Hippos on the Rhine.

Most days this week, I woke before a cold dawn and walked my dogs in the dark, thinking of the hippos that once grazed as far north as the banks of the Rhine and the Thames rivers. The last time they wandered up from Africa, about a hundred and twenty-thousand years ago, the planet was much hotter, the ice caps smaller, and the oceans higher. This last week, average temperatures along those rivers and all across the northern hemisphere were as hot as they have been for a hundred and twenty-thousand years. If the hippos can hang on a bit longer, they may yet have their revenge on us.

In summer, I walk my dogs before dawn because it would be cruel and even dangerous to be out with them when the sun’s iron hammer starts beating for real. In winter, we still go early in the pitch black and bracing cold because I love the intense solitude, described by Coleridge as the secret ministry of frost which suits the musing mind.

I often muse while walking on what to write for you come Friday morning, and this week as my Labradors huffed thick and steaming clouds of hot breath into the air, I mused on Dan Andrews terminating with extreme prejudice Victoria’s Commonwealth Games bid.

Dan and the Severe Derangement Syndrome associated with all things Dan are usually good for some easy lulz.

But it felt weird to be planning for lulz. It felt weird to be cold and watch my dogs’ breath steam on a planet as hot now as it had been when hippos wallowed on the Rhine.

Sixty-one thousand people died of the heat in Europe last year, and I guess another fifty or sixty thousand will be sacrificed this year. But that’s just in Europe. Maybe millions will perish in the global south from crop failures and starvation.

Meanwhile, in America.

Weird, sure, I guess. But weird is the new normal now. The new normal, the new lethal, the new derangement. It’s deranged because we keep trying to map the new onto the old, even if they don’t fit. Our reasoning no longer maps onto reality; at best, our language misleads and distorts.

Think of the word ‘heatwave’, for instance.

It doesn't sound right anymore. It’s an almost lyrical artefact, like a pictogram on a shard of ancient pottery from a civilisation fallen long ago.

A wave rises and crashes down upon us. It can be terrifying, even lethal, but the thing about a wave is that it recedes. It comes, but it goes. What’s happening now isn’t an oscillation; it’s an explosion. An extreme, rapidly expanding release of energy.

Explosions dissipate, too, of course. But this one will go on for hundreds of years, with the energy expending itself only when the fuel source is consumed. And the fuel source isn’t necessarily coal or crude oil.

It might be human civilisation.

We’ve identified the problem and engineered the solutions. Still, even as chaos and system failure begin to cascade and feed into more chaos and failure, we remain unfocused and, in some cases, delusional. (Not to mention pathologically fucking evil in other instances).

I don’t know that it’s humanly possible to remain fixed on a single question for every minute of every day. Even Volodymyr Zelenskyy probably needs to vague out on Tik Tok now and then. But the weird silence and emotional distance that characterises these our final years recall to me the experience of depression I had five years ago. It’s like we’re waiting for something to pass, even though we know we must pass with it. And not just us, but possibly everything. The worst scenarios for climate catastrophe end not just in civilisation collapse but the runaway heat death of everything, everywhere.

We are like Saint Augustine in this. Great enigmas to ourselves and forever asking our souls why we are so sad.

“And my soul knew not what to answer me.”

But perhaps dressing up as Darth Vader and running a mile through Death Valley might help?

Perhaps not.

We mostly sleepwalk through life, unaware that our ambitions and endeavours survive in a delicate reality that can turn hostile or deadly. To be constantly aware would be intolerable. But then comes cataclysmic change, the dying of the oceans and the burning of continents, reminding us of our mortality and the fragility of the world we have imperilled.

This must surely alter us. But when? This summer, the next?

I don’t know, and not knowing made it impossible to find the lulz this week.