Gloomy and wet all day

Here we are nearly at the end of the first month of the new year. I didn’t make it an alcohol free month, nor indeed a ‘veganuary’ - can’t do without cheese and eggs I’m afraid. Or wine. So nothing happening there. One needs one’s comforts in these rather bleak times, times when of course millions are denied their comforts. Maybe that should read billions. The sheer scale of global problems is now overwhelming, and I don’t see any particular politician with the wherewithal to get a grip—it’s more a case of watching a group of loudmouthed privileged passengers fighting over those famed Titanic deckchairs (but to his credit, Trump wouldn’t have bothered with a deckchair, he would have commandeered the first lifeboat). The fights our world leaders are engaged in are pre-modern (I’m using that phrase as a sort of crutch) namely to gain territory, to keep territory, and to subjugate the other. How is it possible that we have got this far down the road of climate catastrophe when these idiots (not just Putin) are still so obsessed with sacrificing hundreds or thousands of lives just to raise a flag in some obscure village or town? And yes, I apply the same criticism to Hamas and their partners in senseless killing, Israel, since these days one doesn’t want to be accused of being ’one-sided.’
 
Well, we know that when humans are faced with a bit of a crisis they can go into distraction mode. If the house is in flames, at least make time to have a hoover-up and do the dishes. Indeed, go looking for dirty dishes to prolong the distraction. But as I’ve written before, great minds (Russell, Einstein et al) have considered this problem and nobody has taken them up on their ideas, such as world government or a single global military force. Other ‘great’ minds briefly believed that world peace would be secured through the globalisation of trade, like no two countries with MacDonald’s would ever go to war with each other. What do we hear from the globalisers now? Just a bit of fretting and tut-tutting between canapés at Davos. And we’re just seconds away from midnight on the Doomsday Clock.
 
January 29th 2024, note for the diary: it was wet and gloomy all day.