Prelude

PLEASE NOTE: This isn’t an official BBC / BBC Wales post. All words / opinions expressed here are my own.

These are almost the worst of times. Look see.

The seas are mercury in a thermometer.

Cop out 28.

Raise a voice, risk a prison cell.

The truth isn’t objective, it’s something to ridicule, to shout down, loudest when we’re in the most wrong. Vested interests burn the planet for their own ends. Clanking loom workings replaced by Escher conveyor belts of recyclable boxes. A tsunami of plastic geegaws traps oil for eternity in landfill and dolphin’s lungs.

Some who’d never had it so good - with their jobs for life, pensions and once gleaming hospitals - are stoked into paranoia not gratitude. Headlines in newspapers run by non-domiciles on loophole ivory tower islands.

Bring the drawbridge down! Close the border! These people are here to steal everything that is dear to us!

Profit is god. Venture capitalists - brave deskbound Captain Cooks - sacrifice anything that moves downwards, on altars of diminished returns.

Everyone has an opinion but the only opinions that matter are the ones we already share.

Tolerance is rarer than clean air.

Everything is grains of sand on drowning beaches, priced according to weight not excellence.

Identity has become political. Who you are, who you love, how you feel, is a subject for other people to debate and decide upon.

There are almost as many food banks as there are actual banks.

Sunflowers are worshipped by the same false gardeners who raze their roots.

The human heart is an inconvenience, the soul a distraction. We’re on bikes weaving between angry traffic. The next drop off is all that matters. Lungs fill with fumes. Kids with tyre tracks across ‘L’ plates instead of apprenticeships.

Make way for the rich people in their pristine 4x4’s. Cattle bars to keep stray children out of the way on the school run.

Everyone is doing it so why shouldn’t I do it too?

Democracy is only available to the congruent and bio-matriculated. Or it’s a TV vote. Why not swap things round? Vote for the politicians that fail us to flail round in sewage and testicles. No court for those kangaroos.

Tax half the population for their biology.

Marginalise the original voices. A steady diet of soma and feelies. Monthly contracts like escape rooms. Big cons masquerading as favours.

Ridicule the wokeflakes! Those goddamn empaths! “If it was down to people like you, we’d all be speaking German.” Say people who were born in 1962.

Willy-waving billionaires taking us to the next frontier of their egos so they can deliver there. Fill the universe with more lithium and long chain carbon molecules than there was at the Big Bang.

Dark matter? Where the gods hide embarrassed behind the curtains of the universe. Trying to ignore their kids throwing the planet out of the pram.

Things can only get better. They can’t get no worse.

A glow on the horizon.