Looking for truffles in the garden
Well Jesus Christ almighty, it has just dawned on me that I haven't posted here for nigh on six months! The last time I felt obliged to issue some garrulous screed, snowdrifts had covered the pavements and we were all tramping to work like Russian soldiers at Stalingrad. Now the troublesome neige has slurried its way back into nature's bounteous cycle, we have endured a heatwave, torrents of rain and - as detailed in many newspapers of late - a terrifying dystopia in which millions and millions of people are not killed by swine flu.
Of course the insidious pig-clap pandemic has provided rich pickings for the professional neurotics of Fleet Street. Every newspaper worth its salt has one of these; the house hypochondriac who is paid gallons of pounds every week to churn out a bucketload of chyme in the guise of "lifestyle" commentary, which normally refers to several paragraphs of self-centred rambling that was first drafted during their weekly consultation with a Harley Street psychiatrist. Conveniently, H5N1 has passed over all the media houses like some benevolent Angel of Death in these arid summer months, when the usual trite is running dry at the pump and the endless well of tales about thirtysomething love affairs and which one of the children has the most obscure behavioural disorder has been exhausted. It has been said that swine flu does not discriminate; that it can strike anyone, male or female, young or old. Quite why the doctors and biologists are not investigating the phenomenon whereby it manifests itself in at least one columnist in every large-circulation newspaper, I don't know. I spotted versions of "My Swine Flu Hell" in three different newspapers last week, and I'm sure it didn't end there. And did they seek to bear their malady with stoicism and dignity, so as not to contribute to the already saturated market for hysteria on the subject? Did they fuck. Stoicism and dignity walk hand-in-hand with brevity, and these brain-buggering masses of verbiage displayed anything but. Here's one from Sarah Vine in The Times, who opened with "my brain feels as if it’s rotating very gently, floating uncertainly inside the cavity of my skull", and that wasn't even the worst of it. Who knew that one of the unacknowledged symptoms of this immunological curse was God's cauliflower doing 16 RPM on the turntable of the medulla? No doubt playing an overture by a tiny violinist as it did so. I caught flu at the age of eleven, and it wasn't very nice for a couple of days, but I still bore it out a lot more manfully than these so-called adults, and having spent most of the time asleep I certainly couldn't remember every stage with an array of colourful adjectives. So maybe swine flu improves your mental capacity. Or maybe the prospect of swine flu just makes you mental.
Of course the insidious pig-clap pandemic has provided rich pickings for the professional neurotics of Fleet Street. Every newspaper worth its salt has one of these; the house hypochondriac who is paid gallons of pounds every week to churn out a bucketload of chyme in the guise of "lifestyle" commentary, which normally refers to several paragraphs of self-centred rambling that was first drafted during their weekly consultation with a Harley Street psychiatrist. Conveniently, H5N1 has passed over all the media houses like some benevolent Angel of Death in these arid summer months, when the usual trite is running dry at the pump and the endless well of tales about thirtysomething love affairs and which one of the children has the most obscure behavioural disorder has been exhausted. It has been said that swine flu does not discriminate; that it can strike anyone, male or female, young or old. Quite why the doctors and biologists are not investigating the phenomenon whereby it manifests itself in at least one columnist in every large-circulation newspaper, I don't know. I spotted versions of "My Swine Flu Hell" in three different newspapers last week, and I'm sure it didn't end there. And did they seek to bear their malady with stoicism and dignity, so as not to contribute to the already saturated market for hysteria on the subject? Did they fuck. Stoicism and dignity walk hand-in-hand with brevity, and these brain-buggering masses of verbiage displayed anything but. Here's one from Sarah Vine in The Times, who opened with "my brain feels as if it’s rotating very gently, floating uncertainly inside the cavity of my skull", and that wasn't even the worst of it. Who knew that one of the unacknowledged symptoms of this immunological curse was God's cauliflower doing 16 RPM on the turntable of the medulla? No doubt playing an overture by a tiny violinist as it did so. I caught flu at the age of eleven, and it wasn't very nice for a couple of days, but I still bore it out a lot more manfully than these so-called adults, and having spent most of the time asleep I certainly couldn't remember every stage with an array of colourful adjectives. So maybe swine flu improves your mental capacity. Or maybe the prospect of swine flu just makes you mental.