FRIDAY MORNING 6AM, OCTOBER SUMMER HEAT

FRIDAY MORNING 6AM

It’s mid october. You’re in a tee shirt.

It’s mid October , in the UK, before daybreak, you’re in a tee shirt and you’re sweating. In New York, and all the way down the Eastern Seaboard there is dramatic flooding. Elsewhere there is worse, but we can’t look.

We just can’t look.

Instead, you take your exercise, you rustle up some endorphins. You chemical finesse yourself out of the sense of futility, because - even though it’s not actually about you - you right now have a tolerable existence. You’re not in Syria. Thwaites Glacier hasnt melted yet

In the London streets, the air hangs humid and hot already and the pavenemnt stinks of decay and sewage. What new disease might you inhale this morning, born of effluent and apathy? Maybe yYu’re still tired, from another covid hangover, from the compulsion to take on too much work, rather than brood over a broken system where people no longer even understand why your taxes should pay for your healthcare system, your police system, your social security system, your education system, all of which now offer you nothing. And while you have plenty of money left over, still what’s worth buying when you can’t buy a future?

The greedy continue to amass wealth off the back of your pauperisation but somehow their crime is acceptable, despite being predicated on your less fortunate neighbour starving, while the crime of burning down the second homes of the wealthy is not.

Tennis players collapse from heat exhaustion. Schools are left to crumble. Foodbank use continues to rise. People are still taking long haul flights and forming massive traffic jams and consuming, consuming, consuming relentlessly. Nothing works.

When I was a kid, this would have been the description of what we then called "a corrupt third world country". This would be Mombasa or Mumbai, not cosy North London. Of course, we rebranded those countries as "developing nations", in all our liberal generosity. Even though we continued to exploit them. Oh but then you voted in a government that would steal from you too. And you still let them. Don't you feel a fool, when you look in the mirror? Or is it somehow not your fault?

You wonder how many tolerable years we have left, attempting to shut out the knowledge we have held since 2018 that the answer, yes we already know it, the answer is ten to twenty, at best.

Nonetheless the balmy, misty dawn warmth is peaceful. Thje sky is glorious. It’s lovely. You’re grateful.

Your friends perhaps send you an article outlining the possibility that restricting climate change to 1.5 degrees is in fact very possible, even likely. Something about carbon capture. You feel ridiculous for not believing a word of it. Surely no one would be so irresponsible as to write this.

But the same species who might offer hope for saving the planet is the one bombing children in Gaza, allowing thousands to drown in floods in Pakistan, drilling for oil in Baku and the North Sea, mining for coal across Russia, sending exported food on vast tankers, consuming consuming consuming every day from Amazon.

So sure, you could be hopeful.

Perhaps you shouldn’t be