gloria

I’ve had a great summer. Not even the sub-kafka absurdity of my job in the twilight world between Machine Bureaucracy and Corporate Inertia, not the impending annihilation of my (and many other) species through our collective folly, not even the fact we got done two - nil away at Bolton last week, can take the gloss of it. I’m happy. And hungover.


So, I hear you ask, what’s that all about then? You in love or something? Well, no, unless it’s the something. Basically, and this where it all threatens to get sentimental, I reckon it’s all down to me mates. They do incredible things. Outrageous, audacious and unconstrained things. Things driven by love, anger and a deranged belief that through action - personal action - the way we organise our world can be transformed. That the stupid, ignorant and complacent patterns of behaviour and belief that have got us into the mess that passes for modern life can be slowed, stopped and eventually be reversed. That, despite lives and times that constantly would seem to demonstrate the opposite, we are not all shit-for-brains, hopeless gluttons on a one way shopping trip to oblivion.


If it wasn’t for them, I’d have given up years ago. It’s sometimes got pretty close even with them, to be honest. But I haven’t, because they haven’t. As someone said, a very long time ago, “Mind shall be harder, heart the keener, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.”* They may well fall. We may well all fall, with no hope of anyone to record or remember it. But I will fall with them.


*For those who are interested, the quote is a translation of the Old English lines “Hige sceal þe heardre, heorte þe cenre, Mod sceal þe mare þe ure magen lylað” taken from the Battle of Maldon.