epilogue

This is the last post in the current form, not that I suspect the five or so of you that read this will notice. It’s run it’s course. I am not going to apologise for this, or for the long gaps and inconsistencies of floodculture. It isn’t for you and it never was. It’s just something I do when I get a thought or a rant, whatever, that fits it, because I enjoy it. And, frankly, much of the time I have something better to do anyway. I don’t care about it’s audience, or even if it has one. It’s not here to recruit, to build a movement, push a manifesto, change minds, change the world. We all do that every day, anyway.

Piece by piece, cliché by cliché, increment at a time, we all of us change the place around us with our actions. Sorry, but the future isn’t made by the great gestures and actions or great people, by Heroic Efforts at Moments of Destiny. It’s made by the squalid, thoughtless actions of fuck ups like you and me, actions taken in panic and blindness as we simply try to live our lives, to get by. Yesterday I switched to a (supposedly) renewable electricity provider. Yes, me, who’s rants about climate change have soiled these virtual pages, only just got round to it. Because that is how life is lived. Because it just wasn’t high enough up the list. Because, deep down, I just don’t believe there is actually any point anyway. Because, if I really meant it, I’d be switching to self generation, or quitting electricity all together. Instead, I got a fucking iPod for Christmas.

And, when those small things add up to larger, collective actions, we don’t make the right calls. They just don’t add up to what we need to do, more often the opposite. Like building a new coal fired power station at Kingsnorth. Like funding climate change denial from oil profits. Like not pushing for regime change to save people from tyranny when the country concerned…, but I’m turning into a bitter, cynical, whining liberal spitting self loathing platitudes from a comfortable chair in a comfortable house in a comfortable country.

Bottom line. When it comes down to it, I’m too comfortable. We all are - apologies to those on the end of the bell curve here, but the vast majority of us are, and by us I mean the people who are able or likely to read this. Whatever. Look, those of us who need to change won’t, because it will by uncomfortable, simple as. So, get back to work, put your noise cancelling earphones in and grin while you bear it. Just read the sports pages, don’t watch what passes for news. Keep it tuned to the music channel. And, for fucks sake, don’t look to hard out of the closed and locked window. There is a big world out there you and I made together.

Control. Alt. Delete.

fear III

This time it’s personal…

A different station, Saturday morning. Many police about, as it’s a match day. About half of them have the blue square panel in their yellow jackets - Forward Intelligence Team colours. Spotters and snoops. Cameras. Photo albums.Trouble. The lowest, poorest trained and least respected rung of the architecture of a police state in waiting. Full of adrenaline, speed and an inferiority complex resulting from their place at the bottom of the food chain in the wonderfully oxymoronic world of ‘intelligence led policing’.

My hackles rise, my awareness ramps up a few notches. I scan the station to fix their locations, and those of their quarry as well as the exits. There’s only a few home shirts about as yet, one group of pudgy short-hairs with bulging carrier-bags straining to contain the stella cans are keeping their distance and have formed loose circle round a mate at the cashpoint, while another is busy on his phone. Move along. Nothing to see.

But I’m also on a low level adrenal rush now, so I get out of the station by the most direct route, keeping to the pace of the general flow. They check me out, I check them out. We both decide no further action is required. I head to my usual cafe bar for a quick belt and some free wifi, but it’s a film set for the morning. No, really. it's full of cameras and earnest student types with clipboards and sheaves of paper. it takes them five miuntes to realise i'm there, after which they politely ask me to piss off. So, it’s back to the station for chain caffeine and more twitching.

I assume everyone has the same, or at least similar, reaction to the cops. The fact I can id their roles and rank probably has little effect on that. Thing is, the last 15 years of my life probably has. Is my reaction more so, of maybe even different? And can they tell? Or, is this paranoia? And, do I / should I actually care?

Things improve greatly once the surprisingly good coffee hits my system and I get onto the platform. At least the twitching is now related to a reasonable cause. But, along with the bitter aftertaste of the coffee, another lurks, just below the surface, down in the place were I keep the fear, right next to the anger.

fear II

Same station, last train, late night. I’m on the way back from a fairly ridiculous round trip that ate most of my afternoon and evening. And, I’ve had no tea. There’s a woman a few seats down, facing me. Makes a fair bit of eye contact, but nothing full on. She’s probably about my age, is well dressed, hair very well maintained, well but fairly heavily made up. She has a nose stud, and a big luggage trolley. As we approach my stop, she gets up too.
she gets off, I follow her, she moves slower than me, on account of the trolley, but takes up all the space on the overbridge, so I have to think back to my womens self defence awareness training thing at college to remember which is the least threatening position to take. So I hang back and walk slowly, but stay in the light.

However, the light at the far end of the bridge is out, and its dark, and frosty, and the white lining on the step edges is worn off. She has some trouble with the bag, I offer to help, she says thanks, but she’s got it just about sorted. We briefly chat about the state of the bridge on the way to the car park.

In the car park, she has a taxi pre booked - you have to round here. Very organised, i think. I walk on, the cab takes a while to load and get going, and passes me half way down the station road. Then, in a way that takes me back to my hitching days, the twin flare of brake then reversing lights. The driver drops the window, and asks if I want a lift anywhere. She is leaning forward in the passenger seat, looking directly at me. Eye contact, a quickly flashed smile.

I ask where they are going, turns out they are off to the second next village the other side of mine, i.e. the wrong way, but will be passing the turn where I leave the next village, and take my new more scenic route home. I tell him where I’m going, and we agree it’s not on his way. I thank them, they pull away, she is still looking at me, then looks to the the road ahead.

I walk home through a crisp autumn night of bright hard stars and a waxing gibbous moon, through the quietly busy woods, passed the mist hung lakes. And I think about the encounter. It contrasts so much with the guarding mum from the previous day, and to be honest with general experience, that I regret not taking the lift as far as my turn. You should always accept hospitality. Especially if it serves to reduce the fear we are constantly provoked to by the stream of media messages and images we are fed. In the brief time the ride would have taken, an equally brief but powerful little connection between three strangers could have been made. Who knows, it could have ended in a pint in her hotel, and a lifelong friendship. Or wherever.

I round the summit on the lane home, and the moon is lined up right down the road, picking out my path in silver between the trees and their falling leaves. I remember I'm hungry.

fear

It’s half seven in the morning, at the station for the early train to work. At the station, again. It’s chill, but not cold, the dawn is just gilding the hilltops and the ash have all dropped, but the sycamores are clinging on to summer. I arrive at the station just as a big car disgorges a young woman with a big portfolio. She is well dressed, and the big car is new and clean. Inside mum, I assume, waves her off and as she settles into the drivers seat, notices me.
Now, I’m not scruffy - could do with a shave, but not rough by any means. However, and again I assume, mum stays in the car and the car stays where it is as I walk onto the platform, where the daughter greets me with a cheery ‘hi!’

I go down to the end of the platform where I know the end of the train I want to be on will stop. This puts me about a carriage length distant from the daughter and in full view of mum. Who is sat tight with the engine running. After about 5 or 6 minutes of this, the train is a bit late, daughter pointedly waves bye bye to mum again, obviously embarrassed by the chaperone. She looks early twenties, college rather than school. Mum waves back, but the car stays as is. A few minutes pass, as does the airport train ours is stuck behind. Another commuter, one of the regulars, turns up, as does a lass for the later train off the opposite platform. Mum and car are still in place, engine running. Daughter is now pointedly ignoring her.

It occurs to me at this point that this is a useful illustration of how we deal with risk, and fear. Mum is staking out the car park on account of her daughter. I assume, once again, that she judges her to be at risk in some way from the rest of us. She fears what could happen if she where to go home and tuck into her Waitrose orange juice and fresh baked croissant. She didn’t look a muesli type. It has not, however, occurred to her to switch off her engine. She is not afraid of the effects those emissions will have on her daughters future.

OK, I admit that the impact of her emissions is minimal to the point of incalculability, and that the risk of random attack on a rural railway station is actually real, and completely appalling for those it happens to. I have no issue with mum if she wants to sit in a car park for 10 minutes of her life to protect against a real, but very unlikely, possibility. But why leave the engine running, and why stay in the car? Comfort? Convenience? More fear? I can only conclude that mum just isn’t even considering the impact of the engine, a real and actual effect, it’s just not on her radar. She’s a happy frog in her pan of water.

Far too happy to consider actually getting out into the cold and talking to the daughter she is willing to spend 10 minutes af her life mutely guarding, it seems.

folly

Middle of the Observer, a few weeks back, round at a friends parents house. Splash page on the top technofixes to stop climate change. Basically, terraforming our own planet. Stuff like chucking sulphur into the atmosphere, mirrors in space and iron filings into the ocean. Carbon sucking fake trees. Oceanic heat pumps. That kind of shit.

Now, some of this stuff may even, in a very narrow, engineering sense, work. It is possible that we could suck enough carbon out of the cycle or heat out of the process to avoid catastrophic climate change. I doubt it, though, as the energy required to actually make this stuff happen is colossal - I mean, space mirrors? But that’s not the real problem with these Bond Villain plans, it’s the side effects. Trashing the oceans with geological scale algal blooms or spraying the whole planet with acid rain will have massive consequences, especially as we’ve already degraded most of the earths habitats to the point of near collapse.

Worse, it proves we just aren’t learning. We’re willing to contemplate highly risky, completely experimental and ecologically catastrophic plans that we don’t even know will work, rather than turning a few plugs off, not flying to Paris for the weekend and getting to like the taste of warm beer again, etc. Our greed and comfort come first. Like some toxic toddler, spoiled beyond recovery, stamping our feet and screaming in the supermarket untlil our parents buy us more chocolate so we can bolt it down and throw it up. We want it all, we want it now, and then we want more. Because we’re worth it, because we want to, because we can. And fuck the hindmost, the future and the reckoning.

Well, tough. The trip ends here and it ends soon. Either way. Enjoy, you’ve earned it.

fatter

This gem today from the BBC, you can read the whole thing if you like. But here’s the, ehem, meat.

‘Obesity 'as bad as climate risk'
Alan Johnson said a "cultural and societal shift" was needed
The public health threat posed by obesity in the UK is a "potential crisis on the scale of climate change", the health secretary has warned.’

Well, that’s a worry. A plague of fat people is as bad as a mass extinction event. Then I suppose he has a point - all that extra weight could sink land-masses, and their uncontrolled appetites could consume whole species. Which, in some ways of course they are and, in just about every way I suspect is not what Alan Johnson is actually worried about. Just a guess, but, I won’t flog this one. It is it’s own satire after all.

However, there is a solution which could just deal with both of these pressing threats to our continued viability as a nation. Get all the fat, and potentially fat, people out of their cars and give them bikes. Impound their televisions and play stations. Get them on rationed food, turn down their heating, get them walking everywhere and working in the garden or allotment to grow their own healthy food.

And, of course, lest any of you smug thinnies out there are cackling at the thought of enjoying this spectacle, this actually means all of us.

Which, on second thoughts, may actually be exactly what he had in mind all along. Body image as a driver for saving the planet (sic). Loose a stone, or the polar bear gets it. Less cellulite for more icecap. RDA vs PPM. Hmm.

Excuse me, i think i'm just going to be sick...

intermission

in the form of a few words from Philip Larkin.

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.