Gee – You Guys Really Specialise

Daughter is now heavily into Chess though I’m not sure she has actually grasped the idea of actually thinking about each move before it is made. The result is that her American-Voiced Chess program is continually chatting to us from upstairs, an alternation between a man’s and a woman’s voice which brings to mind a genteel argument. I suppose I will have to try and resurrect my own extremely poor Chess skills. We used to play in the Sixth form common room though I was only ever on the fringes of the main Chess group. We really should have been studying but hey – the sun was shining and we were all … er … indoors huddled around a chess board.

The youngest has been on a voyage of self discovery this week. He suddenly discovered his navel and not having spotted it before thought something really bad had happened – “Mummy – big hole”. This of course meant that everyone else in the family had to prove that they were the same. None of this stopped him lifting his shirt at every opportunity and pointing excitedly.

Life for the rest of us has involved lounging around trying not to look as if we were melting. All the thunderstorms that have been promised (I have a signed document from The Met Office saying so) have missed us and gone on to soak some undeserving South-Eastern Water area. They’ll be up here sooner or later, hanging around our (full) reservoirs whistling, with a view to filling up the odd tanker or two while no one is watching. Oi! Come back with our water! We have new grass in what was once just a pebbled area and then was a disaster area of a slag-heap for months. Have to say that the last man who worked on it certainly knows what he is doing and has been able to create something rather wonderful out of the postage stamp that is our back-garden. The children now have somewhere other than the few square meters in front of the television to lounge around.

All this domestic bliss has meant that the terrible problems of the rest of the world seem to be receding into irrelevancy. This is of course a shame but it makes me wonder about the weighting that is given to various news stories depending on how relevant they are to out own little realm of balance. There is a sort of perverse equation that means that certain numbers of dead people are only the equivalent of certain numbers of other dead people. The weighting is of course down to how much each death will affect us here. So anything that relates to oil comes way up the list. Basically, it comes down to how much an event will affect the economy. I’ve long thought that terrorists have gone for the wrong targets. So many dead and injured from any atrocity are always going to mean much TV coverage, standard outrage and condemnation, but in general after a while we seem to switch off to the suffering unless we are directly affected. A campaign of just nuisance against infrastructure would be more damaging because what people really cannot stand is having to queue for petrol or panic about not having enough toilet rolls. Spread out all of that annoyance over the whole population and Governments would soon have to rethink policies. I must add that I do NOT advocate any such behaviour in the same way that all right-thinking people do not call for terrorist attacks. You will see me panicking just as much as anyone else.

I could never understand why the Rwandan genocide was not in the headlines for months and then suddenly it was ten years ago and the only things about it were a few mid-news items from the BBC about the aftermath and reconciliation. Yet we have reminders of various economic crises every day. I suppose that a real and deep depression has the potential to kill many people and I don’t know enough about economics and world affairs (C grade at O-Level) to say whether any economic downturn will really kill people in the future. I seem to remember reading some things that say that in our western society that is not possible any more. If we can reduce our dependency on oil or even do with out it completely like Sweden aims to then we might be able to look forward without a nervous eye on the markets at every opportunity. Economic downturns only happen because of people, because of collective pessimism; the world economy for all its slick marketing image and clever copy about how wonderful various goods and services are, is at the mercy of rumour and hearsay. There is of course the inertia of something so large Things which happen this week may not cause measurable affects for months or even years; that is of course Chaos theory in action but isn’t that what globalisation will lead to? Small, local business entities can react faster to the situation on the ground, though I suppose that a determined company can make people redundant as quick as it likes and any oil company can up it’s pump prices as soon as the words “oil futures” break out of the relative calm of the business news into the realm of death and disaster that makes up the headlines these days. So be confident! Buy something today and keep those wheels turning. Oh dear – that’s not what I meant at all.