In hopeless times, we can never afford to lose hope | AL Kennedy

As democracy's opponents peddle hate, anger and division, our job is to act like citizens of a better country

So, 2025... Will you finish us off or just leave us with ineradicable psychic and emotional scarring? Will our hyper-capitalist special economic zones ooze out to meet our hyper-capitalist freeports and offer us exciting new opportunities to be indentured serfs, or work abroad as trafficked persons, or perhaps just lurk dangerously in the depths of the very toxic harbour sludge that provoked our mutation into new, nauseating life forms. I hope I get fangs. I've always wanted fangs. And a tail.

Like many of you, I'm unsure if 2025 will be able to scar me emotionally - after the past decade, my soul already looks like Deadpool. That's not the peak cute Ryan Reynolds at the start of the movie, or the snazzy mask and cool moves - I mean the naked wealed and welted freak with the face of a Halloween pumpkin in late December. What's left to scar, 2025?

AL Kennedy's new novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, is published by Saraband on 9 January