Tea and sympathy.

Right now, along with most British liberals, I feel like I'm sprinting up a down escalator. There's to much to do and too much to oppose and too much to say; I'm overworked and exhausted and running on empty, to the extent that I've had a mental health crash and had to call in sick to drink strong tea, contemplate the future of the Left and watch True Blood, simultaneously the worst and most compelling show ever made. Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I mention all this partly to explain why all the posts I've been wanting to write, about gender at the Labour conference, about fucking Roman Polanski child rape apologists, about teenage mums and the notion of social justice and winning the argument on mental health and employment rights, are all boiling away in the charging ether of my hindbrain, and they're likely to stay there, because this weekend I need to chill the fuck out even more than I need to put the world to rights.

Because there's so much going on that I almost don't know where to start. It's been a bad week to be a lefty, a bad week to be a feminist, a bad week to care. Here's just some of what's made me angry this week:

Kate Harding reminds Salon readers that Polanski raped a child.

Melissa McEwan and Jill at Feministe give us the Roman Polanski defend-a-thon (trigger warning).

Anne Perkins sums up the gender agenda at the Labour conference fairly well (I was in that Tim Montgomerie event and almost threw a sausage roll at him).

...and Liberal Conspiracy uncovers Tory links to a European party with a right-wing, homophobic agenda. Hail our future lords and masters!

I've just got back from the Labour Party Conference, which was one of the most depressing events I've ever attended. Brighton was doing its tarty, gaudy best to lighten the mood, all brilliant sunshine, sparkling beaches crisply stinking of chips and sugar and the grand old seafront buildings lit up like the biggest wedding cake on the planet; but it was all to no avail. At the fringe meetings, the equality agenda was on the back foot, the feminist lobby was almost non-existent, and the loudest voices for social justice were those of the hordes of young Socialist Party members protesting outside the Conference zone on Sunday (Dave Osler has a great analysis of this over at Liberal Conspiracy).

The parties were the worst, hordes of apparatchiks drinking themselves into oblivion, staving off the terrible tory hangover we're all going to wake up with come 2010. One former MEP, hearing that I was a feminist blogger, told me that the only difference between the Tories and the Labour old guard is that the latter are 'only unofficially misogynist'.

At some point during the melee, I turned 23. And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I'll probably be in my thirties before a nominally left-of-centre government hold the reins of my country again. From now on, being on the left is going to be a real fight. And whilst I've cut my blogging and journalistic teeth in the last days of Labour, it's all going to be a lot harder from now on, with more ideological territory at stake. John Cruddas MP summed it all up perfectly in the Fabians' Next Labour debate on Sunday, when he declared:

"There is a train coming down the track.It's brutal and it's extremely right wing. It is incumbent upon us to step up and face it."

Right now, today, that train coming down the track feels almost unstoppable. On Tuesday I walked along the seafront with Hilary Wainwright and John McDonnell whilst those two seasoned old campaigners- veterans of 1968, feminists and formerly die-hard Labour activists - mused that the future of the left lay in direct action. The left is not beaten yet, but we're flagging, caught between two parties scrabbling madly for the centre-right, with only the Lib Dems pursuing any sort of liberal platform at their conference. I feel tired before it's even begun: not because I'm ever, ever going to lie down and let them roll over me and mine and our agenda of tolerance and decency and justice. I'm tired because I know I never will, and it's going to get a lot harder from now on. Normal service will resume shortly, but right now I'm going to drink tea and collapse. I hereby give every other lefty reading this permission to do the same: we need all our faculties for the fight to come.

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A small ray of sunshine: The Samosa, a new liberal-leaning, multicultural British comment site, launches today. I'm writing a column for them. You should check it out :)