I sometimes wonder exactly when I lost my faith in the world. I know for sure that I didn’t always feel like this– possibly because I was younger, possibly because I simply didn’t notice how bad things were– and yet I still find myself looking at the tidal wave of problems crashing over us as a race, and can’t see any way for them to do anything other than get worse. Certainly, I still find myself strongly wanting to move– there’s something about the British ‘hive mind’ mentality that oozes out from the media which I find especially difficult to cope with. I think it’s more the fact that the world feels like it’s broken, and the people who should be in charge of fixing it– the politicians, the people who were elected to lead us– are striding around behaving like Snake-Oil salesmen in the Old West.

I think a lot of my faith went the moment Bush clawed his way into the White House by his fictional win (and the fact that he managed to, four years later, win by only a few hundred thousand votes, shows what a ringing endorsement that was), and immediately tore up the Kyoto deal. Alright, I’d lived through Ronald Reagan and the first Bush administration, but for the first time, there was a man who appeared to be a complete idiot in charge of America- and nobody seemed to mind. Sometimes, if you stop and think about some of the things that have happenned as a result of the ‘War on Terror’- it scarcely seems believable (a) that they happenned, and (b) when the truth came out, they didn’t bring down the government. Nobody seems to mind anymore.

There’s so much about the world that makes me angry and upset and depressed by the idea of the world any children I have will be growing up in. And then, I stop, and I wonder if it was always like this. If the interconnection that the Media gives us magnifies everything, makes everything look like the precursor to doomsday- and that really, things are no worse than they have been. I’d like to think that.

Trouble is, every time I poke my head up above the parapet and look at what Britain’s turning into, it just makes me want to emigrate.

I just don’t want to be the kind of person who moans about the state of the world and doesn’t try and do something about it.

Stories seem to be the only thing I’m good at (or at least, the one destiny that I’m put on this planet to do). They may not do much– but I feel like they’re my only option.

Sorry. This kind of thing doesn’t really get you anywhere in the end.