Picture This

          As I write, a storm is blowing in from the west. I’m glad it didn’t arrive a couple of days ago, when there was a springtide and the sea washed over the road without so much as a breeze to drive it. As I watched, I felt anxious and awestruck in the face of the unstoppable force of nature. But I’m one of the lucky ones not to have been flooded or washed away: so many millions have. Does it take this kind of close encounter to feel a degree of empathy for them?

          Meanwhile, despite the impending doom of its eventual submersion, I’ve been converting the extra bedroom into a study. It’s a process that involves more than simply replacing a bed with a desk – we had already done that, but the sleeping ambience lingered somehow, making the space feel half-baked and unresolved. So, I replaced the flooring with hard cork boards that are office-chair friendly but warm to the touch. The pictures we had hung on the walls never did convincingly conceal the soporific magnolia paint behind them, so we decided on a textured cork wall-covering, coloured, to make the room a bit quirky, hopefully banishing all trace of sleep-inducing blandness and replacing it with something more stimulating to the imagination. Ever practical, I took the precaution of photographing the picture arrangement beforehand, so that all could be restored ‘as was’ afterwards.

          This process took months to come to fruition, during which there was plenty of time to reflect on the point of the exercise. Given the fact that the polar ice caps are melting and our home is a mere half-metre above sea-level, a fixation on interior decoration or home improvements seems indulgent and irrelevant. Besides that, the news media have been full of images of bombed apartment blocks and reports of millions of homeless refugees fleeing war, drought, floods and starvation. We feel privileged to even have an extra bedroom. It’s ‘first-world’ angst, I know and, although it drives many a philanthropist to try to make a difference, it’s apparent that my philanthropic urge is more intellectual than practical. My hair shirt remains in the wardrobe, as I press on with my project.

          I would like to think that there is hope for the world, despite the selfishness of geopolitics that sees every nation-state fight for its own advantage rather than co-operate for mutual benefit. Surely there will come a point where, as in my questioning the point of re-decorating a room, governments will realise the end is nigh, their ambitions are futile and it’s time for us all to pull together to tackle existential threats? But the evidence suggests that this is mere wishful thinking. It’s more probable that there will be a fight between the most powerful states to coral what’s left of the world’s resources, possibly while throwing a few crumbs of charity to the losers.

          I picked up a book recently that I hoped might offer deeper understanding of how nations are governed and whether progress is being made towards a more humane world order. Political Thought from Plato to NATO * is a potted history of philosophical notions of statehood – its origins, purpose and validity – and what’s clear from reading it is that whatever intellectuals may have conceived of over the past 2,000 years, the overarching tendency is for the powers of state to be captured – in ascending order of selfishness and ruthlessness – by interest groups, dictators and tyrants.

          Nevertheless, I cling to the hope that things can change. When it came time to hang all the pictures back on the walls, the new décor did indeed stimulate the imagination and it struck me that I didn’t have to reinstate them ‘as was’. It also struck me that I ought to put them a little higher up.

*A series of essays, introduced by Brian Redhead. Published 1984.