Just As the Tide Was Flowing
On my last long weekend run I covered 11k and felt OK at the end of it. My plan for the coming week is to push it out by a further kilometre and thereafter to gradually increase the distance and the time spent running continuously. Looking at progress so far, I’m confident that I’ll manage the Edinburgh half-marathon next May and have entered it. My aim is to be at half-marathon fitness well before it, allowing for inevitable setbacks and for winter.
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Back in 2017, a visit to Audiology confirmed that I was losing some high-frequency hearing. I went back to Audiology this week for another test that they could match against my records. The loss has indeed spread further down the frequency range and the audiologist asked if I wanted to try hearing aids calibrated to boost the frequencies where I’m having difficulties. I agreed to a trial and I expect the hearing aids to be delivered at some point in the next few weeks.
It is a trial because it isn’t clear whether they will be effective in the situations where I have difficulties. All of this is free at the point of use, of course: NHS.
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I’ve written here off and on over the years about climate change and how it is the only game in town. This has been known for years. I’ve also written that I expect no mitigating actions to be taken until it is too late – arguably it is already too late. As I write, the impacts in the northern hemisphere are obvious and will only get worse. And it is linked to the other major issues of our time – biodiversity loss and pollution – as well as driving problems with food supply and population movements.
In my collection Coyote in the Corner I had the problem of reducing emissions solved by vampires largely wiping out humans. I’m writing sequel stories now, and one of my problems is that every time I calibrate a story for the latest analyses of climate change, I have to revise it six months later as more analysis comes in of the changes already locked into place – usually to make things worse.
In my teens, stories built around various apocalypses used to be either the very British novels of John Wyndham or set in the far future. It seems odd to watch it happening on the news and encounter so many people, not all of whom are American, still denying what is happening. It has been a feature of the past few years, despite no lesser person that Margaret Thatcher warning of what was coming, that governments have found all sorts of ways to ignore what the science was saying and to water down reports and predictions.
All the time, various optimists have been saying that there was still time to mitigate at least some of the impacts we can expect. All of those optimists ignored the inertia in the system and tacitly put more faith in governments and their willingness to cooperate towards necessary changes than justified. My view has been for a decade or more that the necessary changes will not happen at scale, at pace or in time. Nothing I see now changes my mind on that, and there are no magic hearing aids to distribute to politicians who default to expedient deafness.
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