NOT A GOOD NEWS DAY

From a news point of view, last Monday was godawful wasn't it?

I came so close to posting something to that effect on FizzBook or Twitworld, something pithy like "Lost (sad face)" or "Bloody hell, there's not much good news going around today is there? (sad face)" before coming to my senses and realising just how crass that would be, and that very few people want to join in with that sort of game anyway, or be reminded of just how dreadful it all is by a nonentity like me, especially when their own televisions are already brimful of that sort of thing anyway.

After all, that's what the blog is for, eh readers?

Instead I went off to be gloomy and miserable all by myself somewhere for a short while.

To be honest, in recent years, I've cut down on sitting down to watch the news on TV in the evening because it all started getting so bloody depressing, especially on those days when there wasn't much going on other than some ridiculous sporting tournament which we "all" were supposed to be fascinate by, or when the Royal Family were in the process of acquiring a brand new uterus for us to fawn over or celebrating the impregnation of same in some way or other.

I'd even stopped putting the morning Radio Four "John and Jim Show" (other "today" presenters are available) on in the car because it started getting me so angry that my day couldn't improve, or there might be an outside chance that my commute might stretch into "Thought For The Day" at a moment when I was too distracted by the idiots at the roundabout to reach for the "off" switch and that would really piss me off.

But Monday brought with it the rather upsetting and unsettling announcement about the missing plane and, like several hundred thousand other armchair theorists, I had found myself wondering how it was going to play out, and just had to listen as this sad tale unfolded towards its inevitable terrible conclusion.

The sad announcement also led to several hundred ignorant idiots on Twitter who obviously only ever listen to the first two words of any headline before coming to any conclusion to spout off at length (well, for many of them 140 characters is a thesis) about what they still "reckoned" and how they knew better than what they were being told, and how they wouldn't believe a word of it until every last scrap of wreckage and all of the missing people were dumped onto their front lawn so that they could sift through it and tell the entire world about their expert conclusions.

I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists will decide that those Chinese ships were dropping debris into the water before pointing at it and fishing it out again. Al least those who aren't insisting to anyone who'll listen that it's parked at a US airbase somewhere waiting to trigger a calamity big enough to stem the latest round of military budget cuts.

I kid you not. These people would rather believe anything other than the cock-up theory of history, or that mechanical parts can sometimes fail tragically and spectacularly, or that an autopilot can just keep going in a straight line until the laws of physics and fuel exhaustion take over.

What do they want, for flip's sake…? This is real life, not a movie or video game. A desperately sad, heart-breaking and tragic version of life, of course, but certainly not a stupid game. Just shut up and stop over-thinking every possibility about something that is basically a tragedy.

Meanwhile, and thinking it through, I could only hope those passengers weren't conscious as the plane took its seven hour ride into eternity because the alternative of just having them sit there knowing that the inevitable was coming just as soon as the fuel ran out is just too horrible to contemplate. If anyone had been at the controls, then it would have been an act of supreme kindness to ditch it earlier if there was no hope of survival. But then, if it does turn out to be just one lone act of madness, perhaps kindness wouldn't have been high on their agenda, and that really is far too ghastly to contemplate.

After that, all that's left for the rest of us is to hope against all hope that we're never ourselves put into a similar situation, and, perhaps, if the search and rescue hadn't proved so effective, we might never have known a thing until something tangible washed up on a beach somewhere and the sea started giving up its answers.

On the very same day that this terrible announcement was made, and the ravenous pack of hyenas we call "The Media" acted in that distasteful way over photographing the families of the victims in that horrifically intrusive manner, a body was found in the search for a girl missing in Scotland, over five hundred members of the Muslim Brotherhood were sentenced to death in Egypt, the Ukrainian situation just kept getting worse and worse, the terrible extent of the scale of the disaster of those landslides in Washington state started to become clearer, schoolchildren were being arrested for murdering other schoolchildren and, all-in-all, it really, really didn't feel like a very good news day at all.

In the end I retired defeated from being glued to these various unfolding tragedies and sought out some alternative entertainment which turned out to be "University Challenge" where I joined the programme just as Manchester (Huzzah!) were in the box seat playing Cambridge.

Naturally, almost from the second I tuned in, Manchester failed to score one more point, and got their asses handed to them by Cambridge after all, so that's probably all my fault, too, even though I know that it was recorded months ago and that I could no more effect the result of that than I could alter the outcome of the story of flight MH370.

Sometimes it really sucks not being an omnipotent if minor deity…