The Oxford Comma

I know. I said I was done with BREXIT, but couldn’t help coming back one more time with a word or two about the commemorative fifty pence piece, and this fascinating row about the Oxford comma, or rather the lack of it.

A word of background: if you’ve not heard, the UK government has minted a few million specially engraved fifty pence pieces to commemorate leaving the European Union. On the back of them, there’s an inscription that says:

Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.

Now that looked fine to me at first pass, but the grammarians say no, it should read:

Peace, prosperity, and friendship with all nations.

Spot the difference? The comma after ‘prosperity’ is called an Oxford comma, and while I’ve probably used it when it felt appropriate in the name of clarity, I’ve never heard it named as such.

The grammarian in this instance is the author Philip Pullman, also an outspoken BREXIT Remainer, who suggests we should boycott the coin on account of its illiteracy. This is worrying because I like to think of myself as a writer, yet it seems people I would otherwise consider fellow travellers, might actually consider me illiterate.

Just think of all the novels I’ve written. And among the millions of words out there, how many Oxford commas have I missed? How obvious therefore my lack of education. No wonder publishers never took me seriously! I’m a great fan of Philip Pullman and I bow to his prowess as a writer, and as an imaginative, educated, and erudite man, but to insult the coin this way I beg to suggest risks insulting more than those who voted “leave”.

I mean, have you heard of the Oxford comma? If not, you’re in good company. Indeed my good lady, a teacher with a quarter century of experience at the chalk-face hadn’t heard of it either, and when she saw it, said it was ‘obviously’ wrong. This prompted further research which suggests opinion is divided, perhaps leaving us to conclude that as with all the more obscure conventions in punctuation, prowess in their application proves only that the writer has been to – well – Oxford.

However, consider the following:

I’m coming to the party with my brothers, John, and Peter.

And then:

I’m coming to the party with my brothers, John and Peter.

In the first one, a careful reading suggests John and Peter are coming to the party, plus my brothers. In the second, my brothers (who are called John and Peter) are coming to the party. The Oxford comma adds clarity.

The Associated Press guide, which American journalists follow, says to leave it out when not necessary, which seems sensible. Other publishing styles say leave it in regardless. So, it’s really a question of form, style, and context. For us lesser mortals who may be getting confused by the whoe business by now, just watch out for ambiguity in your prose and you’ll be fine.

As for that coin, well, I’d argue an Oxford comma would have added nothing and to insist on it regardless seems a bit snobbish. The message is clear either way, though seems to me more appropriate to nations joining rather than leaving the EU.  Personally speaking, given the evenness of the split over the BREXIT issue, it might have been better had the victors taken a more magnanimous view and never minted the coins in the first place, let BREXIT pass with as little fanfare as possible. But I suppose it’s a lesser rubbing of remainers’ noses in it than a compulsory street party.

I’m generally short of change these days so I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing many of them anyway. But if you do find the EU fifty pence piece offensive, might I suggest you save them up and put them in the homeless person’s hat next time you’re in town. Four or five of those, regardless of what’s written on them, and how it is punctuated, will buy a man a brew to keep out the cold. Leaving the EU isn’t going to help him – or staying in for that matter.

The only thing going for him right now, is your charity.

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Who needs another hero?

In attempting to understand the world’s ills it’s all too easy to fall foul of low-level egoic thinking. In the olden days a writer might have addressed waspish letters to the Times on whatever issue vexed him. Now he’ll keep a blog and thus similarly satisfy his need to shout at whatever devil enrages him. But to do so is to overlook the fact the forces at work in the world we rub up against are the result of whatever myth the human race is living at the time, and are generally impervious to the individual will.

The left shouts at the right and vice versa. Meanwhile the world moves inexorably in a particular direction, one dictated by the myth of infinite growth, a story in which the ego must for ever feed itself in a frenzied attempt to maintain its relevance, its dominance in the daunting void of the universe.

One way or another, we are all invested in this idea, but since we live on a planet of finite size and resource, it’s clearly impossible we should continue to grow, to consume, to expand for ever. There is a point at which the earth will be stripped bare of its resources, the seas turgid with our trash, and the atmosphere choked with the smoke of our fires. It’s irrational then we should continue in this vein, but we are not dealing with the rational, more a tide of mythic being emanating from the collective psyche, and we are powerless to subvert it. Unless we can renew this myth, the story must play out, and us with it.

I’m all too guilty recently of sniping in my blog, and in my fiction at who I see as the villains of the piece. My ego is infected by the fever of a righteous anger and this weakens my ability to think in more feminine terms, to see beyond the material, to see through the witch’s scrying-glass, into the realms of the psyche where the myth-making begins.

The dreams of the individual dictate our conscience, our actions and our speech as we each live out our story, but since that personal myth is not shared by everyone we can have little effect at large and would do better to mind our own development, prevent our own devils from becoming manifest and troublesome to ourselves, yet thereby also learn something of the troubles of the world, for as the old Hermetic adage goes: as above, so below.

Most of us struggle with the concept of a collective dimension to the inner psyche since it implies a supernatural ground to our being, and this is not fashionable in a world built on rational thinking. We struggle also with its early theoreticians, like Carl Jung, because these were not one dimensional thinkers, and were often flawed in themselves, as are all men. But, at its simplest, the direction of travel is for the unconscious in man, to become conscious, thus there is nothing we do or say or think that does not first have its origins in our unknown depths. What each man then discovers in himself becomes his life’s work, and in a similar vein what humanity discovers in its collective dreaming becomes its destiny, one to which all of us are tied.

Thinking psychologically then, we see reflected in the current state of world affairs the kind of strife the individual inflicts upon himself by an unhealthy domination of the psyche by the Ego. Our affairs stagnate and the unconscious sends monsters to torment us, not because that is its nature but because, by our actions and our faulty thinking, we have invited them. The remedy is the oldest story in the world, this being the Hero’s quest, told in many ways across many and diverse cultures, but essentially a metaphor for renewing the myth of our moribund times.

In this light we see the current somewhat sinister jokers at large on the world’s stage less as individuals and more as manifestations of the trickster archetype. The trickster has two faces, one jocular and provocative, the other malign and destructive, though both presage the disruption of the status quo. They appear at a point in the world-myth when the old ideas have run their course, their function being to usher in chaos, from which new psychical structures, new ways of being, both collective and individual, can emerge.

This is not to say these figures see themselves as embodying that role – indeed who knows if they even see themselves at all, beyond their own will to power. It’s more that we, inspired by the great dream of life, and our despair at its apparent end-game state, project that archetype upon them. And if it’s true, it tells us we are close to a transition between myths, one in which the hero journeys out at last to bring home the wisdom of renewal, and the secret of a new way of being. That’s the good news. The bad news is the tricksters foreshadow a collapse before any transition is possible, so while there may be a silver lining, there is a lot of darkness yet to come, and the question is shall the hero return in time to usher in that new dawn, or will we by then have already extinguished the sun?

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Everything’s fine. Go shopping.

I was travelling the M61 south from Chorley in the predawn murk. I’m not sure if it qualifies as the worst stretch of motorway in the UK, but it’s certainly the worst I have to drive. The lane markings have almost gone and the cats eyes where they exist at all are dim, so these dark, misty, winter mornings have been terrible, with dangerously poor visibility.

What was particularly frightening this week is there was an incident on the hard shoulder and the highway men had shut the slow lane, pushing us all into the middle. Without that guiding line of the hard-shoulder, I felt I was hurtling into the unknown, unable to see further than the feeble cast of my headlights, and barely a whisper from disaster both left and right. Though I’ve been on the road for forty years, and I still drive that crumbling stretch of miserable tar most week-days, I was definitely afraid.

It’s perhaps the perfect metaphor for how I feel generally at the moment, that while I’m told half our citizens will be celebrating our leaving the EU on the 31st of January, it feels to me like we’ll be cheering our own headlong rush to slaughter. Some, of course, have every reason to be happy, like those who truly benefit from BREXIT. But let’s not go there. I’m weary of the argument and can barely raise a head of steam to repeat it.

I’ve moved on, I think, well beyond the crass jubilation, am now beginning to rough out a dystopian vision of mid twenty-first century England by extrapolating current trends to their inevitable conclusion. It’s not looking like a great place to be if you’ve no money, you’re old, or sick but I won’t bother describing it in any more detail than that. Indeed my advice to fellow remoaners is just to shut up and get on with it, and under no circumstances must we ever say we told you so. We live in a post-fact, post-truth world where the bad guy always wins, and where nothing means anything any more, except when it all goes wrong, and then it’s your fault.

Remainers voted to remain because they understood the EU. They knew what it was, had seen and experienced the benefits of membership, had worked with Continental colleagues, learned their languages, visited and admired their cities, the quality of their roads, their trains, their infrastructure. It wasn’t perfect – indeed far from it – but it was better being a little fish in a big shoal than a little fish on its own. I mean that’s why fish shoal up right?

Those who voted out, did so for many reasons, all of which perplex me. I can find no logic, no rationale to any of them, and it’s beyond insanity how even the claims of Brexiteer politicians and their Bond-villain backers – when revealed as pants-on-fire lies – can still be cheered on by the reliably demented wavers of the flag of Saint George.

Yes, it’s over and done now. But I won’t be celebrating.

You can always buy your EU citizenship back with one of those handy Maltese passports, as indeed many of those billionaires who championed BREXIT are now doing. I too have a route back, virtue of an Irish grandfather, which will at least save me having to queue up at the border with the rest of you with your patriotic blue passports, but that’s not going to benefit my children who now find themselves without a country. They’re not alone. There were riots in London on election night, not widely reported. What was trumpeted loud and clear though (and still is) is that the socialist, egalitarian evil of a Jeremy Corbyn led government was roundly thrashed. What’s been less explored though are the implications of being even more securely in the grip of those who sold us BREXIT in the first place. And they’re not saying anything.

It’s easy to lose heart when you witness the overwhelming power of lies and the ease with which people of bad character can tip us over into the void of tyranny. I’ve brought my children up to be decent, honourable young men, and must now witness their first steps in a world I don’t recognise, one I fear I have left them ill prepared to materially thrive in. Or maybe I should just relax, await the milk and honey we’ve all been so glibly promised, pretend everything’s fine.

And go shopping.

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The inner world of the introvert

There’s this person I know. Let’s call her Lottie. She’s an energetic and attractive woman of fifty years or so, and she doesn’t speak. At all. There are rumours of past trauma having taken her voice, while some think she’s just not right in the head. She’s an object of curiosity then, generally tolerated but treated cautiously by others. In earlier times she would have been taken out into swamps by the priesthood and drowned.

But Lottie’s a very intelligent, empathic and friendly woman, a former librarian, who’s simply taken a vow of silence, having spent most of her life under the impression, being strongly introverted, no one listens to a word she says anyway. She has a point.

The introvert attains a particular view on life. They’re not outwardly expressive, tend to be cautious with words. At school they’re labelled “quiet”, which is mistakenly equated with: “lacking self-confidence”, “self confidence” being equated with the ability to shout down the loudest berk in group discussion, in order to get a word in edgeways. But who can be bothered tackling people like that? Introverts don’t lack self confidence. Alone, they’re perfectly at ease and capable of all manner of things. It’s just the proximity of so called normal , shouty people that perplexes them.

They can be targets for bullying, but a word of warning here: you can only push an introvert so far and they’ll react against the abuse they’ve had to carry their whole lives, not just the bit you’re hitting them with right now. In short they can seem disproportionate in their retaliation, but that’s not their problem, and you deserve everything you get anyway.

Like Lottie, I’m also strongly introverted. In smaller groups we tend to stand out because, as a percentage of the population, there aren’t that many of us. Weird, creepy, loner – these are the standard tabloid descriptions of our kind. Pensive, thoughtful, observant are the less derogatory ones.

In larger groups we tend to disappear because, since we’re not making a noise all the time, no one knows we’re there. For the same reason, we’re often left behind at school, lost in the noise of others and we tend to develop later, given a chance – which fortunately both Lottie and I were. We’re not simple-minded though, can in fact be as clever as any of you, though we tend to suit occupations that require analysis or observation. Mathematicians, scientists, writers, artists, certain types of engineer, all are professions suited to the introvert.

Group discussions tend to be stressful for us, not because we’re nervous or incapable of dealing with others, but more because others aren’t on our wavelength, and its both physically and mentally draining tuning ourselves down to your level. Our natures also tend to suffer fools, though not gladly, the definition of a fool being quite broad for us, though generally speaking it includes all those who enjoy the sound of their own voices.

What’s interesting also is that time can literally slow down for us in those group situations, as our metabolic rate shoots up. My normal resting pulse is around 65 beats per minute but in a meeting of blatherers, it will go up to 125. Lottie’s has been known to hit 150, and I worry for her. It’s a classic fight or flight response. What we want to do is tell the blatherer to shut the f&uck up and let someone else speak. But we don’t. We sit, we smile, we tolerate. So think about that next time you’re in a meeting with someone who’s a bit on the quiet side, and measure your words more carefully, you verbose jackrabbit.

On the rare occasion a question is directed at us, we pause, initially in shock to be so included in the discussion, then we consider our answer because we value accuracy in speech. Then we open our mouths to speak, but by this time someone else is already speaking for us, invariably misrepresenting our position, and since no one is waving down our unsolicited proxy and asking us to clarify, we close our mouths again, and shrug. Meetings are a waste of our time. And yours, if you’re honest.

I think this is what happened to Lottie.

A younger introvert will suffer pangs of anxiety, thinking they must change their nature, become more combative and gregarious and it takes until middle age to work out that you can’t, nor should you have to, that you should be yourself and others should fit in around you if they want to, as they expect others to fit in around them.

It doesn’t work like that in practice of course, and the introverts tend to become more isolated. As a result they have fewer but more intense friendships, often with other introverts, and they develop a keen eye for observation of the dynamics that drives the typical group. They also become adept psychologists and anthropologists, the insights derived therefrom being deployed in self-defence, usually by evasion.

They have ideas about the world, a wisdom acquired from observation and experience, and are happy to share it with others if asked, but no one does, so they don’t. If others do approach, it’s more because the introvert’s silence is mistaken as the sign of as a good listener, so they tend to get talked at by sad-fishes who, having vented themselves, simply walk away as if not expecting an answer, and really they’re not expecting one because they don’t actually give a damn what you think at all.

So, Lottie takes a vow of silence, and I admire her for it, am often tempted to do the same thing. Indeed there are days when I might as well. There she sits, twinkling, proudly self-aware, doesn’t speak a word.

Everyone thinks she’s leaking somewhere, but I know different.

Because boy can she write!

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On my bookshelf – The Long Walk – Slavomir Rawicz

First published in 1956, mine’s a used 2010 reprint in paperback, presumably intended to cash in on publicity for the Peter Weir movie, “The Way Back” – 2011 – and which is allegedly based on true events. It’s a best seller, half a million copies sold, and translated into 25 languages. But there’s a problem with it.

We begin with the narrator, Slavomir Rawicz, a Polish officer, wrongly arrested for spying by the Russians after the invasion of Poland in 1939. He’s tortured into signing a false confession which results in his being sentenced to 25 years hard labour in the infamous Gulag system and is sent to one of the remotest labour camps in northern Siberia from where he escapes with a group of fellow captives. But instead of heading east, the more obvious and shorter route to freedom, via a boat to Japan, they go south, walk four thousand miles, through Siberia, across the Gobi Desert, the Himalaya and eventually find sanctuary in British India.

Apart from being an epic of adventure and survival, this would be one of the earliest known accounts of life in the Gulags, perhaps the more famous being Alekzander Solzenystin’s “Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch (1966)”, so it might be considered quite a find for anyone interested in that period of Soviet history. Solzenystin’s story, though based upon his own harrowing experiences in the Gulag around the same period, is sold purely as literary fiction, whereas the Long Walk is sold as heroic fact.

However,…

Rawicz’s arrest and torture, also his transportation by railway cattle-wagon to Siberia ring true enough, but his depiction of events at the camp began arouse suspicion, suddenly reading more like a boy’s own comic-book story, especially when held up against Solzenystin’s forensic descriptions of actual camp life in “Ivan Denisovitch”. Then we are sold a somewhat simplistic escape, implausibly aided by the commandant’s wife, to say nothing of being persuaded malnourished men could travel thirty miles a day, on foot, over trackless tundra in the teeth of a Siberian winter. And then there’s the eerie encounter with a couple of Yetis.

All of this gave me pause, so I set the book aside and did some digging.

Sure enough there’s been considerable controversy about the veracity of this story ever since publication. Ghost-written by Daily Mail reporter, Ronald Downing, the suspicion is that the pair have spun us all a bit of a yarn. Later documentary evidence suggests Rawicz was actually released from the Gulag in 1942, that while the early part of the book might be based upon the facts of his arrest and torture, the escape is pure fiction.

Or is it?

Well, here’s where we leave the text of the story and turn instead to the story of the story, as traced by researchers working on the film adaptation. They became aware of the controversy early on and wanted to get to the bottom of things, like was it a true story or not? Their researches duly turned up another man living in Cornwall called Witold Glinski. Glinski claims to have been the one who actually made the journey, that he never spoke a word of it to anyone, except to British officials on his arrival in India. The explanation for his silence, he said, was on account of one of his fellow escapees, a murderer who’d threatened him and, on settling in England, he’d not wanted to draw attention to himself for fear of his life.

On subsequent publication of Rawciz’s “true story”, Glinski recognised the gist of his own escape, including details of his companions, though with much added that was implausible. It was then he recalled being accosted by a pair of chancers back in the 1940’s, wanting to know how he came to England, and whom he suspects were actually Downing and Rawciz. He told them nothing but speculates they had somehow got hold of the transcript of his interview with officials at the Polish embassy, and wanted to pass the story off as Rawciz’s. That said there is no evidence to support Glinski’s claims either, so we’re still left wondering.

There is however tantalising evidence that someone did indeed make that incredible journey, this being from the account of a retired British intelligence officer who recalled interviewing a group of ragged men who had come out of the Himalaya, claiming to have escaped from Siberia, an account corroborated by a Polish engineer who had acted as translator.

While much has obviously been lost in the fog of war, on balance it seems likely the story is true at its heart, though it’s less likely we’ll ever know the real identities of the men who took part, or what happened to them afterwards. The only thing that seems certain from here is that Rawciz was not one of those men, and it’s for this reason his character was written out of the movie.

I didn’t finish the book, felt a bit cheated by it actually, and didn’t get past that encounter with the Yeti. Still, it’s a remarkable tale in many ways, though not for the obvious reasons.

Personally, I would rather have had Glinsky’s version of events.

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Blinded by the light

Photo by Little Visuals on Pexels.com

For the last couple of years on the road, I’ve dreaded the dark commutes of late November through to late January. It used to be that the biggest danger facing a motorist over winter was the weather, but now it’s other people. My journey involves several stretches of unlit, country road, but these are becoming no-go zones, and I’d rather take a long detour than risk them.

At night, regardless of what the limit actually is on a stretch of road, you adjust your speed so you can pull up within the cast of your dipped beams if you need to – that’s the theory at least. But now it’s impossible to see the road at all when there are cars coming the other way, coming at you with very bright headlights – so bright your vision whites out. And if there’s a long line of these vehicles, it makes seeing your way a real struggle, to say nothing of dangerous and stressful. Add some heavy rain into the mix which exacerbates the glare, and these roads are barely passable at all now. I’ve been arriving at work this week still in the pre-dawn with my eyes burning, and have concluded that were it not for that commute I’d be giving up night-driving altogether.

I wondered if it was me, if my eyesight was shot, but the optician says not, well not yet anyway. In fact super-bright headlights are now a major problem, one that’s largely unreported, but it takes only a little research to learn just how dangerous they are, that they’re being cited more and more as a cause of road traffic accidents, including fatalities.

Indeed, the RAC reports that 70% of drivers are struggling with night driving now, purely on account of dazzle from headlights, that the problem has arisen in the last few years with the rise of LED and Xenon beams, and has reached a stage where many of us are unable to tell if an oncoming vehicle’s lights are dipped or on full beam, because they’re so powerful. Cars aren’t the only problem. I was forced to pull over suddenly one night when a peleton came at me down a dark lane, all with super-bright bike-lights seemingly targeted directly at my eyes.

Surprisingly, regulation is rather dated – like from the 1960’s – and somewhat lax, being more concerned with beam alignment than actual power. Luxury vehicles are a particular problem, tending to have the most powerful lights, also SUVs and vans where the headlights are set much higher than a saloon car – combine that with a powerful beam and you have a real problem.

Other than tightening the regulations, there seems to be no solution, and I doubt anyway if all those luxury car owners are going to have their headlights retrofitted with dull old halogen, like the rest of us. You can go the other way of course, upgrade your mediocre beams to something more killer-bright,  but that’s only adding to the problem.

I used to enjoy night driving as a kid – there was something relaxing about it. But there was half the traffic back then, and no one was trying to blind you in the name of their own personal visibility. I suppose its just one more thing we have to accept as inevitable, that the future isn’t what it used to be. As for me, I’ll be retiring from the commute at the end of this year, and not before time because by then the headlights will be so bright they’ll be burning the paint off each others cars.

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The great debate

Photo by Ralph W. lambrecht on Pexels.com

On the night of November 28th 2019, Channel 4 broadcast a debate on climate change, on the steps we might take in the UK to put our carbon footprint in order, and provide an example of best practice that others in the world might follow. Leaders of all the main political parties were invited to speak and all agreed something must be done, the only difference between them was how much each would fall over itself trying to outdo the others’ ideas.

At bottom it required a radical move away from carbon based fuels and intensive agribusiness but, with targeted investment, it looked possible, that we might indeed reduce our carbon emissions to zero by 2030. I felt the vision served that night was not one of a defensive decline, but more of a positive, prosperous and sustainable green economy, one built upon a genuine political consensus, and I was heartened by it. The debate was of course part of the build up to the 2019 general election.

Notable by their absence that night were the Conservative party and the Brexit party. The podiums they might have occupied were replaced, much to their annoyance, by dripping ice statues, which spoke volumes to the nation, that those parties had nothing to say about climate change, let alone how to mitigate it. Their crass no-show seemed disastrous, guaranteed to wreck their credibility and severely damage their chances of winning the election.

But the Conservative party romped home to a massive majority and are now in power for the next five, possibly the next ten years. Everything progressive that was debated that night was rendered meaningless, and won’t now happen. This implies the majority of UK voters either don’t care about the impending climate catastrophe or – even as Australia burns and Greenland melts – they still don’t really believe in it.

We can’t wait another ten years to do anything about it. By 2030 all the sensitive ecological tipping points will have been tripped, and savage environmental phenomenon will have settled in on a scale that makes it obvious to even the most egregious denier the planet is adapting itself to our toxic presence with a view to wiping us out.

The feeling among many climate scientists is that even if we act now, and in unison, globally, it’s probably too late to do anything other than stabilise the climate in its present state of distress. Without action, as now seems the case, not just in the UK, but across all the major world powers, vast areas of the planet will become uninhabitable, harvests will fail and future wars will be fought, not over oil but over fresh water, grain and habitable territory. Meanwhile, unimaginable numbers of climate refugees will cross the world trying to find safety in the temperate zones. And they will not be welcomed.

The rich are insulated from the problem by virtue of their wealth. They are buying up land in places like New Zealand in order to build their fortified palaces, complete with zombie apocalypse bunkers, where they imagine they might continue to consume in extraordinary luxury the last of the planet’s resources. Meanwhile, our children will struggle daily in the face of hardship and danger.

So what to do? Well, in my latest work in progress: “Winter on the Hill”, (currently being serialised for free on Wattpad) my protagonist, a former eco-warrior, veteran of street protests, and with a criminal conviction for civil disobedience, surveys the wreckage of that climate debate and the ensuing results of the 2019 election with a cool head. His conclusion? He buys himself a three litre diesel four-wheel drive SUV, takes up hill-walking and, though it’s late in the day for him, he falls in love, more than once. The argument is lost, he says, no sense even debating it any more – just enjoy the next twenty or thirty years as best you can, because that’s all you’ve got left.

He’s an interesting character, at times prickly, and something of a socialist firebrand which may annoy some of you, but he’s also a very persuasive old curmudgeon, and I’ll be spending the next year or so getting to know him. I hope to convince him he’s wrong of course, not about love – I mean good on him for that, the old dog – but that we need him back on the barricades. Oh, and he’s to swap that monstrous diesel for an electric vehicle that won’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.

How do you rate my chances? Well, from the off, and as dispiriting as it is, I’m already tempted to concede that he might be right.

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The best I can come up with for now

Pendle Hill Summit, December 2019

It was about six degrees in town this morning, with a light rain. It felt bitter and unwelcoming. The parking machine took most of my change, leaving little for the homeless guy sitting there with the thousand yard stare, but he accepted my bits of shrapnel with more enthusiasm than they deserved, and he called me sir. The coppers were all I could muster as symbols of my solidarity with his lot, and I felt in the “sir” a rebuff, not from him – he was grateful for anything – but more from within myself, the distance it implies, between me and him. I have never been comfortable being called “sir”.

Amid the ruins of this, my little market town, there has risen of late the paradox of a glittering high-rise that promises a “cinematic experience” and bowling, though these attractions have yet to appear. And of the quality-shopping also promised, over the years of this great carbunkle’s somewhat listless construction, only a Marks and Spencer food hall has opened. It sits uneasily like a top-hat among the ragged, alongside the vape-shops and the tattoo parlours and all the charity places.

Meanwhile I note the news-stands speak of war with Iran, the more right wing and tabloidy the title, the more strident and crass the headline, but whether to instil terror or glee I do not know. It will depend on your disposition I suppose. Me? I see only that the social fabric of the UK is in tatters, that it will improve not one jot in the decade to come, and the looming climate catastrophe is beyond help now.

Middle eastern politics never makes for comfortable reading and try as I might I’m not sure if we’ve been brought here by miscalculation or by artifice, for these are dark powers and completely beyond my knowing, but I do know another war played out as infotainment isn’t going to be fun viewing, and it’s certainly not going to fix anything that needs fixing.

Thus the New Year opens and leaves me casting round for a glimmer of hope and I am seeking it in the food aisles of M+S. A week ago I was on the top of a misty Pendle, feeling for a time that all was well. Everyone I met at 1800 feet looked fresh and happy, but that’s the tops for you and always worth the effort. It’s when you come back down to earth the shadows regroup.

I bought something for my tea, browsed the novels in Heart Foundation, but nothing took my eye. I bought a brew for the homeless guy from Gregs and walked it back up to the carpark, but he’d gone by then. So I sat in the car for a bit, watched the people cowed by winter and the flat murk that passes for daylight at this time of year, and I drank the tea myself. Milk and one sugar. That’s how I take it, but I had not stopped to think if it was all right for him.

It’s all very well, trying to help out a bit, but it’s better to pause and consider what it is that’s needed first. And maybe there’s no answer to that, no obvious place to start, which is why we’re going nowhere, and hope is so elusive.

Meanwhile I have snowdrops in the garden, green shoots appearing among the leaf-litter for the first time, and I sold another copy of The Inn at the Edge of light last night, which make two. Then I have seedlings of sweetpea to plant up for the windowsill, for planting out come spring, to bring some colour and the heady intoxication of their scent.

Small beginnings, but the best I can come up with for now.

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