7723/20664
Spent a good chunk of today watching Home ahead of my interview with Rufus Jones on Thursday - still tickets left Brighton, but not many.
Get on it It's a lovely sitcom about humanity, prejudice and family which avoids straying into becoming too preachy and manages to gently mock all points of view (though more harshly mock some of them). It's also really funny. Phoebe came home from school to see me watching telly and I told her that watching telly was my job, which today, it was. I am sure that as a kid my parents told me to stop watching so much telly (I watched loads of it though, so they can't have been too strict about that) and I bet I said that one day I'd make watching TV my job. I did try to get some work as a TV critic early in my career, but as you can imagine that's a tough industry to break into. Because every fucker in the world wants to get paid for watching telly. The only thing better would be to be paid for testing video games.
I told Phoebe that if she works hard enough at school then she might get to watch telly for a job. This isn't true though. Not working hard at school would be a better way to make that happen and also there will be no such thing as telly by the time she is looking for work. There may be no such thing as work or human beings by then as well, which will make it even harder.
I am as always reminded of how fortunate I am in my life. Much as I like to pretend otherwise. I might be the luckiest person who ever lived all in all. Any more successful in my career and my life would have been actively worse, any less and it would have been a bit of a struggle. When you think of all those millennia of poor fuckers living hand to mouth and bashing stones together before being eaten by lions then most of us are doing OK. Though none of them had to worry about tax returns or obeying the law, so maybe I've got it totally wrong. Glad to have lived in the time of laptops and iphones though. I'd like to think that in the future they'll have something better and laugh at me for believing this was as good as it was going to get, but I refer you to my previous comment about there soon being no human beings.
There is talk of bringing back National Service, which unsurprisingly some people my age who neither had to do it themselves or would have to do it now are right behind. I hope my kids don't get forced to be in the army or have to go to war against Russia, but who knows what will become of them. If they do I hope they will think of me watching TV for my "job" of talking to more talented people than me, when they're hiding in a hole in Eastern Europe. It should give them a nice laugh. Just as I guess my granddad's brother would find my life wryly amusing as he tried and failed to escape at Dunkirk. I guess most people in human history and also people around right now would be forced to find my life amusing in order not to express outright anger about it.
Ah, this is probably all just a simulation anyway and I am not even real, so it's grand.
