Take, for example, a very vivid memory that I was fretting about on one recent morning. I was completely upset by it, and found myself pondering the horrible consequences of it and yet, as far as I’ve been able to find out, it never really happened. Nevertheless, in my head, I can see the Breakfast News presenters holding up the newspapers during their usual morning review of the papers and showing us all the shocking headlines and the terrible photographs the previous day, which is why I’d been lying awake and looking back on it with such alarm.
I was getting so angry about it that I was intending to write something about it in quite forceful terms, so when I got up I thought I’d better check a few facts and look it up on the old computer, so I went off to trawl through the news stories using one of the major search engines and there it... wasn’t.
Nothing at all.
All those horrific events that I’d been fretting about simply never happened, and I’d kept myself awake for no good reason whatsoever. I know now, of course, that it’s all due to a general mish-mash of half-remembered stories tangled up with some current events and the darkest, most disturbing and deepest wells of my mind had juggled them around and sorted them into some kind of logical-seeming order and then woven a disturbing tale to tell me as I lay asleep. That’s the rational explanation (if you still think I qualify as rational after all this...), and it does kind of make some sort of sense that something quite so vivid might be remembered as having been real as it seemed very real to me. Nonetheless, I suppose the world is very lucky that someone as tired as I am isn’t in a position to influence and change world events. After all, if I was a more powerful mover and shaker, I might very well have woken up and demanded explanations from some Ambassador or other and set in train events that could have spun spectacularly out of control.
I wonder how many real life events leading to bitter recriminations and human tragedies have been caused by the sense of outrage that any similar such thoughts or faux-memories might trigger in someone? How many of the perceived slights against some dictator or emperor throughout history have been originally only from their own dark imaginings? How much bloody retribution has come from something completely created in the mind of the person with their finger on the trigger? Maybe that’s the kind of fear that dictators depend upon to keep them feeling secure. If absolute power really does corrupt absolutely, you’d really want to be sure that the guy with all that power is getting a decent, undisturbed night’s sleep. But then, how can they ever sleep soundly, with all the plotting and scheming that’s going on all around them? Suddenly a lot of things become crystal clear.
Now it seems slightly ridiculous. I was lying there, wide awake, looking back upon, and getting annoyed about, something that my own subconscious had dreamt up out of nothing but the dark corners of my own imaginings. Sometimes it’s just very disturbing being me, and I do wonder quite where it was that this stuff came from. All those long hours spent in the night thinking about our brilliant, fantastic, useful and evolution-boosting human opposable thumbs and what a horrific thing it would be to be deliberately deprived of them and how you would be supposed to cope without them, all because of some half-imagined news story (with vividly realised - and utterly fictional - photographic evidence in support) that never actually occurred about people from certain religious groups having them deliberately and forcefully amputated before they were executed.
Horrific. Disturbing. Total fiction.
Those in the know, and students of human nature do, of course, say that if you can think anything up, then it’s probably happened somewhere at some point, and maybe that’s the most disturbing thing of all. Maybe I should be lying awake and worrying about these things because they actually are happening to someone, somewhere, and my sense of outrage should be piqued.
Sometimes I think that I really should take more interest in world events. Just don’t ever put me in a position of responsibility, that’s all. Anything could happen.
Meanwhile, parts of that world I constantly fail to engage with continue to wobble. Now, I’ve never personally been to Libya, but all the recent unrest there has reminded me of a couple we met last year in a hotel in Cairo who had just been there the previous week. She was an art teacher of the old school whose eyes were permanently fixed on some faraway imagined horizon, and who talked with the sort of long, deliberate, thoughtful vowels that spoke of a house festooned with Laura Ashley designs and taking herself far too seriously. He was a rather amiable but skittish fellow who spoke with the staccato rattle of a woodpecker or a sub-machine gun, but without any of the menace, and who perpetually reminded me of the sort of nervous chap Michael Palin might very well have played in the Monty Python TV shows and had me permanently concerned about his blood pressure.
A couple of people less suited for spending time in Libya I could not imagine (with the exception of the beloved and myself, of course, but then we are very aware of our limits), as the long, convoluted tale they had to tell about the simple process of trying to get into the centre of Cairo and back by taxi was almost a Python sketch in itself (if only I’d had my notepad with me…). So, the thought of that pair delaying their holiday by twelve months and getting caught up in the events that are currently unfolding simply does not bear thinking about, really. Mind you, I do have a sneaking suspicion that this terrifically nervous chap is precisely the kind of bloke that can and does actually survive pretty much anything, and would be found standing in the middle of the battlefield as the smoke cleared, surrounded by the victims of that skirmish, still wearing that straw hat, Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandal combination, and fretting about where his suitcases are.
And I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream them up, either.
Whilst we’re considering matters in the world of current affairs, I was interested to read in the reports about the ‘7/7’ inquests about the bizarre situation with pagers and the ambulance service. A dozen or more years ago, in the days just before mobile phones were widely and cheaply available, I had a friend who had a particularly complicated lifestyle who decided that she needed a pager to keep control of her life. It turned out to be quite a handy thing for keeping in touch and I was quite impressed, despite lacking the kind of lifestyle myself that created a need to own such a thing. As with many things, of course, eventually other options came along and, as personal mobile phones began to become ubiquitous, the pager fell out of favour and eventually into disuse, so I was quite surprised to hear that it was only just before the horrific events in 2005 that the London Ambulance Service decided to stop using them and start using mobile phones instead.
Ironically, and perhaps fatally, it now turns out that the shiny new technology they embraced completely fell apart during the massive crisis they faced as the mobile network crashed and that well-known phenomenon of “text message delay” that anyone owning a mobile phone has experienced once in a while led to a certain amount of problems with coordinating the necessary rapid responses. Shortly afterwards, apparently, they quietly reissued the pagers again and I think that there’s a lot to learn from this about the perils of ditching your old technology options in favour of the swanky new ones too soon, and the brutal irony that the one time in the last ten years when they were unavailable, was the one time when they were most needed. One of the things that always impressed me during my visits to the USA was that, whilst they remained at the cutting edge of new technology, there was much more ‘techno-lag’ in their society, in the sense that they seemed to recognise the poverty gap which meant that not everybody can always afford to keep up with all the latest stuff, and so video stores, for example, were still widely and unashamedly visible despite later formats having come along. I think that it’s something we should consider more as a nation as we skydive headlong into the white heat of the future, abandoning everything considered even vaguely old-fashioned along the way as we go.
As I’m talking about abandoning things as we go, it now also seems that we’re choosing to divest ourselves of the better part of our language as fast as we possibly can. Apparently phrases like “Avoid Alcohol” and “May cause drowsiness” printed on our medicine packaging are too confusing for the Great British Public nowadays and the pharmacists of this great land of ours are now being told to simplify their labelling. I would say that it’s another signal that society is going to hell in a handbasket, but then I realised that handbasket had three syllables (as does ‘syllables’, of course…) and you wouldn’t be able to understand a flippin’ word I was going on about (assuming of course that anyone ever did) so I’d better rewrite this post for more general consumption…
Can’t sleep - Bad thoughts about bad things (Not true things though). Thumbs are good. Brits abroad, eh…? Old things good. Big words bad.
I don’t know, I think it loses something in translation…
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