....day ..th ...... 2008
Love, it was so amazingly, unexpectedly, earth-movingly good to finally meet you last Sunday afternoon (4.46 pm, 2.56 kilos, a little red in the face but sweetly, stunningly, achingly beautiful), that I thought "If it was possible to describe this feeling and communicate it to others, perhaps we wouldn't need a revolution after all".
Wishful thinking, of course, and in fact fundamentally mistaken in an important respect: it is not simply a lack of empathy or an abscence of love that leads us to consent to this state we're in (from which I hope with all my heart that we will have some respite before you're old enough to read this). For example, I'm prepared to accept, for the sake of argument, that Tony Blair may once have been a nice person with the best of intentions. (Tony Blair: look him up under "mass murder" in any impartial history of the dark days of the early 21st century.) I can even almost contemplate the idea that he retains some shred of sincerity in his protestations of morality (admittedly this is stretching my credulity to its limits). The point is that it wasn't necessarily because of his personal flaws that he ended up in the deep pit of iniquity that he now inhabits (he stands very near the head of a line of people responsible for the death of a million people in Iraq, for example). There are other reasons. When Margaret Thatcher (also a mass murderer, smaller scale than Blair but dedicated nonetheless, see under previous millenium) said "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families" she captured an unusually pure and direct falsehood. In fact the interest groups, social structures and collective circumstances in which we make our own histories are extremely strong influences on almost everything we do, and no individual can escape.