Lost...

I like answers. They kind of give a solution to the problem of not knowing what the hell is going on.

I  like Lost. It's a well made and intriguing TV show that has actually managed to keep my interest for the four seasons I've watched (unlike 24 which kind of bored me after 2.4 hours).

The problem I have is that the two things are mutually incompatible. 

Series 5 has just started. I was told I was going to get answers.

Bollocks I was!

The English...

...or at least the ones who are proud of it to the extent of xenophobia.

I am fed up, quite frankly, with a certain type of English person. Not the Englander as perceived by the rest of the world, the reserved, polite, well spoken individual. They're OK. It just seems that they aren't the English any more.

No.

We have people who believe that Sportswear is the ultimate in cool. That an England football top is the height of fashion (for men OR women) and is something to be worn at every opportunity. That a St George's Cross hung from a window is a viable form of exterior decoration for a home. That St George's day should be a national holiday, despite the fact that the bloke was a Turk and never visited the country, oh, and the fact that were no dragons, ever, he didn't kill one, save a princess or do anything he may be associated with in the minds of the people in question. That being pure bred English is possible. That we have a had a proud history of independence. (The Romans, the Vikings, the Saxons, and the Normans? Anyone? English? Or Roman, Norwegian French crossbreed?) That football is the defining reason for living. That the Sun is a newspaper. 

I live in a deluded nation. Surrounded by people that have a word picture formed by reading the Sun from back to front (that way comes in the order of importance, sport (just football) adverts for porno phone lines, problem page, womens shit, more football (if you're lucky) celebrity gossip, page three boobies, major story (so long as it's about football celebrities or sex)). People who are tattooed with bulldogs, phrases of absurd patriotism (Im forever english (captalised and punctuated as on the arm of the subject). It's disappointing. I could be proud of our nation, but I'm embarrassed by it. Visitors arrive expecting Hugh Grant and get Chavs. They get yobs. They get one of the most fucked up nations on the face of the planet.

This isn't inspired by my Scots heritage. 

The Scots are a pretty fucked nation too. Governed by the sassenachs as my brother would say. but really, it's the same problem. Chav or Schemie... the difference is in the name the scum are given.

If only the country was the way the outside world believed it was...

If

If is such a hateful, shitty little word. Not all the time of course. Sometimes it's useful.

It's NEVER a word I ever want to hear again when it comes to hindsight, to things that can never be changed, to things that, frankly, have gone. It does not matter at all, in the slightest, not even microscopically what would have happened should another path have been chosen at some precise point in the past. It can't matter. It is not important. The reason? You're actually stuck with the consequences of the path that was taken. Imagine that. No time machine to take you back and change your mind. No way of stopping the events that forced a path to be chosen. Who'd've thunk it? You're actually stuck with your past. Now there's a concept!

I could do without hearing "Well, if he hadn't...." or "it would be better if you'd never...." or anything of the sort. Pointless speculation on the past is just exactly that. Pointless. As in something with a total lack of a point. An absence of narrowing protuberances. NO POINT. 

Speculate for all you're worth on WHY something happened, on HOW it happened. These can be worthwhile endeavors. They can teach you how to avoid mistakes in the future, they can show you how to do it better next time. If, after the fact is worth nothing.

So what peeved me today? 

An article in The Sun (Bleah, I read the Guardian, no-one reads The Sun, they look at the pictures and try to cobble together a meaning) about Prince Harry's "Racist Abuse". (Why the inverted commas? Who knows if it's racism, really? It's probably the stupidity of the inbred. Add to that the fact that it DOES NOT MATTER. It will not stop the recession or global warming if Harry called him anything else, and frankly that's what really matters on a global scale right now, isn't it?). This article speculated on the fact that Harry would have been a more pleasant chap IF his mummy, the not all that attractive and media manipulating Princess Di would have lived. SO FUCKING WHAT? She's not alive. She is dead. There is no Diana (despite constant press coverage in the Daily Mail and the Express, papers who give her far more importance in death than in life). It does not matter what the world would be if she was still here because, incase you haven't noticed, she isn't. Harry is the product of his past, of a system so institutionalized and inbred that it would be surprising if he were a rounded individual, rather than a fag smoking self important toff who thinks he's above reproach.

If, as a concept sucks.

So, it's been a while since I actually seemed to hate anything. At least to you. Life's been getting in the way, in a way that quite frankly has kept me so apoplectic with suppressed rage that... well... I could have exploded.

In any case I'd like to rant about coughing. Coughing is something that currently I am intimately familiar with. Hack! Grunt! Hurrrrggghhhh! Splutter! I've been at it for about a month, and I'm not the only one, my wife and daughter are at it too. My life has been one hack after another since before Christmas. 

I'm starting to get just a little teensy bit fed up with it. It is starting to spoil everything. It wrecked Christmas for a start. I had the flu, so did my daughter and it turns out my wife had the measles. I helped cook some of the Christmas dinner (which could have been a disaster) my wife spent half the day in bed and the other half curled up shivering on the sofa, and if it hadn't been for the fact we had guests we would have put off the entire day. Since then we've all started to feel better but the coughing hasn't stopped. 

It's like having a constant accompaniment from the least enjoyable percussion section in the universe, and it's  a percussion section that have chosen big clubs to hit their instruments with, forgotten their instruments and then chosen you as a replacement. It's like getting beaten up on inside. All. The. Time. It has gotten so bad that I seem to have hurt my hamstrings. Thats right. I have hurt my legs, with coughing. My chest has hurt the tendons in my legs. A cough has given me an injury common in footballers and sprinters. It's gone beyond the point of normal. It's gone beyond normal and out the other side into impossible. I'm a deeply unfit creature (I should work on that) with a sports injury, all thanks to a virus. 

Bugger it.

Bugger it all to heck!