A Wreckage of Tiny Truths

Hmm. The words are coming out rotten today no matter what I try to write...the delete key is throbbing with overuse. So...Friday it is and Friday it remains...and the day has been dusted with snow and little events of curious magnitude. Yet something is keeping me from expressing them on a computer screen. Some of this is clear; there is a limit to the amount of self-regarding nonsense in which I am willing to indulge. This prevents any stupid words being wasted about most of what I learnt today. Hell, who cares what I learnt? I am not here to throw pages of some hastily written diary in the spotty face of the Internet.

Sometimes all you can rescue from the wreckage is a pile of unconnected and modest truths that are naked when seen out of context. So finding a thread that runs through them is a noble goal and may even lead to a point being made...the least we can expect, surely?

Well...this is not always true. We buy books of miscellaneous facts by the basket, mostly as presents for miscellaneous friends. There is no satisfaction in these books except for a watered-down firework effect...we sit there going “ooh” and “aah” as each successive fact explodes before us, more out of duty than interest, and once they have disappeared, the night is just as dark and all we have left is a hole in our wallets.

Christ! What an absurd swamp of metaphors! And there was another. Ye gods. Rotten words... Ah, but we were going somewhere with this, and this was to assemble our pile of random facts into some kind of a round up. A news ticker in which news is replaced by unimportance...like Heat magazine, only not completely lousy.

Right...so here we go. There was a bomb scare today. This almost saw our office evacuated; it happened when a bag containing strange and fearsome electronics was found abandoned. It later proved to be a hoax. And here's the thing...a programme was broadcast last night about vigilance against terrorism and we wonder if this whole thing happening the next day is not a coincidence. Perhaps the result of someone being fed bad ideas by another production company in love with juicy scare tactics. These programmes do cause more trouble than anything...the same turmoil caused by the typical medical show where, inevitably, hundreds of viewers switch off and immediately develop all the symptoms of whatever disease is being profiled. People are horribly suggestible and prone to panic...uneducated people seeing the door opened slightly for them and not being able to process the sight of what lies beyond without having some kind of brain spasm.

Perhaps that is snobbery, but if what I said is true then what the hell. We have a great deal of sensationalist media to contend with every day and so long as this keeps translating to good sales we are stuck with it. It is one step on the ladder below outright lying, and a great many steps above psychological manipulation.

Enough of that. Today I discovered that talcum powder comes from a mine, and in effect so does kitty litter...or at least the one single mineral that can be used in the stuff does, anyway. There are few situations in which this information would be useful, but this is the case for most of what we learn...especially at school where trigonometry and oxbow lakes replace genuinely useful pieces of education such as how long you can leave paying a bill before it becomes an Issue, how much you can fiddle a tax return whilst staying under the radar, and where the hell do you buy sticky hooks for kitchen towels? Seriously, this last one has me stumped. And to think I wasted two years on fripperies such as German, Ceramics and IT.

Later I was in the supermarket and was surprised to hear a burst of stirring orchestral music. It was the disconcerting sound of a Great British prom that had become detached from the shore of summer and had floated off down the river into the fag end of February. The music became louder and I realised this was not a public address system malfunction...there was someone, something coming towards me, some kind of hideous vehicle. This fearsome buggy was covered in Union Flags and controlled by the kind of man who wouldn't think twice about twatting an asylum seeker around the chops with his Ruffian-Begone stick. He swooshed past, music blazing, almost knocking the wine from my hands.

"Up yours, Grandad!" I bellowed, tossing the wine overarm towards the old idiot. The bottle landed inches before his cruel machines, causing him to swerve desperately. He span the wheel round and round, but the skid was unstoppable...soon the wheels gave up beneath his frail form and the buggy struck a pyramid of baked bean tins, flipped over and burst into flames. The old man crawled out, only to find me standing on his hands and looking triumphant. Then I blew a raspberry at him and ran for it.

Well, maybe. I still have no idea why this twisted freak had been allowed in the supermarket and why he was pimping his patriotism on a bunch of weary shoppers, most of whom were uninterested commuters searching for some crappy jar of pasta sauce. Did he have a message, a point to impart? Was he wallowing in some kind of last-ditch pride in his autumn years? Or was he fucking nuts? I shrugged and left to find some cheap beefburgers.

By the time I got home I noticed a couple of young women in a nearby garden were filming some kind of weird ballet dance, but by then the day seemed too irregular to cope with...so I closed the curtains and defrosted some chicken.

Ah, we have crept into the bad realm of the hastily written diary. With the amount of people giving a damn about what meat I had for dinner reaching a staggering zero figure number, it is probably a good time to end this thing.