Well, that was lovely. I’m battered.
Part of what I was doing today was getting Year 9 students to start thinking about their individual power consumption. Now I’m running a bath. Right there – that’s the disconnect.
If I had some sort of device that captured all the energy I expend stomping needlessly from room to room in order to forget why I came there in the first place, I could use the energy from that device to heat my huge evening baths. No such device exists though. Shame. This evening it’s just going to be guilty bathtime as normal. I’ll perhaps be a little bit more mindful than usual as to how many kilowatts I’m burning. I won’t leave the kitchen light on all night. And perhaps by writing this, I’ll inspire some of you to be a little less profligate in your electricity use for a short time before we both forget again. It’s all I can do, really. It’s all any of us can do. But anything is something. The biggest deadener is the voice that says “There’s no point me doing anything.” That’s all we have to avoid really.
It’ll be another early start tomorrow. Then more. A week of the buggers. Compared to some of the things I get up to, it’s not much of an adventure anymore, getting up early in order to help small humans think. But … it can still be elucidating in short bursts. I hesitate to say I enjoy it. But it’s certainly revealing. It was a good school today so I don’t feel like I’ve had my heart torn out by wolves. I got home and found myself looking longingly at my shelf full of playtexts. I’m bone tired and it’s only just gone seven. I’ll be dead to the world in two hours. About once a week I need to sleep for twelve hours to reset. I haven’t managed that long for a long long time and I’m starting to feel the deficit.
All of this could be academic before long. We won’t need to worry so much about global warming in a nuclear winter, and the shells are falling closer and closer to the Polish border, provoking NATO. Mutually assured destruction has never looked like a deterrent when insanity is in play – this is why it’s been important to stop all the countries depleting uranium. If you’re bonkers then you’re immune to consequence and there have been lots of world leaders over the years who are six hedgehogs short of a hatbox. At least there’s only a few countries where the damage can go global. The Russian Bear is mad though, suddenly. It has had a nasty little backwards thorn Put into its head. I can’t see a clean end to this, with the combination of war crimes, pride and a lifetime of being unquestioned.
I can’t use the possibility of imminent global war to stop me from getting out and talking about climate change to the Yoot, though. Life just marches inevitably on and on. The Yoot are the Fewtcha! And a lot of them are very angry with everything. I don’t blame them. We’ve made a horrible mess of everything financial, then we voted in a load of blithering meanies because they were familiar, then we just let them get too busy lying and getting rich to care about anything local or global until it was too late to do anything but stammer, delay and hope. Boris is our Neville. He’ll never be our Winston. Although we just have to hope that this war won’t spread. In 1939 we didn’t have nukes. I would argue that the existence of nukes is the only reason we haven’t been widely conscripted. Those young women I met today might have a lot more to contend with than where to charge their electric vehicle.
Oh, and my laptop fixed itself. I just had to leave it on all night so it could finally download the update it was queueing. I assumed it had been hacked so switched it off at every chance as I figured it was mining bitcoin or something like that. I can’t even solve tech anymore. Leave it to the Yoot? Or will they be too busy fighting?
AlBarclay 