Talking of ego, I skimmed through the appalling rag that is the Sunday Times at a local cafe. Wall-to-wall ‘aspirational’ bullshit. I wonder how many of its readers can afford the £2.5 million mansions, the £100,000 cars and the £20,000 holidays? Clearly some, but I’m convinced the majority seethe silently with envy and plot despicably to get one over their real or imagined neighbour. Isn’t that the way life is?
Sacked, but won’t go quietly, Jeremy Clarkson rails against the British Bigoted Club and one time friend Chris Evans, and tells all that the ‘executive’ comparing the ex-Top Gear buffoon to Jimmy Savile scuppered any chance of him accepting the offer to return to the programme.
Clarkson ‘reviews’ a £93,000 new Range Rover. He likes it, but compares it to a Rolex, because ‘everyone now has a Range Rover’ and so it is a ‘bit naff.’. His article spends about 20% on the car ‘test’, and the rest telling us how he was bullied remorselessly at public school and then launches into full blown snobbery. I wonder how many other boys from Doncaster [which he now hates and ridicules] went to public school and were given Omega watches [the Rolex link, geddit?] as a leaving home present?
Now the café that supplied the Sunday Lies has seats outside, is [deservedly] near the top of Trip Advisor ratings for Malvern restaurants, but suffers from a fatal flaw [in the Microsoft sense] which can afflict any eating/drinking establishment. The curse of loud. On the last three occasions we went into Mac and Jack’s the same four person table has been occupied by people [sorry, but 90% women in this instance] trying to assume conversational supremacy by speaking the loudest. And most of what they were saying was the spoken equivalent of absolute, X-Factor dross. Thank God for the outside tables. Conversations conducted at normal volume, respectful of others present.
Everything is loud. Kid’s TV is a school for shouting and screaming. ‘Passionate’ idiots on the recorded [adult?] media getting excited over bags of antique pegs or f*** all, and ‘reality show stars’ [these people really exist] putting themselves forward, and their talentless competitor clones down. As loud as possible.
As a late teenage/early twenty something I was loud too. Cringingly so at times. But mostly when drunk. No excuse I know. But loud today is not the exception induced by too much Stella, but the norm created [and embraced here] by a corrupted corporate culture imported from you-know-where.
So, as the queue for louder still grows ever longer, the transhumanist agenda has the answer. Remote voice volume control. Turn up the volume [wasn’t that a song? Oh yes, pump up the volume] by blinking your eye wearing Google glasses. By pass the X-Factor mind. Cut out all that pesky thinking about what you say, how you say it and who gets deafened in one action.
The more I travel on public transport, walk down the street, go into cafes and bars, the more I seem to be isolated in my world of calm, worthwhile conversational choices and open mindedness, willing to challenge ‘norms’ and yet seek out and listen to someone else who is not programmed.
I buy into the belief that the world is about to shift, certainly in my lifetime, to a peaceful, war game/war-free, poverty free and control freak exempt paradise. And that not all the eight billion will join us.
No matter how loud they shout.
Jack Stewart, rapidly approaching my 63rd birthday, Malvern.