I often muse on the future of planet earth, you see, and all who sail in her. I think of the threats we might face any time from tomorrow to a few decades down the line – economic meltdown, global warming, WWIII, power-hungry Presidents, giant asteroids, coronal mass ejections, and so on.
And then I look around at all my possessions which are showing signs of needing repair or renewal and my end of days mentality kicks in unfailingly. Will the gadgets hang on long enough to see me out and save me the trouble and expense? It’s becoming a regular hope and habit because life now seems to have entered a race between the state of the world and my own mortality. Which of us will pack up first, or will it be a dead heat because the endings will be simultaneous?
‘You shouldn’t think like that,’ I hear you say. ‘I don’t think like that,’ I reply. ‘It’s the way I feel.’ ‘Then you should learn to control your emotional state,’ you remonstrate with a level of sagacity born of your deluded imagination. ‘Please don’t patronise me; go away,’ is my only riposte. (Actually I would probably use stronger language and drop the ‘please’.)
* * *
But for now I’ve drunk my mug of tea and eaten my slice of toast and jam, so I’m off to see whether my alter-ego Mr Joyce can depress my mood even further with tails of desperate and dysfunctional Dubliners. Odd that I should find them entertaining, but maybe it’s something to do with my Mayo roots from way back (the song Rocky Road to Dublin comes to mind.)
And now I have a new problem. I bought a fresh pot of jam last week, a more expensive and therefore upmarket brand than Sainsbury’s own. It’s blackcurrant flavour and has real, whole blackcurrants in it. They keep falling off the toast and having to be picked up from the floor with a piece of kitchen roll so I don’t have to bother washing my hands. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of telling me that peasants like me should avoid the presumption of buying upmarket jam.
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