On Being Washed Away
31 March 1990, Saturday, Glasgow
[Blank1.]
If one entry I’ve made in A Writer’s Diary stays with me, haunts me, it’s this about the destruction of England —
A piece of Russian propaganda, seen in a tweet with a link that followed, has overwhelmed me.
They threatened England with an underwater nuclear bomb, undetectable on their cloaked submarine, irresistible if detonated in the Channel (which would finish France, too) or the Atlantic (which would do for Ireland). A man-made political but entirely watery tsunami was promised, threatened, by Lavrov. It would pass, a hundred or more feet high, across everyone and everything I know intimately. Across and through, for there would be trees shooting sideways as spears, and cars tumbling as if catapulted. We would wash away. All the details of decades of architectural preservation, and every attempt at small DIY improvements – the totality would be instantly meaningless. Perhaps we would stand for a moment, in awe of the grey wall, as victims do in disaster movies since CGI got good. At the crest would be a white fringe of radioactive foam, and beneath it would come Bristol, Stonehenge, Slough and the Peace Pagoda from Battersea Park. Every diary and letter, every hard drive and Victorian necklace populated by hair, every knitted hot water bottle cover and pair of spectacles lost behind the radiator, every rotovator and prayer mat, every cat and multistorey carpark, every plan and promise and confusion and nostalgia, everybody unlucky enough to have a government who annoyed a man powerful enough to give an order to wash away a land. There are such words as could do this, and although I have long imagined by familiarity disappearing into horizontal fire, this twitter terror was new, and seems worse. Because some heap of something would be left, after the backwash, even though all the people would be gone.
The thought of this wave has changed my perception of everything around me.
I look at the physical copies of my diaries, and know that they are not safe. That nothing is safe, not in any real sense, if such an act can be considered.
If such an act is within the power of one man.
This threat makes me want to digitise what I have that I think might be worthwhile to someone else. At least in the cloud, it will remain somewhere.
I was reminded of this wish by Salena Godden’s recent post on Bluesky —
Please remember to keep diaries, use ink & paper, they will not believe the 2020’s unless we unite in poems, letters, written testimony corroborating it was what it was & we saw what we saw. The past won’t believe we repeat it. The future won’t believe we endured. The present hardly believes us now.
I no longer trust ink & paper. Would the British Library’s underwater stores survive such an attack? Maybe I should scan every single page of those diaries.
But then I think, the single thing I’ve written that I believe most worthy of outliving me — the novel Patience — is already backed up in multiple locations. There are physical copies in America, Australia.
And I think, Let the rest of it swill away.
I am only picturing in cataclysm what happens gradually and inevitably.
But then again, I am resistant. I try not to get depressed. I return to ink & paper.