Today I took the girls to the swimming pool - but left them to enter alone, whilst I took my rucksack with its the contents of laptop, book, notebook and a coffee across the river on the ferry to a bench on the promenade to write, read, jot and sip contentedly for an hour or so.
Reading
I was nearing the end of Naomi Klein’s excellent book Doppelganger (which I find hard to type without the ä), all about her deep exploration of the world of her semi-namesake Naomi Wolf and the latter’s drift and then hard turn into the role of right-wing conspiracy-fantasy superstar. The book is also a powerful critique of the interlinked inhumanities of colonialism and rapacious capitalism, and a hard-nosed but also sympathetic analysis of the loss of self that all of this engenders.
Observing
The only antidote that Klein sees for this unhelpful turn is being sociable again. I’m not the world’s most gregarious person, but today I genuinely enjoyed looking up from my words to see and hear the passers by, and even to end up chatting to a group of dog-walkers who had happened to congregate just in front of me. Equally I could watch the kayaks and barges paddling or churning by, thinking lightly about the gamut of human endeavour, from sport and recreation to heavy industry and transport.
Being uncertain
Should we cease all transport, all progress, all industry? Of course not, but we should focus as much as possible on maintaining our environment, helping it as well as our societies heal. Our societies have a long way to go: the AfD is heading for a strong showing in the municipal elections in Nordrhein-Westphalia, and, back in the UK, the far right staged a demonstration attended virtually by stupidifier-in-chief Elon Musk, who called for the dissolution of the UK’s current Parliament - which got me thinking again about replacing our otherwise excellent Tesla.
