On Perception and Pretension.

This week has been a week of mood swings, mostly without just cause, although the news hasn’t helped. A week of feeling unsettled, confused, edgy, pessimistic. A week in which the chill wind now blowing through the Shire seems to echo a chill wind blowing through the world.

It feels to me as though the world is entering an ideological, political and economic autumn, to be followed by a winter of discontent before we settle back into the spring of a new order. Such a phenomenon has happened before, and the process can take a very long time.

But this is just my perception, of course; I have nothing empirical to offer as evidence. It isn’t a prophecy or anything as grand and pretentious as that. I’m probably just in a bad mood.

And talking of pretentious, I just sent an e-mail to Ms Wong, a line from which might warrant repetition on the blog. Ms Wong works for an American-owned publishing house, an environment in which the corporate mentality takes precedence over the core reason for the existence of publishing houses. Occasionally she has to suffer a period of moving in close and making the corporate connection before she can get back to simply doing the job. Ms Wong finds this difficult, and so I offered my opinion of the corporate world:

‘Such a characterless world. A colourless world. A drab world. A world in which superficial vices preen themselves as virtues in the minds of vacuous people.’

Pretentious it might be, but I think it’s the kind of statement I’d like to be known by after I’ve gone.