2020 Blog Week 43: Futures

My 2020 weekly blog did not come to fruition. Even before personal crisis and global pandemic, I figured that it wouldn’t. And this was fine. A project unfinished is better than a project unstarted. Now, with 2021 on the horizon, I was thinking that I’d like to do something similar next year, and turn this “blog” into a blog. Then thinking, well, you’ll just falter next year too. Then thinking, but what if you started now?

If there is one thing that I have achieved this year, and to be honest there is just one thing that I’ve achieved this year, it’s to finish a project. I wrote a book. Only a first draft, and nothing that publishers have responded to, but still, that first draft is finished. What was different? Many things, but one crucial different was instead of writing it all in one huge document, I split it into one chapter per word doc. A stunning strategic innovation it was not. But I had an achievable goal.

So here is another achievable goal. If I can blog weekly up until the end of 2020, maybe I can keep going a while into 2021. Here goes.

Now it’s mid-October. Crisp, bright autumn mornings have begun, and I suppose I’m happy about that. This autumn morning I’ve found myself reading through the blog of one of my old creative writing tutors at Warwick. A woman who never actually taught me, but who I knew peripherally as an example of one of those classic bookish types: quiet, bespectacled, purse-lipped, demure.

From my choice of adjectives you can probably tell she didn’t interest me as much as some of the more gregarious, or more youthful, tutors. But from her blog I’ve learnt she’s at least 15 years younger than I’d imagined, much more successful (the impression was that our tutors were mostly on the peripheries of literary renown), and much more well-travelled. Research trips to Japan, years spent living in the Icelandic wilderness. She’s got a young family who move house every few years, and still reads 10 books a week, “easily.”

This is all interesting, but it’s still a fairly ordinary life. Thoughts about hobbies, worries about the state of the world. It doesn’t explain why I have spent the last few hours completely transfixed. I came to realise that I’m living vicariously.

Because this kind of life, when a middle class British person is in their late twenties and thirties, and is finding their way in life, becoming truly adult, “settling down”, establishing themselves in a relationship or a career or a community, navigating the transition between youthfulness and middle-age, enjoying the benefits of security while lamenting the loss of spontaneity, watching their friendship groups lessen but solidify, taking the decisions which will ultimately decide what person they become; this kind of life no longer seems certain or guaranteed.

This is a distinct phase of life that I just expected to find myself in, as I expected to find myself at University and expected to find myself travelling. But now there’s a spanner in the works. Potentially more than one spanner.

Arthritis has made living in my body really quite difficult. I couldn’t do a single one of my past jobs now that I can’t stand for very long without being in pain. But that should hopefully improve.

Politically, crisis looms. I can no longer placate myself with the delusion that the people who run my country are competent. And my country is one of the better ones. Fascism stalks American streets; absolutism grips China; poverty turns all but a few gilded corners of the world into a free-for-all. But there are pockets of hope: New Zealand, Scandinavia, and Trump set for a downfall. This could hopefully improve.

But the tidal wave of global warming still blots out the horizon. And that will not improve.

So I’m scared. And I think that’s why I find myself drawn to blogs about comfortable middle-age. That’s why I watch middle-aged couples in cafes out the corner of my eye. Whereas I used to fantasize about the places I’d travel to, now I fantasize about waking up on my 35th birthday in a nice London flat, going for a jog, meeting some friends for lunch, fighting my way through autumnal rain back home, where my girlfriend waits and the kettle’s on. And since the rain only intensifies we lock the door against the world and turn the heating on. I do a crossword, we make dinner, and then watch a movie. Before bed I remember to take my pills, and my pills work. And I fall asleep quickly knowing where I’m going to be in a month’s time, knowing roughly where I’ll be in a year’s time, and with some solid notion of the futures which could unfold.