Autumn Rhythms With a Touch of Politics
Autumn Settles into Place, Labour Less So and The Question of Kids and Taxes
A Quick Warning Before We Begin: This post is rambly and personal. I’ve had a quiet Sunday morning to myself, so you’re getting a full legs-stretched, rambly post that includes only some politics. I’ll clearly mark where the political bit kicks in, so if you’d rather skip ahead, please feel free to do so.
My autumn pattern of life is in full swing.
It’s always been my favourite season, Autumn - there’s a rhythm to it that I can never quite find in the rest of the year. Summer is pure unbridled chaos - braais that run too late, the sun never bloody going down, the constant, ceaseless pressure of doing something.
Winter is survival - dark mornings where you get on the train to work a good hour before the sun makes it shallow-horizonned appearance, heating bills that make you wince and because I’m an NHS denizen, perma-crisis after perma-crisis that leave me sleepless (or even more so than usual) and worried for the sake of humanity.
Spring is restless anticipation - prepping for the coming chaos of summer, everything akimbo because winter made you stop caring, and now you suddenly care.
Autumn is routine - it’s my time of the year where things feel like the click back into place, feeling like puzzle pieces finding their groove with each other, even when it’s just a picture of a horse and the pattern is a bit boring. It comforts me.
I generally wake up at four or five in the morning - sometimes by my own doing, drawn awake by that strange pre-dawn clarity that you can only find when the world is still and spaces feel liminal, and sometimes because the fur-daemon who likes to rule our lives with an iron paw invokes her subtle tyranny of demanding her brekkie. The house is still dark, still holding onto the night’s coolness and quiet. I go to our lounge, dressing gown on, careful to not wake my sleeping husband (when he’s here) and make a cup of strong coffee. The kettle’s beep-beep-beep when it’s done boiling feeling like a small ceremony that marks the start of the day.
I curl up on my chair in the living room and start scrolling through the news - everything from The Telegraph to The Guardian to Politico - everyone gets a visit, and I try to take in the full smorgasboard of contradictions, and try to take in as much as I can before the day properly kicks off. It’s, despite what it may sound like, and considering the state of the news these days, a soothing ritual - it’s my time to attempt to process the world before the world processes me.
By six o’clock, it’s into the shower, dressed and straight onto the train by 6:45 - battered MacBook teetered precariously on my lap, to pick up whatever draft I would have started the evening before. The morning commute has become my main writing opportunity - surrounded by tradies, yawning nurses and young men and women in their invariably navy blue office attire. The city slides past the window, landmarks becoming small milestones of just how much time I have left to tap away, and by the time I get to my work station for the day (there are four separate options), I’ve usually finished my shout into the void that gets scheduled to publish around midday.
The workday itself has its own distinct rhythm - safety calls in the morning, endless meetings where we discuss change that’s near impossible to do, budgets that don’t exist that are supposed to enable targets that have been set by someone who has presumably only heard about how healthcare in this country functions, before suddenly the day starts sliding slowly to its inevitable close, and I find myself on the way back home, headphones on, listening to a podcast, or more often these days, some Scissor Sister based playlists.
When I get back home, I find myself in front of the stove, luxuriating in the smell of onions sizzling, cooking our dinner, before settling down on the sofa where I’ll watch whatever’s on telly with one eye while planning what I’m going to shout about the next day.
Rinse. Repeat.
My husband and I manage life like a relay race - passing the baton of domestic responsibility to each other with the practiced ease of two people who’ve spent a decade and a half living around each other’s impossible schedules - his shifts at the hospital mean that he often hands me said baton in the morning - a quick kiss hello/goodbye as I’m heading out the door and he’s finally getting in, still in his scrubs, exhaustion etched into the lines around his eyes, and takes it back when I walk back into the house.
Last week it was nights, which meant days of ships passing in the hallway and conversations conducted through text-messages. This week, it’s weekends.
Between us, the health service is an ever present spectre in our house, like an invisible, and sometimes unwelcome, housemate that struggles a bit with boundaries, and this year, it is even more acute, because it is the hardest year I’ve ever experienced in my career in healthcare. Every single person I work with feels the same, says the same - usually over hurried cups of tea in corridors that haven’t been painted in years, inculcated with a sense that hope is finally running thin.
The polite version of what’s happening is “there’s no money.” The impolite version is… unprintable1.
One small mercy that I’m eternally grateful for is that we don’t have kids to juggle into the seventeen balls (and five chainsaws) of our rapidly moving lives. I have incredible admiration for my colleagues who do have kids, because honestly, I do not know how they manage it. Which brings me into the only real bit of politics I want to touch on today - kids and taxes.
Politics Bit Starts Here
The Telegraph has run an op-ed by the ever pleasant Zoe Strimpel who has voiced her displeasure at the thought of paying for other people’s kids in light of the two-child benefit cap possibly being thrown in the bin.
A stance which I’ve always found… well, idiotic, to be honest.
We had a conversation in our late twenties about kids and said we’d reassess when we were in our mid-thirties and… well, here we are. It didn’t happen. And we’re okay with that. It wasn’t a dramatic decision that was made one day or a grand philosophical stance - just two people who looked at their lives, their careers and their complete inability at the time to keep a houseplant alive2 and thought “maybe this isn’t for us.”
We both adore our nieces and nephews - we’ve loved watching our friends build their families, one schedule-ruiner at a time. We’ve been there for midnight phone calls when there was a bit of uncertainty about whether it was teething or a true medical emergency3 and for celebrations of first birthdays, first steps, first words and first days at school.
We’re happy in the role of eccentric uncles who arrive with far too many presents, teach them slightly inappropriate words and sugar them up on Haribos and ice cream before handing them back to their parents with a cheerful goodbye.
But no, we didn’t want our own - and that’s fine. It’s more than fine - it’s a perfectly valid lifechoice that doesn’t require explanation or justification to anyone.
Does that mean I resent, in any way or form, paying tax for other people’s kids? Of course it bloody doesn’t. It’s absurd to even begin to frame it that way - as though society were some sort of transactional marketplace where you only pay for the services you personally consume and screw the rest.
Children, despite not having any of my own, aren’t niche side-projects or luxury items that only benefit their immediate families, they are the actual, living future of this country. Today’s child benefit isn’t just for “your” children, it’s a direct investment in the teachers who’ll educate the next generation of kids, the doctors, nurses and care-workers who’ll look after us when we’re old and, yes, the taxpayers who’ll fund our pensions when it’s finally time for us to admit we’re too old to keep working.
It’s really one of those arguments that falls apart when you look at it just a bit too closely. It’s the same thing as “well, I don’t drive, so why should I pay for roads?”, or “I don’t have a house-fire, so why should I fund the fire service?” Society doesn’t work that way - it’s not a subscription model4. Every single one of us benefits from living in a country where children are healthy, educated and supported - where families aren’t choosing between heating and eating and where kids can concentrate at school because they’ve had breakfast.
The alternative isn’t the libertarian paradise that someone with an Ayn Rand quote tattooed on their left bicep will tell you it is - it’s a fractured and impoverished society where the next generation grows up without the support that they need, and deserve, to thrive.
Trying to sell it as anything else just collapses under its own weight and gives away a fundamental misunderstanding of how a civilised society actually works.
Now, speaking of collapsing under their own weight - Labour.
I may have gotten myself into a bit of trouble on Friday for saying that they’ve lost me, at least for now. People were very upset with me - especially on Bluesky, but I’ve got an email inbox that has a couple of red-hot seething messages waiting for me to respond to, telling me that my actions this week will hand Reform the keys to Downing Street.
Besides the fact that I hadn’t realised just how much influence I have, I just can’t help but think that the worst way of keeping fascist-lite parties out of power is to keep quiet when your own side mucks up. I am troubled by the idea that dissent is, somehow, betrayal, when in my mind, it feels like accountability.
I said in my post where I discussed this that Labour has done some genuinely good things - Renter’s Reform, Worker’s Rights, and I’ll add onto that in this post, Breakfast Clubs - but when I look at the bigger picture, it really doesn’t look all that rosy. The botched benefit reform that left many of my friends in despair and steady stream of Telegraph-flavoured immigration rhetoric are only two of the things that have left me deeply sceptical.
I loaned my vote to Labour last year, but right now, I don’t see why I would uncritically extend that loan.
The biggest argument against my witholding my vote in Labour and looking elsewhere is “if you don’t vote for them, you get Reform”, and I’m very sorry, but as far as campaign messaging goes, that feels a bit more like emotional blackmail than it does a compelling reason to change my mind.
But - and this is important - I am not slamming the door behind me to never come back. We have three and a half years until the next General Election - things can change. They always can. I hope they will.
All I’m saying is that in the current state we find ourselves in, I am just not convinced. And I don’t think I’m alone.
Politics Bit Ends Here
Which brings me back to this autumn rhythm I’ve been waxing lyrical on - wake up, coffee, headlines, commute, write, work, commute, dinner, write, sleep, repeat. It might sound incredibly monotonous, but it grounds me - and truthfully, it gives me a little bit of a space to dream.
I would, one day, Cher-willing, love to make writing my full-time actual grown-up work. I’d love to take this little rhythm I find myself in autumn and shift it from something I do in between the cracks of my day to something that is my day.
I picture myself not waking up at five in the morning (with the permission of the fur daemon) to get my reading in before settling myself into my study, Mac starting up noisily, coffee steaming next to me and really writing.
I’m not there yet - not really even close to there. But I am closer than I’ve ever been. Inch by inch, word by word. And that’s thanks to so many of you who read my daily rambling thoughts (and especially those of you who put up with my especially rambling Sunday words), who challenge me to be clearer and braver and more honest. I am incredibly grateful.
For now, I’ll keep this rhythm. Wake up too early, annoy the cat, make the coffee, read the headlines and write on an interminable commute which allows me the time to do so.
And with that, this particular ramble comes to a close - thanks for sticking with me, even when I get myself into trouble.
Best,
Bear
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As ever, thank you for all the incredible support, I am very grateful.
I really would love to write more about it, but out of professional courtesy and the fact that I’m not fully allowed to, this will need to wait for a future time.
We have learnt since then and the 20 odd house plants we have in our two-bedroom flat are thriving.
It’s almost always teething.
Though certainly not for a lack of trying from some corners of the world.
Loved reading these ramblings, Bear. Your words feel like a gentle push into that autumnal rhythm.
A society that stops caring about the support it offers for all of citizens, regardless of the immediate benefit to them, is a society that contains the seeds of its own destruction.
If you don't want to fund childcare for other people today, tomorrow someone may not see why they should help fund any care you need and once you stop working you will be most likely be considered a leech to the system. That’s not a world I want to live in.
Unfortunately the UK has two big problems: extreme individualism and a feral aversion to anything that smells of, even remotely and particularly if it's a good thing in the long-term, social reforms intended to support citizens in moments of need.
"Benefits" has become a curse word when it should be a resource the state provides to show they care about their people. Unfortunately, the British mindset has evolved into seeing anyone unable to fend off for themselves, whatever the circumstances, as a tax burden.
Hope everyone who thinks like this never finds themselves unemployed, homeless, chronically ill, has a very healthy private pension, and no dependents whatsoever to be in with a chance of never needing any support.
If it is any consolation, I feel exactly the same about the placing of my precious vote.
Really enjoy your vivid description of the Working Day…quite a while since I had one. I miss the stimulation .. mine was in education….but love the quiet. Thank you and you OH for your struggles with our terminally sick NHS. Would love to know your ideas for reinvigorating it.