I see that unesco's latest global gabfest launches this week. It's the world conference on esd with interminable lectures and panels. I predict that there will be much grandstanding, virtue signalling and sanctimonious pontificating, and no doubt myriad folk will tell what they are convinced are their ineffable and immutable truths.
Just looking at the programme requires a strong stomach. It brings Oscar Wilde's lines on life in Reading Gaol to mind:
"All that we know who lie in gaol / Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year, / A year whose days are long."
For "goal", read any unesco conference. The relief at not having to take any of this at all seriously any more is palpable, and has already done wonders for my well-being. If being post-esd is a syndrome, it's a welcome one.
At least, thanks to the unwitting and unwonted virus, all the contributors are spared having to be in Berlin for the event. They will be missing networking, of course, and Berlin's hotels, restaurants, bars and fabled nightclubs will be the poorer for it; much sausage will remain unconsummated.
But it's not as though it's COP26. Or that anything very much is at stake. It's only esd after all, which unesco continues to treat as conceptually sound despite all the available evidence. When you continually have to explain what you're talking about, even to a professional audience, you really should just give up and spend more time on the allotment.
My advice, unwanted though it is, is to ignore the gabfest and watch the 3 box sets of Babylon Berlin on Sky Atlantic.
Loved the Berlin one too. Gabfest is such an appropriate description.