why things need to get worse instead of better
Behold! I have had a thought.
Hello!
Hi! Have I ever mentioned that I hate winter? That I hate the cold? That January is horrible but so are December and November and also February? I think I might have mentioned it once or twice. I hate winter. It makes my brain freeze and stop.
Anyway! I went through the tabs on my phone the other day and found this extremely entertaining piece from the 90’s in there, and I have no idea who sent it to me or why, but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s about a man, in Chicago, trying to go retrieve a cat from a flight, without having access to a car.
It’s essentially a hero’s journey and it’s charmingly written and pretty funny. It also has the best description of walking around in the US - including some bits of New York! - I can think of:
“I had the disorienting sense that every location was too far away from every other location. Each building and intersection was islanded by a mysterious, useless zone of emptiness that revealed its true size only when you tried to cross it on foot. It was like being in an Einsteinian model of the expanding universe.”
Anyway, it’s here, if you would like to read it. If you don’t, there’s a new essay from me, Marie Le Conte, the author of this newsletter, just below.
Bye!
A column
I just don’t know how we can tell people that their lives need to get worse, is the problem. I’ve been writing about politics for a long time now - nearly a decade to the month! - and if there’s one thing I learned it’s that no-one wants to be told that nothing good lies on the horizon.
Well, I suppose I could have learnt that elsewhere, it’s not exactly a scintillating insight, but being in Westminster for so many years really rammed that point home. If there’s going to be a stick, you better be damn sure that the carrot will be even bigger. What worries me, though, is that we reached some point of no return a while back, and the only way to correct our course is to be all stick and no carrot.