Wednesday 3rd August 2011

Another hot day in town, though they say it will end in heavy downpours.  This seems to be the pattern these days.  As if the weather is mimicking the furious pace of human activity. Where are the languorous days of the summers I remember, when time seemed to stretch to eternity and we had all the time in the world to waste.  Now time seems to be at such a premium, what with twenty-four hour news and the internet bombarding us with information all the time, and you pop into town to do some window shopping and automatically pick up the Metro, which you hadn’t intended to, and certainly didn’t need to read, having already had the Telegraph delivered and devoured over breakfast, with the TV on BBC news quietly humming in the background, casually peering up from the Leader prattling on about falling standards in society, (when haven’t they been?) you can’t help catching the strap-line “Breaking News” and you watch even though you know, of course, that it isn’t even News, let alone Breaking, so you settle into the tube carriage and partly out of habit, partly to avoid the embarrassment of actually meeting some fellow travellers enquiring eye, and the imagined accusations of being caught staring, you read some regurgitated piffle which you not only saw on the ten o’clock News last night, but also in slightly more detail on the News Channel and splashed all over page 4 of the Telegraph, and yet you again re-read this edited down précis, which gives no depth, no understanding, just a few what might be considered facts, which like everything else, is instantly forgettable.

And so the time goes.  Whatever happened to time for personal reflection?  Well maybe there was a tad too much of that in the book of course.