The End of the Walk

We have walked a long way. From Hadley's closing on my street, through the pressures quietly loading, through what tends to happen when they release, through the machines we are building and how far what they learn may travel.

It has been a lot. If you are tired, that is fair. I am tired too.

I do not know what you will do with this walk.

I do not know whether you will close the book and return to your day and forget most of what you read. That is allowed. Most walks are forgotten, mostly. They leave a small trace. That is enough.

I do not know whether you will close the book and sit for a while and then begin to do something small and specific you had been putting off. Call a grandparent. Visit a neighbour you had been avoiding. Teach a child something steady. Refuse to teach them to hate. Keep something beautiful going. If you do any of these things, the walk will have been worth it.

I do not know whether you will close the book angry that I did not tell you what to do more directly. If you are, I understand. I did not tell you because I do not think I know better than you do. You know what to do in your own life. You have been doing it, mostly, all along. The book is only a reminder.

We are at a strange moment. Big things are moving. Small things still matter, and may matter more than they ever have.

The road seems to be set. The severity of the journey is not. What we do between here and there is up to us.

The machines we have built are not going away. Nor should they, probably. They do real work. They will do more. What I hope, quietly, is that they become a part of our lives rather than the whole of them. Useful. Unignored. But not the first thing we reach for when we wake up, and not the last thing we put down.

The things that have always held us are still there, waiting to be chosen again. Buy someone a coffee. Say hello to the person on the bus you have seen before. Have lunch with your family on a Sunday, not because the calendar demands it but because it is Sunday and they are yours. Remember the name of the person at the till. Hold a door. Ask one real question and listen for the answer.

None of this is a solution. None of this stops what is turning. But it is what holds a place together while the turning happens, and it is what will be there, if anything is, on the other side.

Thank you for walking with me.

Now go and do the thing in front of you.

Do it well.

They are watching.

About this book

This book is a walk for ordinary readers through a difficult moment. It is not an academic work. It carries no citations in the body. Readers who want to check the specific claims — the birth rates, the space laws, the Nile water dispute, the carbon accounting — can find them in a short companion notes document.

The book is deliberately vague about time. Where it would have been tempting to predict a year or a decade, the book stays general. This is because the shape of what is described is more reliable than the clock of it.

The narrator is a storyteller. Hadley's, Mr Hadley, Ashcroft's, Helen, Rosa, the man at the bus stop, Alan the retired council worker, the uncle who fished, the neighbours at the corner shop and the bakery, the old man and the child on the bench, Margaret and Tom and Ruth and Jamie, the seven families, the grandmother — all invented. They are there to carry the walk in human shape. What the walk describes is not invented. Only its faces.

Acknowledgements

I owe thanks to the people who read this book in draft, and who told me, honestly, where it worked and where it did not. Without their honesty the book would be softer and less useful.

I owe thanks to the many writers whose work has shaped my thinking over many years. The ideas in this book are mostly not mine. What is mine is the assembly — the putting together, in one walk, of observations others have each made separately, in their own fields, in their own voices.

And I owe thanks, though she will never read this, to my grandmother. She was right about what mattered. I hope I have begun to live up to what she was telling me, thirty years ago, with a potato in her hand.

And, more personally —

Thanks to the many people who have helped me. To my mum and dad, for letting me play on the grass, for never asking me if I did my schoolwork, for not caring about my exam results. To my family, who have laughed at me since I was little trying to get out of the front gate aged four, and who still laugh at me. To the women who have loved me and let me be me, without judgement, who just came on the journey — I loved and still love you. To my kids — I am not perfect, in many ways, but I try. To my friends, some of whom I see often, too many of whom I do not see enough — I love you. To the people I have fought who are good people: even if we no longer speak, know I still love you, even when we disagree. And to the people who did me harm: I forgive you. I do not know the life you have had. Thank you, all of you.