For many and varied reasons, 2023 was a hard year. I’m fairly confident that that was true for a lot of people. The first ‘post-pandemic’ year marked what felt like a desperate fervour to ‘get back to normal’ – despite the war in Ukraine grinding on, despite the climate crisis becoming more obvious and keen, despite growing political division and fascist ideologies becoming accepted and implemented world-wide, despite the ever-tenuous Israel-Palestine situation literally exploding and turning into little more than death and destruction (not to mention other areas of the world that got less press), despite rapid inflation and deep economic hardship for everyone but the richest of us, despite the fact that COVID is not, in fact, finished mutating and harming us. This last year it has felt like the whole globe is in one giant humanitarian crisis all of the time. There’s literally nowhere to go to escape tragedy. Read more...