I was doing some routine tidying up the other day on my computer. You know the kind of thing, clearing logs, getting rid of email spam, making files and other nerdy activities which I had been putting off for months.
Having a house full of builders putting in a new bathroom inspired me to do all those jobs that you can do when your brain is being fried by the sound of drilling and distant badly tuned transistor radios accompanied by random whistling and bursts of Elvis Presley sound-a-like wannabes.
I got round to sort my emails too. The idea was to rationalize various accounts and reroute them to my posh mobile phone. As you can see, I am really in the swing of modern communication technology. Well, writing from home everyday on my computer means that I have to know what I am doing. Right? Wrong.
I rose above myself and started fiddling with account settings and soon I was definitely not getting too many spam emails, I was getting no emails at all.
I fiddled a bit more and opened up a whole new world. In fact I might have invented the time machine.
Suddenly emails started to arrive in their hundreds….onto the computer and into my mobile phone. Amazing, you might think but the trouble is that they are all from earlier on this year.
I am now receiving daily news updates from April, May and June 2009, all at the same time, as well as numerous other personal and spam emails all long forgotten. I have done the sensible thing and called in an expert who will be arriving to, hopefully, unscramble my muddle any minute now.
In the meanwhile I have the pleasure of reliving 2009 all over again. It is a kind of current affairs ground hog day with breaking news about the collapsing banking industry, the war in Afghanistan, fiddling businessmen, the announcement of Michael Jackson’s death, Swine Flu and climatic disasters.
Long before that depressing night, New Year’s Eve, when we all have to drown our sorrows in drink after reviewing the year, I am going through it all now. What a depressing year it has been. Was it nearly the end of modern capitalism? the collapse of the West? the end of musical entertainment? Or even Pandemic Time? I doubt it very much but we were all in a state of barely repressed hysteria through most of the Spring and Summer and I had forgotten all about it.
Actually the sun is shining today and the economy seems to be picking up, there are some hopes for the Afghanistan campaign, Swine Flu has mostly made us feel just one degree under and, well, we are slowly getting to live without Michael Jackson.
Before this year is packed away let’s try to remember that it was a tough old time and, if it was bad for us, just think what it was like for our leaders, Barrak Obama and, in our case here in Britain, Gordon Brown. They got a lot of stick from clever old us sitting here at home saying that they weren’t coping with the economic collapse, that they were doing all the wrong things and that we were heading towards the worst financial collapse, maybe even worse, than The Great Deprression of 1929. Well, good on ya, Brown and Obama, you suck to your guns and we have come out the other side and, even if there are more problems before complete recovery, it is now pretty clear that we were lucky in our leaders and also lucky that their critics were nowhere near the reins of power when the going got tough.
In the meanwhile, I have been cut off from the outside world..well, from the email world and it all seems very quiet here except, of course for that drilling, sawing, banging, whistling and shouting. It’s a grand old world though and we really should try to keep our nerve when the times get tough.
I don’t know about you out there but I say let’s give credit where credit is due and give Gordon Brown and Barrack Obama at least one pat on the back.