*I pondered whether or not to post the following which was written while I was feeling quite rotten… but then I thought I would.

Sometimes we all feel rotten...

This month I am ill and November is often reduced to a rectangular patch of white sky visible from my bedroom window. I can see nothing but sky from here. No roofs, chimneys or treetops. Just sky. I watch the shifts in texture hour to hour, day to day. Sometimes the clouds ripple in mackerel ribbed skies but today, as with most days, the rectangle is a solid white with vague translucent grey shadows, barely visible, which move slowly out of the frame. I wait for the birds and dream of the sea. Now and then jackdaws rise above the ridgeline of the terrace, bobbing upwards into view. I love jackdaws, they are symbols of the rising darkness that always, since I was very small, fill me with delicious dread and excitement. Murmuring flocks of bodies silhouetted on a skeletal sycamore— or lined up on telephone wires, swinging in the late autumn winds— mark the inevitability of lengthening nights and the coming winter. They become more visible in the darker months, ragged black shapes in a revolving seasonal landscape that strips itself of sound and colour and fullness. Their crying voices speak of survival, of determination, they warn us of the coming and remind us that we can endure it. I listen to them now, as my rectangle of November remains white and in my mind’s eye I watch them shuffling on the roofs opposite, jostling each other while they study the street below with their startling blue eyes, or hopping through the stubbled fields above the valley, staring fiercely out to sea.

My partner goes to the water most days and brings me back stories of bone-gnawingly cold water, of grey stillness and rolling white. Our rockpool is only his right now, but he takes photos to share with me: of cushion starfish, some pink and flush with life, others bleached and gone; he shows me crystal clear visions of pink coral weed and snakelocks anemones and drifting fronds of tiny purple and lime green seaweeds that we try to identify in books. One afternoon he returns disappointed and quietly angry. The water of the pool, which appears only once every low tide, is greasy and frothed with brown iridescent scum. The seaweeds we have identified, the kelp, the seagrass, the bladderwrack, are clagged in sewage. I rage ineffectually from my bed, unable to think of anything except this stink of corrupted humanity seeping into the glass-like pool, choking it with thick unnatural shadows. I want to protect it, the small sea pool, but I can do nothing. I am stuck here waiting for a glimpse of flight. I rage against my malfunctioning body, and our ailing political systems that let this happen.

I am ill during COP26. I am too tired to read the news properly, and when I do it tires me more. My partner takes the children, and they march along the waterfront with hundreds of others. They walk on ground that, when my children are adults, will most likely be underwater— hundreds of feet pound earth that will yield itself to the sea soon enough. They walk on paving slabs that will succumb to waves, past buildings that will subside and upon soil that, swelled by water, will push up through cracks in concrete. From my bed, I imagine them transposed in time, my children walking past the skateboard park clothed in seagrass, with green anemones clinging to the edge of the ramps; I watch as my son and daughter’s hair drifts beneath the tide and coral weed waves from the doorframes of houses where young families lean from windows curtained with kelp. But then it empties in my mind, filled instead with dead water, acidified, flooded with the shadows we have cast. My children are not there.

I do not like this dream.

From my bed I can feel the tremor of earth beneath feet, a desperate shudder to testify that right now we still exist. We still have power.

But not everyone feels it. And without the steady reassurance of the landscape, of the touch of earth and water, I feel hollowed out by the empty gestures of this world’s ‘leaders’. Perhaps I have too much time to think, but the difference between ‘phasing down’ and ‘phasing out’ yawns like an open wound. Semantics has become a tool of aggression. Apathy is an active and negative force. Nobody is ‘doing nothing’ here. They are doing something. We are. Apathy is a choice and for too long Western normality has been destructive. It’s not pleasant to acknowledge, but it is true.

I could list all the figures on catastrophic biodiversity loss in the past twenty odd years and the impact this will have on human life; I could find articles that pointed out how many world leaders are already contradicting their own pledges at COP26; I could point out how personal responsibility cannot replace corporate responsibility, but that there is also immense power in the hands of the consumer, what we choose to buy into and vice versa; I could talk about sourcing local seasonal food, reducing meat consumption, reducing flying, reducing consumption generally… but who am I talking to? If you have got this far you already know all of this, and I am sure you are already as angry as I am. And perhaps you have some better answers. While I am just wasting time, lying here, staring upwards. Thinking out loud.

Right now I miss the cold air in my mouth. I miss long views. I miss aching muscles and wind shorn skin. But every so often drifts of distant starlings sweep up into my white rectangular November sky and some of their exuberance bursts through the glass onto my pillow. It warms my cheeks and makes me smile for a moment. Then I hear the jackdaws and I remember. Winter is blowing in. And so too is the other rising darkness. Both must be endured. One will end, the other—at least in my lifetime and those of my children—will not. It is coming. We have made it, and it is coming.

And we might survive it.

But I don’t know who I mean by ‘we’. Heartbreakingly, I don’t think I mean a personal ‘we’, perhaps not even a human one. But I must believe that some form of we will survive. But to do it we have to alter the way we view survival. We have to stop seeing the changes we must make as deprivation and sacrifice, and start to see them as opportunities, as gifts. It’s frustrating that so often we only really get this when we are unwell. When we feel ill we crave the simplicity of being well, we know how much that feeling is worth. Right now the world isn’t well, none of us are well. Nothing is a sacrifice if it is a trade for our shared health, for survival. Survival is life, and life is wonderful. To survive is wonderful.

Rightly or wrongly, while I am ill at least, I no longer have faith in mass behavioural change, of systemic change, of positive leadership.

But I do have faith in jackdaws, clinging to the wires and branches, waiting for the full force of the winter storms.

I will get better soon and I will have to face this rising darkness. We all will. We will face the unpleasant truth of our own actions, the shadows we have cast. And we will change. We will huddle together. We will value and celebrate survival. We will see that it is wonderful.

We will look to the jackdaws.