I’ve been thinking recently that, despite how i sometimes wish i knew what it was like to live in years gone past, and how it often feels like everything is about to topple over at the hands of { authoritarian reactionary bigots | power-hungry anti-democratic dictators | neurotic puritan ‘progressives’ } (take your pick), i am, at the end of the day, so, so grateful that i live in the modern era, and in a developed country to boot.

I'm grateful to live in a time with the highest living standards in history; where even someone flipping burgers at Macca’s has access to luxuries that would make Louis XIV blush.

To live in a time with modern medicine, where people are inoculated at a young age against pestilences that used to ravage the world, and to live in a country where urgent care is free of charge.

That wars between nations are largely a thing of the past, at least to the scale of World Wars I and II.

That i live in an era and place where being bisexual or gay is, legitimately, no big deal — something that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago.

That every day the acceptance of us transgendered folk is growing, and that, if i had the money and determination, i could get a pretty good approximation of the other sex grafted on — something Heliogalabus could only dream of.

That in the age of the internet, people can find community anywhere, no matter how odd or niche their interests and identities are, and that nearly everyone has access to the sum of human knowledge at their finger tips.

Yes, 2021 has its problems, and so does the UK. But i wouldn't live anywhen or anywhere else.

....Okay, maybe Norway.