Panic in Needle Park

If you drive a really nice car down a dirt and gravel road, through a shabby-looking part of town you have never been in, at the dead of night, all alone with no GPS and very little gas left in the tank... you would be forgiven for that onset of hysteria beginning to take shape in the pit of your stomach, long distilled from childhood warnings of unseen chainsaw-weilding marauders and chewing-tobacco spitting toothless deviants with shiny eyes and very little charity in their hearts. What does one make of, though, meticulously well-heeled and well-read bon vivants, given to cavorting in various wine and cheese circles, usually seen flitting from one art gallery to the next must-see exhibition, or holed up in their two/three-storey beach 'shacks' through the pandemic, perpetually well-hydrated and exercised, worrying about the efficacy of the vaccine and the 'side-effects' on their bodies?

We are in the midst of a severe backlash against powerfully racist and sexist moral mendicants, begging for mercy from their straw mansions, exposed for the obtuse & cruel overseers of extreme privilege they really are, driving in reverse through an Age of Transparency - in thought and deed and ethical absolutism. Seen in the light of a world in spate - from daily briefings of how bad the climate crisis is getting, to reports of habitat losses, and destroyed ecosystems, and dried-up rivers, and the upending of harvest-time, and regular summer and winter temperatures being long replaced by an endless cycle of fire and flood... can we still fall back on our belief that a just law will prevail and save us all from ourselves?

Trump is gone, long-live Trumpism. Right-wing populism on the rise and already all around us, western governments long accustomed to an easy and familiar recognition of the brown-skinned and foreign-tongued extremist amongst us, suddenly forced to reckon with handsome Harry and debonair Delilah down the street driving down the Brenton Tarrant-track in their Dad's Audis and Mum's Range Rovers, inevitably running up against Cho from the office and Atak at the helm of the barrista machine in the corner-cafe, and harshing everyone's mellow with their putative superiority-complex.

Dogs and Horses, horses and dogs, O what a nice coffee-table, glossy picture book that would make... sipping an infused flavourful tea, looking at page after page of large-format photos of dogs and horses, horses and dogs; in play, at rest, out and about... with no people in the frame to spoil the idyll.

I dream of a cloistered English village, a vacant savannah, a Great Lakes-vista, an Amazon not yet cut down... I dream of palaces made of stone, a pile of precious stones glinting in the moonlight, a clear still pool of water - one that you peer into all the way down the bottom, to see the ghosts of time and patience beginning to rise, disturbing the integrity of the stillness, creating a distorted pattern, until they disappear at the surface - having already broken your hard-won reposeful rectitude.