Optimism Over Despair

 Noam Chomsky's book 'Optimism Over Despair' was sitting on the top of Monkey's TBR pile and it seemed like an appropriate title for my Blogiversary post since, despite having a lot of stuff to despair over, I am still here after 10 years. I am a week late with this post because the despair struck hard last week with the news that we are not, after all, going to be buying our lovely little house and have to move out. We have done a lot to make it feel like our home and now we are going to have to start from scratch. We are soldiering manfully on in our hunt for a new place to live.

In other news, the world as we know it is imminently coming to an end. This fact has been preoccupying me for quite a long time and it was nice to find that there are, in fact, a lot of other people who also think we should be doing something more serious about the problems. So while on the one hand I expend pointless energy agonising over pretty much everything I buy and am trying to cut my own plastic use with homemade soap-on-a-rope:

Monkey and I are also getting involved in more direct action to force the government and the wider public to be aware of how urgent the problems are (Waterloo Bridge, London November 2018):

I have spent quite some time ploughing through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, trying to understand what is happening and what can be done to prevent the total collapse of our ecosystem and thus human life on this planet. It's a work in progress but I will try and post about it soon. I feel like I want to walk around with one of those 'The End Is Nigh' sandwich boards like weird people used to do. I am concerned about the shift in political attitudes away from international cooperation and towards an insular carry-on-regardless approach. I fear that the tipping point will come and we will be over it before people wake up to the realities. I look around and the world seems the same, because the things that are already changing are not apparent. I don't know how to communicate all this. The media gets people all excited about giving up plastic straws to save the turtles and I just sit there furious because it is so distracting from the real changes that need to be made. But I force myself to be optimistic; we will buy a house, because I want to believe that the world will still be inhabitable when I am old and I will need somewhere to live. 

So here's looking to the next decade ... will my blog still be here ... will any of this matter ... I hope there will still be books.