Thursday, 29 January 2009
Back to the Future 4
Yesterday I learnt that more train journeys are being made in Britain than at any time since demobilisation in the 1940s - this in an age when we were supposed to be whizzing around with jetpacks on our backs (I confidently await the return of steam). Today I learnt that the deer population is as high as it was 1,000 years ago - those outmoded relics of medieval times have more than adapted to the modern world. We've probably got more child drunks than at any time since the 19th century (and this kind of nonsense won't help). And we're very probably heading for literacy and numeracy levels around what they were before the State got involved in schools (tellingly, a functionally illiterate/innumerate young man interviewed on the radio this morning came out of school with 7 GCSEs to his name). All these things were supposed to be moving in the opposite direction, propelled by that great force of historical inevitability - Progress. If it's a force at all, it seems a strangely weak one. Atavism, as the great Marilynne remarks somewhere, is the strongest force in human culture.
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Planning is the problem. It's not just that we're bad at planning, we're utterly off the scale bad.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's not just that we're utterly off the scale bad, it's that we don't ever realise that we're utterly off the scale bad.
Did you plan to say that Brit or was it one of your impromptu riffs, and did you notice the reference to Belisha's after a night on the tiles, strong association between them and poles, at some point in the evening methinks they accidentally fell into a lap dancing emporium. Glowing orbs all round.
ReplyDeleteThat could explain a lot Malty...
ReplyDeleteI tend to be pretty improvisational in my comments, Malty, though I do occasionally workshop them a bit beforehand.
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