It’s cold. Real cold. The kind of cold that seeps in through the pores and out through the fingers. I shiver in my blanket, turn the TV up to catch the rest of the news before the power outage starts.

“….President Biden has called for calm as a secessionist march through Flagstaff, Arizona, erupted into violence today. The crowd of 30,000 had assembled at the historic flagpole to hear influential leader James Buchan speak about employment, but his long delay in reaching the stage caused unrest among the protesters, who started rioting through the streets. The army have been called in to contain the situation, and it is believed that there have been shots fired….”

Fuck. Arizona now? I remember a family holiday to Sedona years ago, getting sunburned after I went for a long walk in the searing heat of the day and spending the rest of the afternoon in a cold bath cursing my stupidity. We’d had spicy ribs in the Red Planet café, and dad had spent the next day prodding my raw shoulders. It had seemed a lovely place, more hippyish and liberal than I’d expected the south to be, all aliens and wind chimes. Beautiful country, America like I’d really imagined it to look. And now it was going up too. Going the same way as Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas. Christ, Texas had been ugly. The lynchings, the burnings, the mob screaming and hollering as they chased that young guy down the street. The dead-eyed truth of rolling news- millions of people got to see the look of sheer terror in his eyes before he was engulfed by the furious tide.

Midnight, and all the lights go out. The TV, which had been cheerfully predicting more snow, dies with a static sound and crackles quietly to itself. I groan, lurch off the sofa and light a candle. Not much to really do now but sleep, anyway. Or at least try to. I pad through to the bedroom, trailing my blanket. Spread it out over the two duvets already there, my breath frosting in the bitter air. Cam is sound asleep, her gentle snoring and starfish position a testament to her incredible ability to sleep in such a way to guarantee me a really uncomfortable night. Fuck. She hits work early, if I wake her up and get her move across then we’ll have to talk, and she won’t sleep, and I’ll feel like a bitch. I stand by the bed, mind groggily working through ways I might manoeuvre her across without waking her up. The stupid things we do for love. Christ, it’s cold, I’m standing here freezing my ass off wondering how to get into fucking bed? Right, sleep it is then. Don’t be so fucking daft. I lift the covers slightly, moving like a pantomime villain as I try to contort myself under the covers. She shifts slightly, half-grunts, half-moans, shuffles, and I’m in. I blow out the candle, feel my extremities start to tingle with warmth in the sharp darkness. I lie awake, thinking about Arizona. If they go down too, what then? Nobody really thought secession was going to happen before Texas. Nobody. It was for history books and grade school, not the response a state gives after ’13.

I lie in the dark, and try not to think about ’13.

Novel setting (maybe)

2015. The global recession that gripped the world has ended, leaving a radically changed political landscape. The “Economic Nuclear Winter” upended governments, starved millions, and left the former Western political powerhouses in ruins. The USA, ripped apart by race riots and secession since the assassination of President Obama two years ago, is a country on the brink of bankruptcy, having been hit the hardest by the ’09 crash.

Against this “Second Depression”, Eugene Cernan, the last man ever to have set foot on the moon and the last of the Apollo astronauts, is found dead in his Houston nursing home. His death brings the final curtain down on America’s Space Age, and with him the end of an ideal.

Cernan’s death shocks America. It’s a country with few heroes left, where abortion is illegal, immigration laws are tighter than anywhere in the world, and food is rationed to cope with appalling drought and mismanagement. In these desperate times the moonwalkers had swung back into focus, a representation of the Golden Age of America, and now they are gone.

It's not November yet!

It will be a week Saturday though. Thirty days of writing absolute bollocks, in public, for the benefit of my ego and your desire to read whatever passes for entertainment that I can think up. If I was going to make this into anything, it' be called "Holding Patterns", as I used to think my life was constantly spent in one long holding pattern, waiting for the good stuff to start happening. Of course, I now realise that a life spent watching the calendar is no life worth living, but then I'm saying that with a ticker on my facebook and a printout of the remainder of 2008, the dates being crossed out as I count down to the 6th of January and a flight to the far side of the world, so hypocrisy may happen here.

Just warning you.

So, seeing as you're here, I may as well write a little something, as I'm waiting for my dryer to finish so I have a clean towel for a shower and some well-deserved kip. Enjoy, or whatever us Gen X types do instead of genuine emotion.

Strata

The church was never a place to show real weakness. It was a place to come with your mates, put on a little bravado, look like you knew what you were doing and generally be very positive and nice to everybody. Tuesdays and Thursdays were rammed to the ornate rafters, the mix of people as stratified as the rock we all pretended to climb.

At the apex, the hardcore. Gnarled, tattooed types communicating in grunts and impenetrable lingo, their dominant place in the climbing heirachy confirmed by their exclusive use of the "Scary Wall", often looked at and rarely attempted without muscles that resembled Grey's Anatomy as drawn by Tom of Finland.

Next down you got your sport climbers. A subgroup of the Apex Twinbreds, they tended to be young, wiry and rarely out of clothing that cost the sustainable rainforest and had the suffix "-tex" discreetly hand-sewn in one corner by fairtrade gorillas. They exist in a world of weekends climbing in Slovakia ('cause, y'know, Spain is ALL about the paragliding this time of year) and earnestly discussing which ski resort will best suit their snowboard bindings.

Middle of the heap, us. Good enough to speak their tongue, not confident enough to venture out in the summer months, we lorded over the place as little deities during the summer months, when the sport climbers were in Boulder and the Tom of Anatomys were in some remote pub up north, boasting of climbing the Inaccessible Pinnacle naked in a rainstorm. We knew the lingo, wore t-shirts with amusing slogans on to show we were here for fun, a lie revealed as soon as we got out the changing rooms and said "what climb first?".

We all want to be better. Better than our peers, better than whoever went first, and above all, better than we did when we climbed this last time. We'd start slow, climbing things just below the limit of what we could do. "Warming up". Then came business. Tie in, check knots, get started. Climb until our arms burn hot and legs wobble and you strain for the next hold. Climb something that looks half-finished, but can't be as that fucker just did it. Find ourselves trapped on a hold, the next one looking miles away with nothing between us and it but bare, gently inclining wall. Know in our hearts that it's bloody impossible, even if that fucker just did it. Just then! I saw him! Bastard. Fear to wuss out, ask to come down, cheat by grabbing that oh-so-inviting hold that is so conveniently placed but not the right colour. Stay trapped. Look at hold again. Chalk fingers to play for time. Look again. Hop from foot to foot, knowing that one of two things will happen.

1. We'll fall. And then have to do it again, plus the six or so feet we just fell.
2. We'll make it.

So, with that relatively simple choice to make, we go for it. With the shouted encouragement of the slightly bored belayer below, we gather muscles (less Tom of Finland, more Margrave of the Marshes) and half-leap, half grab for the elusive hold, hoping that option 2 is going to win this time.

That primeval fear of falling never really leaves us, but we manage to ignore it enough to pull these moves and draw the admiration of those further down the pile. We say well done and nice work and good effort, knowing that moment of utter terror when we let go of the closest thing we had to safety and put complete faith in bodies that used to be good for nothing but alcohol consumption and conversion.

Having never had real pride in what my body can do, it's a new feeling for me. I still look at the top of the heap with a mixture of admiration and slight fear at their goggle-eyed lunacy, but at least I'm not one of those dozy fuckers in rented helmets and sensible trousers.

Now that's something to be really proud of.