Day 160

“I’ve been a bit worried about you – you seem so preoccupied with all the shite.” Thus reads the second line from an email I got yesterday from my lovely friend A. Read this to yourself with a NorthEast accent, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from smiling. It certainly made me smile. Often it’s reassuring to hear others are thinking about you. And A’s email finished with a paragraph musing on time and her own situation that was pure poetry (and that I won’t quote here, because it’s too precious and because she will turn it into a complete poem if she stops putting her writing persona to one side and starts scribbling again. Go read her marvellous novel, A Place For Connie, and then email her and ask her nicely to write more stuff. I’d like her to write more, because she’s good at it. But like most good writers she doesn’t acknowledge that she is. I did tell her not to worry about me. Her life is full enough as it is.

Therapy yesterday was interesting again. Despite my depression last week, I felt in a good place yesterday, and realised that perhaps the depression had seemed so extreme because I’d been in such a good place before it, too. My therapist asked me if there was anything in particular that I thought might have caused this latest episode, and I told her, just as I wrote last week, that I couldn’t think of a catalyst, that I’d been wracking my brain to see if there had been one, and had come up with a blank. Except for the the feeling that time was slipping beyond my grasp. And I’m kind of dealing with that in my head now.

The roar of fighter planes has restarted here. We have normalised war. I have said this before, but it bears repeating. At least, some might say, the noise comes from “friendly” planes. But for how long will they be friendly? Who’s to say that Johnson, or any right-wing enemy of mine, won’t turn one of those planes on me? And I’ve not descended into paranoia – I am just very aware that the machinations of state can very easily boil over into personal and secretive vendettas against private individuals. Therein lies the essence of tyranny. The tyranny we live in right now, despite Johnson’s extremely narrow victory in the vote of no confidence earlier this week. Pick these things apart, and you’ll see he has normalised the Ukraine war so much to use it as a convenient lever in his quest for personal survival in his position as Prime Minister, an office whose dignity and integrity he has besmirched as much as Trump did that of President of the USA. Politicians of this type thrive on wars and will never stop them. Personal glory is all that matters to them. And never forget that those two men, regardless of whether or not they are in office, will always be a clear and present danger to freedom and democracy. Plus any number of other dictators, tyrants and manipulators, with Putin top of that list, and from what I see not in danger of leaving office for some time to come, despite all the speculation about his physical and mental health.

Another day when I thought I would run out of words before I started. I’ve not written a poem in an age. I was going to turn that lovely daughter/father interaction I wrote about the other day into a poem, but it didn’t happen. Maybe it will.

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 114