Thursday 13 March 2008

outside sainsburys
he caught me. security.
snared with my own eyes.

I don’t know whether this happens to everyone, but life seems to get far more complicated as you get older. I blame choice personally. Human beings as a species are given far too much of it.
If I ruled the world, as Harry Secombe might have said, I would turn back the clock and restrict TV viewers to just four channels which might prompt the channels that do exist to actually produce quality programming rather than the cheap dross that passes for entertainment today. I’d also ban anyone from publishing an autobiography until they’re at least forty-five years old.
Last week, I went into WH Smith as I often do, just to check if their book selection is as abysmal as it was the last time I went in. Sadly, it was worse. Next to their biography section they now have a section entitled ‘Tragic Life Stories’, which must be a popular genre since there were at least four shelves of grim reading, penned by people who feel it necessary to share their life of abuse or their tales of being locked in the cellar and made to eat shoes, or how they faced life having had to hack off their own genitals when they froze to the side of a glacier hundreds of miles from the nearest human habitation.
Who reads this sort of thing? I don’t mean to denigrate the genuine suffering that many people have experienced in all countries and at all levels of society, but really, once you’re released from the cellar with the bootlaces still hanging out of your teeth, do you really have to rush to the nearest word-processor and write everything down for the benefit of the rest of the world. Surely all that will do is encourage more people to lock their relatives in cellars and feed them on trainers.
However, glancing along to the adjacent biographies section I could not resist taking copies of Jordan’s autobiographies and placing them on the Tragic Life Stories shelf.
It gave me a strange sense of satisfaction. I suggest you all do the same. I also regularly take The Bible from the reference section and put it under Fiction.