Last night, I dreamt that Birmingham was surrounded by water, that you could stand at some point and see that we'd been cut off from London. I tried to turn on the TV and there was electricity, but the BBC was gone. In the dream, I accepted it — at least the house was still standing, though in the way you wonder about continuity when you're dreaming, I thought about where the food was coming from, did we have any food. We must have, I wasn't hungry or thirsty.
I woke to the buzz of my activity tracker and the blue light and the sound of rain. I made coffee and there was some sound coming from outside that I couldn't place, like furniture was being moved, and I realised it might be thunder and the rain became heavier and lighter and I wondered, listening to it, if it was too warm for September, was this what we should expect in September. I thought I would meditate to the sound of the rain and I did, counting up to four and holding for four and then releasing for four and holding for four, but I couldn't keep count, I kept feeling panic, like I wasn't getting enough air. My head hung and I realised I had nodded off — I opened my eyes and it was seventeen minutes passed and I needed to read my email now.
The weather report says it will rain all day and tomorrow and this now is something I worry about — is the rain normal, should I be worried. Are the floods coming and as I open the shade to look outside, I look to see if and how swiftly the rain water is running down Victoria road. The house itself, the energy we use to heat and run our lives is carbon neutral, but what does that matter. It's only one thing and what does it matter if we all go vegan if there is no structural change. That's what they say anyway, but that's easy to say when you don't have to face your kids every day and try to teach them something, they have to live with this, and you can't just say to them like you do to people on Twitter, it's a structural problem, it doesn't matter what you do. You can't patronise them. You can't tell them it will all be okay, can you.
When I was a kid we worried about the apocalypse, but it was always something that someone told you about, that Jesus would come back suddenly without any notice. He would appear with the shout of a trumpet, those words, and I would sometimes hear the sound of a horn and be concerned, think that things were suddenly over. There was nothing to actually see though, no weather report, no melting ice sheet. Just that Jesus would suddenly be here and it would suddenly be over. Maybe seven years of tribulation, if you believed in that sort of thing, if you were a post-trib believer and thought we would have to endure some trials to be tested before Jesus really came back and ruled in peace for a thousand years. Seven years, anyone can manage seven years.
My daughter wants to strike on Fridays and I'm not sure what to say to her. I'm the enemy now, aren't I, I was the one who for thirty years or more dumped the CO2 into the atmosphere and not thought about it. I was an adult in the year two thousand, but I didn't know. I should have known. What am I supposed to say to her, tell her no, tell her that the teachers who say they can't strike are right. The eldest one said that, We aren't allowed to strike, and I said, that's the exact point — they don't want you to strike, they won't let you strike. At what point do we all need to put everything down — I don't know sweetheart, I don't know what to do either. Shut of the TV now, it's time to go to school anyway.