however, if they had known exactly how he had come to that elevated position, and what a little shit he was.