The election that brought us together
Bear with me on this one...
Above: an ill-suited photograph of a wonderfully gezellig evening in Wales
This will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
Bear with me on this one.
For me, like many, this election was the first where I was an active participant beyond casting my vote. I wish I could find numbers to support this comment, but all I have is anecdote.
On Monday night I went to canvass in the Kensington constituency, but went home without knocking once - there were more than 200 volunteers and only so many doors.
But my canvassing in Bournemouth West and Reading West meant that for the first time in my life I was purposefully engaging complete strangers in conversation about everything we humans hold most dear: our health, wealth, families and futures.
How could such meaningful conversations fail to bring us closer together?
Perhaps half of the people I spoke to weren't remotely interested in holding an unsolicited conversation on their doorsteps. They’d convey this in a manner either polite or abrupt - I hold short of saying 'rude' because who knows from what I interrupted them?
But half of my answered knocks ended up with a profitable conversation of some sort. Of course, some of those conversations were with people intending to vote for the Conservative Party. Of course, we started from opposite poles of opinion. But did those conversations drive us apart? No.
The original sense of the word ‘conversation’ is to ‘live with’, rather than to ‘talk with’. For these brief moments, facing each other across a threshold, we tried to find ways of living together, squaring the sympathetic human before us with the antipathetic opinions they espoused.
It wasn’t always easy, but I always walked away feeling like I understood a little better and had lived a little fuller.
From brief glimpses, I guessed that the lives I interrupted were trimmed from the same cloth as the one I returned to after the door closed softly: a mother and son watching the football on TV, a woman washing the dishes before going out, one man drinking a beer after work, another taking the dog out for a walk.
So, for me at least, this will be remembered as the election that brought us closer together.
What do we do now?
Today, though, everyone is asking, ‘What do we do now?’
I’ve done the research. France sounds good - citizenship in two years if I enrol on a masters degree and don’t develop any ‘assimilation defects’.
Italy is a viable option too, assuming I can find someone - anyone - willing to marry a jobbing writer in his late thirties.
Quitting the country aside, what do we do now?
Last night’s election results have made me think more carefully about what I’m already doing, and to measure that against the yardstick of my ideal future society.
It’s not a complicated calibration - am I pushing in the right direction? - and I think this election gives us all a moment’s grace to tap the barometer and take a reading of our purpose.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday is helping to create our own vision of society, then we should double down and use the vacant impotence of the general election results to motivate ourselves to work harder and faster toward our goals.
If we decide that what we were doing yesterday doesn't align with our vision, then we must change. We must do whatever we can to change whatever we can in our lives today so that we are always working towards a more promising community.
Life is too short to stay indoors, praying for rain.
~
So I spent the morning working on Thighs of Steel, a project that creates the kinds of communities that I want to participate in.
This year, for example, the 90 cyclists raised over £87,000 for grassroots refugee organisations that I know have a uplifting influence on the lives of the dispossessed in our society.
So what can I do? I can use the energy of this election to work even harder on next year’s ride to make sure that it’s as successful as it possibly can be. That’s what I can do.
In just over a week, I will be volunteering with Crisis at Christmas. This year I’m doing three shifts instead of my usual two. It's not a huge amount of work, but it's the kind of response that I can make to the crisis of five more years of Conservative government.
We know that homelessness will increase again during this parliament.
Since the Conservatives first came to power in 2010, the number of households in temporary accommodation in England has risen by 60 percent (2017 figures; it’s got even worse since then) and the number of homeless people being treated in A&E has tripled (2018 figures). That's astonishing.
I cast my vote for a party that promised to end rough sleeping within five years. Unfortunately, this wasn't a priority for most of my fellow voters.
So what can I do? I can, in some small way, stand in solidarity with rough sleepers and homeless people by volunteering my time over Christmas. That's what I can do.
~
Reading that back, it sounds like I’m virtue signalling, wanging my holier-than-thou altruistic tittery around like a politician before his scandal hits the newsstands. Sorry - that’s not what I meant.
I’m trying to say that everything we do is political because everything we do contributes to the future society that we’re building together.
So how does that society feel to you? And how can we use the energy and momentum of this election - however you voted - to deepen the ways we live with each other?
99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About in 2019
The fabulous 99 Good News Stories You Probably Didn't Hear About in 2019 email dropped today. It couldn't have come at a better time.
Every year, Future Crunch compiles a list of good news items culled from a truly international media diet, spanning topics from conservation to peace, safety and human rights.
There’s something in the list for everyone, but if I had to pick five favourites…
16. China's tree stock rose by 4.56 billion m³ between 2005 and 2018, deserts are shrinking by 2,400 km² a year, and forests now account for 22% of land area. SCMP
47. Nepal was also declared an open defecation free country in 2019. Eight years ago, nine million people did not have access to clean sanitation facilities. Rising Nepal
52. Democracy is proving far more resilient than the headlines suggest. Since 2000, the number of democracies has risen from 90 to 97, including 11 countries that became democratic for the first time ever, and in 2019, 2 billion people in 50 countries voted, the largest number in history. Al Jazeera
76. The world’s largest multilateral financial institution, The European Investment Bank, agreed to stop all financing for fossil fuels, and committed to investing half of its entire annual outlay — not just its energy budget — on climate action and sustainability by 2025. Guardian
96. It looks like the world may soon hit peak beef. The compound annual growth rate over the past decade was just 0.11%, production in Europe is now 26% below its peak level in 1991 and in Canada and Argentina beef production has fallen 41% and 16% from the mid-2000s. Bloomberg
This year the list comes with a thoughtful acknowledgement of the dangers of positive thinking and a stirring call to inspiration:
The goal in putting these stories together has never been to create a warm glow, or lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. The challenges facing the human family right now are big and scary and there’s no guarantee we will overcome them.
As millions of people have demonstrated in the past 12 months though, action is possible, better solutions are available and a better future can be built. That’s the whole point of Future Crunch, to play our tiny part in telling the story of change, and inspire people to leave the world a better place than when they came into it.
Amen.
Thank you Wikipedia
I recently checked my browser history to count exactly how many Wikipedia articles I’d accessed in the past twelve months.
Blow me down with an avian epidermal growth if it wasn’t precisely 2,019.
From How to Solve Our Human Problems and Jan Åge Fjørtoft, to Zsa Zsa Carter and Hedgehogs in culture; from Murder of Hae Min Lee and Music Has the Right to Children, to Paradise City (disambiguation) and Citizenship of the European Union, Wikipedia never fails to astonish, educate and entertain me - not to mention help me fill out Foiled scripts.
Well worth my Euro cent per article donation.
Thank you.
Your neck of the woods?
Abandoned Rugs are in the London studios recording our hotly-anticipated 2019 Christmas single, which may or may not have had to undergo extensive rewrites following last night’s events.
Next week is something of a mystery, but I’m hoping will involve a lengthy walk and perhaps, just perhaps the inestimably spectacular Tickles & Tarts comedy night in Cardiff. Biggest ticket in town.
Much love,
dc:
CREDITS
David Charles wrote this newsletter. David is co-writer of BBC Radio Wales sitcom Foiled, and also writes for The Bike Project, Forests News, Global Landscape Forum, Elevate and Thighs of Steel. Reply to this email, or read more at davidcharles.info. Thank you for subscribing!