PANDEMIC

I’ve rarely been one for “pulling my punches” when it comes to the so-called “news agenda” in this country. In fact there are few things more likely to raise my ire than a member of the “noble” journalistic profession basically doing their job, but doing it in a sloppy, sensationalistic and fundamentally stupid and thoughtless way.

So when I am driving my way to work, as I was a couple of weeks ago, and I hear that there’s another pandemic on the horizon (or so they said) then I will naturally get myself into a bit of a fluster and listen more intently to what they have to say. After all, a “pandemic” is a serious thing. The kind of thing that could eventually lead to the end of civilisation as we know it and, if not that, possibly the loss of at least some of those who are nearest and dearest to us.

Now obviously, I’ve done my best to shelter myself from the worst impact of that at least by making sure that those closest to me, my own “nearest and dearest” are very few in number, although that argument doesn’t really hold up, does it...? After all, if they are very few, the loss of even one of them would have a higher impact, but it’s far too late for me to deal with the consequences of that misreading of the rules of the game of life now, so I’m just going to have to live with that, if I am “lucky” enough to be one of the survivors, that is.

Someone very wise once observed that adult males don’t make new friends, but instead spend most of their adult life trying to get rid of the ones they’ve got, but once again I’m slipping away from what I was originally thinking about.

You see, when mentioning the possibility of there being this potential pandemic coming our way, the newscaster also managed to say that it’s “just like in a novel by Stephen King” just in case we were getting too worried that it might be some intrusion into actual reality… Of course, as I was in the car and therefore more concerned with the pinging of an actual engine instead of a search engine, I “Harrumphed” to myself and shouted to no-one in particular but chiefly at the radio “Which Stephen King novel, eh…?” but they could not hear me and so didn’t answer.

I chunnered on to myself about lazy journalists as I travelled along, and remembered the late Terry Nation being bothered enough by the prospect of what we didn’t yet call a pandemic (at least not where I grew up), to go off and write “Survivors” way back in the mid-1970s, and arrived at work still none the wiser as to which Stephen King novel (if any) that copywriter had been referring to.

It was “The Stand” by the way, although you would never have found that out from your radio, and, having gone and looked it up to check that I was right, I was distracted enough to pack away the short pithy TwitRant I had composed and decided to save it for another day, even though I still think that whilst trying to talk about “real world” events in a way that you think your audience might relate to isn’t the worst idea ever to come out of a news room (indeed it may very well be the only good one…), somehow equating what could be a devastating reality to a work of fiction seems extraordinarily sloppy to me.

But maybe I was just in that kind of mood that day. I posted a link for my e-friends to the new picture of the universe that was published courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope (and which puts a few things into perspective, I can tell you...) and I came within a gnat’s crotchet of apologising to them (m’e-friends, that is) for the over-effusive and non-scientific use of the word “amazing” in the headline before I thought better of it. It is, of course, “amazing”, but, in my opinion, it’s not the journalist’s job to guide or shape my opinion on that. If I choose to come to that conclusion for myself, then that’s fair enough, but telling me up front that it is “amazing” smacks of this strange philosophy of “groupthink” which always bothers me. “WE think this, so you ought to as well. What do YOU think?” Well, I think that’s a tiny bit scary...

Nor did I post anything about 30 year old maths teachers running off with 15 year old schoolgirls and there being something wrong with his sums. I thought about it, and even composed it in my head, but thought better of it. I decided that I ought not to be flippant about something that a lot of other people were more than likely to get very hot under the collar about and stepped out of the way of that juggernaut, (only for another and far more dreadful juggernaut to roar into view of course), and decided to let it lie.

Until now, at least. Ha, bloody ha...!

You see I’m learning. I might not be learning all that well, but I am learning…

Once upon a long ago I considered a career in broadcasting, you know. Every so often I even think that I might have been quite good at it in so far as it goes, but that ship had long sailed and I chose another path through my life, one which I rarely regret unless one or other of the more idiotic broadcasters happens to cross my eyes and/or ears and then I start to wonder once again about whether interviews really are the best way to get the best people.

After all, it recently struck me that the most nervous ones are the ones most likely not to be offered the job, but perhaps they are the most nervous because it’s the most important thing in the world to them and the “cool, calm and collected” ones are feeling “cool, calm and collected” simply because they couldn’t care less.

Interestingly, and as a complete aside, I recently found out (from another of Horizon’s “We’re all doomed” documentaries) that “big business” and “psychopaths” seem to be made for each other as they provide an environment to which the psychopath is naturally drawn and in which they can thrive, so now I’m rather pleased that I’m rather rubbish at interviews... It probably means that I’m comparatively sane after all...

However, I cared a hell of a lot back I those days, although I don’t think that I’d have been cut out for such things, really. But then, every so often, when I take one of those sharp intakes of breath as I hear another crass comment, I do begin to wonder why I wasn’t more persistent.

Perhaps in the end it came down to my generation being far less savvy about careers than they are nowadays. I sometimes think that my school might as well have lined us up and pointed and said “Army… Bank… Teacher…” as they went along the line, and now, of course, I even wonder about that “noble” choice I once made about not wanting to go to the “fee paying” school because I knew that my parents really didn’t have the money might have shut the door to things like Oxford and Cambridge and, ultimately, any hope of a career in journalism.

Thankfully.