Wading Through Fiction.

Well, I haven't posted on here since November 2022, and I stopped posting regularly way back in Sept '22. Back then I said I was stopping the frequent posting to concentrate on my work of fiction. The news on that is both good and bad. On the one hand I have got a lot done, but on the other it's at a rate far slower than I would've hoped. I'm over half way through writing the second (and final) book now. At current rate it should take another two to three months to get it done.

Once that's done I can put it on the back-burner. I'll still need to do 2nd, 3rd and 4th drafts, etc. So if it ever sees the light of day in public it will be a good while from now. I'm literally thinking in years rather than months. 2025/26 will probably be the ballpark for both books. No rush. It's kind of a work of passion, so the main thing is getting it out of my system and down in writing.

Anyway, it's reached the point where I feel so exhausted by it I feel it would be good to start posting here again just to freshen myself up.

Since last time..

The last time I posted a daily journal style post it was when Liz Truss was prime minister and the Queen had just died. I said at the time "I think I've covered the main things..", but obviously, since then, there's been a fair bit of drama. We're currently under the Rishi regime, and it seems we're moving back towards the EU. If not outright, then through entanglements with the European Defence Union and so forth. Things under Sunak look exactly how I expected they would be under Sunak - though not quite the worst case scenario version.

Immigration

Today it was announced that net inward migration into the country was 606,000. Quite a big number. It's getting very hard to take it all seriously now. You'd think that with numbers so huge even people on the other side of the divide would be able to say, "Yes, these numbers are large, I do understand why people have concerns." However, they don't seem capable of doing this. So they argue exactly as they would've done back when the numbers were 60,600. It's pretty incredible to watch.

I do worry that in this age of mass information it's become too easy for people to have worldviews that are detached from reality. I see it on both the left and right. People on the right watch videos of interracial crime all day on social media, so think everyone's kung-fu fighting constantly - when the reality is it's not that bad. The left watch stuff about racism all day, so genuinely believe that the country's full to the brim with racists.

Though social cohesion is a big worry going forward the most immediate problem is houses and services. You have to be pretty optimistic to think the government will provide housing for an extra 600,000 people every twelve months. So inevitably we'll get more homelessness, more people falling into debt, and more people living in very crowded or substandard accommodation.