I very rarely write these pieces “live” as it were, i.e. direct to the blog without being filtered through some other software. Most of these musings and mutterings are composed a few days before I release them into the world to give me a chance to mull over the wisdom of letting anyone read them at all and to let me have an opportunity to rethink them and remove any more radical or terrifying points of view that I might have allowed to seep in. Yes, dear friends, believe it or not, what you get to see here are actually the results of some actual process of thought and elimination. I’m sure you’d never have guessed that in a million years now, would you? As a bit of a pointless game, the more forensically minded amongst you might be able to tell which of the blogs have been written directly online because of the way this website handles its apostrophes, if you really are that bored.
Anyway, what I’m getting at is that, strictly speaking, this means that this doesn’t really count as a “blog” in the proper understanding of the concept at all. A “Weblog” for which it is the abbreviation (yes, I know that I’m talking to people who know all this already, but bear with me…) is technically a log of events as they occur, much like a diary, and little here could really be described as being similar in any way to a diary, except for the fact that they represent an unfolding palimpsest of thoughts in the order of which they occurred to me, although, as I have already mentioned, even that isn’t necessarily strictly true either. I have been known to hang on to one or two of them far beyond their ‘use by’ date because other, more immediate, things have popped into my head in the interim or world-shaking events have occurred that I feel a need to react to.
Once or twice I have hung onto one of my notions for far too long and they will suddenly need judicious pruning and reshaping to make them even remotely relevant again. Either that or I’ll just chuck them out, alone and frightened, into the big wide world anyway and see what happens (usually not much…). Interestingly enough, what sometimes seems to be a hopelessly inappropriate or out of date posting, when I’m focussing upon one irrelevance and the world has its mind focussed on something more significant elsewhere, doesn’t seem quite so out of kilter when you just look back on them a month or so later. It’s also true that the ones that I think are a load of old rhubarb are generally the ones that get most read, but I suppose that I should be immune to that particular irony by now. Occasionally it does still feel like I’m writing about the kind of ridiculously over-focussed minutiae that would have inspired a middling episode of “Seinfeld” (although with all the humour removed, naturally…), as I burble out my thoughts on trivia and irrelevances.
I was recently reading about “The Diary of a Victorian Clergyman” which was published in the mid-1920s, the better part of a century after it was written, and I began to wonder whether much the same situation was happening here. Not the posthumous publishing part, obviously. That would be ridiculous. No, the point I’m trying to make is that the forty-odd years which are covered by the diaries apparently go into great detail about pretty much every single thing that the Clergyman actually ate, but completely fail to mention anything much of any significance that was happening in the world around him. It’s a bit like writing your diary for September 11th 2001 and just mentioning that you had tea and toast for breakfast, you skipped lunch and were then disappointed to find out that all your favourite restaurants were closed.
In a similar vein, I do sometimes wonder, although it is highly unlikely that anyone would be likely to be inclined to do so, if you read back through these various rantings and ravings of the last half year or so, what precisely would you learn about what is happening in the real world from them? Sadly, I came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be all that much and you might just get the odd idea that old TV shows are somehow massively important to our culture. Meanwhile, of course, the actual real world is still a sometimes rather bewildering place. With all of this in mind, here are a few things that have been taxing the great minds of the bigger, wider world recently as I sat here writing my usual drivvle.
There were accusations of corruption in the high places of football land, and evidence of torture in care homes for people with learning disabilities, as filmed by an undercover reporter. Both of these news items just had me wondering whether people are ever really made aware any more that some things are just plain wrong and that you don’t do the things you shouldn’t just because you can, you stand back and say “No, I won’t do that because it would be wrong.”
I know, it’s easy to take the old “Untouchables” strategy when it’s not you that is in that position and you don’t really know all the facts, and it’s also terribly easy to take the moral high ground, especially if you have feet of clay like I’m completely aware I do. The footballing thing bewilders me because the whole thing seems to be based around people who are in a well-paid job that millions probably can only dream of being lucky enough to have, but then wanting to get even more out of it. The care home one is a much more tricky situation to come to terms with, because it seems to be born out of frustration more than anything else. Certainly few in that sector are highly paid, but you would hope that we would all want to treat vulnerable people as we would wish to be treated ourselves. Perhaps, in the end, both are really about the abuse of power.
Despite the fact that in this instance it seems to have unveiled a shocking truth and therefore be fully justified, of course any “investigation” that relies upon secret filming is bound to be highly selective, and having been in a few supermarkets on a Saturday morning, I suspect that there are one or two people whose actions with their own children might not appear to be anything other than torture if filmed out of context, so it really is difficult to tell, but we can still only hope that this brings an end to such practices. Sadly, I doubt it. Self-interest and business practices will always trump basic humanity, it seems. Why else would a spokesman for the company suspended from trying to extract Shale Gas because it was possibly causing earthquakes say something along the lines of “It’s only a small earthquake… you’d barely notice it. It would do hardly any damage at all…”
Well, that’s all right then.
Meanwhile, the space shuttle “Endeavour” has returned to Earth from its final mission and will now end its days housed in a museum after all those millions of miles it has flown, hopefully inspiring future scientists to greater things. More down to earth technological developments mean that some people are emailing the BBC to complain about the methods used to sell tickets for the Olympics (in the words of an old “Not the nine o’clock news” sketch “This really has got nothing to do with us…”), and our mobile phones are now definitely, absolutely burning our brains (unless of course, they’re not…).
At the same time, the people of Blackburn are being fined for public swearing (“Two thousand ****ing hells in Blackburn, Lancashire…”) and the fight against cancer seems to have embraced the dubious delights of “Management Speak” as it transforms itself into “Something you can live with rather than something you die from” which has the air of a “Mission Statement” about it and doesn’t much help all those I’ve known who’ve already succumbed to its horrors. Someone far more eloquent than I’ll ever be did recently say “If cancer was a person, I’d want to punch it in the face”, and I think I know what they mean. Maybe that would be a better slogan all round.
“So, what’s all this preamble all about?”, I hear you scream. Well, I did try to watch a rental copy of “The Hurt Locker” over the weekend, but the disc was a bit faulty and so I got to within 20 minutes of the end and then it became totally unplayable… (Stick with this, there is a point to it… honestly…) Sigh! You do find yourself sometimes wondering what it is that “other people” do to these discs before they return them. The idea of “please leave these things as you would like to find them” just doesn’t seem to work when it comes to film rental it would appear, but you do sometimes wonder whether people are feeding them to their dog or using them as skating rinks for their gerbils or something.
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