No.75, Tuesday, 17th. February 2026

My mother will be with me at about 11am so I shall put the heating on at about half-ten. It is 13-14 degrees around the house at the moment – too cold for me and certainly too cold for my mother. For her, the blood-thinning medication she must take means she feels the cold more than most.

It will be a welcome break for me; I have spent too much time at my computer, scanning slides from 1988 and making sense of my library of over 10,000 photographs dating back to the mid-1970’s. I sometimes wonder why I do it, as very few people will get to see them. It also makes a mockery of one of my most important subconscious desires – I want to live in the future.

We all live in the present. I try not to live in the past, only learn from it. Being an optimist I want to believe that the future will be a better place, and it seems to me that in the decades leading up to about 2015 we were heading that way, albeit slowly. However, in the last ten years I have witnessed a reversal of that progress, with division and hatred on the rise – and in the open. It is increasingly okay to be unpleasant to people, dressing up taunts and slurs as humour, and then taunting those same people again because they have no sense of humour. They should like being bullied.

For a few hours today I shall be listening to my mother, who lives largely in the past. She is happy there and for her it is a better place. And I am coming to realise that in a sense it was, if we set aside hunger, cold and disease.