CUT IT BACK

There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment, not that you’d notice it if you were to rather foolishly only allow these pages to be your guide to what’s going on in the world. Only this very week there’s been the outcome of the Hillsborough investigation, a possible future queen has had topless pictures of her published in newspapers, the middle east has started to erupt into violence again, and an American presidential election campaign has got into gear.

Not that you’d have heard anything about any of those things I’ve you’d come a-calling upon these pages over the past few days. My focus has been focussed far more closely to home, on matters of shopping and work and holidays and my own ventures out into the big, wide and scary world of social media and the more important happenings of the world’s news have rather, as they often do, passed me by.

I even had to be told what the “Major Oak” tree was last week because I’d never heard of it. (And that’s not the half of it. Only this week, in an ultimately futile gesture to make me be merely four years behind the times, I had to have explained to me who or what – I’ve forgotten already - a “Lady Ga Ga” is…)

Ah well, I suppose I do sometimes forget to pay attention, but then I do also forget that these are supposed to be personal thoughts and might not touch upon the bigger events of the world because, quite frankly, neither do I. Not only that, but I would probably only embarrass myself if I did choose to comment upon such things. There are, after all, far wiser heads looking into these matters and simply (and without any real knowledge) adding what “I reckon” into the mix probably isn’t going to help all of that much, as I wish our news editors and advocates of “Have Your Say” news gathering would realise.

We are, after all, mostly ill-informed and ignorant about many things, and we used to turn to the people who were supposed to be “in the know” for their wise counsel, but that doesn’t seem to be the preferred way of things now and in our “democratic” wisdom we’re allowing every idiot to voice their opinion, no matter how idiotic that opinion might be. Nowadays it seems as if it’s the idiots that are running our asylum and they want us to tell them how to do it.

I recently heard a man trying to persuade his entire family about a “fact” he knew about a particular TV Chef which was unutterably wrong, but he sounded pretty convincing and they all looked pretty convinced by the end of the conversation.

The idiot!

In the end, perhaps that’s what it’s all going to come down to. The biggest idiot with the loudest voice will have the opinion which we all end up having to believe as we descend once more into tribalism as civilised society crumbles all around us and our culture sails off into history.

Meanwhile, on a lighter historical note, the bones of Richard III have quite possibly been found under a car park in Leicester and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been resurrected by a corporation that finally seems to understand that its previous policy of short-term thinking and opening contracts up to the highest bidder might not, after all, have been the shrewdest of moves.

I’ve always preferred the idea of “in-house” design departments of whichever type, by the way. Somehow I always feel that if you’re specifically focussed on promoting “your” company and products, you’ll hit a richer vein of creativity…

Instead there came along this idea that you had to “cut things back” and put them “out to tender” as if by going with the price which undercut another one by just a few percentage points, you would end up getting a “better” rather than a “cheaper” service. There is, of course, another old adage about “getting what you pay for” and anyone who’s ever had their local council change their recycling contractor because of getting a cheaper bid will know that “cheaper” really does not generally mean “better…”

But once more, I digress. That’s not what I wanted to write about today and, once again, I’ve allowed myself to get sidetracked and gone off chasing a particular train of thought like a will o’ the wisp instead of making my point, whatever that might turn out to have been. This is what happens when you allow amateur bloggers like me to compile their own “thought for the day” instead of going to the tried, trusted and occasionally truthful “big thinkers” of the world to guide you thoughtfully through their own well-thought out arguments.

Some mornings I get this sudden realisation that I’m just an ignorant idiot who doesn’t really know much about anything and hasn’t had a proper, well-judged opinion on anything very much for quite some considerable time, and sometimes that really bothers me.

Meanwhile, and rather surprisingly given my predilection for noticing significant numbers, blog posting number 700 came and went last week with little fanfare (not that even I seemed to notice), although it was, coincidentally I’m sure, also the most “popular” day these pages had had in quite some considerable time. Whilst they never quite make it to three figures, the page views topped out at 78 that day (or – perhaps less impressively - 19 if you read the other counter…) which is kind of a lot really, and, naturally, they plummeted to a far lower number the next day to keep things in balance. Even so, it’s still certainly far more people than I ever let read my stupid plays. Nevertheless, I am feeling the urge to cut back on these pieces, too, but then I’m always thinking that and usually something pops into my brain, no matter how ill-informed and ignorant it might turn out to be, and drags me back here.

And so, as we stagger on bewilderedly towards the second anniversary of me poking my head out into the great big cyberworld and saying “hi”, perhaps I can at least try and persuade myself that I must be doing something right, if only to have managed to get this far, even if I’m doing it all far too cheaply and have managed to spend the better part of two years actually not managing to say very much about anything at all.

I suppose that only proves I’m human if nothing else, although from the constant references to whether or not I am a robot from various websites, I sometimes wonder about that, too. Perhaps it’s time I took that Turing Test…?