Bank Holiday Thoughts

Thanks to the reader who sent me a nice message and said I seem down. Yes, I've been down recently, for many reasons. My fast-approaching fortieth birthday is one of them. Being forty is not something that excites me.

Today is a bank holiday in Ireland so I have time to feel reflective.

I write a lot about "political correctness". I have quite a broad understanding of that term, and perhaps an idiosyncratic understanding in some respects. When I complain about PC, it's far more than having to listen to feminist or gay propaganda all the time. It's a hundred silent assumptions that pervade public discussion every minute of every day, no matter what subject is being discussed. This is a big subject.

I've been writing a novel. I have thirty thousand words written so far. I've written novels before, none of them published. This is the first novel I've written with a Catholic theme. The small amount of people who've read bits of it are enthusiastic. The plot of the novel is something I've actually mentioned before on this blog, though not as an idea for a story. I don't think anyone would be able to work it out, though.

As mentioned previously, I'm feeling more and more drawn towards the realm of imagination and poetry, rather than the realm of analysis and prose. I've been on Twitter for a while, and it soon becomes obvious that there is no real discussion between right and left, conservative and liberal, globalist and nationalist, liberal Catholic vs. conservative Catholic on that platform. People throw arguments at each other, but nobody expects to convince anybody, or even to make them think twice. And there's something absolute about the differences. Between a progressive and a conservative a great gulf is fixed. I believe that the fate of society is decided in the imagination, individual and collective.

I'm also increasingly tired of point-scoring and triumphalism. I find that so boring. I want to live with contradictions, to explore them. Yesterday I was in the supermarket, looking at the shelves of casserole mix. The song "Harvest for the World" by the Isley Brothers came over the radio-- it's a soul song from the seventies. I felt a tremendous wave of peace come over me. How could a traditionalist conservative admit to such a thing? Consumerism! Pop culture! Things of evil! And yet...it's true.

Perhaps this wobbliness is why my blog readership has been falling. A few months ago, I got about five hundred to seven hundred views a day-- sometimes close to a thousand. Now, it's a hundred and fifty to two hundred, usually. Perhaps my increasingly right-wing views are to blame. I don't know.