The Thames is clotted and slow today. Flat light and steady rain make the city warp and recede as I cross the river.
Londoners divide into those who are happy to see the back of the worst weather we’ve seen in fifty years (most adults) and those who are pretty damn disappointed (me and a whole host of school children). I miss the blanket of quiet the snow laid over the city. I miss the black and white drama, the time suspended. I liked the extremity, the excited chaos.
I should be grateful that today is such a normal day in this city. Instead it reinforces an absurd realisation that has only recently come to me: I am on the road to becoming a survivalist. It’s only a matter of time before I start hoarding cans.
A fascination with science fiction is partly to blame. Hollywood too, with its current glut of the hyperbolic and the apocalyptic, tries to convince me that the End Of The World May Just Be Nigh. In saner moments I dismiss the near-future alien invasions, the vampires, the dying stars and Skynet. It’s harder to dismiss novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where the catastrophe seems all too human.
Back to reality, I stop for a second and try to imagine the future. Truth is, I can’t see beyond my fingernails on the keyboard, let alone into next week. The here and now is explosively, fantastically distracting. We slough off a whole generation’s approach to education, every day. Our brains were hardwired to steep themselves in knowledge: now we flick through the flood of data until fleeting connections are made and patterns emerge.
My family, especially my children, are the real cause of, and the answer to, all this extremity. They teach an unconscious, bone-deep interest in a future outside my own lifetime, for which I’m grateful (if none the wiser). They give me hope, laughter and love. And yes, they are the reason I lie awake at night, wondering in atavistic, over-protective fashion what will become of this world.
I am on the road to becoming a survivalist. It’s only a matter of time before I start hoarding cans.
Just over a decade ago, ‘January 22nd, 2010’ was my contribution to The3six5, a global collaborative storytelling project created by Len Kendall and Daniel Honigman. It began on January 1, 2010 with the idea to create a crowdsourced journal of the year from the perspective of 365 individuals from around the world. It ran for 3 years in a row and documented the lives of over 1,000 people. You can find the whole, pretty wonderful time machine of an archive right here.
In early 2020, a decade on, I wrote what I now think of as a sister post to this story: a letter from lockdown called ‘Fever Dream’. You can find it here.