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We were off round the country looking at potential houses today covering 150 miles looking at just three places. We are not totally committed to one location and so ended up zig zagging down the country. But it was a nice day out. One of the houses ended up on our maybe list and so the search continues. We both seem more keen to compromise on the stuff that seemed most important to us two years ago, but we’re also conscious that we don’t let fatigue set in and end up somewhere that isn’t right for us. Fate’s finger is hovering over our lives and seems to be mainly sticking itself up at us. But we will get there I am sure.
We were listening to Jeremy Vine’s show on the radio and they were discussing the fact that people need to wash their tins and bottles when they put them in the recycling. Some angry people were aggrieved by this, trying to claim that this was a waste of energy in itself (though how hard is it to dip your baked bin tin into the washing up bowl at the end of the washing up or even to rinse it quickly with cold water? The answer is it’s not hard if you were struggling). It’s a horribly small-minded and selfish attitude which seems to be pervading the world at the moment and to go unchallenged. Why should we do it? Because ultimately it will be helpful to everyone if we don’t destroy the world.
All these people who didn’t have time to rinse out a baked bean tin seemed to have time to ring up a radio station and complain about their wasted time. The thirty minutes that this process will have taken them -from initial call, waiting to be connected and being selected to go on the show, would be enough to wash all your baked bean tins for the next ten years. But that didn’t bother these people. They were angry about it - why? Because they thought they were being ripped off by the recycling firms that should be paying for this cleaning themselves? Because there was some kind of implicit criticism of their lives? Who knows?
One man complained that he was being asked to wash rubbish which he considered the first sign of mental illness (Jeremy Vine didn’t seem to want to step in to say that if you were doing it for a good reason then it wasn’t mental illness, but increasingly journalists don’t seem that interested in stepping in and pointing out the bleeding obvious, because in today’s politically correct world we have to view people with stupid views as equal to those with valid ones). The man dismissed the fact that he was doing this to save the planet he lived on arguing that “Saving the world is 'a catch all for everything these days'. Like the idea that you might want to save the world is ludicrous and that it was his right to not have to save the world, because what has the world ever done for us? I’d have been tempted to at least make him explain the negative connotations of keeping the earth inhabitable for humans, but Jeremy Vine let it go. After all, it’s not like he and his descendants have to live here.
This tape will be playing constantly in my mountain top hall of portraits of climate change deniers. And just in case I am wrong I am also going to build a ground level hall showing portraits of all the smug liberals who used saving the world as a catch all for everything. If we’re right then our hall will only be able to be visited by scuba divers, but if we’re wrong then people can come and mock us.
This blog will be in the liberal hall, along with electrical readings from my house showing that I always left my TV on stand by and my central heating on in every room even when I was out.
We’re all hypocrites and the world is doomed. So at least let’s wash our baked bin tins so that we don’t look like total bell ends to our aqua-grand-children.
