There are a lot of emails to answer this morning, and one to write I should have done yesterday, when instead I cancelled a Physio appointment (because the pain would have been beyond my ability to cope with) and simply began to decompress. We added some Things to the possible rotation of Stuff That I Can Make for Promotion, and we were sad when someone’s work that we enjoy reading went away. It was, on reflection, an average day.
Today we’ll hang up washing, sort socks, plan next week, get annoyed at random shit, push really hard through my exercise class, cut down on my snacking, work on chapbook production (need to go get the endplate card today) and accept that the ennui I’m feeling needs a better word to describe it with. I am not dissatisfied with my life right now, very much the opposite, but this feeling is inescapable.
We are coming to the end in this country of 14 years of terror. The generation of kids who have never known anything but this shit show of existence aren’t getting better leadership next week. They will not see improvement. In many ways, things get worse because of the inability to then vote a new set of clowns out of the clown camp when they cling onto an archaic voting system.
We are walking eyes open into potential disaster.
I have a number of very good friends who are committed Labour supporters who will do their best to make things better. I know and accept this will happen, but branches of the same company will never flourish if Head Office is run by penny-pinching miserly wannabe tyrants. Keith Labour is more frightening than Rich Tea PM to me because he’s clearly not in charge. Someone else is pulling the strings.
We’re going from a cutout Prime Minister to a Trojan Horse and that’s worrying. It is inescapable too which should also be ringing alarm bells because without effective opposition all forces are uncontrollable. What if Labour decide to attack LGBTQI rights? What if they really have absolutely no plan to save us from the damage wrought from fossil fuels? What then? Who speaks for the oppressed?
How fucked would we then be with absolutely no viable opposition to vote in?
As a writer it is my job to look ahead as well as behind. Optimism is something I want to hold onto and nurture too, and it genuinely concerns me how so many people seem to sleepwalk into disaster. How that changes needs to come from creatives: through humour and performance and the slow drip of continual education. That is absolutely something I am capable of doing, and I will.
I’ve spent the last two days reading poetry which, I won’t lie, I found really hard going. It makes me realise how big a gulf exists between my way of thinking and that of the average white man. Can I fix this? Is there a way to bridge that gap and produce work that might spark an interest? Is that not the right approach and should there be another way to try and help people think outside themselves?
Whatever else happens next week, I have a job to do.
We just have to keep hoping, though it's so hard to do. Much love xxx
Yeah. Optimism is the future ❤️❤️❤️