Back to Reality

I’m back! What? No-one noticed I was gone? Damn and blast!!

Anyway, I’ve been away from my blog for some while now, partly due to not having anything much to say about anything but mainly to my being away in foreign shores, soaking up the sun and staring out to sea whilst ingesting copious amounts of soft drinks, oysters and cashew nuts, none of which is calculated to do the waistline any good!

Not your typical beach pic but more 'scenic'

Still, gluttony and excess will have their way, but now it’s time to try and shed those extra pounds by a diet of carrots and lettuce leaves. Not for nothing is it called the ‘Rabbit Diet’. Munch, munch.

There was also the carnival, a time of enforced revelry and legitimised lunacy when all other life came to a standstill. I too was swept up in the general mood of merriment and mayhem but managed to get away with the minimum participation.


When I got back on home ground it was cold and grey, as usual, and the sun and the heat were already but a distant memory. It was back to warm woolly socks, jumpers and jackets. But that was then and this is now. It’s warmed up again and now we’re on 18ºC! Still, can’t really compare with night-time 28ºC and daytime 38ºC at my holiday destination. But at least I’m comfortable in clothes now and have no desire to run around butt-naked to relieve my discomfort.

Back to the routine also means back to reality, and reality is nearly all bad. The world has gone mad and everyone seems to be up in arms in the Arab countries in a chain reaction to oust the oligarchic regimes that reign there, Japan is on the brink of national collapse after suffering earthquakes, tsunamis and radiation leaks, and the European economies are sinking ever deeper into the murky waters of austerity and teetering on the edge of national bankruptcy. We’re all worse off - it's official - with some much more than others. Man-made tragedies vie with natural disasters for the top position in destructiveness. It’s got too scary to even look out of the window, let alone go outside!

Crikey, it's too fuckin' scary out there!

Indoors is the safest place in a world where no place is safe. Vicarious experience through the telly and the internet and the cellphone are the best options. The real world is a scary place and getting scarier every day. Suddenly the sofa and one’s bed offer infinite attractions at little or no effort and zero cost.

Still, mustn’t grumble, I’m still alive and in one piece and millions of people out there are in a much worse condition. As I write this piece, the sun is shining, the birds singing, the trees budding, there’s a blue sky above, some food in the fridge, I’ve got money in my pocket, and life still seems worth living. Well, let’s face it, it takes a lot to make death more attractive than life, don’t you think? When all’s said and done, death doesn’t have a lot going for it unless of course life has been dumping on you since you were a baby!

Well, that’s enough of that, I need to get back to work now and earn a few bob to re-stock the fridge, otherwise life won’t be worth living!

Stop the World! I want to get off...

Do you ever feel, like me, a sense of growing despair at the state of our world in this the 21st century? The sentiment expressed in the somewhat humorous title of this post is meant to convey this sense of ‘fed-upness’ with the present state of the world that we humans have forged. We have somehow created a world seething with conflict, war and strife on all sides? If only the world were like a fairground carousel from which we could jump off at any time! I myself grew up in a time when we were made to believe that, having emerged from a massively destructive global conflict and the dark days that followed it, society and the world in general were gradually becoming a better place by the day in every way and that it would continue to get better until we attained some sort of earthly utopia or Nirvana. We were not, of course, given a time-frame for this, but there seemed little doubt that it would come to pass one day.

But that’s not happening, is it? Not even remotely. There’s precious little peace or harmony in the world today and danger seems to lurk round every corner. All over the planet earth, one country or people is dumping on another country or people. One nation or cultural community is clashing with another. The apparent cause may be territorial, political, economic or religious. It hardly matters. An excuse or pretext for aggression or hostilities towards one’s fellow men can always be found. And once found, the business of making war or launching homicidal attacks can begin in the name of Jesus, God, Allah, or some other suitable deity, holy figure or to-die-for cause, with a clear conscience.


If it's a war waged by Muslims against the Infidel (nowadays that's us in the West), it will inevitably be a holy war or crusade, in the name of Allah and all Islam. It would seem that Allah, the All Merciful, is quite happy to see women, children and innocent people in general being slaughtered in His name by such devotees as suicide bombers, providing it’s proclaimed a holy war. So that's alright then. So much more reassuring to know that one might receive a holy bullet in the head or be blown up by a holy bomb than by one of your common-or-garden bullets or bombs. The reality, of course, is that there's nothing holy about any war, whether it's waged by Muslims, Christians or the followers of any other religion, and one could not imagine either the God of Abraham or the God of Mohammed sanctioning such carnage in His name. War is wrong whoever practises it, its outcome consumes many lives and causes untold misery and visits the participants with destruction and devastation.

If it’s not human beings butchering each other in the name of their god or other ideal, it’s a natural disaster: it’s a flood that sweeps away people and their homes, a tsunami that swamps the land and bulldozes everything in its path, an earthquake that demolishes villages and towns, a volcano that disgorges molten lava and spews out hot ash engulfing whole communities, a hurricane or cyclone, or some such phenomenon, that tears its way across the landscape carrying all before it, torrential rains that transform huge swathes of land into lakes, months of drought that parch the ground and turn it into a dust-bowl, and so on and so forth.


And of course we mustn’t forget the threat posed by contagion when it becomes an epidemic and then spreads across national borders to develop into a full-blown pandemic, killing thousands of people as it extends its reach. Suddenly there’s an outbreak of some life-threatening infection in one country and within days or weeks it’s spreading from country to country, sowing fear and panic in its path round the globe. Before you know it, it’s arrived on your doorstep and emergency action is being taken by the local authorities to check it and to immunise the population against it. Usually too little and too late.

You would think that with so many natural disasters and calamities occurring throughout the world, that would be more than enough for us. But you’d be wrong. We feel compelled to add to the sum-total of our miseries and misfortunes by serving a dose of our own man-made woes just to be sure there’s enough sorrow and grief in the world to go round. So, those few pockets on our planet which have relatively few natural calamities often have local nationalist movements busy planting bombs in public places designed to kill en masse and indiscriminately. A sense of injustice or desire for regional autonomy or even independence seems to excuse nowadays any act of mass murder of innocent people, as they go about their day-to-day business, to make its point.


We often brand someone an ‘animal’ to indicate that their behaviour is unworthy of a human being or we might say that a riotous mob behaved like animals to signify that they ran riot or behaved in a savage manner. And yet this is the last thing that animals actually do. Animals very seldom kill for sport, but for food. Humans kill for sport and out of sheer spite and revenge. Animals rarely go on a rampage of destruction. The history of humans is full of countless acts of looting and rioting. Animals are not known to indulge in serial or mass killings, humans do it with alarming frequency. Need I go on? In fact, when we want to describe wanton and unacceptable conduct of any kind we should say that we’re behaving like humans! Because we are the savages, not animals. We are the species that kills and slaughters and pollutes and destroys on a large and systematic scale and are a threat to ALL other species of life on this planet and to our very environment. Animals live in harmony with their environment, whereas we are antagonistic to it and are constantly harming it.

We humans have made a very complex place of the world. Unless you are prepared to take yourself off to some exceedingly remote and hostile location and live in a cave or hut, cut off from society, you cannot escape this all-pervasive complexity. Today human society is more complex than ever before. Our technology and our scientific inventions, which are meant to assist and support us, add to this complexity as they become ever more sophisticated. It is difficult to really keep up with anything these days. Innovation and invention means that no sooner have we familiarised ourselves with one weird and wonderful device or gadget, than a new one comes along to replace it. Not because it has outlived its use or is outdated, but simply because the policy of ‘planned obsolescence’ dictates that products must be constantly renewed and given a face-lift to keep the relentless wheels of capitalist enterprise turning.


We are a wasteful, voracious, destructive and lethal breed and bad news for the environment and all other animals on this planet, and we consume vast quantities of the Earth’s resources to sustain our ever-growing numbers and maintain our prodigal way of life. When God went one step further than the apes to create humans, was it possible that he did not know what He was unleashing on the planet? How could this be, given that God is prescient and omniscient? Could it be that he knew and did it anyway? Perhaps He foresaw that without man the earth would be a very boring place, with no bloody wars, savage conflicts, genocidal massacres or social unrest, just peace and harmony all around. It seems that even God needs a bit of excitement in his celestial existence and so He created mankind, and I’m sure we’ve never disappointed him since!