Being the Lost Child.

It’s become a habit of mine lately to watch compilations of clips from Lord of the Rings on YouTube. There are loads of them, all accompanied by different music. I saw all three films years ago, but my memory of them is vague. Now I have the boxed set of DVDs sitting on my office desk waiting to be watched, and yet I’m incessantly reluctant to make the time to do so.

I’m reminded, you see; I’m reminded that adults make a clear distinction between reality and fantasy: ‘this is real, that’s just entertainment.’ I’m reminded that children don’t make such distinctions. Everything blends together into a more comprehensive view of reality. It isn’t so much what LOTR is, but what it represents: the magic, the heroism, the beauty, the suffering, the triumph, the spectacle.

I never lost that blurring of the forms, and so I’m concerned that in my present situation I could so easily be stolen away. I could become The Lost Child and find it hard to return, and then I’d be tilting at windmills even more than I do already.

Maybe I should get back to commenting on politics instead. That’s real enough. The problem is that what I hear coming out of the mouths of government ministers at the moment is even further removed from reality. It’s absurd, dishonest, self-serving and delusional. How is one supposed to know what line to walk in this crazy, complex life?