To be fair, it is what I was writing about a couple of days ago, when that spoof BBC meeting popped into my head and I thought it might be slightly more ‘entertaining’ to write that instead that day, so when the earlier thoughts were finally published a day or two later, that became a small example of what was already the past masquerading as the present, and was able to demonstrate in a small way precisely what it was I was mulling over back then. Kind of. Or maybe it just proved another half truth, that, as the theme tune to “Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads” went “It’s the only thing to look forward to, the past…”
Whilst I was mulling over all that kind of stuff, Virgin went and changed their website again, just to confuse me, I’m sure. All the exciting new upgraded jiggery-pokery that they’d added to it now tends to cause the aging relic that I do my work on to crash out of ‘Safari’ much more often than it used to. Oh joy! In the meantime, and whilst I wait for the ancient operating systems to creak back into action after the subsequent restart, I keep (coincidentally I’m sure...) getting telephone calls from people with strange sounding accents that speak of faraway places telling me that they’ve detected a problem or series of problems with my PC. I tell them that I’m having no problems with it, but they seem pretty insistent and I have to get to the point of just putting the phone down on them, but I still try to be terribly polite about it which does rather make the whole pointless conversation carry on for much, much longer than it really should do.
We had a damp and soggy Sunday last weekend after the cloudy wonders of the night of the supermoon, but at least amidst all the rain there were birds to watch again as spring seems to have properly sprung. You can always tell because the rains start to hammer down and the temperature starts to drop. Never mind. Despite all that, I got terribly excited whilst I was on the phone to spot a bunch of tiny little birds which I was unfamiliar with clustered on one of the bird feeders after I’d just filled them up again that morning. Sadly, because I was on the phone I wasn’t able to grab my camera or bellow upstairs to the beloved and suggest that she looked out of the window. Instead I continued with my conversation, probably unable to hide my irritation and impatience very well, and away they flew, never to return, despite me lurking by the window on the off chance for rather too much of that particular weekend morning.
I had been rather neglecting the birdies of late, forgetting for week after week to refill the feeders because of other things going on in my life. It’s sad really, because I do get a lot of pleasure from watching them when I actually make the time to do so. Naturally, they have since repaid my renewed kindness by breaking the bird feeder (I suspect a rather determined jackdaw), and now nothing but a sorry chain dangles from the hook and the feeder itself lies in a shrub with all its nutty content scattered around for the benefit of both the many jackdaws and any of the passing squirrels to nibble upon.
If you watch any of the interviews you see on the tellybox, you would get the idea that metropolitan folk really don’t seem to think that any of us should want to live in the countryside, thinking instead that it’s somehow unnatural to want to live anywhere but in the big city. At least that’s the impression you get whenever matters rural are discussed in the news media, that slight sense of bewilderment as and if they ever talk to these (as they like to imply) ‘simple unsophisticated folk’. This week it was a sliding scale on petrol pricing for communities out on the edge that was taxing their little grey cells because it didn’t seem to cross the reporter’s mind that by asking some urban city dwellers what they ‘reckoned’ about it, he was rather missing the bigger picture. Ah well, perhaps I’m being unkind. Maybe they couldn’t afford the petrol to drive all the way to the faraway island communities who might have found such a thing to be beneficial.
Maybe if some of these high-flying sophisticates got to spend a couple of hours watching the birds, or the flowers, or the trees, or the sunset, they might change their opinions on such things, but I guess that they’re all just too busy being youthful, ambitious and go-getting to stop for enough of a moment to actually do that. Instead they’d rather make pronouncements and rules and laws that I’m sure work perfectly well in whatever shallow environmentally controlled high offices they inhabit, but which they utterly fail to understand really don’t work once you get beyond the tarmac encircling the concrete jungle.
I do, of course, have a bittersweet ‘love-hate’ relationship with the media anyway. I read an awful lot of it to inspire much of what I think about, but then I hate a lot of what I read. The media, meanwhile, are generally a cynical bunch and not known in recent years for celebrating or lauding anyone who they see as being ‘clever’ and some of the debate that my tiny fragmentary contribution to pop culture garners does little to persuade me otherwise.
Wednesday was what can only be considered (as someone much more eloquent than me put it) to be one of those “Too much news” days. Normally, just the fact that it was budget day would have been enough to keep the newsbods busy enough, but then there were bombs in Jerusalem and the continuing fighting in Libya as well as the worry of the radiation in the drinking water in Japan to think about. Then they announced that cricketing legend Fred Titmus had died and I was only just getting my head around all of that when it was announced that Dame Elizabeth Taylor had also died. She was (give or take a couple of weeks) the same age as my mother, you know, which kind of makes you think. Coincidentally, I’d only been thinking about Richard Burton this week as well because of another thing I was working on, so my thoughts were already moving her way, with “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf” being another of the all-time classic great movie performances I tend to believe. I guess it all goes towards helping to prove the interconnectedness of all things but, whilst I know that all her great performances were long behind her, it still remained a sad loss.
Ah well, the census forms are sitting there awaiting the coming of the black biro and will no doubt devour much of my day today, and I really must look into repairing or replacing that bird feeder, and so, with these small tasks, the little tiny moments of the jigsaw of life slot together some more.
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