The creative synapses are dulled. The spirit muffled. My energy has been drained and trouble is afoot. Weakness haunts my every step and a hungry failure snaps at my heels.

In this cold motionless recess music seems so beautiful, like a cascade of white magic wrapping itself around my consciousness, soothing my weary soul. Yet it tackles only the symptoms, the disease of the mind remains, cackling its triumph, plotting its next victory, my next downfall.

So much to do, so little will. So little time. A thousand angry faces snap through microwaves that penetrate my concrete cocoon. Slowly, ever so slowly, like the planet we all feast upon – I begin to fade.

I have fought tooth and nail to get this far, and yet here I stand, red eyed, and only at the starting line. The race is still before me. Refreshed and ambitious participants either side. You can taste the talent. A crowded graveyard lies to the rear.

As dark clouds roll over head and heavy guitar chords rain down on my unwashed hair – Too tired to shout, too tired to cry, too tired to run, too tired to write, too tired to compete, too tired to care.

I stand and watch as time marches on, dictating play. Tomorrow I am old. Tomorrow I am beyond hope. Tomorrow I am ordinary. Tomorrow I will open my eyes. Today I have failed.

Today, four years past my time, I have attained (n)emo.

Tomorrow I am eighteen again.

an ignobale ease

After a summer of hectic and frustrating ecstasy and the onset of a new adventure - the words of one of my many historical heroes, a certain Theodore Roosevelt, resonates through time. Transport your mind to 1899 on the evening of April 10th at the Hamilton dinner club in Chicago. A smoky room, proud men dressed in black suits and hats. Cigars and whisky. Excited exchanges. Self-congratulation at the dawn of a new century for a new power. Up steps our man to the podium, silence falls. Hear his words.

… I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labour and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes - to be the ultimate goal after which they strive?

You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of: Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practise such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research - work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honour upon the nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace.

We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbour, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labour as a period, not of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though perhaps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world...

Could we do worse than to live by his words?

revolution 3.0

Man is a politically animal. If I was smarter I could tell you who said that. But I can't. Might have been Aristotle, or Plato. One of those Greek fellers I Think.

But this statement has for a long time caused me a lot of frustration. 'Yes!' I shouted when I first heard it - 'Yes - it's true!'. But of course, like most philosophical statements they rarely survive contact with the real world. When all around me people seem to turn instantly off at the slightest whiff off current affairs and most believe papers open from the right and begin with the sport news - I felt like an outcast, why was it only me, and maybe a select few others - that got angry, that got passionate about this stuff?

Well, I do. Nothing fires me up quite like a political tract or a bold speech made in the Commons. Before you jump to conclusions, just remember one thing - some people watch Big Brother. So go easy on me.

So it is that I can go back and pin point exactly when and where my political opinions were formed and why. They usually involve books. The first book to do so was a gift from my High School (and stands as the only positive to have emerged from that horrific experience). It was called 'Captive State' by George Monbiot. And like all best sellers it was a well written critique of Labour's Private Finance Initiative. It set me off. I had become the stereotypical middle class teenage socialist. Never again would our rights be sold out to big business! Then this propelled me into a second populist text that was to change my outlook. 'No Logo' by Naomi Klein, a sensationalist account of how brand bullies were enslaving the working poor of Africa and the Far East. Shock Horror. That was it. I plunged my head into globalisation theories and vowed to bring down the capitalist machine from within.


Yet my convictions could not be sustained and slowly it dawned on me that these 'working poor' were once upon a time 'the starving masses' and that corporate investment in far away lands was in fact one of the best things to have happened to them. Which put me on a cautious but upbeat pro-capitalist stance for most of my university years. University however changed the nature of my reading, I came to read a lot about far away planets in far away years and of course the occasional book about a teenage wizard. Only very slowly did my politics mature during these years.

But now, free from the shackles of reading lists and eassy deadlines I can finally stomach non-fiction once again. Accordingly - I bring to you – the third book, my third phase change. 'Collapse' by Jared Diamond. It is a blend of historical forensics and human tragedy and it has pierced my political heart to the core. He looks at civilisations (large and small) throughout history and charts their decline, attributing their eventual failure to poor environmental management. This book confirms our worst nightmares but also provides hope for the future, it is quite simply stunning.

I beg, I urge and I plead with all to read it - for great swathes he gets lost in frustrating detail and statistics - and his narration picks up pace in stops and starts - but by the end, with his concluding chapters the urge to make a significant lifestyle change is irresistible. You simply must read this book, it might not be a barrel of laughs and the temptation to skip chapters does occasionally rear its ugly head but this book is simply too important to miss out on.