A couple of years ago I was doing some tutoring for The Brilliant Club in a school in Trafford. One of the things the students had to do was compare and contrast some poems. There was a Yeats one about young love in later years "When you are old", followed by Carol Ann Duffy's "Havisham".... Continue Reading →
“Providence Place” – another book I DID NOT buy and anyone who says I did is a dirty liar…
This book didn't arrive yesterday. This book, that didn't arrive yesterday, was written by Jacky Gillott (more of her books haven't arrived, won't arrive). She was an up-and-coming novelist and essayist. She did the whole "Good Life" thing in the mid-1970s (this book is part of that genre. And I intend to read it alongside... Continue Reading →
The one weird thing stopping us taking action on climate change
How’s THAT for a click-bait headline, (albeit circa 2014)? You’re unlikely to read to the end of this, so I’ll spit out the tl;dr - It’s hubris, or pride, or arrogance, whatever you want to call it. Of COURSE it is also the wildly successful disinformation and delay campaigns run by the oil companies and... Continue Reading →
To read or not to read – Ctrl F movements, Ctrl F global justice…
Quick post, because mad busy. Will talk about the prolier-than-thou exchange (thoroughly dispiriting) on Twitter another time. For now, I came up with this algorithm for whether to read articles that are telling us "there's still time/here's what we need to do blah blah LOOK AT ME I AM AN EXPERT/Celebrity" that appear with spiralling... Continue Reading →
The conspiracy of silence about the need for social movements – an “institutional” analysis
Everyone I know (i.e. the people in my Twitter feed) is staring at colourful graphs about sea ice, or global average temperatures, or else sharing footage of Just Stop Oil protests (a real “ACTUP” vibe, btw, for anyone old enough to remember the late 1980s). Or they are sharing “the cat should wear a bell”... Continue Reading →
The end of regular “doom diaries” -End of Days #31
And now, the end is near. And so I face the final curtain… Well - that’s even more portentous than my most purple entries in this series. But indulge me. It’s a month since I started doing these, and so looking back on the purple, the blue etc, is okay. I’ve learned a bit, and... Continue Reading →
Of missing days, sabre-toothed tigers and addictions – End of Days #29 and #30
2023 07 11 End of Days #30 Another double-header because I didn’t get myself together yesterday. Various things are running through my head (as ever), few of them for public (if you can call it that) consumption. The usual rubbish. Various groups going through the motions Is it so wrong that they do? Here’s one.... Continue Reading →
Of orange weddings, doomerism and “rough years ahead” – End of Days #28
Why am I wallowing in dread? The following answers are a) wrong (we have a lot less insight into ourselves and what makes us tick than we like to believe, I think) and b) only of interest to me - and only even of passing interest then. There are “objective facts” around what is happening... Continue Reading →
Of wows, sea-ice and hoping to laugh at myself – End of Days #27
Yesterday someone from my climate action (distant) past read my first blog post in this series and their response was a skeptical “Wow.” Which I totally buy. I mean, as I lampshade, I may well have gone sliding off the deep end into doomerism. I certainly hope I have and that we can all have... Continue Reading →
Of rants, reprogramming and racism – End of Days #26
And here we are, with the temperature records getting scratched (h/t to Kevin Pluck, and embarrassment that I didn’t get it when he made that gag on Twitter). And here we are with the Australian government saying yes to the extension to operate of thermal coal mines (none of the ambiguity you get over met... Continue Reading →