About three and a half years ago, during a time that now seems to belong to an earlier historical era, I became obsessed with the idea of the apocalypse.
The prospect of climate catastrophe was increasingly imminent, the fabric of the global political order was beginning to fray and it seemed to me that some incalculable darkness was gathering on the horizon of the future.
Sitting on the couch with my son as he watched cartoons about friendly anthropomorphised animals, I would come across a news story on my Twitter feed about how yet another species had gone extinct, or about a chunk of ice the size of lower Manhattan that had just broken off a polar ice cap, or the terrifying proliferation of antibiotic-resistant diseases, and I would look at the back of my son’s head, his soft and slender little neck, and feel an overwhelming guilt about the world he had been thrust into.