Terry Prone: 'Don't tell me things can't change'. That's exactly the hopeful note we needed

One of the simplest lines expressed the obstinacy of optimism we all need, right now: “Don't tell me things can't change.” 

The new US president Joe Biden, Jill Biden, US vice president Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff walk up the steps of the US Capitol ahead of last Wednesday's inauguration. Picture: Melina Mara/The Washington Post via AP

Day 108 

It’s like the character in the cartoon, descending a rope and realising it’s fraying above them. Nowhere to go but down. Bone fragments everywhere. That’s me with the iPad. Isolation is tolerable with an iPad, although I could do without it prissily telling me that I spent all of the previous day glued to it. Of course I did. I was working. Also buying the boxed collection of Horrid Henry (don’t ask), checking out the life of the inventor of the Ferris wheel — George Washington Gale Ferris, who died at 37 of typhoid — and trying to get The Daily Telegraph, the right-wing shower, to leave me the hell alone and stop making special offers to me.