From 1984 to 2024

In my lifetime, there has been extraordinary change affecting human life on the planet. 

The speed of technological advances means that the average person has no understanding of how systems operate - from AI to satellite systems, global weapons to data analysis, even how we make ultra-processed foods and pandemic medicines. We simply use the technology and rely on someone else's knowledge of how it was created. We eat food that may not be good for us, use mobile phones incessantly and compulsively, and yet we have access to vast stores of human knowledge and scientific advancement - which we mostly ignore. 

We are the Proles....

At home with a high temperature and possible COVID symptoms, I reread 1984. This is ridiculously relevant now in 2024. (Okay 2025, but it wasn't when I was writing this...)

The feeling of the world constantly at war, so that we all just get used to living with it. The Newspeak - a language of propaganda and misinformation. Trump's doublethink - where he tells us that Ukraine caused the war that they are fighting against hostile invaders. Where protestors are arrested and imprisoned, and those who speak out against dictators or the wealthy elite are quickly silenced.

How easily did we slip into this state of affairs, with all of us complicit because we have no knowledge of how to rise up and stop this rule by oligarchy, this demonisation of immigrants, the poor, the disabled, this stressful existence where we are encouraged to look the other way for fear of losing our own jobs, our own fragile stake in the world.

What has the power to subvert this descent into societal breakdown? 

Who or what can stop climate change?

I feel oddly well-positioned to answer these questions. Like many authors of dystopian fiction, I have read sci-fi, been schooled in global war scenarios, played games that destroy planets, and grown up on literature that forewarns how we get to Gilead.

The antidote is CONNECTION.

The current Labour party is not socialist, even though it used its socialist roots to appear like an alternative to Tory corruption. Young people distrust politicians - for good reason - see what they have allowed to happen on their watch. So it doesn't feel realistic to suggest we can vote ourselves out of trouble.

Instead, we have to build grassroots resilience, communities that are inclusive and well-prepared, and be ready to download manuals and knowledge, and preserve practical skills for the day when our ruling bodies cease to function. I am not talking about becoming preppers - it's bigger than that. It's about how we bring the rest of the world with us - all those who want to live via community, empathy, honesty and decency.

Remember those balloon debates in school? They taught us that capitalism was going to swallow us up unless we preserved our individualism, and had a better reason for being saved than the next person. 

I disagree.

We want to bring everyone along with us - all the divergent, messy, broken people whom society has placed a low value on. These are the people who actually know how to survive in an intolerant world. We need the crazy scientists and fantasy writers, people who pray and those who don't, carers, workers, farmers, healers and musicians. And we don't need big impressive leaders who got where they are by treading on all of us.

We may be the Proles, but we are also the industrious ants and bees, the fruitpickers, the dambuilders, the vast swarming hordes who can build and grow and care and survive.

Turns out WE have the power. And the more we work together the better our future becomes.

Singular Cake - Mk II

Most of us occasionally enjoy a spot of schadenfreude (a positive reaction to someone else's misfortune) if we are honest, but there is also its counterpart, freudenschade (a negative reaction to another's good fortune), which in its Germanic way is oddly a very British concept.

But which of these really applies to George Monbiot's article in today's Guardian? I did smile  so I'm going for the former...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/24/extreme-wealth-super-rich-devon-society-planet#comments

Living close to the Devon coast myself, I have also seen the yachts and superyachts come and go, and the overt displays of wealth and privilege at the private boat clubs, bars and country clubs. But I don't envy them OR feel pleased if their existence is less than perfect. 

I'm comfortable in my own existence.

But I do wonder about how to reach across the divide and talk about sustainability, and the mantra of Singular Cake to those whose only measure of success has been EXCESS.

It's as though we need a new arena for discussions - how to live collaboratively in a post-colonial world, how to scale back on over-indulgence, how to promote projects that benefit the planet AND provide joy and fun for human beings.

All I can say is that there is a certain pleasure that comes from living within your means. Taking what you need, and no more. Enjoying the simplicity. Instead of proving you are successful, or looking for outward approval, just BE successful - on your own terms. It's freeing.

#singularcake #sustainability #onlywhatyouneed #agoodexistence #georgemonbiot #guardian

New House Vibe

 A few years ago, we bought an old house. I started a poem about it - it was old and unloved, the wires needed stripping, it had 'efflorescence' on the walls (look it up, it's nowhere near as gorgeous as it sounds). Generally speaking we've made slow progress, although I have a kind of vision for the house - white-walled art gallery meets book-nook library with a smattering of natural history curios thrown in.

The garden is more of a challenge. How to develop a botanical jungle that resists slugs and snails, is fragrant with herbs and feels like an oasis when I only have about 4ft square to play in....

Move

Amber-eyed, 

the Overlord presides 

over the detritus of the living room

where I have badly stacked the incoming boxes

such that the bottom one

is compressed and extrudes its contents.

Arms ache from van trips and stair treks.

In the echoey dining room, rows of vertically-filed vinyl records 

are causing the IKEA cupboard to sag in the middle, 

temporarily shored with two garden bricks

yanked from stacks behind the weather-beaten shed.

The exterior brickwork has a white efflorescence 

that suggests water seepage.

Electrical wires hang from door jambs like stripped veins.

She’s old and weary, like us.

The front door mat is curled to catch unwary feet.

Things move in my peripheral vision

and move back again when I stare 

like scenes from a scary movie

where the new owners have disturbed the lives

of those who came before.

That first night

I sleep like a cat with fleas

hearing sounds of the street all night

through the meniscus of my dreaming.

The house has a broad back of centuries,

wrapped around me, dusty, impregnated 

with other handprints.

Years pass.

She is still weary but her rooms

are lit with light, filled with echoes

of our noise-making. You painstakingly

revealed her wooden window sills, smoothed walls

and ceilings. We infuse her with splashes of passata,

garlic hummus, chilli oil from the garden vines.

Family

is what you become when you live

in the same nest. Cats morph on the retaining wall.

Vinyl crackles as the needle drops. This year

we’ll give you a new roof and stem the damp

although you don’t seem to mind it.

You’ve seen worse.

Factchecking and the Forest World

It is reassuring when even the most exciting new science is questioned and fact checked by peer scientists. We need this, in a world of disinformation, AI-written articles and deep fakes. Even those who witness and catalogue signs of climate change encourage peer review that may contradict their findings based on longer-term evidence or differing analysis models.

So I dug into a Guardian article about discrediting the concept of the 'wood-wide web' with avid interest, having aborbed The Overstory by Richard Powers and followed the explosion of interest in Suzanne Simard's 1997 study that inspired it.

I was not expecting to find Daniel Immerwahr's article so richly rewarding with its nuggets of peripheral but related information. His fascination with trees goes beyong merely critiqueing Simard's stance, and providing the context for the outpouring of enthusiasm that her research engendered, and instead takes us on related pine-strewn paths of his own interests from the explosion of new plant writing, to what botanists bring to the table of ethology (plant and animal psychology). Full of intriguing diversion (trees can smell themselves, can a rat's spinal cord act like a brain, do some plants have a form of sight?) it's well worth a read, and nature writers may find inspiration in it for worthwhile exploration for their own writing.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/23/mother-trees-and-socialist-forests-is-the-wood-wide-web-a-fantasy?

How Many Years Does It Take to Write a Novel?

I don’t appeal to everyone. Or even try to.

My writing is about the things that fascinate me - things that make my brain go “Ooo, OoO!” and wave my hand to talk over you because I’m so excited. And that changes weekly, daily, oh, alright, hourly. (I may have ADHD.) 

Crafting a novel is therefore a wholly absorbing series of wanders down side streets and blind alleys, stopping to exclaim at certain points, followed by tangents through ferny foliage into impenetrable forest, being rebuffed and finding my way via pine needle-carpeted trails that take me over scrubby ranges and down into gullies, and short detours along a riverbank, and discovering that I have ended up on a promontory, overlooking where I started but with a whole different point of view. Pause, reflect. 

And then I might jump character. Or time zone.

So, I get that it wouldn’t make sense to most people that this novel has taken six years to write.

For context, I started it the summer before my dad died, when I was working at a secondary school, spending hot days in exam invigilation, watching kids with additional needs struggle in the rigid environment. A year later, with some funds that Dad left me, I took a writing retreat at the Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank and got some feedback, resulting in a major rewrite. Buoyed by my experience with Arvon, I asked the tutor for a recommendation which ultimately secured me a place on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and that blew apart the whole structure of the novel until I had a three-person perspective, a much better understanding of suspense and dialogue, and only half the word count. Cue more late-night writing binges.

It took me two years part-time to complete the MA (while working full-time) but it was a springboard to a job in publishing and a sense of self-confidence. (Thinking about an MA? Do it !!! And tell me how it goes). Patrick Rothfuss has been working (or not-working) on his novel The Doors of Stone for over 12 years. Plenty of authors have taken longer - with varying excuses - but I guess it takes as long as it takes.

Last month I was made redundant from a job I loved. Three weeks have passed, where I've been applying for insane numbers of job applications for every sort of creative role imaginable, and still not one interview. Yet. The university has been supportive. They said with my CV they’d be lucky to have me on their temporary admin team  - and I’ll be glad to get some work (and money) under my belt in a week or so. 

But this week, I’ve written the final chapter of Outlandish: a novel about a boy with maladaptive daydreaming. 🙂

(Thanks to Farley Lapenna for the illustration - https://www.instagram.com/lapastaillustrations/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/farley-lapenna-19b938180/)