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Everywhere I look at the moment, the country seems f*ck@d.
Perhaps it's the media I consume, perhaps it's my age, or perhaps it's the people I associate with.
The NHS, which I see very closely, particularly through my wife's work and my association with dentistry, does not seem great.
In education, where my daughter is positioned, the situation does not seem fantastic; it certainly requires an extraordinary amount of increased investment, which is unlikely to come.
The prospects for new graduates (my other daughter just qualified as a physiotherapist) are poor; no jobs anywhere, and AI is stealing it, taking it away.
The airports I go to, the roads that I travel on, the trains that I sit on, none of it is particularly good.
The money available to defend us from existential threats, which apparently are over the horizon, is limited.
And so what do you do? How do you rail against this threat from many directions?
Alison and I were chatting the other day about this. It feels like 1985 again. There were wonderful, fantastic elements of that, but we still lay awake many nights wondering if a bomb was going to explode on our heads and vaporise our teeth.
As a young teenager at that time, the threat of nuclear war and a war between America and Russia was on everybody's minds all the time. I could look out my mum's front window and see the American submarine base at Holy Loch, a constant reminder of the Armageddon that was just over the hill.
So what do we do at times like this, when it seems to get darker, it seems to get harder, people seem to struggle more?
What we do is remember who we are and what we stand for. It's far more important to stand for something now than it ever was, but it's far more important to stand for the right thing.
The right thing is togetherness, the right thing is society, the right thing is kindness.
Positively influence as many people as you can with values like this; confrontation, shouting, fighting, and violence are never good for anyone.
Everybody does better when we're friends.
Blog Post Number - 4211