ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time a man with limited intelligence sat down at a keyboard and decided to share a little piece of his mind with the world. He didn’t have a lot going on, to be fair, just an ordinary little life, in an ordinary little corner of the world, but it meant a lot to him and he thought that he might like to try and let the world know how much it actually did mean.

Once upon a time the words used to come so easily, burning in the mind like blazing stars, screaming out with the need to be recorded and remembered. The words don’t come so easily now, they flicker in the dying embers and, on a good day, sometimes rearrange themselves into a pattern that can be recognised, but mostly they remain just the red glow of hot coals dying in the grate on a dark night.

Once upon a time, a breakfast cereal company decided to put out two flavoured variants on one of their popular products to see if people liked them, but because everything needed a marketing strategy in those dismal and shallow days, they had to add a caveat. If you preferred one to the other, you had to vote for it on a social networking site and, if enough people agreed with your choice, your preferred flavour would survive and the other would be consigned to the dustbin of history, no matter how many other customers might actually have preferred the other sort. Perhaps they call this process something like marketing evolution, where only the fittest survive, but I suspect it of being something more insidious, more sinister, a dastardly plot to give us less choice by pretending to give us more so we end up with a homogenous society where everybody is all the same.

Once upon a time I might have railed against this, shouted and raved in burning letters ten miles high, but now the universe is old, and I am old and the inevitable march of time is trampling me into the dust and I find it harder and harder to care any more. No, that’s not strictly true. I think I probably care more than I ever did, but I’ve just come to the inevitable conclusion that nothing I can say or do will change any of it. The majority rules, and even though I like to hope that people are generally more savvy than I give them credit for, I start to wonder that if that’s what they want, then that’s what they deserve to get. If you choose a grey, bland and uniform world where the other points of view are ignored, or dismissed, then that is precisely what you will get.

Once upon a time I would have been screaming “Vive la difference!” with all my lungs, and extolling the virtues and delights of the eccentric, the other point of view, the anomaly, and the exception that proves the rule, all those little bits of variety that make up the spice of life, but not any more. The greyness is overwhelming us and we just sat there and let it happen. We mocked those who didn’t fit in, or had an alternative point of view instead of embracing them and rejoicing at the colours they brought into our drab little lives.

Once upon a time a movie had genuine thrills and jeopardy. A brave person who performed stunts for a living attached to a flimsy wire would astonish and terrify me with their antics as they threw themselves around in a high place at genuine risk both real and imagined to life and limb, but now, all the high places are green screens, and the daredevils are never more than a couple of feet from the studio floor and the thrill has just gone.

Once upon a time you would quite possibly have gone “Eh? Where’s he going with this?” and you would have been right. There we are discussing the deeper philosophies and suddenly he’s gone off onto some tangent about stuntmen…? W (as they say) TF??? Bear with me, everything’s connected. Those real stuntmen leaping around on those cable cars, thousands of feet above a valley floor, or jumping off those impossibly high buildings, or climbing those comedy walls to hang from that clockface made our hearts quicken and our pulses race, even if it turns out that there was no real danger involved, it looked as if there was and things could still have gone wrong. They made us feel we were alive because they were alive and in real, genuine danger. Whilst it’s not the greatest of human traits, people used to go and watch motorcyclists jump over buses as much for the chance that something could go wrong as to appreciate the achievement of it going right. Now, because we know that all the danger is artificial as the environments they are moving around in, the only thing left to excite us is the quality of the CGI, which is fine if you are some kind of “gamer” I suppose, where all of life’s little problems can be solved by hitting “restart” after the legend of “Game Over” has flashed up, but somehow I think it will leave us needing other thrills, other excitements, and that’s when our problems could really begin.

Once upon a time, the world was young and so was I.