The journey to East Kilbride last Saturday did not go as expected. Quite aside from the smelly old bloke who boarded the bus trailing clouds of stale urine in his wake and plonked himself down next to me, problems on the M8 meant the bus was redirected on the old road through Shotts. Man was it bleak.
I hadn’t noticed the diversion at first: I was trying to tune out the odour of the old bloke and concentrate on Stevie Smith’s The Holiday, of which more some other day maybe. I looked up to see a monotone landscape dominated by stunted trees with split trunks, one of them stretching a single long bough above a sea of tall grass, groping for light from the uncompromising horizon.
In some ways it reminded me of the high road to Annfield Plain where my dad was born, a hard landscape contrasting against the soft light on distant hills. The view through the grimy bus windows was of rubbish littering the roadside verges, brightened by the occasional clumps of daffodils. Every so often we passed some forsaken housing scheme where even the bedraggled starlings looked marginalised and oppressed.
As we pulled into Buchanan Street Bus Station 40 minutes late, two bus spotters photographed the bus, a new one for me.
I mentioned the church service that I attended for Mum; outside of Mum’s piece and a rededication of the church building seventy years after the laying of its foundation stone, it was a conventional Sunday Eucharist. I was struck, as usual, by the dreadful tone of so much of the words, the focus on humanity’s fallen state wrapped up with misery and guilt. It is one of the many things that I find off-putting about Christian orthodoxy, the theological equivalent of a late-running bus through Shotts on a miserable day.
What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.
…
[T}he environmental challenge which confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.
*Answer at the end
***
A core notion in writing fiction, especially SFF genre fiction, is ‘world building.’ A lot is said about it, but the aim is to create a consistent context for the action, because readers will usually suspend disbelief if everything hangs together, no matter how ‘out there’ the story goes. The same idea crops up in all sorts of contexts, and it swims in the same pond as notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts in the sense articulated by Thomas Khun.
Paradigms and associated fictions have been on display this week in the strange Tory ‘leadership’ debate here in the UK, a debate which is marked by an utter lack of anything resembling leadership from candidates who have ‘succeeded’ so far by craven pusillanimity, patronage and pretence.
That debate is positioned according to a world view that has been with us for several decades, the one that tests everything against a social and economic paradigm. Within that paradigm, economic analyses dominate and climate is discussed, if at all, by reference to the ‘affordability’ of a pledge of ‘Net Zero by 2050.’ This is the language and conceptual structure of Oxford PPEs who seem to be incapable of grasping that Net Zero is nonsense and 2050 will be far, far too late. They do not get that all of their favoured policy concepts and arguments are contingent in the face of an existential threat that is impacting us now, and they have not the first idea of how to react to what is to come.
One of the more obvious perpetrators of this nonsense in that debate was Kemi Badenoch whose (failed) campaign was masterminded by Michael Gove, whose opinion on listening to experts is a matter of public record. She was not alone in her nonsense, just the most visible. Notably, discussion by Liz Truss of ‘economic growth’ and the forthcoming recession lacks any understanding at all of international factors degrading the already weakened UK economy and how global catastrophe will deliver the coup de grace.
At least during Covid some initial lip service was paid to ‘following the science.’ Not so now.
There is some intelligent discussion on issues ignored by political discourse led by Rory Stewart here from around 2’23” :
I should add that I haven’t heard much on the realities of this from Labour either. Their position is built entirely around responses to the talking points of British politics so far as I can see.
Perhaps here in the UK the debate will at last have reached a turning point with the shock of fires in London and elsewhere after just 1 day of 40° (104°F) heat. I’m not optimistic, but I do get the sense that public opinion is shifting ahead of political action. When lockdown first happened in March 2020, there wasn’t a lot of resistance because we’d all seen what was happening in Italy and expected it. Will the same be true for the much more stringent measures necessary to mitigate imminent disaster? I’d like to think so, but I’m pessimistic.
I’m writing a novel just now which posits that after human depopulation emissions stop completely (it is in the same world as Coyote in the Corner). I had to come up with a plausible scenario for the world as it would be circa 2050. To do this, I used consensus scientific opinion but looked at the edge cases and uncertainties to ramp up the world building. Over the time I’ve been writing it, I have twice had to go back and recalibrate for more severe climate impacts. As the edge cases and worse-case scenarios develop and as the UK and Europe reach those worse cases decades ahead of forecast, I’m going to have to go back again.
*It was said by Margaret Thatcher at the UN General Assembly, 8 November 1989. There are a lot of things to be said about Margaret Thatcher, and the rest of the speech has makes questionable assertions, but she was a chemist and understood the threat of Global Warming in ways that her political descendants do not.
It’s an odd time to be writing blog posts, for those few of us who still do it. Maybe if I focused on cooking or writing or running or some single subject it would be different, but this has always been a place for random diary items and journaling, and I rarely edit past entries unless I spot particularly egregious typos. It’s an odd time because, while my daily life goes on largely unchanged, there is war on the edge of Europe and it remains uncertain what will happen there, except that more people will die.
In The Fourth Craw, one of the stories in Coyote in the Corner, I wrote:
In La Rossa’s, over cards and cold beers, the talk was all of the war and whether we liberators could be trusted. As always, the cry was to punish the guilty, but all over Europe it was the innocent who died – quickly, slowly, cleanly, appallingly. Modern warfare made sure the innocent were more efficiently targeted: a school here, a hospital there, evisceration everywhere; the accidents that always happen when you drop bombs on inhabited areas. It never matters which side you are on when the shrapnel comes your way, the gas slips over the back of your throat, the bread knife hacks your gizzard. And always it is the fault of the other side, never, ever, the fault of the side that pulled the trigger, no sir, sounds like sympathising to me, sir, please step this way while we ask you some questions—
Todays news and images from Bucha are horrible and distressing; they were also predictable because it is what invading armies do and have done throughout human history. All that’s left to a blogger, safe in a semi-detached house in the Edinburgh suburbs, is to type inarticulate noises of rage – which make as much sense, and have as much impact, as any finely crafted reporting in a newspaper or on TV.
Should I note the deer I saw on the hill behind our house yesterday while out for a walk? Or my enjoyment of a couple of TV shows I’ve watched, or the progress of my writing? Should I complain about energy prices or the increasingly empty shelves of my local Tesco? That would be as banal as the nonsense I’ve seen sluiced across Twitter – where people risk, and lose, their lives to send despatches from the frontline while useful idiots exercise their thumbs issuing lukewarm takes that expose their own ignorance.
What’s behind my mumbling and slurring of thought is a continuation of thoughts in other recent posts: something is happening in Ukraine of profound importance. This is not because it’s closer to home than other monstrosities and not some distant land far away of which we know nothing, it’s because it is a turning point, and one that has been coming for decades. Ukrainians are dying for a way of life that we take for granted. It brings us to an either/or situation where nuance is a dangerous luxury, as likely to betray as to bring comfort, and sitting on the fence will just see you impaled.
The events of today are occurring in a symbolic space, just as irrevocably as they are occurring physically in the fields and bomb shelters of Ukraine. Ukraine today is the arena of an ancient battle between good and evil, however grandiose that might sound; its outcome affects every one of us, not just Ukraine and Russia.
Evil is an old-fashioned concept. The postwar decades have taught us to see things automatically from the perspective of our opponent in order to establish understanding, compromise and dialogue. But sometimes there is no one to speak with — in the place of an interlocutor there is only impenetrable darkness, and it insists on its own outcome at any cost.
That isn’t the kind of language that sits easily with me outside of a fictional context, and my rational self seeks to unpick it and question it – and yet there is a truth in it. That is uncomfortable for a generation like my own, that grew up in the long shadow of WW2 but at least drew some comfort from it being behind us. That comfort is no longer available. There is discussion over on Twitter of whether the graphic images from Bucha should have been shared: my answer is yes. We cannot turn a blind eye in the name of decorum.
And yet all your blogger can do is type inconsequentialities onto a screen, unstuck in time, falling towards Tralfamadore, while outside the slaughterhouse the birds sing Poo-tee-weet.
I finished watching The Ipcress File last night after resisting the temptation to binge watch it. I enjoyed it a lot. It took several liberties with the book, but I’m OK with that. And it was perfectly cast. Here’s hoping they keep the same team and follow Len Deighton’s novel sequence. The next in the series – Funeral In Berlin – is probably my favourite Deighton novel.
***
Earlier this week, I watched a short documentary on YouTube about the catacombs of Paris. You can find it here. The catacombs were developed when the soil of Cimetière des Saints-Innocents became so oxygen-poor that
proper decomposition of the dead was impossible, meaning that, instead of rotting away, those buried in the cemetery slowly turned into gelatinous mounds of fatty horribleness, known as corpse wax.
Inevitably, I was reminded of the current UK government, of which more later.
I’ve been thinking more about some of the subjects I touched on in my gloomier-than-usual post a couple of nights ago. Specifically, I’ve been musing on society and interconnectedness. This isn’t entirely doom and gloom – it is also relevant to my long-delayed writing in progress and the thematic background to it, so I would have been thinking about it anyway.
All my assumptions about society revolve around interconnectedness. Of course, there is always some degree of connectivity, but how it manifests varies by context. In the extreme case of a society in collapse, the sudden decoherence of the links between the nodes that connect it may be triggered by a relatively small event, akin to the straw that broke the camel’s back. It is generally held that highly connected networks are more prone to (eventual) catastrophic failure then weakly-connected networks. The latter grow increasingly damaged, but are better able to adapt. Our society is highly connected – as we discover when, for example, we attempt to disentangle ourselves, as with Brexit. Be that as it may, my thoughts have been around personal and local ability to respond to catastrophic collapse (this is the core of the inciting event in the writing in progress).
In our daily lives, we assume power, food, water, sewerage, shelter, healthcare and a recognised medium of exchange – though this is not true in many places. Those things are all simultaneously robust and fragile for the same reason – interconnectedness and infrastructure. They work well enough until, one day, they don’t. Throw in sustained acts of violence and your world shifts from calamity to horror. This sits at the heart of my thinking about preparedness: what is reasonable and realistic to prepare for? Survivalists and preppers represent one end of that range of possibilities; ‘keep calm and carry on’ is at the other end.
Why am I thinking in these terms (aside from narrative and plot development)? Because to prepare for collapse, we have to admit the possibility of it into our thinking. This isn’t about catastrophism but about scenario planning. What is the minimum we require? Shelter, fire, food and water.
Kirstin and I went to the supermarket yesterday and bought some of the same basics that we bought at the beginning of lockdown: dried and tinned goods, for example, as well as batteries, etc. These are all things that we’ll use anyway. We got them because supply chains have been abraded and degraded by four things:
Brexit
Covid
War
Our gelatinous government
Supply chain robustness is only one aspect of interconnectedness, and buying in some basics isn’t enough, but it’s a start. However, even were we to continue to accumulate ‘stuff’, there are limits, and it’s the limits that interest me in terms of writing and concern me in terms of the state of the world. I was born 14 years after the end of WW2 and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s mindset of the post-war settlement. That mindset has been deliberately and comprehensibly wrecked by successive Tory administrations. Much as I’d like to follow my instincts and assume that there’ll be a safety net to catch us, I can’t do that anymore, even though my sense is that it still lurks in the attitudes of a substantial proportion of the British population.
Anyway, there are no answers here, just questions I never thought I’d have to ask or answer. You might think that I’m over-thinking and over-reacting; I hope you’re right.
***
I haven’t had any music here for a while, so here’s Jean Michel Jarre supplying what Cimetière des Saints-Innocents lacked.
We are in the time between times, the time when we know something horrible is about to happen but we don’t know what it will be. But it will happen soon and Ukrainians are dying while we wait.
I’m 62, and never thought I’d be thinking this way. Back in the old mutually assured destruction days, there wasn’t a lot of point to pondering preparedness because the assumption was that there wouldn’t be anything to prepare for. This thing in Ukraine has the feel of something very different – something that will echo on through the rest of my years. Call me too pessimistic, but it seems to me that, whatever Putin chooses to do now, the trajectory is towards escalation, and that trajectory is unlikely to be interrupted without Putin’s death.
At a selfish level, the impact can already be seen on my pension fund and our savings. The impact may be transient, but over what timescale? Our local Tesco supermarket is getting embarrassing at the best of times – they barely even bother to disguise the emptying shelves, and prices are going up. Our energy bill is fixed for two years, supposedly, but I don’t know if that can hold without government intervention to steady prices. Even if the conflict remains ‘regional’ rather than European, it’s impact on raw materials, supply chains and economies will be major.
And that brings me back to preparedness.
That all reads dramatically, I know. There may well come a day soon when I look back on what I’ve written here and wince at my foolishness – and I hope it does. But I’d rather be foolish than unprepared, so I’m thinking about stocking up on candles, torch batteries, tinned and dried food and no doubt some other odds and ends, just in case. If nothing else, they’ll get used in time anyway.
And I find myself having to reassess a lot of positions I’ve grown into over the years, positions based on the assumptions of continuing peace. I don’t think of myself as naive, but I certainly think I need to examine my presumptions. And I hate that: mine is the peace we knew between the wars.
Like everyone else – certainly everyone in Europe – Ukraine is on my mind. It seems redundant for a random blogger in Edinburgh to bloviate about it, but, rather like my Covid diary, that is kinda the point of having a blog like this which functions as a hybrid diary and journal (and an ad hoc vehicle for bloviating.) I don’t pretend any special insight, and everything I write here is necessarily personal and provisional, but here’s my current tuppence worth.
*
There’s a story, quite probably apocryphal, that at the outset of WW2 Winston Churchill mused on outcomes and what the end of the war would mean for Germany and, by implication, Europe. That isn’t a million miles away from the old programme management notion of Outcomes > Strategy > Tactics. I am in no way qualified to muse on outcomes for Ukraine and Russia, but I have been thinking about outcomes for the UK and Europe.
My starting point is one articulated by most commentators – that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has, within days, reaffirmed the importance of both NATO and the European Union. (This is worth a read: Putin Loses No Matter How This Plays Out – But We Might Too.) That is despite Putin’s best efforts to destablise both of those institutions through Trump and Brexit and their associated fellow travellers. In consequence, the stupidities of Brexit are once more laid bare. This country has isolated itself from decision making in what is one of the major geopolitical blocs, a bloc that, despite all that Brexiteers said about it, turns out to be able to move very quickly when it wants to.
That we are left isolated when the government is stuffed with the most corrupt and inept Cabinet in memory is the cherry on the cake. With every day that passes, the incompetence and pettifoggery of Priti Vacant and Liz Truss is allowed to make things worse. The Tory party as a whole is too drenched in Russian money and influence to have any ability to do what needs to be done to isolate and sanction Putin and his croneys.
The current issues with visas for refugees and their families (and we are the only country requiring visas) are not merely symptomatic of the Tories’ incompetence and meanspiritedness, it’s worse than that. This is how the system has been designed to work by sociopaths and ideologues egged on by a compliant right-wing press that pretends to be unable to see a distinction between the economic migrant and the refugee. These are the people who questioned whether the RNLI should bother to save the lives of asylum seekers, the Home Secretary who thought out loud about using the Royal Navy to stop boats at sea and push them back to France until the MoD told her where to go.
The government is caught on the horns of its own infernal dilemma: if it recognises the plight of Ukrainian refugees, they’ll have to recognise the rest too, which grates on every fibre of their being. All they have left is to flounder, gaslight and lie. From the top down, they continue to say that we are ‘world-leading.’ This is, and always has been, bollocks.
In the meantime, the government is forced also, through gritted teeth, to acknowledge that the BBC, which stepped up to the crease with educational programming for children during Covid lockdown, which the appalling Nadine Dorries is fond of threatening, turns out to be a potent and respected source of trusted information via the World Service – the same World Service that the Foreign Office has persistently sought to defund and shrink through successive administrations.
Also in the meantime, a wing of the Tory party, to which the loathsome Nigel Farrage remains tenuously linked via slug trails of odiousness, has taken to pondering the notion of Net Zero and how beastly it is for their oil-producing chums (including Mr Putin and his oligarchs.) Putin’s war has forced a serious and timely crunch time in decision making, not only for oil and gas, but also for energy provision in general. It looks likely to reinforce a push for renewables and alternatives in a way that increasingly apocalyptic IPCC reports haven’t. As it happens, I agree that we should question the idea of Net Zero – because I think we need to set actual zero as the target outcome and find strategies for achieving that.
One of the possible outcomes of Putin’s War and the sanctions now in place may well be that Russia becomes, to all intents and purposes, a vassal state of China. That’s why I think that China – taking their customary long view – won’t be too unhappy if Putin’s murderous adventurism is stopped. That would be a geopolitical shift of such a magnitude that a general realignment of Europe, the USA, the rest of the world and NATO would be inevitable. What then for Tory and Brexiteer visions of a post-Imperial Britain and its dreams of a Victorian paradise where we all ignore experts, identify fronted adverbials, learn Latin and know that Johnny-foreigner understands their place?
I think it puts us on course for some kind of associate status in Europe, however that comes to be tarted up to save blushes. How long it will take the Tories or the electorate to begin the process of rowing back from Brexit is an open question (as is the degree to which the EU would welcome us back), but that will now be the direction of travel, I think.
Standing all of the above, in the humanitarian instincts of the British people and the general outrage at Partygate, I see signs for optimism, though. Signs that the tide is on the turn, and that petty nationalism of all stripes can be seen for what it is: terminal.
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