Trial By Ordeal

Big Up, y'all

The thing about having a blog is deciding what to write about. Being as I largely have no life to speak of and am in my late 20's, I am at least not distracted by the doings of my friends and lovers. I know where my friends are. My friends are all at work, be it teaching, lawyering or local government administrating. My lovers, meanwhile, are such a discreet bunch that even I don't know what they're up to. I'm sure they will drop me a line eventually.

The first choice of blog material is oneself. I could go on for pages about the nonsense that floats around my skull. But then, personal stuff carries an image question. What I may think of as endearing whimsy could read as either endearing whimsy or the sociopathic bile of a man saving up all his anger and rage for the day he can lay his hands on some kind of doomsday laser. Starting a posting with "I don't want to sound bitter, but..." basically says "I am bitter and you are going to hear about it."

So the choice turns to current events. We are all digital citizens, and I do take the point that if you have a forum, you should work out something to say. The Guardian has a column of entries following the opinions of bloggers on the major issues of the day. This is serious stuff, too serious to fill with aimless musings about telly and my life between 1979-1990. Look at the legacy of Ed Murrow, Bernstein and Woodward, Paul Foot. I have gone to the trouble of setting up a blog (ten minutes) and then annoying my friends by tellng them about it (four minutes, but the effects will last a lifetime). Well, here I go.

Tessa Jowell seems to still be in trouble... Quite cold today... Did well in the cricket... Charlize Theron's dress, how silly did she look...

Really, I don't know enough about Tessa Jowell to make a valid comment. I can say, well, she was a bit daft, fancy not reading her own mortgage, but at the same time, I will be hoping that having broken her 25 year marriage, the Westminster press pack, the Tories and half of the Labour Party are happy now. As far as I can see, she's done nothing wrong, but it seems that once mud starts to fly it really is only a matter of time until you resign. Tony Blair today gave her his full support, which seals it. She'll be gone by the end of the week. And it's all just baseless - if Italian companies were getting a suspicious number of contracts to build bits of the Olympic sites, then that would be corrupt. Not knowing exactly how your husband pays the mortgage is stupid, yes, careless, yes, negligent, yes, but not actually illegal. If stupidity was illegal there would be no-one left outside prison except monks and people in comas.

And now that perennial British favourite, the weather. It is ridiculous how we were reliably told in October that this winter would be the coldest on record, the dead piling up like stacked cordwood in the streets and polar bears ravaging those unlucky ones who survived. In the event it was a bit chilly, quite cold a couple of times, and we had not quite enough snow to put off a hosepipe ban until at least April. We don't have weather, we have a climate. If you live in Devon you can wear the same kind of clothes all year round.

So well done the Met Office there, but also congratulations to the newspapers who between panicking about bird flu and Siberian Weather Chaos! still managed to get Princess Diana on the front page at least a couple of times a week throughout. I find that nothing but ghoulish. Poor woman. I am curious how newspapers which make quite a point of how they stand for respect, good manners, tradition and family (basically the Mail and Express, but they all do it) can happily keep on about how Diana was killed by a conspiracy of MI5, Tony Blair, Prince Philip and probably giant trans-dimensional space lizards without wondering whether they are being at all hypocritical. Still, her face sells papers and that's all that really matters. My Mum has changed her newspaper of choice from the Daily Express to The Independent.
"Why?" I asked, as I have been telling her to do just that for about a decade.
"I got fed up being told I was about to die," she said. Good point.

As for sport, my views on football are well known, and I am very happy for Paul Collingwood, Alastair Cook and Monty Panesar, but frankly no-one will care as it's about the cricket. I did hear that Charlize Theron's dress had invaded Cuba, but that may have been a misprint.

So that's the news from me, for what it's worth. I'm not quite the citizen journalist yet. I do get very angry about the news sometimes - David Cameron may have fooled most people, but not me, dammit - but I ultimately think that stuff like that really doesn't matter very much. Nothing much changes, whoever's in the big chair. Overall we are wealther, healthier and safer than we were ten years ago. Tony, Dave or Ming, we will all get up in the morning and go off to a day of teaching, lawyering or local government administrating. We will do this for approximately fifty years and then die. As long as we spend the intervening time doing right by eachother, or at least trying to, then we will do OK. A bit feeble, really, as worldviews go. Solipsistic, even, to use a needlessly long word.

Please believe me though, I know this is missing the issues of social inequality, racism, anti-Semitism, religious fundamentalism, the environment, cultutral hegemony and Victoria Beckham's 10 fashion dos and donts, but I am only one man, and I've been typing for an hour. You'll be sick of me by now.

Good night, and good luck
Doug