With wildfires, railway tracks buckling and tarmac melting, it’s no longer possible to ignore how broken the world is
Back in late February 2020, in the days before the pandemic, I spent a morning in a taxi listening to the news and wondering what it meant to preserve a moment. There was the slow-motion sensation that life as we knew it might be coming to an end. Still, something whispered in me, experimental rather than fatalistic: you’d better remember it, just in case. So – here is the window-shaped patch of blue sky, here are the people walking along the pavement, here are the trees. All recorded deliberately, eyes wide. Here is your life as you know it, frozen in a single frame on a cold, bright February day – taken carelessly, recklessly, for granted.
Now we are experiencing another crossing over into a before and an after. Tipping points are subjective. People have different thresholds, different ways in which we bury our heads. It’s also easy to get used to things. It’s just a matter of a couple of degrees, after all. Any boiling frog would tell you the same. But the sheer physicality of a wall of heat – malevolent heat, city-stopping heat, deadly heat – is hard to disavow. Heat that has been unprecedented in my lifetime, and will become normal within my lifetime. It’s as good a point as any to accept that the unthinkable is now thinkable.
Sophie Mackintosh is an author. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker prize
