The MSM is full of prep advisories. Tinned fish, bottled water, sleeping bags and wind-up radios. For those who already were in possession of such items, presumably this confers a smug glow of ‘Well like, yeah, duh,’? And for the rest of us, here, have a creeping sense of ‘what the heck are we being softened up for?’
And reading that we have 1000 days to prepare for war?* Well that set my cortisol levels aspike. Holy crap. How did we get from prepare for floods and high winds to…to what? Fat lot of use a tin of sardines will be if the Boyz with Gulag tattoos are at the gate.
That aside, how can I be of use in this moment? What is the correct behaviour for End Times? Do I carry on shopping at Tesco/Aldi for a decreasing number of available vegetarian foodstuffs? Do I keep on with the edits for a new picture book in the hope that its intended audience won’t be sobbing in cellars with their parents while feck knows what rages outside?
It goes without saying that my anxiety levels are cycling through full-on panic stations to calm down and have some carbohydrates and remain positive. But I need to find a middle ground. A place that accepts that collapse is coming ( how could it not?) while reaching out in communion with other beings who see the writing on the wall too.
It’s just very lonely, is all. Ever since I read Sarah Wilson’s ‘I eat the Stars’, I’ve been living under a different paradigm from my beloved family. And playing the rôle of family Cassandra is awful. Just awful. So I try to keep my own counsel and that, friends and neighbours, that isolation, that dealing with the fears and the uncertainty is what wakes me up at night with yet another existential crisis.
My utter inability to calm my rampaging thoughts and do even the simplest of meditations has driven me to seek help. Help which I can barely afford, but still. I can cope with a lot if my head is in a better place than the one it’s in at present. And besides, it’s not as if I’m a stranger to the counselling process. I’ve been seeking help off and on for the past three decades. It pretty much always helps, that help. Nudges me back to a more level course. Right now, I feel as if I’m lashed to the mast of a small and leaky boat in mountainous seas. And my compass went overboard and my pemmican’s got weevils and….
However, to look on the bright side, I have a new knitting project that uses up a shedload of stashed yarn, but is crafted on such small needles that it’ll take me a long, long time to finish**, by which time my knitting mojo might have resurfaced. The simple action of small repetitive hand movements has been shown to release dopamine. Or was it serotonin? One of the feel-goods, anyway. Oxytocin? Nah, not oxytocin – knitting doesn’t trigger the let-down reflex, or at least mine never did.
And I spent a goodly amount of studio time today wrangling with drawing a new cartoon for submission to the WABTT zine about Gen AI. Spoiler alert : I’m not a fan. Pencils went stabby stabby stabby. First time I’ve drawn anything for a few weeks. That’s a terrible confession for an illustrator, but it’s an honest one. The prevailing Awful is making it exceedingly tough for me to draw or write or, pfffffff, create much more than the odd cake and a lot of hot air. Jeez, these times, people.
A new podcast recommendation : Wild with Sarah Wilson. Her interview with Margaret Wheatley is well worth a listen. And now I’m going to heat my supper ( exhumed carrot burgers from a previous life in which I had time and energy to make and freeze such things) and read the New Yorker and hope my ailing guinea pig makes it through the night. Oh, and gin. And possibly a small square of Aldi 85% chocolate…
May you be well, may all things be well, may we all be at peace with each other.
*Wes Streeting in The Independent, 29th October 2026
** Although not 1000 days
