Sometimes, a report of bad news makes me realise that the world circumstances I’d been living in weren’t as bleak as I’d been assuming. The death of Ella Fitzgerald did this for me. I’d thought she was long dead. It made me realise that I’d missed years of enjoying the fact of her still being alive. Perhaps, along with the “in memoriam” segment at the Baftas, there should also be a “surprisingly still alive” video to encourage us to appreciate some elderly stars while they’re still faintly twinkling.

I used to get the same sensation of retrospective positivity from reported job losses in the British car industry. I was always pleasantly surprised that there were still that many jobs left to lose. That’ll be it now though, I always thought, but then, a year or so later, another gargantuan layoff was announced and I was once again impressed by how many people in the UK had apparently still been making cars all this time.

That’s assuming this isn’t some accountants’ trick whereby it is possible to have negative employees. I’m not talking about GPs’ receptionists – I mean mathematically. Perhaps it’s been discovered that making British workers redundant is such a reliably successful business strategy that some financial instrument has been invented whereby you can continue to do that even when there are no literal British workers left to lay off. Like a futures market in UK redundancies – or a “no futures” market if you happen to be British.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly the sort of thing that could cause the next global economic crisis – though we’d perhaps better let the current one finish first – when it is discovered that notional trillions of British workers must now somehow be made redundant in order to square the circle of global finance. A whole rainforest of P45 forms may need to be filled in on a daily basis.

I got that old familiar “I think the glass that just smashed might actually have been half full!” feeling again last week with reports of “M25 brought to standstill”. So it’s actually been moving then, has it, all this time? That’s nice! I’d been assuming it was now basically a car park. The M25 was a byword for interminable delays when I first moved to London around the time Ella Fitzgerald died. Decades of worsening traffic later, I reckoned it must have become unusable long ago, so the thought that something could noticeably slow it down was rather cheering.

I don’t suppose that was the reaction the Just Stop Oil protesters who caused the standstill were expecting. I think the response of the authorities is more what they had in mind: a great big high court injunction specifically prohibiting the thing they were specifically planning to do. That’s got to be gratifying if you’re doing a protest: to have the desperate gesture you’re about to make officially designated as aberrant behaviour. It’s like the high court was the protesters’ MC: “Ladies and gentlemen, this next protest is absolutely not allowed, so make sure you pay attention to that!”

It’s impressive that, in maximising the illegality of the protesters’ actions, the government is throwing itself squarely behind raising awareness of the climate emergency. It’s a deft move. Ministers know that, as discredited rightwing politicians, their words have little power to convince, but in these actions, they’re showing a real commitment to putting climate change high up the political agenda. It’s a far more powerful gesture than Rishi Sunak’s grudging attendance at Cop27.

So it’s all good really, unless of course the high court injunction was intended to stop the protesters. Anyone who thought that is a moron. I have a niggling fear that the transport secretary, Mark Harper, at least, may have held out some hope. “I instructed National Highways to apply for this further injunction… [to] make it easier to take action against this reckless minority of protesters,” he said, adding: “They could face imprisonment or an unlimited fine.”

Lots to unpack here. I’m not sure his assertion that the protesters constitute a minority is quite the zinger he hopes. When are protesters not? I don’t think there’s ever been a time, in all human history, when a majority of people have been protesting. Even during the French Revolution, I expect most people were keeping their heads down.

But the main idiocy is his implication that this small group of people who are consumed by the, I’m sorry to say, far from irrational terror that the planet is soon to become uninhabitable, is going to back down in fear of prison or a fine. Maybe it would disperse a crowd of thousands, but the hardcore few dozen dangling from motorway bridges have long since made their peace with it.

When Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Matt Twist said: “This action is grossly disproportionate to any legitimate aim that this group may have”, it made me wonder where he’s getting his news. An Opec-sponsored message board?

Disproportionate? They’re stopping traffic because they think the world is ending. And unlike various religious groups down the centuries, there’s a decent chance they may be right.

But the authorities are not merely showing stupidity in the face of these protests, there’s malevolence in the mix too. The new offence, under this year’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, of “conspiracy to intentionally or recklessly cause public nuisance” seems open to wildly illiberal interpretation. It was on suspicion of this crime that several potential protesters were arrested on Monday morning before they’d done any protesting.

What is the justification for new laws restricting protest? The mere fact that protests are on the rise? To address assistant commissioner Twist’s pet subject of proportionality, are they rising out of proportion to legitimate grievance? It doesn’t feel like it. It’s not that the people are getting more bolshie, it’s that the country’s getting worse. And the government’s response is to restrict the legal means by which we can say so.

In the early days of their marriage, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s dream was simple. “We wanted to do something in life together – be in business together, or work together … Just be together,” Sparhawk told me in 2013. The solution materialised in 1993 when they formed Low, in which Parker sang and drummed until her death on Saturday of ovarian cancer.

They’d known each other since elementary school, growing up together in Clearbrook, a tiny city in rural Minnesota. Parker’s mother had been an aspiring country singer whose career had gone no further than a handful of shows in Minneapolis, but still loved singing old gospel songs with her daughters, occasionally performing at church or at funerals. After they began dating in their teens, Sparhawk would hang out at the Parker house, and jam with Mimi’s mother. It was there that Sparhawk and his future wife/bandmate first harmonised, singing Neil Young’s Heart of Gold together.

For Parker, music had been “kind of a dream, but not something I’d ever thought I’d do”. She had other passions anyway: sports, and riding snowmobiles across Minnesota’s wintery landscapes. But then Sparhawk suggested he and Parker form a band, giving her a snare drum and cymbal he’d found in the basement of the arena where he worked (Parker had played drums in her junior high concert band, years earlier). “She was a little reluctant,” Sparhawk remembered. “She’s really not terribly interested in being in front of people.”

That minimal drum set helped shape Low’s early, spare sound, but Parker’s voice – along with her songwriting – would prove her most crucial contribution to the group: a hushed, strong voice, holy yet human. “I vividly remember writing Words, off our first album, in our old apartment,” Sparhawk told me. “And then Mimi came in with the harmony, and it was like putting the spirit into a body, like taking something two-dimensional and making it three-dimensional.” The intimacy of their harmonies almost felt like we listeners were eavesdropping. Parker later told Ace Hotel that on the rare occasions she sang with anyone else, “it almost feels like I’m doing wrong … like I’m cheating on Alan, in a weird way.”

The spectral quality of their early demos charmed legendary indie maverick Kramer, who produced their debut album, 1994’s I Could Live in Hope. Critics christened their sound “slowcore” – a term the group detested. But Low soon transcended such pigeonholing, their unhurried pace and sparse arrangements earning a loyal cult following. After Gap soundtracked its 2000 Christmas ad campaign with the group’s glacial reading of Little Drummer Boy (off the group’s 1999 EP of holiday songs), Low found a modest commercial breakthrough.

The following year’s Things We Lost in the Fire was a masterpiece, defined by Parker’s contributions. Laser Beam was breathtaking, a resonant lullaby inspired by Parker watching her alcoholic father being Maced by a cop when she was a child, immersing the trauma in a healing stillness. On In Metal, she used the practice of bronzing a baby’s booties as a metaphor for the intense vulnerability that follows having a child – the fear they may come to harm, the sensation that parenthood itself is a fleeting experience, quickly ebbing away – singing “Partly hate to see you grow / And just like your baby shoes / Wish I could keep your little body / In metal”. Both songs were studies in Low’s ability to create music that is both beautiful and unsettling at the same time.

The albums that followed built on Low’s early acclaim, but also fearlessly dismantled and reassembled their paradigm, adopting rock dynamics with 2005’s The Great Destroyer and, on their three albums with producer and Bon Iver collaborator BJ Burton – 2015’s Ones And Sixes, 2018’s Double Negative and 2021’s Hey What – embracing a bold experimentalism in sync with darker lyrics which reflected a country in turmoil. Indeed, some of Parker’s finest songs came in Low’s final decade, not least Just Make It Stop, the highlight of 2013’s Jeff Tweedy-produced The Invisible Way. Over muted drums, emotive piano and brooding guitar strum, Parker sang with understated desperation – “I’m close to the edge / I’m at the end of my road” – but her harmonies offered a shard of hope, a sense that she wasn’t alone.

Like the wonderful All Night, from last year’s Hey What, Parker’s lyric seemed to allude to Sparhawk’s mental health struggles, which she told Carmel Holt, host of the Sheroes podcast, he had suffered from “for many years … It’s not one of those things that has an easy fix.” As the child of an alcoholic, Parker noted that she and Sparhawk were “a perfect storm”, but their love was strong enough that they were able to weather it. Indeed, whatever turbulence hit, their union endured, their chemistry a mutually sustaining thing. “It’s a good balance,” Sparhawk told me in 2013. “She’s shy. I’m still a stuttering 14-year-old boy with a guitar. My erratic psyche and her very in control, reserved nature have pretty much saved each other over the years. Mimi’s been the essence that’s made us able to do the things we do.”

It was on Holt’s podcast earlier this year that Parker revealed her December 2020 cancer diagnosis. In the interview she’d said that she’d had “some really intense chemotherapy” and surgery – “a crazy and surreal two years”. “Our time can be cut short,” she added. “We try to make each day mean something, to make a connection with our kids, our family.” The ability to make music, to release their universally acclaimed Hey What in the midst of this turmoil had, she said, “been a respite and a source of comfort … I’m thankful for the experiences I’ve had, the opportunities to make beautiful music, to collaborate with Alan, to understand his chaos and his tendencies to mesh them with my calmness and my search for harmony and beautiful things.”