BACK TO “NORMAL”

Back to normal now (whatever that is) after the inglorious excesses of our annual foray into something approaching festive fun (he said, whilst doffing his hat to the spirit of Leonard Sachs), and what a month it’s been back in the big bad “real world” whilst I’ve been off trying very hard to compile some fun in the form of some highly derivative fiction to “entertain” you all with.

The strange game of “Celebrity Pass the Parcel” continued with more arrests occurring whenever the music stopped and somebody was left with the finger pointing at them. Hmmm… Perhaps I’ve got the analogy wrong. Maybe it was a game more like “Spin the Bottle…?” which might be a more appropriate mental connection to make, given that it was a fairly popular pastime back then.

At least it was when I was a teenager back in the 1970s.

I suppose it was the more innocent version of whatever those notorious “wife-swappers” and “swingers” were supposed to be all getting up to behind their closed curtains in the Shires back then, whilst the frustrated housewives weren’t seducing the window cleaners, that is.

This was all the kind of stuff that led to sentences like “I made my excuses and left” as the old “Investigative Journalists” used to say. Different times, different times… and all of which proves that I really ought not to base all my memories of an era upon the “pop culture” that has outlived the era in which it was made.

Whatever and however different the world might have been, the baying crowds nowadays who immediately commit “Trial by Twitter” whenever someone’s past indiscretions finally catch up with them did little to endear themselves to me during those times. “Someone” got arrested and a name got bandied about in cyberspace and this was immediately treated as “established fact” and the particular “much-loved” broadcaster suddenly transformed into the most hideous monster known to mankind about whom so many people suddenly felt the need to share that “they always thought” that there was something “funny” about him…

If any of these people did turn out to be innocent, of course, their lives would be ruined forever, and the wild hunting pack will get away with their crimes almost scot-free (although they do still have to look themselves in the mirror) because, as Lord Leveson said, it’s almost impossible to police the internet, and I do now suppose that people really are entitled to their opinion and are less and less likely to keep it to themselves nowadays, but I do wish that a lot of them would just shut up about what they “reckon” until they actually, genuinely KNOW something…

Not, perhaps that we shouldn’t try to police. Especially when we learn the tragic results of any kind of media bullying. After all, during that month, a nurse died because a woman of “importance” announced that she was pregnant and someone else decided to make sport of it, and merely just proved to me a couple of things that I’ve always believed: That something that is supposed to be a “bit of fun” often isn’t, and that we are not all built to spend our lives in the harsh spotlight of the media despite the sense, often created by the media itself, that all any of us really want is to be famous.

Sir Patrick Moore died at the end of a year which hasn’t gone well for the “space” fan or the astronomy world, what with Neil Armstrong and Sir Bernard Lovell also being called up to the heavens, although, perhaps rather poetically, there were some spectacular full moon scenes to be seen in the skies at the beginning of the month, and some dazzlingly clear skies as the world got colder.

Meanwhile there were some numerically very strange dates involving beautifully balanced numbers that cannot now reoccur in most of our lifetimes now that we’ve passed the part of the century where the calendar months are outnumbered by the tally of the years. I do sometimes wonder about my similarly obsessive counterparts looking at the calendar one hundred years ago and wondering about how they thought that the world might turn out in a hundred years time. That generation were all but blown away by a huge war breaking out less than two years later of course, whilst we have the prospect of North Korean Long-range rockets to trouble us. Still, at least the world failed to end as some people predicted which should only serve to remind us that all calendars are merely fairly arbitrary human constructs.

And Christmas time came and went as it usually does…

Still, the day after Boxing Day can mean a return to “reality” in a lot of ways and for a great many people. The Christmas Day hangovers are fading, after being held off by the supplementary ones attained during Boxing Day. The revels are all but over for another year. Many of the toys are already broken. Most of the gadgets are now programmed and are now just found to be dull little boxes that go “ping” and ruin your life. The exotic boxes of “pong” will have turned out to have been a bunch of chemicals in a bottle and not brought the lifestyle promised through all those pretentious pre-Christmas adverts. Everything still has to be paid for and, for those of you who still choose to celebrate it, the system now needs to gear itself up for the dubious pleasures of New Year’s Eve and whatever fallout that may bring.

So there, I’ve gone and got on my “high horse” again after so many weeks of rambling around rather ineptly in the world of creative prose. Have you missed it? I’m sure that you haven’t, but now that we have got “back to normal” here in Lesser Blogfordshire, I suppose we’d better make the most of it.

Go on, I dare you to say that you’ve missed this kind of thing…