It’s New Year’s Day and what’s that sound filling the air? Well, if you’re in the Antipodes it’s probably the roar of bushfires as they consume your neighbourhood. A former friend moved to Australia with her husband a while back, and lives in Sydney, I’m wondering how she regards that decision today. I’m also wondering how much longer the television series Wanted Down under will continue to be made (or even shown), and I’m thinking that this may turn out to be a post-Brexit windfall for Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers, with a steady stream of skilled expatriates returning from the Southern Hemisphere to take the jobs recently vacated by those EU citizens heading back across the Channel. My niece is already here, and her parents may not be too far behind.
As ever, I feel like I’m in some way inextricably-linked to unfolding events, as no sooner do I write about something than life starts to imitate art. In a passage from my current novel …when you wish upon a star, I write about an Australia being consumed by flames, with a scene set in a gridlocked traffic queue inching its way to hope-for safety, beset on all sides by fire. This has now become a reality for thousands of unfortunate Australians in New South Wales and Victoria.
Although it’s gratifying on one level to be part of the zeitgeist, it’s not something I expected to be happening this soon. It all adds to the feeling of apprehension as we contemplate the 2020’s, a feeling that it may already be too late and climate change has become inevitable. In …when you wish upon a star I write about a world consumed by fire and flood, but I set the worst consequences of this comfortably in the future. But it seems that the future is only too eager to start early, like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse trying to crash your New Year’s Eve party, and guess what? They’ve brought a couple of extra friends, Fire and Flood, along with them.
In short, the coming decade is not filling me with a great sense of anticipation. Many people (I imagine) will be too lost in their personal orgy of unnecessary and conspicuous consumption to notice, and it may take something really ‘significant’ happening (like the World Cup or the Olympics being cancelled) before it registers.
However we have (very nearly) the worst possible set of political leaders in place at this moment, whose ‘strategy’ would appear to be denial, closely followed by lies and excuses. One can only hope that a new generation emerges, before it is too late.
Happy New Year
The Author January 2020