Looming Void: March 25, 2025

Hooray and yippee, the birthing of a book at last has shape.

10,000 minutes

What do you call a fortnightly newsletter stuck in its writer’s brain for a month? A faltering? A newsletterly death knell?

Not at all. I’ve written a couple of times about the grotesque pain and effort in conceiving the penultimate (but arguably the most important) chapter of my book-in-progress and the past few weeks saw that continue. But now it’s done. I have a clunky but coherent and storywise-successful draft of the chapter done and dusted. The joy in this achievement is only now sinking in.

The path forward at last seems clear (or at least not murky). A final concluding chapter (maybe six pages long) is expected to take a few days up to a week to draft. Half the book’s fifteen chapters need one more edit to reach what I call the “manuscript ready (MR)” standard, the point at which all I care about is honing language and rhythm and storytelling. Half the book’s chapters need two more edits to attain MR. Then I’ll edit the book as a whole once or twice (or more?). I’m trying to line up a copyeditor for the middle of the year and plan soon to approach cover designers. This will be a sweet time, a rewarding phase, and I plan to dip back into fortnightly newsletters. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting things to say about these next book development steps.

If at times my recent writing efforts have seemed fraught, I need to keep reminding myself of my good fortune in that part of my life not obsessed with writing. Eight grandchildren aged seven and under are a wondrous yet exhausting pleasure. Life in Melbourne could not be sweeter. And I’ve been trying to restore my feet and legs and lungs to a fitness level capable of hiking the 5-day, 85-kilometer Old Ghost Road track (photo below) in New Zealand next week. We’ve been walking weekly in the Dandenong hills east of the city, and once a week we tramped two to three hours north, south, east, or west from our apartment to a somewhat distant restaurant (returning home on tram or train). I am hoping to luxuriate for a fortnight in a rare mood of escape while enjoying a slice of NZ’s north island.

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Monsters

Processing the climate news from America is too painful, so you’ll hear little from me on that, at least for now. Brushing aside the usual techno-optimistic diet we’re fed, I am encouraged by this Damian Carrington article about a five-year project, fully funded, to get into the weeds on early tipping point signs for the AMOC current and for the Greenland ice sheets. If we truly had a global network of governments working for our grandchildren, they would be pouring money and manpower into the very best of predictive science. As the programme directors relate:

“In a similar way to how we use monitoring stations to detect and warn for tsunamis, we’re aiming to establish networks of climate monitoring systems to detect early signs of critical shifts in our climate. … Through these systems, we can equip decision-makers with the data they need to confront the threat of abrupt climate change head on.”

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As implied above, one could lose one’s sanity parsing 2025’s climate news. I’ve been trying a simple strategy to keep my focus on writing: don’t read the daily news! Instead, over the last month, I’ve stored twenty articles/newsletters that might be worth catching up on re the climate crisis. Reading those twenty headlines now, without even dipping into the actual articles, is a horror show, so this month forgive me if I only slip in one item arising from the immoral climate-centric acts of the evil, buffoonish administration of evil Trump: “Chris Wright says climate change is a ‘side effect of building the modern world’” (weep, reader, weep, for Wright is the fossil fuel devil now in charge of America’s Department of Energy and is daily wrecking our futures).

Of my twenty clippings, which one terrifies the most? Not this one (these are all from the mighty pen of Jessica Hullinger): “UN report: Melting glaciers threaten billions.” Not this one: “Jury sides with pipeline company in Greenpeace lawsuit” (oh, they salivate, those fossil execs, at the prospect of wiping out Greenpeace…).

This is the one. Don’t read it. “Key takeaways from WMO’s ‘State of the Global Climate’ report.”

Just to make that decision difficult for you, here is JH’s pithy, scary, scary summary:

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Mortality

Even if you’re an active exerciser, listening to fitness advice can infuriate. It seems to be commonplace wisdom that one key to really making exercise work for you is to increase your “VO2 Max” (a measure of aerobic capability) by doing intense “intervals.” I’ve done one VO2 Max test that proved to be very disappointing (I thought I’d be at a considerably higher percentile for a 69-year-old than proved to be the case). The solution? Intervals.

So a few times I’ve jogged slowly down to the Glenferrie Oval (historic home of the Hawthorn football team) (pictured below) and tried intervals. In practice that means I’ve “sprinted” from the goal posts at one end to those at the other end, then walked (you’re meant to jog slowly but I was pooped) back to the starting point. I repeat this half a dozen times. All well and good but my heartrate maxes out at a level BELOW my regular jog’s maximum heartrate. Surely that won’t help me improve my heart’s performance, surely? What’s more, although each dose of “intervals” has exhilarated, I just can’t motivate myself to any week-by-week consistency.

For me, so far, intervals have been a dud. But I’ll keep experimenting and trying.

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Forget intervals. This is the lovely scenario greeting me when I do my super-slow, part-walk-run jogging session early of a day. Yes and yes.

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