24 June 2026

 With the heatwave continuing unabated today, I found that opening every door and window did not help to cool the house, and the indoor temperature stayed at over 29 degrees, only about 4 less than the outside.

I've spent the day in the downstairs living area, in a sheen of discomfort and perspiration, reading and reflecting - mostly on the subject of hope.

Maryam Ishani, the Iranian journalist who has been my main source of reliable information and analysis on the events in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon, had written quite poignantly about the impact on her personally of reporting on these hellscapes.

What had been broken irretrievably for her by the events of the last few years, she said, was the belief or hope that we participate in a system that, once informed, would step in:

'that what we learned about ethnic cleansing, what we learned about genocide, what we learned about the responsibility to protect, at some point would kick in. Nothing did.'

At the same time, and in the same vein, I've been reading Sarah Wilson on what happens when you give up on the hope we've hung so much on - that we can still fix things. That human goodness and moral instincts will ultimately prevail and unfuck us (or as the Portuguese say, desenmerde or unshit ourselves). It seems highly likely that we won't. 

She's asking the question in her book whether - and, if so, how - we can survive without hope. 

While thinking about this it's been calming to look at these small things around me that I love: 

my angel hammered from pewter by an artist friend in Cape Town, 

these sensational English pink summer peonies, 

the stones that I waded into the Baltic Sea on Åland to collect, 

my terracotta plant pots from Cape Town.