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Day 331 of #ayearofwriting and I am at the end of draft 5 of Ms Hayashida. I have cut around 2000 words, pointless tangents that bring nothing to what the truth of the story is. What it is really about.
Day 332 of #ayearofwriting and another 1000 words hit the rug. I lose the old curator for the museum, even though the office still resides above it, there is no need for her. I just need the image of an atomic bomb society. I make some things clearer and then send it off to my reader, from 11,000 words to just over 6,000 in under a week. That is the joyous thing about editing, it is not writing, it is necessary surgery.
Day 333 of #ayearofwriting and there are moments in your life when as a child you are drawn into other worlds, the beauty and the power of them. When I was young, off school and sick, there was a film on TV. I was mesmerised and I think it showed me that you could write stories that traversed different worlds, worlds within people, worlds outside people. This was long before I started reading voraciously but I owe much to the cinematography of A Matter of Life and Death – I will now go off and watch it on DVD – one day I will get an original cinema poster of it.
Day 334 of #ayearofwriting and my short story, featuring Ms Hayashida, comes back from my reader. They love it. They felt like they were in another world and missed the characters when they parted ways. This is is how I hope it made her feel.
Day 335 of #ayearofwriting when you complete a short story and you think that you are again on the scrap heap. Just for a moment and then you turn to your scribblings and the rising sea.
Day 336 of #ayearofwriting and I turn back to climate change to consider the mosaic nature of it. Climate change is not complete change but leaking change, parts of our world change by dribs, drabs and monumental floods but unless it impacts on us, we do not see it.
So, let’s break down how the UK will be impacted on with just a 4-6 degree rise, which is feasible now much sooner rather than later. Let’s work our way up the country, SW first, that lovely haven of Tories on holiday. Cornwall, Dartmoor, Devon, Somerset will all gradually turn to deserts but it won’t be a desert over night. First there will be water shortages, than water failures, out breaks of cholera after floods. Hell, even SW water commissioned a report on it under the guise of water meters. Their at risk list is basically…everyone in the SW.
Now, let’s tip from the desert in to the SE, under water. The Thames barrier won’t always hold and the marshlands will stretch right up into East Anglia. Parts of the Midlands will succumb to rising temperatures and will inevitably become scrub land rather than forests. Too hot for our trees, too hot for people and displacement from London will have ramped up some form of hatred.
Up into the NW and NE, by the way, you think Wales being mountainous would get away with it but Cardiff will be go as will most of the north coast if sea rises carry on. Whole stretches of coast will be eroded and wash down into France and Ireland. Water run off from the mountains and hills will erode those green valleys. Back to the North, Liverpool, Hull, Morecambe, Whitby, Blackpool gone to Poseidon. The East coast of Yorkshire so friable, so loved and eroded by crashing waves of the North Sea will crash and fall by metres every year until the gulls can be heard in Leeds and Barnsley.
Up into Cumbria, humid and tropical, the balmy heat stretching from Manchester to the Scottish border. It is at this point, depending on sea rises whether we discuss Scotland as an island state. Either way they will be shot of England because England as you know it will be a fairy tale. However, this far North in the glens and the winds strip and burn the skin from your face. There’s nay pheasant to be plucked here. The heat is high, the UV exposure could fry a kidney or two and the rain will strip the rest away. Sleep tight.
So, when will this horror show start? It already has. You’re too late. 7 billion people blindly ignoring the painfully obvious that there are too many of us. If climate change reaches where it could be by 2040, 2080 and 2100, that 7 billion (by that point pushing 12 billion) is first struck by famine, cries of food shortages as the west still strips the farmland of Africa and beyond. By 2080 we’ll be lucky to be pushing 5 billion as the American West becomes a dust bowl and parts of Russia too exposed to winds to survive in become unfarmable. Farm land is stripped by tropical storms and wind fronts that exceed anything we have on record. By 2100, we are down to maybe 3 billion, more than probable due to diseases associated with the melting permafrost, cold wet winters, scorching summers, we will be down to just over 1 billion. Sleep tight. Tell your children and your grand children it will be okay. It won’t.
Now you understand why I turned to growing food, writing about climate change, I’m not a prepper, just a realist. Check your local temperature in 2080. I’ll be well gone but your kids won’t.
Day 337 of #ayearofwriting and a little light reading on how easy fertile land becomes desert https://www.independent.co.uk/…/why-deserts-will-inherit-th… #climatechange
Day 338 of #ayearofwriting and what if the expulsion from Eden, supposedly 6,000 years ago, is a climate change metaphor. An extended telling of how the Sahara became a desert, how Arabia fell to the sands. That the knowledge we discovered was our own demise, and the story we wove around it an analogy, a dream of a world lost to our children. Imagine trying to explain a green garden in a landscape that would strip your skin?
Day 339 of #ayearofwriting and I am athiest drawn to an origin story. Eden fascinates me, something has been bubbling inside me about this image for a long time, it is threatening to become something but what I am not sure but somehow at the same time I consider Coleridge’s Xanadu.
Day 340 of #ayearofwriting and in my research for my next story I am doing research on displacement. How sea and land heat will impact on city living, as they are heat sinks, how displacement from Africa and the Mediterranean will impact on Northern Europe. How growing risks of heavy rain, soil erosion, droughts and flooding will impact on the UK. I consider London as a new Venice but wonder about those who cannot afford to stay, where will they go?
Andrew Oldham's Boneyard 