Hello again,
This is late because it was my birthday this weekend so I did not write this on Sunday, as usual. I turned 30 on Friday, which should feel momentous but sort of didn’t. Maybe it’s because I like my life a lot but I didn’t feel the sense of scrambling around in a panic, or like anything was ending. That might set in soon though. I’ll probably write about it if it does. I also make sure to always keep a lot of 25 year old friends around, and those in their 40s too, for a sense of perspective. I think it helps.
Sometimes I feel like the main difference between me now and when I was 19 is that whenever I am asked for ID in a bar now I say: “Thank you, genuinely.” Which is my sly and subtle way of saying this still happens relatively often. The sands of time are no match for a diligent skincare regime.
I wanted to write about something which did feel momentous about this weekend though, and it relates to something else that felt momentous to me recently.
It was spring this weekend. And my birthday is never in spring. I have had birthdays where it was so cold and wet and miserable that that is basically all I remember of the celebrations. Everyone tramping around in coats with wet hoods or standing, blowing in their hands at a bus stop on the way to the club. I remember my costume party, when I was at University, where everyone ruined their outfits by wearing coats inside.
But this year it was spring. And when I got back to London from Belfast last week it almost felt like summer, in February. The air smelt of a taste that doesn’t exist, warm air and barbequed meat, but not exactly, it’s a smell I associate more with flame than with meat. I can’t describe it, I have been trying to for years. But I know I usually only smell it in summer. It was so warm I stored my jacket in my suitcase for the journey back to my flat.
The other thing that felt momentous to me was a court ruling last week which found some Just Stop Oil protestors guilty of damages for blocking the distribution of oil from the Esso Fuel Terminal in Birmingham in April 2022 (7 were found guilty, 2 were acquitted). JSO posted a summary of the judge’s sentencing remarks on social media. Their full statement is here.
I shared the JSO summary of the statement on Twitter. I thought it was amazing, momentous; also terrible. It really knocked me out.
It garnered a big response and then, predictably, I suppose, some people started commenting to fact-check the statement. The JSO summary of the remarks wasn’t exactly what the judge had said they alleged. No, these had been taken out of context, they declared, linking to a passage of text shared by an anonymous Twitter account. A source I would say is no more or less reliable than the JSO website. The passage of text linked to was, to all intents and purposes, more or less the same as the one I shared. Certainly not out of context. I would encourage you to read both of them if you have time and you’ll see what I mean. I don’t think anyone who suggested it as a gotcha genuinely did.
I found this fact-checking impulse, applied to this specific context, horrendously depressing. Pedantry is a terrible impulse at the best of times. But, in this specific context, the urge to feel superior and knowing, when I’m not even sure what that would mean, struck me as terrible. Would it stop the world burning? Give everyone another excuse to ridicule climate activists? As if everyone isn’t happy enough doing that as it is.
The desperate, frantic search for a conspiracy or a plot, anything which would mean not having to read those words and feel their impact. That’s what I think it is.
It reminded me of the spectacle, which was more common a few years ago, when a teenager would wash up on a beach in Kent, desperately making their way into one of the richest, most comfortable countries that has ever existed on earth, and the tabloids would argue about whether he (it was always a he) was 17 or 18, and thus an adult and beyond sympathy. That two months or whatever it would be between those birthdays makes all the difference does it? Right.
Arguing about what exactly the judge said is a nice, easy distraction. A place to hide hard feelings. Because I wonder if any decent person can, hand on heart, say they think these people did anything wrong.
Parallel to what is happening with these protestors is the very different legal reality experienced by the companies who wreck enormous, irreversible damage on the world we all have to live in, through negligence or design. Because doing so makes a few people an awful lot of money.
Thanks to a network of shells and umbrellas and different legal domains and things which everyone knows are owned by something but are, on a technicality, also not, it is incredibly arduous to prosecute any of them.
There are very complicated cases currently ongoing to try and find ways around this. To try, for example, and hold the UK entity of a subsidiary operating in a territory with a corrupt or sluggish legal system responsible for those operations, so the case can go through the courts here. There is one ongoing currently in which a dam collapsed in Brazil and ravaged the entire local ecosystem. The claimant in that case is a group of more than 200,000 people.
The system does not make it easy for any of those people. If you need a conspiracy, there are worse places to start.
But no, put your hands over your eyes. Get the red pen out. Find a problem with someone’s grammar. Find something it’s easy to feel good about.
Till next week xxx
Some Things I Liked Recently:
I’m just going to tell you you simply have to pre order Nicole Flattery’s book Nothing Special, which is out very soon. You will thank me I promise. I am writing on it for the US release so I will save my thoughts till then. But I promise you will thank me.