RUSH HOUR RUMBLINGS

Yesterday morning, because I knew I would be in a bit of a rush for once, I had written the latest of my humble offerings in advance and saved it, ready to spring it on the world in the usual way and at the usual time before heading out into the dawn’s early light and have the six monthly inspection of my teeth by my dentist.

Sadly, as I did my usual posting procedure, the link to FizzBok that I usually use wouldn’t let me do it. It had been “blocked” or rather I got a message saying: “This message contains blocked content that has previously been flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this is an error.”

Well, obviously I did let them know, because I was rather bewildered. No-one had ever told me I’d been abusive, and I’d certainly never considered myself to be “spammy” (such a lovely word) before.

102 posts and only now was I offending someone…?

Obviously, I must be losing my touch...

But, what was it about Humphrey Bogart that they found to be so very offensive? I checked through the text again. No abusive language, no websites named. I did mention the brand name of a certain type of bread, but I’d done that sort of thing a gazillion times before without it upsetting anyone.

The mystery remained.

There was a row of asterisks dividing up the text which might have been misinterpreted as the kind of non-swearing that the tabloids have a liking for. Perhaps that was it…?

My head was full of interesting thoughts about the possibilities that someone out there in wibbly-wobbly-woo world had perhaps taken offence at my initials which, despite having had them all my life, might be an unfortunate combination of letters in some faraway place, but still, they did form part of the link, and it could have been the text of the link that was being objected to, so perhaps that was it…? Or maybe “Lesser Blogfordshire” had suddenly innocently become a place from which many, many emails were emanating in order to part people from their hard-earned and funnel it through to some unspecified African nation, or perhaps it had unwittingly become a source of that strange lottery that we all seem to win despite never having entered it. A mysterious gentleman did ring me up the previous day telling me that they’d “detected a virus” and “my computer was about to crash”, so could I “just switch it on please”, but I’d told him “no” and put the phone down on him.

Maybe the internet gods were taking their revenge…?

I had precious little time to ponder on these matters, for, as I said, there was a lot for me to do that morning and no time at all to ponder on the vagaries of t’internet. My sister was about to head home after her sterling support over the last couple of weeks with regards to the ongoing family crisis, and I needed to meet up with her for a quick update and key-exchange before she disappeared back off down the motorway.

For the first time in a while I had to negotiate the morning rush hour traffic, and I had the radio to listen to in the car for once, so very quickly my head was being pumped up with the kind of thoughts persuading me that we really were all heading to hell in a handcart that might well be considered offensive by anyone else when I was mulling them over later:

Why are the roads so full of very aggressive drivers who seem to find it personally insulting to their very existence that you happen to be in front of them and choose to go along at the required legal speed limit? I don’t mind what they do with their own driving licence, but I’m not going to risk losing mine just because they want me to…

Or, why do so many people with a car full of children choose to be more interested in what darling Jimmy or Jenny or whoever (other names are available) are trying to tell them rather than to paying any attention to what is going on around them on the road…? If you’re driving a car resembling a bus for safety reasons, surely it would make sense to at least try to drive it safely…?

Do modern cars not have indicators then? Or brakes? Do they magically shrink when there's a car coming towards you in a gap only big enough to take one vehicle at a time?

Then, on the radio, there was some media discussion over changing the laws on succession, which had me just mulling over the unlikely possibility that future Kingy and his future bride might just have said to the reporters “Ec-tually, one has decided that one doesn’t want to have any orf-spring…”

Now that would have been refreshing.

The press really do talk about that girl (who’s name I really can’t be bothered remembering or looking up – it only encourages them…) and inspect her as if she was some kind of breeding mare, and I do wonder if the TV companies are going to start broadcasting live from the Royal Uterus during or slightly after the ceremony in April…? Shoving Nicholas Witchell in there with a microphone doing vox pops with any passing fluids that might happen to go by.

You may well squirm, but one day it will probably happen.

Then I remembered something annoying from the TV the previous night and started raging against that too. It was that bizarre TV ad for a supermarket where idiots approach people and take photographs of what they’re eating, which wouldn’t be so warmly welcomed if they tried it with me, you can be sure of that. Apart from really not seeing the point of it at all, have we really got to the point as a society that the “grunt and point” system has become far too much effort and we’d rather use our wretched, overpriced and utterly pointless telephones to do it for us?

Madness.

Anyway, I saw my sister off and I got to the dentists in plenty of time and had my usual tooth inspection, which I suppose is possibly what got me onto thinking about those “horsey” matters, and then I got my usual telling off for not flossing enough and headed back home, where the original Mr. Bogart and his pals still failed to materialise, if that’s not starting to border on the obsessive.

Happily, at least now, when I venture out in the evening, I’m starting to notice that there’s just the faintest glimmer of daylight still hanging on in the sky, which is thankfully just a little bit uplifting. Spring, as they say, is coming. The darkness, like my hairline, is receding, and all will be well in the world.

If we haven’t got ourselves carried to hell in a handcart in the meantime, that is.