Universal WHINGE

There are days when the per­sonal and the po­lit­i­cal mesh in a way that can only be de­scribed as im­mensely de­press­ing. Days when I get tired of liv­ing in a state which locks peo­ple in jail cells for 22 hours out of every 24, sim­ply be­cause they have (peace­fully) backed a po­lit­i­cal op­tion that that state doesn’t want to know about. And tired of know­ing that if the coun­try in which I’ve made my home ever se­ri­ously tried to be­come self-de­ter­min­ing, at least a few of its cit­i­zens would be slaugh­tered. I’m fed up, too, with the fact that – at the time of writ­ing – the elected pres­i­dent of this same coun­try could be barred from of­fice by a hand­ful of judges for hav­ing put up a ban­ner with an aware­ness rib­bon on it (for God’s sake). And al­though I don’t live in the United States or Brazil, it sad­dens me on a daily basis that these two huge, cul­tur­ally fer­vent coun­tries are in the hands of men who suf­fer from se­vere per­son­al­ity dis­or­ders and an ig­no­rance so mind-bog­gling it de­fies writ­ten de­scrip­tion. As for the prime min­is­ter of the coun­try I was born in – and his co­terie of odd-look­ing min­is­te­r­ial lick­spit­tles – his com­pre­hen­sive lack of in­ter­est in the 784,900 UK cit­i­zens cur­rently liv­ing in EU coun­tries has made us all feel more aban­doned than a dog chucked out of a speed­ing car. Not that Eng­land seems to be going any­where fast, on the con­trary, the en­tire coun­try seems to have got its wheels stuck in the na­tivist sludge that the die-hard Brex­i­teers have been mer­rily spew­ing up for the last four years. And the fact that the whole sorry Covid-Brexit-back­stop-law-break­ing cat­a­stro­phe is being stage-man­aged by an over-priv­i­leged com­pul­sive liar who looks like an un­em­ployed jester, only adds in­sult to in­jury.

On a more per­sonal level, I’ve had enough of going out into the street, walk­ing around for a few min­utes, then rush­ing back home to put on a mask I’d for­got­ten about. And talk­ing as I now am of Covid-19, I’m equally weary of the fact that aside from mak­ing peo­ple sick – or in the case of three peo­ple I knew per­son­ally, dead – and caus­ing all kinds of other prob­lems (de­spite the in­sis­tence of tens of thou­sands of thor­ough­bred halfwits that it’s being spread by some­body’s ’deep state’ or a cel­lu­lar net­work or a Jew­ish con­spir­acy) it’s also slowed down the al­ready snail­ishly slow pub­lish­ing in­dus­try (as I know from hav­ing sub­mit­ted my seven as yet un­pub­lished nov­els in Eng­lish to 63 dif­fer­ent lit­er­ary agen­cies in the UK, only to get back 20 re­jec­tions and 43 stony si­lences).

In short, there are times when my reg­u­lar daily dosage of three anx­i­olyt­ics strikes me as being woe­fully in­ad­e­quate, and my age seems far too ad­vanced, and the world feels in­creas­ingly as if it is spin­ning out of even the most mod­est amount of con­trol. There are morn­ings, like today’s, when I lie awake in bed, won­der­ing what it is I should bother get­ting up for: the un­pub­lished nov­els, the rev­o­lu­tion that’s al­ways stuck just around the cor­ner, or the break­fast I never eat. Then I tell my­self to buck up, and bear in mind the sim­ple fact that not all days can be of wine and roses. Per­haps the fact that some of them can, is enough rea­son in it­self to keep on keep­ing on. But on those days when things look grim, there is sim­ply noth­ing for it but to write a grousy, grouchy, whiny, semi-co­her­ent ar­ti­cle like this one.