An explosion too far, and also too near

Olympics. The nightmare begins. Ugh.

Well, your correspondent is both delirious and comatose with fatigue, and therefore cannot write a proper blog post. In between triumphantly finishing the term at the Poetry School, and the thrill of sharing the pub on the final night with none other than Lembit Opik (yes, it never stops, it is the same pub where last week we met the Bosie-alikes, the nasty one apparently lives round the corner) – and carrying out mysterious editorial tasks for Horizon Review, emailing and commissioning, and being glued with ever-deepening horror to the unfolding news in Japan – flooded with sudden memories of how much I loved Japan as a child, the cherry blossoms and little girls and Lafcadio Hearn and the woodcuts and prints – and of my teenage anti-nuclear obsessiveness – and the spring-green-&-lemon soup (thank you Nigel Slater) cooked with a consciousness of all the people in Japan huddled round fires with cup-a-soups, in the snow, and no home left, and all the rest of it – and then there’s the 9-5 which has been pretty full-on lately, in an engrossing way… and I know there have been other things, but anyway, I can no more write a proper engaged, literary, knowledgeable, calm, intellectual blog post right now than I could fly to the moon.

By the way, there’s been a bit of journalism around the place recently about how we’re just tourists, and the images and news coverage are unsuitable and the videos of the tsunami rolling in are “disaster porn” – but I really don’t think so. Maybe for some people, I don’t know. But I think it is a human thing to want to try to understand, comprehend, to try to make sense of something you can’t make sense of; it’s how we cultivate empathy and learn to comprehend death. When I read these articles, attributing a motive to everyone and casting judgement, I can’t help thinking they come over a bit smug and hypocritical.

(However, life goes on, despite the news. Books continue to arrive through the letterbox of Baroque, the new Bloodaxe anthology Being Human being one, and also the new forthcoming Sean O’Brien collection November – a funny title to launch in the springtime, things to try and catch up with when the weekend goes hurtling by – and a book of short stories about the Paris Metro. And there’s a wonderful thing by John Wilkinson to read.)

The sleep, the dreams, the sense of foreboding as one tentatively clicks on the Guardian or BBC website in the morning… Esoteric London isn’t usually so scary, but this morning I ended up nearly having a heart attack. Not on good old Esoteric, oh dear me no, but on following their link.

Look at this headline! All you can think is maybe in Fitzrovia they don’t read the news.

All it needs is an airplane sticking out of it, or maybe a big ship marooned on top, to really complete the impression. And yes, I know we can’t joke. Trust me, I’m not joking.