How to be Hopeful - A Year of Attempting to Feel Less Awful About the World Doors: 18:30 Start: 19:30 ‘No one’s inventing good, new futures any more,’ I say to my husband, Pete. ‘Everyone seems resigned to accepting that things will be dreadful. I can’t bear it. I need us to do something different.’ One morning, Caitlin Moran woke up - and realised that she had reached Peak Despair. And she’s not alone - in a world of worsening news, online fist-fights, and filthy rivers, it’s hard not to feel, well, terrible. Of course, in books, and movies, when the heroine faces such a crisis, she makes a seismic life-change: moving to a remote, ramshackle farmhouse; walking an ancient, 600-mile pathway; or reconnecting with her primal, joyful self by adopting a baby hawk, or hare. But Caitlin’s new book, How to be Hopeful, is not that kind of book. She tried - but it turns out remote Welsh farmhouses are really expensive. No-one with a job can walk 600 miles. And it’s incredibly hard to get access to baby hawks in North London. Instead, Caitlin decided to go on … a domestic quest. To see if she could stay in the same house, in the same neighbourhood, and the same awful modern world - but try to make better days. She left 800,000 followers on social media; eschewed 24/7 rolling-news for local newspapers; and sat on buses without headphones, to start listening to what people are really saying. Turns out they’re not, by and large, shouting hate-crimes at each other. They’re just working out whether to have chicken, or sausages for tea, instead. Picking litter, donating blood, rewilding a garden, trying to understand where modern anxiety really comes from - slowly, all these things allowed for something that had felt impossible a year before: Caitlin learned to fall back in love with the world again. How to be Hopeful is Caitlin’s story of how, over the course of a year, she realised that “waiting to feel hopeful again” just won’t work: being hopeful is a decision. It’s some