Twenty Years On

In November 2014 I was somewhat bothered, if not bemused, to find that I had been writing bits and pieces for this blog for ten years. I am bewildered and befuddled [Enough of words indicating confusion beginning with B: Ed] as I note that a further decade has elapsed and yet this blog still refuses to die. I pen these words from the rural heart of beautiful Warwickshire, and neither Ruislip nor commuting feature heavily (or at all) in my thoughts, except for a sigh of pure schadenfreude at this sort of news report.

We do have the odd travelling problem. Last year our village was cut off by floods on the roads both in and leading to it; fortunately there was no lasting damage and the waters receded within a day. Sometimes the A46, the main road between Stratford (to our east) and Alcester (to the west) is clogged with traffic or has been closed due to accidents. As I rarely use it, and can always find an alternative given a bit of warning, this doesn't matter. The biggest frustration is being stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or held at road works.

Anyway, I think I am legally covered by calling myself an ex-Ruislip commuter.

The main event within this column was the ground-breaking series, 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die, published between September 2019 and May 2020. I had more time to complete it than I had expected because the Covid epidemic began in the UK in early March and we were in lockdown by the end of the month. We also covered, albeit with cunning camouflage, the strange Presidential career of The Most Popular Man in the World, thanks to our unnamed correspondent in Karakorum, who was there when the mighty Mongol Empire gave under the sway of one G. Khan. And a large number of businesses came under heavy fire for stupid or misleading advertising and risible PR Claims, including Aberdeen Standard Life who changed their name to Abrdn (to get down with the kids and be more cool), Coca-Cola who tried to get us to believe that Kate Moss personally chose some trashy prizes they were trying to foist on an uncaring public and, quite recently, the bare-faced cheek of Vodaphone and Three who claimed that competition in the mobile phone/broadband market would be increased if they merged.  We shall continue to scrutinise all such enterprises and to hold them to account.

Where will we be in another ten years? The signs are not encouraging. Wars in Europe and in the Middle East, the growing polarisation of liberal democracies versus dictatorships and the short-termism of politicians everywhere mean that climate choice, species extinction and the destruction of the natural biosphere on land and, especially, in the oceans, will not be addressed adequately. There is another factor that rarely gets discussed - world population. I worried about this as a student, a long time ago. Since then the population has more than doubled and is still growing. The idea that the finite resources of the planet can continue to provide improving lifestyles for so many more consumers was never discussed at all when I studied economics back then, and is rarely mentioned today in political debate. But the outcome is going to be migration from hot, poor countries to anywhere else on a scale unparallelled in human history; the small boats bringing migrants over the English Channel are just a foretaste.

Anyway, you don't come here for serious stuff. We shall go on trying to find humour wherever it may be lurking, be it behind the news headlines, in advertisements, in popular culture or, if sufficiently chortle-worthy, in unpopular culture.  We shall probe politicians, antagonise admen, petrify pundits and, er, you know, the other lot [I'll get the thesauraus: Ed]. Terms and Conditions will continue to apply wherever we can shoehorn them in. Exclamation marks will be deployed and, somewhat regrettably but there is nothing I can do about it, stupid bloody interventions in italics from the Editor will continue to be injected. 

We are Ramblings!