I am thinking about “recovery” today. I have my own personal tale of recovery. I thought of writing it in full gory detail but there doesn’t seem to be an appropriate genre. It was pretty gruesome. The operation took place almost a year ago now, with weeks and weeks on a knee-scooter being tended by two brave and much-appreciated loved ones followed by months and months of hoping that the three large incursions into the flesh and tendons of my right foot would finally heal and “recover”. I wrote on my phone upside down while lying immobilised in the hospital bed and then wrote more in my diary and the year went on and on and the foot remained stubbornly recalcitrant and then many other events intervened, most notably the cascading signals that we are rapidly approaching the End Times, meaning Doom is at Hand.

There were deaths and disappearences everywhere. My ancient half-brother passed away, My not-so-ancient lifelong friend suddenly was assailed by a hideous neurological disease and also passed. Whatever I had been thinking about before late 2025 no longer made much sense. Why had I put myself and others through this excruciating medical excursus if everything was going to come to a crashing conclusion the week after next?

I found myself constructing the outlines of a new book which is a prequel to another new book (finished but not yet edited) and the sense of things spinning out of control was getting more and more powerful and scary by the minute. Another book – the personal memoir I have been promising for years – was finished, but a key person in it wanted out. I couldn’t see how to re-edit it absent the offensive elements, while real life offensive elements began to prevail almost universally across the planet and do not appear to be susceptible to any kind of editing.

Never before has the United States of American been so profoundly present in my everyday life. Like thousands and thousands of others around the world I am “Inside Trump’s Head” several times a week and flicking around from one utterly bizarre Youtube channel to another then glued to reels on Facebook and Instagram as half the planet is melting and collapsing and inconceivable suffering becomes just part of everyday life on the news and bombs and drones turn once peaceful cities into rubble and a genocide has apparently been taking place but that is edited out as well. The football has been all-encompassing.

Meanwhile conspiracy theories turn out, one after another, to be correct,

I could never have imagined that my senior years would be lived out under these conditions. Trying to write and publish seems more and more futile, and yet I am writing more and faster then ever before and reading and reading and reading and wanting to write about that as well.

Making everything worse is the recent announcement that AI will shortly be eliminating us altogether. Since AI LLMs have been entirely trained on our own written output for the past hundred or more years I can see “we” as writers and readers are indeed superfluous or rather surplus to requirements. AIs, whether ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Mistral (etc etc) can now write books for each other. Or perhaps they will just write books for themselves. Reading and writing is now totally under the Cloud of Claude and thousands of would-be writers are scrambling about trying to see how to write ever more books even though many humans couldn’t care less. Some enormous percentage of Americans, apparently, have never read a single book in their life, or should it be lives?

So this is by way of an apology. I can’t seem to write any more than I am writing. I write all the time but publish nothing. I still imagine it will lead somewhere one day. I have gone back to the old mantra “write a thousand words a day” but then I read that Stephen King says you have to write 2,000 words a day. I might write some appreciations of other peoples’ really good writing soon, just to focus on the positive.

Meanwhile I sincerely wonder: will “we”, whoever or whatever “we” are, ever recover from this?

The Healing of the Tibia by Saint Francis (detail from the Table of the Stories of Saint Francis), 1235, Church of Saint Francis, Pescia (Pistoia), Italy. b Attributed to Giunta Pisano, Saint Francis and Four Post-Mortem Miracles, ca. 1250–1260, Sacred Museum, Assisi.

[The painting used as the banner for this post does not faithfully represent any reality: not mine, nobody else’s either. It seems to be AI but nobody is quite sure. The weird large creatures at the rear are supposed to be cats].