Dejunked

Been a mess for weeks. I hate having an untidy office.

A long term reader wrote to Private Eye this week to cancel her subscription, saying that she could no longer cope with the avalanche of corruption and the constant flow of depressing news about the state of humanity that it contained. Many of us know how she feels. No matter how good the journalism and how funny and topical the cartoons, Private Eye makes depressing reading. Probably the worst aspect is the way that it documents how some people seem to consistently and serially get away with appalling behaviour. I say probably, but there is also a good case for the worst thing of all being the realisation of naivete. I have had a touching faith in humanity and its inevitable progress that I suspect has been misplaced for the last sixty five years, and it is only since the sewage farm walls burst in 2016 that I have been forced to acknowledge that the shit was there all along and I only endured the occasional whiff, rather than the full force of it.


My brother did warn me about this decades ago. We had a wonderful, warm, loving and wise mother who, he said, induced a false sense of security in her children. We grew up to be optimists incapable of reading the runes about the real state of the world. The bad things that happened in our lives were mentally catalogued as aberrations from the norm,  when in fact they were just the visible tip of a buried toxic waste site.


Mrs Iris Smith from Morpeth has therefore given up on Private Eye at the age of 90, and I wish her well in her attempt to ignore the world during her remaining years. For my part I am torn in several different directions. A bit of me wants to scream outside No 10 and get myself arrested. The more rational version wants to be an activist who does something practical without any expectation of success, only a faint hope of arresting the decline in moral standards that seems to be all around us. At the moment the dominant version is a newly minted 65 year old who is trying to use his ample leisure time to make his home into a bulwark against the darkness. I am fixing and improving and constantly cleaning, making the small Edwardian house we own into my own personal haven. It is a moral bunker mentality, a conviction that I can ignore all the bad news as long as I keep my house in order and hang on to my integrity.


But of course as John Donne observed, no man is an island, and I cannot shut myself off from the world; for like unnatural fog in a horror movie it will find a way past my defences and invade my consciousness, preventing me from achieving a peaceful state of mind. I have people in my life that I love and who cannot yet turn their back on this declining age. Their pain calls me to action; even if I could ignore all the evil that exists in the world at large I would always answer their calls for help. So even if I do create a perfect home that is a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness, I am always going to have to go back into the open air, to see what the wind and sky are doing.