(Pictures explained below)
Often it’s hard to know it’s hunger. Emotional hunger: empty griping like a bird’s claw contracting under the ribs. Is that the solar plexus? A network of vessels radiating out: my sun-shine, my sun-pain.
Physical hunger: lies low all morning or all afternoon, then gets to its feet and glares at me. ‘WHERE’S MY DINNER?’
Cut off numb from the body, I often forget I’m alive. Alive with sensations, neurotransmissions, electric connections, nerves.
When did I learn to play dead?
I know when. Then. Over and over.
Now I learn to be alive. My claw in my sun is perhaps my sun asking to be able to shine.
The sullen hunger of the body just needs to be fed! How is this done? I live alone.  I crave shine and glimmer and connection. Transmission. Dopamine. I quiet the bird and drug the sullen beast. How to care about planning meals? How to find the effort?Â
I want socialism because as things are I hate food and the effort of food. It just goes on and on. I would like to saunter to the nearby canteen, slippering and giggling alongside others in coats over pyjamas, for affordable food cooked by people happy cooking. I would like to escape my isolation in this society and its dictations to be ‘normal’, all in separate kitchens, cutting, grazing, searing, spilling, picking, tidying. Miserable.
I like laundry: hugging heavy warm damp bundles and the way it lights up and floats in the sun. What would be good would be to hang it out to dry on common land. In Dorking there’s a block of flats backing on to a common, where rows of washing lines loop like telegraph poles, or  stakes for runner beans! Also in Dorking, there’s an actual common grazing place, a round green on a hilltop, surrounded by huge detached houses. So many contradictions in Dorking. A Surrey-hills stockbroker town, with social housing for retired NUJ members, and a band of Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists.
This is offered as a contribution to debates in Your Party about the kind of society we want.
