The world looks much more frightening through the cracks in the wall

OK, so that was weird.

I had my mental health assessment earlier this morning, a fairly straight-forward phone interview with a perfectly pleasant lass, mostly answering questions on a 0-4 (never, some days, most days, every day) or 0-8 (avoidance and impact of various mental states on various activities), then a more general discussion ahead of a more thorough consult. My throat clamped up a bit and at the end of it I had a little cry - just broaching these things is totes emosh when you've been doing everything possible to avoid it - then I headed out on my bike to do some chores (and clear my head, truth be told). I got back, had lunch and suddenly decided to put on music and do housework.

Before you could say White Winged Dove, I was boogying away to Stevie Nicks (don't you dare judge me) all over the house wielding the vacuum cleaner like I was Freddie Mercury wanting to break free. Cool, I thought, I guess that's just the elation of release, because I'm finally doing something about it. Then Leather and Lace came on. I sang along with Stevie's part and dropped my voice for Don Henley's and suddenly my throat contracted on "Could you ever love a man like me?"

That's it. I was done. I'd fallen from elation to despair in a moment and it was all I could do not to collapse in a heap. I know how I feel about myself, was it that? AM I so fragile? This had never been "our song" with any of my partners, but it did take me back to the time my first relationship, my longest by far, my most painful breakup. Was it every failure since, every time I've run away or sabotaged a relationship before it could - as it inevitably would - end of its own accord?

Or is it just that my emotions are opening up, ever so slightly, after being buried? Is this why I've built this shell around myself, because I'm afraid of truly feeling anything, afraid that I can't control my emotions and they might destroy me as they almost have before.

I need to try to be brave enough to face the world outside, but it takes a lot. Facing it without the shell is all the harder. And if I'm having this much trouble listening to Stevie, who knows when I'll be up to Judie.

Book review: Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman: Are we the bad guys?

Starting as dusk gathers on Brighton pier and the evening strollers are transfixed by a murmuration of starlings, Julian Hoffman takes us around the world showing us how human activity is ravaging the wonders of nature that both nourish our sense of wonder and are vital to our health and wellbeing as part of a thriving ecosystem. It is not a happy book. The awe that Hoffman superbly captures at the beauty of the natural world only underlines what we are destroying by our wilful blindness and our obsession with economic growth and measuring everything with a short-term monetary value. From a previously unknown species of spider in an abandoned English quarry to the magnificent Balkan lynx and the few scraps of tallgrass prairie in the American midwest, we are pushing out irreplaceable biodiversity with roads and shopping malls and monocultured crops. 

The author makes it clear he is not merely arguing for preservation for nature for its own sake, but because it is vital to human health and survival in the short, medium and long term. In one chapter he writes about an established set of allotments in London that not only provides food for locals but an area of green growth teeming with life, and an area of abandoned "waste ground" in Glasgow that nearby residents have turned into a park and nature reserve. Both are under threat from development and he begins by telling us "Of the following two places, one will be saved, the other destroyed." 

He does show us successes, and how small groups of determined people can fight and even sometimes win against the encroachment - as well as the above, there is some success on those tallgrass prairies, a patch of ancient woodland not five miles from where I write this (which, along with mention of other Sheffield woods in which I played as a child and have visited regularly since really brought home the value, as if that personal connection were needed), the former British Army testing site that, due to the danger of left-over munitions has remained undeveloped and become a remarkably vibrant and important habitat. The rejection of a new motorway that would destroy much of the Gwent Levels on the South Wales coast. 

However, despite this, I was left feeling bleak at the prospects. Yes, I am a depressive and currently managing a particularly low patch which may feed into my pessimism, but these patches seem so fragile, so vulnerable, so at odds with the economic forces that see everything as a resource to be exploited. In his final chapter he points out how many pieces of good fortune were needed to ensure that we still have a few slivers of the Cambridgeshire Fens that are undeveloped, and when we see that a drug for cattle is approved in Europe despite evidence that it is responsible for almost eradicating vultures when used in India, or that - despite a law and specific court orders making mining small islands in Indonesia completely illegal, this is openly ignored and corporations land heavy equipment to strip the vegetation and topsoil to scour the minerals beneath, causing run-off that buries and poisons the most valuable reefs on the planet, I find it difficult to hold out hope of change. 

I have known since I was young that talk of "destroying the Earth" is pure hubris. We are a blip on this planet and, whatever we do, it will continue and repopulate itself with new organisms, new diversity. We are here now, for this moment, and have a choice of how to treat our home and the creatures we share it with, a choice for the legacy we leave our children and grand children and great grand children. 

Still, as the cartoon says, for a brief glorious moment we had great shareholder value. 

Increasingly, I think I'm on the side of the David Morse character in 12 Monkeys.