This was one of those pieces that changes between the conception and the final result; largely because it’s so boring writing about the shitty state we’re all in, because we’re all in it so get over yourself!! So I set out in search of a word to describe my mental state because none of the usual ones fit. Just now I checked an online thesaurus and found around fifty possible words for being fed-up and, surprisingly only ten for whatever it is that’s the opposite. So in the normal state of being human is it really true that we need five times more words to express unhappiness than we do to communicate sheer joy? Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina “All happy families are alike but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. So clearly we actually need all those misery words for personal use even if we disregard the pathological criminality of so many of our politicians.
On the other hand, as a writer, I’m familiar with the challenge of coming up with just the right word to suit the situation and so, after a big think, I came up with one word from the much smaller happiness camp – that word is euphoria – and from there it was a short leap to its opposite – dysphoria. When in doubt go for the Greek and switch the prefixes. For me the word dysphoria reaches into parts that other words can’t reach and manages to incorporate such diverse and miserable coagulants as Thames Water, the British Labour party leadership, Donald Trump, and our neighbour who uses a fraudulent disabled parking badge – into the same enormous crock of shite that invades our daytime thoughts and disturbs our sleep.
But what’s the cure for this – well it sounds like “turn away Whittington, it’s not worth it”. And so we did turn away; cancelled the newspapers, shunned the mainstream media; devoted ourselves to the pursuit of euphoria and three days later we’re back in the Bannau Brycheiniog for a brief campervan-testing excursion – and it works! – the campervan at any rate. The media fasting works too – surprisingly well. The sun shone today and we stood on our long walk and simply listened to the birds – although, just to add a touch of reality to the arcadian dream we were on the Monmouth and Brecon canal which is closed at just the point where Ospreys are expected to nest again this year. You might have thought this was a way of minimising disturbance to the birds, but no; it’s down to a dispute between the Canal and River Trust in Wales (Glandwr Cymru) – a charity – and Welsh Water an allegedly non profit organisation which pushed up its charges to an eye watering £100,o00 per week during the drought for providing water to the canal from the river Usk. Just as a matter of interest, Welsh Water has been fined £40 million for its management failures around pollution and recently appointed to its Board the ex Chief Executive of the Environment Agency to which supervised and failed to control the enshittification of Thames Water et al. Just the man to get a regulatory grip on Welsh Water you might think.
So aside from these invasive and dysphoric thoughts and in the absence of much botanical interest apart from Lesser Celandines in profusion we walked on in pursuit of a bottle of milk and listened as woodpeckers drummed in the trees, Buzzards circled overhead and Robins, Blue Tits, Song Thrushes and a dozen other species strutted their stuff in the trees in the hope of attracting a mate. It was absolutely blissful to walk, stop and listen with occasional glimpses of Hay Bluff through the trees where a great deal of brash clearing has gone on. I saw my first ever Kingfisher here and have never forgotten the double-take of seeing and hardly believing its coat of many colours. I would not swap my battered dysphoria for all the bitcoin in the world.
