A Dark Horizon.

I had three phone calls to make today: one to the community transport people, one to a taxi firm, and one to the local mail delivery office to find out whether and when they are likely to replace the village mail box which was trashed by a runaway tractor two weeks ago. That should have taken about ten minutes, right?

Very wrong. Glitch after glitch was the order of the day. I managed the community transport call on the third or fourth attempt. The taxi firm took seven or eight, spread over the day from about twelve o'clock to after five thirty. I needed the delivery office's website to get their phone number, but after struggling through  the slow, crotchety mess of irrelevant pages, no phone number was given. Those three calls or attempted calls effectively wasted the day.

The sad, simple fact is that today's experience was typical of a society cracking at the seams, courtesy of the bureaucracies, the corporate world, and the tech giants placing profit before service. People are becoming superfluous except as a largely invisible cash cow, as is the provision of personal contact while there are machines trained to pretend they're people.

 

And this isn't just one old curmudgeon being reactionary. I'm hearing the same complaint from people of all ages, apart from the very young who haven't known any better. So who should we rely on to correct this deteriorating state of affairs? The politicians? I hardly think so. It's a basic tenet of modern politics that they mustn't interfere with the workings of a free market economy. Mrs Thatcher said so and it became writ in stone. So who else? Nobody, as far as I can see. And as far as I can tell, the people of the Nordic countries are not suffering the same problem, or at least not to the same extent. Could this be because they kept hold of their mixed economies, the system which kept us largely content here before Mrs T cast her dark shadow over the land? The last life satisfaction survey I saw placed the five Nordic countries in the top six spots. The UK languished in 23rd, one behind the USA.

So here's the bottom line:

People reading this blog might suspect I have a death wish. I sort of do for the first hour or two of the day, but not for the rest. But if this situation continues to worsen, as I suspect it probably will, and if there's nobody willing to or capable of changing it, the only way out will be to die. Chilling, isn't it?