On Heat Stroke and Boredom.

I’ve been suffering from heat stroke today. It’s a condition to which we Brits born north of Watford are prone when the mercury rises much above about 65F. Besides, having both Irish and northern English hill stock in the old ancestral line does not prepare one congenitally for heat. Wind, rain and fog, yes, but not heat. Today it was in the mid-eighties, and it was really a bit rash of me to mow the lawn, especially since I’d just had my hair cut. Whatever could I have been thinking of? I got so sweaty that I even took an extra shower, and that’s about as rare as Donald Trump giving free membership of his golf club to members of the Salvation Army.

So that’s why there were no blog posts tonight. I was so flaked out and feeling ill that I couldn’t think of anything funny to say. I was too concerned with the prospect of going the whole nine yards and taking my socks off when I go to bed tonight. Might I get a chill? Might the bed bugs and spiders sidle off in disgust and find a new home? Might the very feet themselves desert me for another man? It’s a worry, you know?

Nevertheless, the delirium thus engendered did give rise to the thought that I might mention my autobiography. I began it five years ago when my writing activities were at their most prolific. I stopped after about 8,000 words because:

a) I found it very boring.

b) I began to wonder how a person of even moderate intelligence could allow his ego such sway as to consider it an activity worth pursuing.

I did take a peek at it, though, and found the following passage. It’s part of my earliest recollection of Britishness, at a time when we still paid lip service to Empire Day:

Such an inflated perception of the nation’s worth naturally made the people of Britain, already congenitally inclined to be insular by the detached nature of the country’s geographical position, even more so. And the well oiled machinery of social life and values was, consequently, more restricted and hidebound than should reasonably have been expected of such a developed culture.

Life was largely dictated by intractable rules and received attitudes. Any form of counter culture was intolerable. Those given to questioning the rightness of almost anything – from the details of fashion and diet to the Anglican view of the right road to salvation – were considered seditious or at least highly eccentric. But the communal sense of self belief gave full credence to the illusion that all was as it should be. It was all part of what made Britain great. ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’ sang the jingoists as they fondly remembered the workings of a system that had laboured so conscientiously to enslave others. And very few of them understood the extent to which they had enslaved themselves with their tight social conventions, their self-deluding notions of superiority, and their intolerance of all things foreign.

You can see why I got bored, can’t you? It sounds like the UKIP manifesto.