Early Death.
I was going to make an attempt to be more upbeat, it is Spring after all, but yet another person I know has died 'before their time'. Living so far out on the moors, I don't see the papers every day so although I get the gist of world cruciality from teletext I miss out on the page-filling gossip. This is of course good in one way, as before not only was it impossible for anyone to tell me anything that I hadn't already read, so I spent much time with a strained smile, but I also knew only too well when somebody was repeating a newspaper story as their own. Which made me despise them, obviously.

Today I had a whole armful of newspapers as I had just come back from my weekly lift to the supermarket. Some time I must reproduce parts of the local papers, as to anyone more than about twenty miles away they must be representative of a vanished world. They have extensive 'hunt1ng reports' which describe for half a page how 'tuft3rs' 'found' in 'Old Cl33ve Bottom' etc. I hadn't realised that special hunts are arranged for big occasions like twenty-first bithdays or retirements ... Anyway ........... Flicking casually through a satisfyingly solid non-broadsheet, there was a familiar face from years of parties. 'Found dead from a suspected drug overdose in a Th@i backpacker's hotel'. But he is about the same age as me. What is he doing in my children's life? Well ...... 'Thingy spent many years fighting drink and drug addiction apparently brought on by publishers rejection of his second novel'. For f@ck's sake. What is happening to the world I ask myself.

It ties in with a news story about Chemistry departments being closed down all over England because no one wants to read Science anymore. They are all fighting to get on to Media Studies courses. A bizarre future scenario looms of everyone wandering around filming each other as the planet sinks into ill-informed chaos....
- posted by Iris @ 4/30/2004 02:06:00 AM comment