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No doubt I risk being called a kill-joy, or possibly worse, but to see images of New Year firework displays from around the world brings two thoughts to mind.  The obvious one is the cost of it all when people all over the globe  are suffering depravation, famine, and severe cost of living rises way above what they can afford. The second thought is how Ukrainians feel, particularly refugees who suffer forced diaspora in these same countries. To see these pyrotechnic indulgences, the wild enthusiasm of their host people, while knowing the suffering and horror of their fellow countrymen back in their home nation, must be particularly galling.

Why is it we fill our minds with a pretence of joy and happiness when the miserable truth of the world is out there for all to see?  For a huge swathe of the world’s populace Christmas is a time of misery and loneliness, yet the media and capitalistic entities are able to whip up a false sense of peace and goodwill to all men, totally obliviating the horrors of Ukraine, Myanmar, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Iran, Ethiopia, Somalia, and lets not forget Syria and Palestine.

It’s the first day of 2023. Is this the year when Western nations are going to stop playing the “People’s Front of Judea”(Life of Brian) in one endless committee meeting, and actually stand up to the latest Hitler-type Russian gangster to try his luck on the world scene? NATO and the United Nations were supposedly formed to prevent further warfare. So far neither has been too successful.

“An attack on one ally is an attack on all allies.”

It took forty-six years from it’s inception for NATO to take any military action against an adversary, and that was in 1995 belatedly against Bosnia. Ukraine may not technically be a member of NATO. Zelenskyy never got the chance to sign the bit of paper, but does that make the innocent citizens of that country any less special than those in Poland, or Britain, or France?

Damn it, no it does not!

Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was an act of terrorism and a war crime. There have been many war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine since, and previously in Syria and Chechnya. Putin is now trying to repeat what he did in both those countries.

Ukrainians voted for democracy. Even before Putin’s invasion there was a majority in favour of joining both the EU and NATO. Just because Putin’s military shattered the possibility, is no reason for the West to sit on it’s hands and allow the atrocities of Putin’s henchmen to continue.

Back at the end of 2021 when Russian forces were gathering along the Ukrainian border and US Intelligence was predicting the invasion, NATO should have thrown all it had into the area around the Black Sea and warned Russia of a terrible reckoning if any invasion of Ukrainian territory occurred. Under such duress it’s very unlikely Putin would have taken the risk, and his “military exercises” would have remained as just that.

As it was, NATO sat on it’s hands and debated, like the People’s Front of Judea in the Life of Brian, allowing Putin to walk right in.

I wonder how many others, like the writer, feel deeply ashamed by the obvious reluctance of Western leaders to stand up for what is right and proper in the face of armed brutality and potential genocide?

Or maybe it’s just easier to sit in front of the TV screen, or out on the streets at midnight after a belly full of ale, watching the displays of fireworks and joining the crowd of revelers for whom, for a time at least, Ukraine and it’s beleaguered people no longer existed.

After all, it’s not happening to us, is it?

 

I try to walk every day, whatever the weather. Today was no exception. I live in the wilds of Brittany so it’s rare to meet anyone on my ambulatory excursions. I love to walk. It’s a time to allow the thoughts to have free rein. While appreciating the late autumn foliage still clinging to the trees, the mind is elsewhere, allowing thoughts to drift into consciousness. Halfway through my walk, I found myself weeping. It was raining lightly, so no one would have noticed even if there had been anyone around, which there wasn’t.

I realized I had been thinking about my late sister, who was killed in 1994 by some guy driving a skip wagon. He ran over her with his truck while she was waiting on her bicycle at a red traffic light in London. She died instantly. I was never able to find out what happened, or what the consequences of it were. I was living and  working at the marina I managed, and had to take care of my young daughter. I couldn’t rush to London to sort things out and there was no one I could leave my child with. My mother was in a state of hysteria and my father was just not good at dealing with that kind of thing. It was my sister’s ex-husband, the father of her daughter whom she had just taken to school that day, who went to fix everything and take care of the thirteen-year-old girl.

I  drove my parents and daughter to her funeral. My mother, always mentally fragile, was beside herself, and as a fanatical Christian, was totally disgusted because my sister had opted in her will for a Spiritualist funeral service. My mother was not slow to show her feelings and chastised Michael, my sister’s ex, for allowing such ‘evil  rites’ to take place.

Michael was a very nice guy, but my mother saw to it that he was never welcome at my parents’ house after that. He went back to his native Scotland, taking his daughter (my niece) with him. I never saw either of them again and since no one in the family had an address for them, I was never able to make contact.

I never mourned my mother. I had no feelings left for her. Whatever she may have thought of Michael, she no reason to abandon her grand-daughter. I didn’t go to her funeral. She died at the age of ninety, eighteen years after my sister’s passing.  The few times I’d received a letter from her, the envelope and the paper inside were completely covered with Bible verses and Christian hymn texts. I don’t know what the mailman must have thought.

So it all ended there.  Except for the memories. They don’t go away.

Which is why today, twenty-eight years later, I found myself weeping in the rain.

My chimney sweep came today to clean out the stovepipe of the pellet stove in the kitchen. He’s not just a chimney sweep, but a plumber and a heating engineer, also.

I see him at least once a year, unless I need some plumbing done in the meanwhile. He’s English but has lived in France for nearly twenty years.

He enjoys coming to me because he says, not only does he get a good cup of coffee, but he also gets my prophecies of what will happen in the world over the next twelve months.

“Well, go on, then,” he insisted, taking a swig of coffee, “what’s going to happen to us by this time next year?”

I grinned rather sheepishly. “Sorry,” I said, “there’s just too many variables.”

He looked mildly disappointed.

Not only do we have the war in Ukraine which is certainly going Ukraine’s way at present, but what will Putin do to change that? Tactical nuclear weapons are certainly on his table. He has already managed to put the biggest nuclear power station in Europe out of action and in a highly dangerous state.

Then there is Africa and the power struggles there likely to reach a flashpoint as crops die and water becomes ever scarcer.

In the United States it is perfectly possible Trump will become President again in 2024. Okay, that’s two years away, but will his tribe of faithful right-wing Republicans gain control of the House and Senate in November? Who can say at present? There do appear to be some flaws in the ranks, mainly due to the overturning of Rowe v Wade by the Supreme Court of Trump appointees, but nothing is certain there.

Right-wing politics is rearing it’s ugly head again in Italy. Does this mean a split in Europe? Italy’s right-wing have roared before to little effect, but we have an energy crisis on our hands and a possible winter of discontent, which can turn politics on its head, and there’s nothing the political right-wing enjoys more than public disquiet and possible rioting.

This week in Uzbekistan Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Erdogan, and a rash of Iranian leaders are meeting in a ‘summit’ intended to show, (according to the Kremlin) an “alternative” to the Western world.

Over all of this hangs climate change: millions homeless in Pakistan after the worst floods in living memory; near continuous wildfires in the U.S. and the worst drought in living memory. “In living memory” is fast becoming such a norm that people hardly take notice any more.

Huge wildfires engulfed the south of France this year as the whole country suffered the worst drought “since records began,” which makes a change from “in living memory” but means much the same.

Bolsonaro’s Brazil has now brought the vast and glorious Amazon rain forest to its tipping point. This vast carbon sink, once one of the great lungs of the world, is now emitting more carbon dioxide than it is sequestering, as Bolsonaro and his brothers rape and pillage and murder, destroying habitat and habitation not only for the animals, birds and insects that rely on it, but also the indigenous human population who called it home.

The melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet will now raise sea levels by twenty-seven to thirty centimetres, inevitably, even if we reduced carbon emissions to zero tomorrow. Twenty-seven inches will devastate coastal areas of the world and make millions homeless. It is a very conservative estimate, because of course we will not reach net-zero carbon release tomorrow or next year, or in any foreseeable future.

These are just some of the bare bones of what is happening right now in the world we inhabit.

Given all these facts, and facts they are, I would be arrogant in the extreme to attempt to prophecy what was going to happen in the next three months, let alone a whole year ahead.

“Yes, but things are going well in Ukraine, aren’t they?”

At this moment my chimney sweep’s brush got lodged somewhere high up in the stovepipe, and the next ten minutes was given over to such heaving, sweating, and occasional swearing, that it was not necessary for me to answer him. Eventually, it was released and the job was done.

After he left, with a cheery, “See you next year, then,” I pondered on what I may have said to him had not his brush problem intervened. Are things going well in Ukraine? I doubted the thousands of dead civilians, the grieving relatives of those killed, the suffering of the many with permanent injuries, tortured, beaten, electrocuted, homeless, would be likely to have agreed with him.

Ukraine war: Hundreds of graves found in liberated Izyum city.