Sinking

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Spending a fair amount of your summer days indoors, being sterilised with a laptop while Sky News loops for hours in the background isn’t necessarily good for your mental health. My excuse today though, is that I’m waiting for a surveyor to check out a hole in the front garden that the building is falling into.

I noticed the cracks in the plasterwork a couple of weeks ago and guessed the ‘drought’ was to blame. When the front step started sinking and an inch gap between the floor and the wall appeared I rethought my conclusions and alerted the relevant parties.

For a week then, as I’ve awaited the arrival of a professional opinion to set my mind at rest, my mood seems to have sunk too. Although not an uncommon knock-on of a mediocre depressive nature, the shitty soup of current affairs and personal over-thinking has taken a bit of a toll.

Watching the ongoing slaughter in the Middle East, often LIVE, punctuated by ads for over-priced consolidating loans while thinking the front room might collapse isn’t quite the ideal summer.

But it’s the impotence that’s the darkest corner – from not knowing shit about under-pinning to having no way of influencing our nut-job Prime Minister.

And then the humbling thought that as I check the width of the cracks in the wall before I go to bed and struggle to sleep thinking about the implications of an unsafe house and the fact that I’m nailing myself to the spot with a cycle of debt and seem to be unable to lift myself to do anything about it as I hurtle through the years with nothing achieved, which I know isn’t ‘really’ true, but it fucking feels like it…

As all that bubbles away, some poor bastards in Lebanon and Gaza are being blown to bits. And if you’re not dead, maybe you’ve no house, no more town, no more family, no legs, no eyes. And I guess you’d develop a ‘depressive nature’ pretty quick.

But the impotence is a different thing – when the pundits asked where the ‘men-folk’ of Qana were while the women and children sheltered, what did they expect? Because if the same situation was happening here, where’d you reckon most of our ‘men-folk’ would be?

I guess the only related good news is the Mel Gibson saga. Always fun to see closeted bigots exposed, but when it’s a religious-nut anti-semite it’s all the sweeter.

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