You, of course, might not be that kind of person. You might
be the kind of person who is just full to the brim with a kind of natural
self-confidence that would never allow you to harbour such doubts and, if you
are, well jolly good luck to you. The rest of us mere mortals are plagued with
our own problems, of course, but why on earth should those concern you? You
are, after all, perfect, and everything you do is done in the sure knowledge
that you are right, so that must be simply great…
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, things are afoot. I was
nearly going to say “great things” there, but they seldom are all that great to
be honest. As I look about me bleary-eyed in the dark, harsh cold of another
pre-dawn, I do wonder quite how it has come to pass that pretty much every
decision I have made in my life has led to this moment.
Or this one… Despite everything, time will keep on ticking
away, won’t it…?
Entropy increases, or so they say, and when it comes to my
crumbling little abode they might very well be right, although, as we now have
builders scurrying across the roof tiles from time to time, perhaps we have, at
least, managed to check that, at least temporarily.
Although, almost as a direct reaction to that, and following
the universal law that if you start to put one thing right, another will
naturally start to go wrong (and if they’re now claiming that super-symmetry
may be a lost cause, perhaps they should visit my little exception that proves
the rule…), the plumbing is starting to
show signs of falling apart.
Nowadays it seems to take a good fifteen minutes or so just
to get enough tepid water to fill a bowl to do a little bit of washing up. If you
run the tap long enough, the water will get hot, of course, but only for about
the two seconds it takes to put the bowl underneath the flow. Then it will
immediately revert to it’s normal ice-cold state and reduce the ambient
temperature of the precious cupful of hot water you’ve just managed to collect. After all, why could I possibly ever need more than two seconds worth of hot water anyway...? Oh, yeah... Right...
And some people still doubt that the universe is getting
colder…
At the same time, the bullet is bitten, and, whilst one lot
of environmental wastage is happening at one side of the sink, the huge carbon
footprint option of boiling a kettle of water to wash the pots with is taken at
the cold tap which, to stop its incessant dribbling, is jammed so firmly into
the “off” position, that I am unable to turn it and hold the kettle at the same
time and many expletives erupt, especially as I’m still trying to keep one hand
in the “hot” water flow just in case it makes a sudden decision to actually
finally warm up.
The world, it seems, refuses to go quietly.
As I rubbed the sleepydust (or whatever that goo is
really called) out of my eyes the other
morning, I happened at the same time to boot up the television set in order to
catch up on the overnight headlines, and I really couldn’t believe my eyes.
In fact I couldn’t believe them so much that I had to rub them
all over again just to make sure.
Instead of any actual news, instead I got about two minutes
of “Celebrity Up the Jungle” or whatever it’s called, and this was on a channel
that wasn’t even broadcasting the wretched programme.
They had, of course, found a “newsy” angle to justify this
inclusion, as one of our sitting MPs had opted to take part in this televisual
feast rather than doing the job she was being paid for, which gave the wretched
newsbies, in a week when they were already making so much of the news be about
themselves, another excuse to dress up a bit of nonsense on the telly and treat
it as if it was a “proper” news story, thus giving the media yet another
opportunity to aggrandise itself and convince itself of how “important” it must
really be…
But this is all rather symptomatic of the modern media and
its obsession with itself. “We are important!” they always seem to be implying,
whereas we all know that “The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought” as George Orwell may very well have suggested.
When the Director General of the BBC resigned after his
turbulent 54 days in office, it was, of course, “newsworthy” although whether
it was as newsworthy as the journalists seemed to suggest is debatable. After
all, it seemed that he was so unaware of his own channel’s news output that he
didn’t seem to know that he was resigning just as his flagship news programme
was going off air, but for the rest of us, we really don’t give much of a
flying fig as to who is running the news, just so long as they can be trusted
to run it with a certain amount of integrity and honesty.
After all, most of the time, we’d all apparently rather be
watching people dancing in ballrooms or eating bugs in jungles so long as,
every so often, they tell us who’s died and in what country the latest disaster
is unfolding, because these days, schadenfreude seems to be what the news is really there for.
Which is why, when I’m having these musings of an early
morning and whilst my eyes are still crusted over and my brain isn’t yet quite
active enough to know when to keep my big mouth shut, I can dress it all up
with my tales of woe about my taps. After all, how else could I get your
attention, if I wasn’t giving you someone else’s misery to wallow in…?
That’s how it’s supposed to work, yes…?
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