X7+1 = AXn(1 – xn)

Life feels chaotic.

Saturday night and we should have been at the theatre but I left it too late and all the tickets had gone.

Sunday arrives and I don’t remember getting through the week, what with train journeys and scaffolding in the front garden. What with young men called Ben who rip you off with shoddy guttering and a firm belief that his shyster ways are legitimate.

Life feels chaotic. Saturday night and a garden full of fallen leaves. Little irises have popped up in three flower pots, but the snowdrops are few and far between. I have promised myself that Sunday will be leaf raking day. The old git will come out with his leaf blower, then empty the leaves into a big black bag. The leaves will be put around whatever plants need them.

The chaos of the time makes me feel unsettled. Living in a country that has a government which is hiding in the shadows. A government that has shut its mouth. A government that will let nurses and junior doctors dig their own graves and knot their own nooses. As if they are the problem. A government that cares so little about its citizens it has forgotten what its like to govern.

The chaos of the time is affecting my hair – it’s limp, lank and lifeless.

The silence of the damned is affecting my sleep – never good at the best of times – but I wander down stairs at 2.00a.m. Dennis meows and shouts at me because his dish is empty. I sit in the kitchen, turn on my lap top and watch a bit of this a frame of that. I turn it off, fill my two hot water bottles and pad upstairs to the Northern git who sleeps the sleep of the exhausted.

We had to go to the hospital for him. I sat in the waiting room whilst he was taken away through swinging doors. He was injected with dye and had a scan taken to find out the state of his lungs – as a smoker of roll-ups for years he hasn’t got off Scott free. One of my birthday presents, in the early noughties, was a tin box filled with his smoking paraphernalia; lighters, tobacco, liquorice papers, and a hand written note not to open it till I got to the studio and then to never refer to it again. His wish was very much my command so the tin is up in the attic, in a cupboard next to my jewellery boxes, and it’s never spoken of. We are not speculating on what the scan may reveal, but good news will not be celebrated with a Cuban cigar that’s for sure.

Outside the hospital stood a boy, dripping from the rain and larger than he should have been, behind a fruit and veg stall. Every Thursday he goes to the hospital and sells his wares. In amongst the grapes and courgettes were some dragon fruits. I bought a box of Palestinian dates, two big leeks, three monumental oranges and 6 hard purple plums. We trudged up to the ticket machine where a queue had assembled to pay for its time in the hospital car park. Fumbling cold fingers having to insert cards or coins, for a needy sick house.

But the strangeness of our times means everything I spend is offset against everything we don’t have and everything we need and nothing that we want. An earthquake that takes out 35,000 people is a reminder that life does not feel safe anymore. The chaos of war. The chaos of malevolent weather. The chaos wreaked by a bunch of elected wankers who prefer to hide behind their parliamentary doors whilst the weakened workforce stand, placards in hand, hoping against hope that somebody will do something sometime soon before its too late.

The NHS was never safe in the hands of greedy Reece-Mogg types who sell contraceptives to the heathens whilst their Catholic hypocrisy drips like spermatozoon into their bank accounts. The Tory tactic of letting us get on with it, as they cower in the corner like spiteful hyenas, only reinforces the chaos swirling round our crumbling schools and littered leisure centres.

It is abominable and heinous, it is scary and disgraceful that those elected nogoodnicks keep getting away with it. Getting away with hearing nothing, seeing nothing, speaking nothing. They are the storm troopers who haven’t quite realised that when their time is up they will be condemned for being the perpetrators of all this unnecessary evil. When they are on the losing side perhaps it will dawn on them that they are the reason that the poor are getting poorer, that the old are getting colder. That the young are getting ever more articulate and that those conservators, with their wrinkly knees and dried up views, have had their day, and that their time at the table is up.

A generation of creatives will unleash their wrath. A generation of tired youngsters will demand homes for all. A generation of disillusioned renters will finally stand on the roof tops and demand that they are part of the future. That basic human dignity is restored. That the have-nots have a chance to have something and the have-it-alls have it all removed.

I read today that words weave spells, that words make up a thought, a philosophy, that those words change things when they weave those spells which is why it’s called SPELLING.

So in the middle of all this chaos the simplest of words can spell a beacon of hope. In the dirtiest of puddles a rainbow can shine and we can finally rest in the knowledge that a new day is dawning and that – ‘In chaos, there is fertility.’ ― Anais Nin