Not to overdo the gloom, but isn’t global warming pretty much self-correcting?

We’re part of nature, so the proof that climate change is happening – if we still need proof – is that we’re adapting at an instinctive level. Birth rates are falling, et cetera. It’s in our nature to, for want of a better expression, get out of the way.

I got caught in a traffic jam on the way to the recycling centre.

In the back of the car, glass and plastic bottles, cans, cardboard, paper.

Around me, cars.

Underneath all of us, tarmac. A wide, flat road laid down on fertile earth, connecting us to the great network of tarmac surfaces laid down on so much of the fertile earth.

On either side of us, shops. Glass windows showing us – on that stretch of road – skiing and outdoor gear, furniture, bedroom suites, a showroom full of electric bicycles.

And underneath it all, more of the fertile earth.

There is, in Falmouth, a building called The View. It’s a block of student flats. It stands between an older row of terraced cottages and any sight of the sea. Its own view has been similarly obscured.

I thought of The View, and then I thought of the millions of acres of tarmac and buildings, car parks, offices, blocks of flats and housing developments, that we’ve laid down on the flood plains and the fertile earth.

Then I thought about the traffic jam around me. My idea of “too much traffic” is enough cars to slow me down on stretches of road where I should be able to burn up fuel and go fast. It’s not the existence of traffic, full stop.

The road network’s a recent thing. The first motorway in the world opened in 1929, in Italy, and then came a German autobahn at some unspecified (by Wikipedia) date in the 1930s. The M1 in England opened in 1959.

The Wikipedia page Evolution of motorway construction in European nations shows far more dramatic rises than anything about global temperature.

If you seek our monument, look around you. We’ve tanked the landscape with non-porous tarmac.

[For those of us without experience of damp cellars, “tanking refers to the application of a waterproof coating, effectively making the walls permanently watertight.” Cut down from the definition on permagard.co.uk’s advice page. Thanks.]

When I got home, I looked up “global birth rate” on Google. Pew Research Centre’s FactTank tells me: “For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates.”

But are we preventing ourselves quickly enough? Will climate change get there first? Maybe our instincts will give us more arguments, relationship break-ups, disagreements?

Ironic, I’d say, if the argumentative angels of our nature goaded us to salvation.

Most of the mud thrown at me during the election campaign was intended to hit Boris Johnson. He was variously, flamboyantly wrong on so many levels, I was told, mainly via Facebook.

Never mind Freddie Starr eating anybody’s hamster; Boris Johnson was apparently munching his way through the entire pet shop.

Most of this drivel came in the form of headlines shared from real and unreal news sources, often based on unsubstantiated “research” or revealed by “a major survey” of which no details were given. None of it was convincing; you had to want to believe.

Once, the online “newspaper” was so clearly faked up for the occasion that it carried only one story, alongside a sidebar that read “In this sidebar, you can add text…” et cetera.

I suppose there was some appeal to confirmation bias, or maybe it was just plain stupidity that accounted for the relentless oversharing. I live in a Labour council ward, on a street in which every window instructed me to vote Labour, so I suppose the idea must have been to preach to the converted. Not to convince anybody else.

They were, now I come to think of it with hindsight, throwing their trash at the core vote.

Perhaps in Conservative areas, the clumsy fakery was directed at Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t know. Maybe. But.

I did quietly laugh at a friend’s blog post in which she claimed that “According to First Draft who analysed the ads used by all parties in the first four days of December, Tory Facebook ads were 88% misleading, against Labour’s 0%.”

No disrespect to First Draft and never mind the advertising*; I know what was being thrown at me via Facebook.

No, I’m not making a political point; yes, I’m sure the other side are just as bad; now, can we get on?

About half-way through the campaign, I spoke to an official Labour person (who happens to be a friend) about all the mendacious, vindictive, not-even-half-true [expletive deleted] that was coming my way. Private conversation. “It’s hurting us,” was the response.

And I think that’s the take-away for me. Fake news reveals the character of the faker. It traduces its own side of the argument. To do anything else – indeed, to be effective at all – it has to be more than thrown-together nonsense.

And it never is. Even in a big-time serious even-the-Russians-must-be-watching global-headline event like a British general election, the fake news is done so badly that it doesn’t work.

I find that reassuring.

*Except – maybe Facebook advertising does work? Worrying thought.

Just briefly. In the post-election Weekend FT, there was some worthwhile analysis and commentary in the main paper.

In the separate Life & Arts section, there was a front-page story about the trend towards creating “virtual celebrities” – people who don’t exist, who express views, endorse products, attract followers.

A company named A-fun Interactive has a “soul-extractor” room in which the likenesses of real people are taken for the construction of their avatars.

Very amusing.

There are avatars of real people operating independently - avatars of real people who have passed through that room - and also there are “virtual celebrities” who don’t exist anywhere at all. These truly virtual celebrities are likenesses of nothing - likenesses of the void.

They express views. They endorse products. They don't exist.

Having written several pieces recently about fake news, for example above the picture, I don’t know how to take this.

Perhaps our lives, like the print editions of newspapers, are separated into sections.

In the politics section, we’re bothered by fake news. In the culture section, we’re excited by the building of totally fake people.

Perhaps next time, in five years or however long, politicians’ avatars will tour the constituencies denouncing the other side’s use of fake news.

While their souls stay at home.

Pleasant to be writing this with the result still two days away. With the future – which will seem so inevitable once hindsight kicks in – still unknown.

A letter came from the Prime Minister this morning. A man named Johnson. For all I know, he’ll still be Prime Minister when you read this.

An actual letter. Clever man. He must have guessed that I would eventually “snooze” the entire population of Facebook in my ongoing effort to mute the politics. I couldn’t tell you what he said, because I shredded his letter as soon as I realised what it was, but I did pick up the gist. He and I want the same things, he told me. Hah!

The envelope was a muted yellow, with a window in it. Sender’s address on the flap was “CCHQ”, which I didn’t recognise – surely they were always at Central Office and that was always in Smith Square? I tore it open.

CCHQ? GCHQ? Time to grab the go-bag and run? Oh, no, wait a second. Politics. “Dear William Essex,” wrote the Prime Minister. That, in itself, was a refreshing change from “Dear WILLIAMESSEX” or “Dear MISTERWILLIAM” or “Dear (f)name,” but I suppose the politicians hire only the best tech people.

The man wanted something. There were pictures. At lunchtime I wandered down to the sandwich shop, where the staff were wearing red Christmas hats and the music was asking “Do they know it’s Christmas?” Thought of suggesting that “Won’t get fooled again” would be even more seasonal, but I’m already an old guy in a crumpled overcoat sitting at their corner table – don’t want to worry them any further.

It’s cold despite the sunshine and I’ve just put on the heating to take the edge off. [The rest of this paragraph was added later, causing a continuity error regarding the weather. Never mind.] It's grey outside. Drizzly rain. Sea merged into sky.

To take the other edge off, I’ve just made myself a large mug of tea and some toast and black-cherry jam. Comfort eating, I suppose. Yes, thank you, I have a book to read, and a sofa.

Work to do as well, but procrastination is a fine art for a Winter’s afternoon. The light is fading. Still a week at least until the shortest day.

Outside, the wind howls [see above re continuity] and the political battle rages for a few more days [hours]. In here, I just have to remember to keep the TV and radio off.

It’ll be over by Christmas, I suppose.

By Friday lunchtime, the winner will be making good on his (her?) promises to solve all our problems within hours, days, weeks of victory, and the rest of us can get on with the important work of being here – working, resting, playing, volunteering, socialising, opening the curtains in the mornings, turning on the lights in the evenings (so far, not a single - edit: so far, only one - canvasser has caught me in), turning on the radio and then off again quickly, and waiting for the world to end.

Politics needs problems more than it needs solutions, doesn’t it? Politics needs us all worried enough to vote.

And yet this time, sea levels really are rising and vast areas of the world really are on fire. How does it feel to be accountable for solving those problems, Prime Minister?

Let’s hold a summit and set some targets, eh? That'll work.

Would somebody kindly remind me why we have to sit at the top table in all these metaphors about international relations?

We’d be no less a country for taking a back seat while China, USA, Russia face off against each other. We wouldn’t end up head-to-head with Iran if we retreated into the Celtic fringe.

The notion of a “special relationship” with the USA is borderline ridiculous, for a start. If we were anywhere near equals, we’d have a relationship. It’s “special” because we claim a relationship beyond our means and they humour us – sorry, humor us.

Also because we speak a similar language and share a history. But today? Come on.

There was an empire and then there was a commonwealth, and – this just in – I’m told by Google that The Commonwealth of Nations still exists.

Unexpected foreign leaders do still turn out to have been educated at a well-known private boarding school down the road from here – that’s “here” in the sense of where my smart (sic, ha ha, smart) phone thinks I am, not where I am – and apparently we do still “punch above our weight” in diplomacy, which must annoy people heavier than us.

Sooner or later, the lightweight who insists on getting between the heavyweights – what’s the phrase? – gets stomped into the ground. Pulverised with a light flick of a ballistic missile.

Tourism is the unique selling point, isn’t it? We’re a great venue. Maybe our diplomats should go back to wearing Elizabethan costume. Maybe we should stop deluding ourselves and accept our destiny as a leading player in the global, geopolitical hospitality industry.

Commenting on the 2019 General Election in the UK, Queen Gertrude of Denmark, a character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, said, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

It is thought that Queen Gertrude was referring either to the incessant social-media shouting about Jeremy’s virtues, or to the incessant social-media shouting about Boris’s flaws - although it is possible that she was just watching a televised Leadership Debate featuring Jo Swinson and/or Nicola Sturgeon.

Also in the commentary box for the 2019 General Election in the UK, Carl Von Clausewitz, author of On War (1832), wrote, “Three quarters of the factors on which a vote in this General Election is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”

This was, of course, an updating of Clausewitz’ seminal masterwork, in which the words “a vote in this general election” have replaced the words “action in war”.

Clausewitz, a polymath known for his love of jellied eels and enthusiastic if uneven playing of the tuba as well as for his weary acceptance of the inevitability of fake news (not to mention fake biographical details), was also an acute, albeit posthumous, critic of the media age.

Like Sun Tzu before him, Clausewitz pointed to the cult of personality among media interviewers. “They think themselves generals, who only observe,” as Sun Tsu didn’t write in his non-existent classic The Art of Politics – a sequel to his The Art of War (5th century BC).

Sun Tsu was friendly with the late Sir Robin Day, big-name interviewer of the Thatcher era, who titled his autobiography Grand Inquisitor (1989).

Day was one of the early exponents of the art of repeating the same question again and again; he earned his entry at brainyquote.com with the observation, “Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television.” You can buy an autographed hardback first edition of Grand Inquisitor from Lazarus Books, for £11.66 (other autobiographies by self-styled grand inquisitors are available).

This is undoubtedly the election in which we haven’t learned anything new since the election in which we learned that we must use social media to excite voters about the election. Facebook is rank with sensational headlines shared from dubious-sounding almost-newspapers.

“Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,” said the not-yet-title character Richard of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III, looking at the statistics for his Facebook page.

The tactic of launching an online “newspaper” to give spurious validity to our fake news is being comprehensively tested in this election campaign, perhaps to destruction.

Scholars have compared this use of “newspapers” in political crowd-rousing to the custom whereby any article about creative writing is illustrated with a picture of typewriter keys. Others have suggested that the use of the big-name interviewer, repeating the question and then interrupting the answer, is also a throwback to an earlier political age.

“We do it this way because– we do it– if you’ll just let me finish– we do– my point is that we–” said one eminent psephologist, discussing the parties’ tactics in the campaign so far.

There’s very little new going on this time, and even the mainstream media seem to be working by rote through a dog-eared second-hand copy of a decade-old playbook. “Politicians, like generals, have a tendency to fight the last war,” said former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, conveniently, picking up a point that’s been made before.

Same with media, obviously. What do we do in an election? What did we do last time? We do that again.

It’s a shame that politicians are delivered to the studio fully media-trained, and not equipped with some terrible secret on the scale of the Watergate break-in and its aftermath. Although I suppose if they were, they’d never get to confess it.

“Welcome to The William Essex Interview. We’re joined in the studio by Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

[Fade theme tune. Up lights. Camera One.]

“Your Royal Highness. Tell me exactly, what is the question?”

“To be or–”

“I’m asking about the question.”

“To be–”

“Yes, we’re not here to talk about being. This is your chance to tell the electorate exactly what is the question?”

“To–”

“Well, you’ve had your chance. We’ll move on.”

“Whether ‘tis nobler in the–”

“It’s too late now. I want to ask you about your beliefs.”

“There are more things–”

“I’m sure there are, but I’m not asking you about things. I’m asking you, what’s in heaven and earth?”

“There are more things in–”

“There you go, talking about things again. Are you avoiding the question, your Royal Highness?”

“There are more things in heaven and earth–”

“Oh, there are things there too, are there? Things everywhere, I suppose? Very materialistic. But that must be a very limiting belief system, surely – things, and nothing else, in heaven and earth?”

[Aside, whispering to an aide.] “…his quietus make with a bare bodkin…”

“Didn’t quite hear that, but I’m afraid we’re out of time. Join us next week, ladies and gentlemen, when I’ll be talking to Lady Macbeth – aargh!”

Roll credits. Fade.

One possibility is that going online makes us invisible to historians.

There is a last smattering of physical back-up copies that were printed out around 2000, by old people who forgot to press Save once and never forgot the experience, and then – thanks to the inevitable deterioration of digital storage – nothing until around 2025.

That, of course, is when we all get bored with digital surveillance and the silly promises of tech companies, and go back to typewriters and film cameras and adding machines that don’t pretend to think. But that’s a story for another day.

Nothing between 2000 and 2025 will be recorded. We’re living in a dark age. Historians will celebrate every small clue that’s discovered – a postcard from circa 2015; a scribbled shopping list; a receipt that somehow hasn’t faded.

They’ll read many, many Quick Start Guides telling them that the full instructions for their gadget may be found online, and they’ll gaze in blank confusion at reams of Warranty Information.

Those scraps will be all they have to go on, as they work out the history of the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

Just imagine. The British Civil War of 2016 to 2020 won’t be recorded (I’m going to print out this post and leave it lying around for a historian to find) and nor will the events described as “carnage” by the American president in his inaugural address.

The final victory of the Rebel Alliance over the Evil Empire will be lost to history, because it was only ever digitally recorded, as will the tussle between the EU and the UK that occupied so much of our waking lives in the early twenty-twenties.

There’ll be no written-down physical record of what happened as global warming reached its climax in 2022/3, way earlier than anybody’s targets, and the only clue to the pre-deluge shape of the continents will be an ancient map with “Here bee dragonnes” scratched in the bottom-left corner.

Ireland will be found and mis-identified as Atlantis. A salvaged first edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden will be read by biblical scholars for clues as to the location of the Garden of Eden – and included among the Apocrypha.

Archaeologists of the distant future will puzzle over the plastic layer in the fossil record.

Here in England, this far-flung outpost of the Roman Empire, when 2025 comes we’ll still be celebrating the results of the 2019 General Election, in which light banished darkness, good won out over evil, social-media prevailed, and we all lived happily ever after.

And laughter was general over England.

Oh, politics.

Have to admit that I’ve been getting more and more engaged with this election. To the point of expressing views on Facebook.

Sorry.

I can’t believe in either of the likely winning sides. I can’t believe that if they win, we’ll be out of the Brexit extravaganza within a year, and comfortably carbon-neutral within ten/twenty years.

I can’t believe that a set of individuals, newly (re)installed in government offices, will pull the levers of power in such a way that their intended (promised) consequences come to pass. Nor can I quite believe that one lot are saints while the other lot are, well, self-interested sinners.

But I’ve decided how I’m going to vote and it would take a lot to make me change my mind. So at some level - the level of faith, perhaps, or the level of believing more strongly in one side’s good intentions - I’m seeing a difference.

It isn’t the issues. I get that [insert issue here] is important, but I can’t see that voting for one party rather than the other is the way to fix it. The NHS, for example, may need more money, more doctors, more nurses, but I can’t believe it needs more politicians.

More interventions by politicians, I mean.

I haven’t quite reached the belief that if an issue is important, it should be taken out of politics, but I suspect that I’m getting there.

Extinction Rebellion wants a Citizens’ Assembly to address climate change - not a government, nor a political party - and the campaign for a so-called People’s Vote (second referendum) on Brexit was a campaign to take the issue away from the politicians (again).

Citizens’ Assemblies have been used to address complex and emotive issues, and they are a valid alternative to the present arrangement.

Back to the election. Despite the media, I am far more interested in the local candidates than the national leaders. There would never be any point in bothering [insert national leader] about [insert local issue], but somebody local might - yeah. Might listen. Might have the time. Might get it.

Finally, after all these years, I get an inkling of what’s meant by “representative democracy”.

Blanket coverage of the leaders gets in the way of understanding, doesn’t it? As though this is a three-way contest between Boris, Jeremy and Jo, with various familiar secondary characters capering around the fringes. It’s a TV drama, isn’t it?

I might be knocked out of my current voting intention between now and the 12th of December, but I doubt it. The media narrative gives each leader an implausibly consistent personality, while social media delivers a daily blast of intemperate ranting about Jeremy’s sweet and gentle nature.

I am interested, but it’s hard to get past the fog to anything real.

I’m sure Jeremy’s a very nice person, but do you have to shout so loud about it?

Yes, I know Boris is a pantomime villain, but I’ve known that for a while now. Could you keep it down?

Behind all that - I have a choice of four locals, familiar faces actually, none of whom have made it to my door yet (although that could be because I close all the blinds, turn off all the lights and keep very quiet in the evenings).

Turns out that this is a marginal constituency, so I expect there’ll be a knock on the door before too long.

And maybe I just will vote for the person I like best on the doorstep.