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| Main | We're all doomed! ( 64 reads) | Friday, July 03, 2009 (14:51:11) |
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| Here in the hills the weather this week has been glorious. Dawn to dusk sunshine, a gorgeous cottage garden and, since I'm now retired, the opportunity to enjoy it. It's been fantastic. Yet the news presenters seem to be on a relentless drive to make us all suicidal, even before the winter gloom that lies a few months away. Turn on the radio or television and what do we hear? That if we're not going to be flooded out of our homes on a tide of raw sewage we'll die of exhaustion in a 'heat wave'. (More on that nonsense shortly.) Similarly if we're not going to catch swine flu we'll die of cancer of the hair through eating too much Monster Munch. And our children will grow so fat that they can barely raise the energy to stab us in the face because we've denied them their human right of playing rap music at three in the morning innit? As for local news, it's even worse. A lollipop lady gets an MBE because she danced the Lambada for thirty years whilst shepherding children across the road; a brave baldness sufferer raises money for victims of attacks from ferrets by sitting in a vat of Reggae Reggae Sauce for a week; and a Bolton man finds a llama living in his ear. In brief almost all news is shite, or at least it is as it's presented to us. But pause for a moment and look at things through the prism of perspective. How many people in the UK have died of swine fever? Four to date, and they all had more serious underlying health problems already. So that's one non-story given undue prominence just to send us into an unnecessary state of panic. As for the laughable heat wave it's lasted for a few days now and is due to end by next week, by which time we can all go back to complaining about the miserable UK summer and cancelling village fetes due to health and safety reasons in case a shire horse might eat a toddler. On water management I've not long since got back from South Australia, the driest inhabited state in the driest continent on earth, where they've just had their longest drought in living memory. Yet no-one passed out, no-one died because of the heat, and there was no need for the government to issue 'level 4' health alerts. Why not? Because they're used to it, that's why. And because they know to catch the rainwater that falls on their roof in a big tub rather than concrete over everything and let it run to waste. Anyway, enough about that. What's the big blog topic of the day here at Lucky Towers? Is it the death of Michael Jackson, the man who recorded 'It don't matter if you're black or white' whilst trying his best to become white? The man who built a career out of hiccupping whilst grabbing his own crotch with a thrusting motion of his hips? Er, no. Is it the annual hysteria that descends upon the nation whenever it looks like someone from these shores might do passably well at Wimbledon? Again, no. Definitely no. It's the impending arrival of a daughter for Jim Junior and his lovely wife. In just over three weeks, all being well, a small bundle of mewling, puking human being will arrive in my son's MQ. He's endured two years of Welbeck college, three years of Shrivenham, a year of Sandhurst and then coming under RPG attack in Iraq, but I doubt if any of this will help him prepare for fatherhood. I wish them all well, of course, but I do look forward to watching with wry amusement his efforts to keep a baby girl under control in the same way he does with a platoon of soldiers. Somehow I don't think it will work out like that. That's how life works though, isn't it? We learn, we grow, we adapt and become more rounded people. Or not, in my case. As I write, the sun has gone elsewhere for the day and it's rained cats and dogs ever since I got up. Situation normal, panic over. Now, which way to the village fete? Take care everyone, L_J | ||
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