A METEORIC WEEK

I can’t have been the only person who thought that the news just kept on trying to outdo itself this week. It was almost as if having come up with the biggest story it could possibly imagine, like a Hollywood movie producer it just had to keep on trying to go one better as we got to the inevitable sequels, expanding the snowball effect of incredulity to try to get the whole world to the point where we simply couldn’t believe any of it any more.

Early on in the week, I was idly sipping at my mid-morning cup of coffee and scanning the headlines as I do during that “little break” (a little break which, I sadly note, no longer serves as a “screen break”) when the first announcements of the Pope’s resignation started to seep through.

Considering that he represents quite an important symbol to a hefty chunk of the world’s population, and that this is the first time such a thing has happened in nearly six hundred years, even I, as a not particularly religious person, could see that this was going to turn into a pretty big story and, when I happened to mention that it had happened, it came as something of a shock, and we all wanted to know a little bit more about it, and, as the news spread around the world, so, it seems did everyone else, with the inevitable result that, before you knew it, the gags about it started going around as well.

Well, it was always going to take a pretty big story to shift the horsemeat scandal off the front page, but, for once, it seemed that the church had come up trumps. Of course, the food story refused to go away and would resurface again later in the week as we all became far more aware that a lot of us eat an awful lot of rubbish an awful lot of the time, and, until now, few of us gave a rat’s kidney about what it was.

Unless of course, it actually was rat’s kidneys, then we’d be really bothered.

Actually, the “I reckon” brigade rather came up trumps over that. Despite the fact that “news gathering” nowadays simply seems to involve trawling TwitWorld for (mostly ill-judged) “opinions” or reporters taking their cameras along on the school run, they did at one point manage to find that most rare of creatures, the “sensible parent” who said that their child probably wouldn’t even have noticed if they’d accidentally eaten a little bit of horsey in their school dinner, so it probably wasn’t worth worrying about.

Give the woman a medal.

So, what on earth was going to knock the Pope from his top spot as “biggest story of the week”…? Well, it turns out that it was a “famous” chap who I’d never heard of (don’t worry, I have now…) called Oscar Pistorius who shot and killed Reeva Steenkamp in the kind of tragic incident that seemed rather out of place on Valentine’s Day morning, but is just the kind of celebrity scandal that will fill miles and miles of newsprint, have the “I reckon” brigade out in full and tiresome force and is almost certain to find us asking “Pope Who…?” a couple of days later.

Meanwhile, a bloody great rock was hurtling towards us from outer space, but because we knew that it was coming, nobody was particularly concerned about it apart from a few jocularists who were in the know, making cracks about sending aging movie stars up to deal with a problem that wasn’t actually happening…

So, it came as something of a surprise then when a ten ton rock exploded in the atmosphere twenty-six miles above Chelyabinsk in Russia with the shock wave injuring nearly a thousand people on the ground.

“Where,” as the saying goes, “the hell did that come from…?

Well, meteors do tend to travel in clusters and we can only track the really big ones, so it ought to have been less of a surprise than it seems to have been, but we are only human and we do suffer from the ridiculous belief that we have some kind of control over our destinies.

I’m sure that Reeva Steenkamp once did, and I imagine that the Pope probably thought so, too, just as I’m sure that even in these more “enlightened” times, some people will see a random meteor striking the atmosphere as some kind of a “sign” about something or other, and other people will continue to believe that celebrities can’t possibly do any wrong…

So instead we’ve learned to watch the skies with a little more fear for a while at least until we forget about it again and life returns to whatever passes for normal nowadays, and we start thinking about the mundane and banal “every day” stories again, as we stat to develop the strange suspicion that it might just turn out that everyone who’s ever been on telly ever might just turn out to be a sex offender now, thanking their lucky stars that the news was bigger than them and their dirty little secrets this week.

A strange week, on a strange planet, and you can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen next to top all of those stories…?