Baby It’s Cold Outside………….

....And it’s none too toasty inside either at the moment.

No sign of Global Warming in these parts then, which is nice, as it’s one of the things I’m currently fed up with hearing about. There are quite a lot of these, too many in fact to ever list here, but global warming is right up there. The main reason for my disinterest is not that I don’t believe it’s real - I do as it happens - but rather that I just don’t really care any more. I seem to have green fatigue.

There are of course as many theories both for and against the warming phenomenon as there are worthy writers and credulous readers. Just pick your polemicist of choice. But for my part, as far as I can make out, I might just live long enough to see olive groves and palm trees around the M25, but not long enough to die in a horrible ball of fire, or drown whilst walking on the Pennines. Having no kids to fret over, I can happily live with that scenario. I don’t go about needlessly polluting and wasting energy for the sake of it, but I’m dammed if I’m going to let populist paranoia make me feel guilty for turning the heating up a couple of degrees.

When I was child I worried about going to big school. Then about getting a job. Now I worry over how I will be able to provide for myself in old age. As an individual, and as a people, we have enough to be anxious about already. I don’t make New Years resolutions but if I did it would be to do my living in the here and now.

You may think I actually doing my living in a state of denial of course, and maybe you might be right, but unlike a large part of the UK one place I will definitely NOT be living in the next couple of weeks is a Gangsta’s Paradise. (Go and google on “Coolio” if you are not up to speed with your faded 90’s Rap artistes.)

Yes…. hard on the heels of “Strictly Pointless”, TV now brings us “Celebrity Big Brother”! …… Your latest mind altering dose of cultural Mogadon!

Is this really what 3,000 years of evolution, education and artistic endeavour has brought us to? Seems to me that the overwhelming quasi-religious rise of celebrity driven, populist hysteria IS actually something worth worrying about. Something we SHOULD collectively feel guilty about.

Don’t obsess about other peoples lives, do something with your own for fucks sake…. Go for a walk, grow some seeds, read a book…anything! (Although on the subject of books, I do like the irony that those people who will hang on every utterance of Coolio, Ulrika et al, and allow a TV program to shape their free time, their conversations at work, and their personal value systems, probably have no idea where the name Big Brother comes from or what it implies.)

With systematic social dumbing down occurring at this rate, even if there is a terrible climate driven dénouement to our existence on this planet, at least we’ll be too fucking stupid to notice.

Global warming may or may not have played a part in the extinction of the dinosaurs, but I suspect it was really because they were too busy sitting on their leathery arses watching “The T-Rex Factor” to go out and get a life.

(….. So all in all then , I’d say the no drinking thing is going quite well wouldn’t you?)