Post telly

As a result of our TV having bought the farm, we can now get rid of the DVD and VHS players, and the TV-Vid trolley on which they sat. That’s liberated the corner alcove, where we can now stash the bureau, making the room seem that much bigger, and making it suddenly obvious we can and should put shelves into both alcoves, creating enough space to put all the CDs and DVDs (to play on the computer) in the house and meaning we can dump another two sets of shelves in other rooms. It’s also left the chimney breast clear, so we think sod it, restore the mantelpiece and hearth and have a proper fire. Who’d have thought so much could come from the expiry of our cathode tube?

And yet we still watch TV on iPlayer, e.g. Glastonbury, which more resembles Ascot these days, but as the missus says you get to FFward to the groups you want and the songs you want to hear, without the queuing, the camping in a field of piss, the all-night racket, the smelly hippies or stoners falling on your tent at 4 am. All the choons and none of the shite – result!!

For her. Not that I would ever watch it, let alone go. I was born middle-aged. Smoked a pipe before learning to use a baby bottle.

You sell your soul, only to find what’s left has no value? Shit

“She was just a child, but with an attitude of arrogance fuelled by drink and cocaine that scraped the stratosphere. If her heart made it past 35, her liver surely would not. But no matter, by then she’d be moneyed enough to import a new one, harvested from some Chinese prisoner executed for stealing to feed his family. Organs were just another good to be bought and sold in the market, and she herself was a trader, one of the best, she’d sold her soul to become one and she defined her success in part by what it took to keep her aloft, be it drugs or other people’s lives. Nothing could not be bought or sold. If it didn’t have remunerative value, it didn’t exist.”

I knew a bloke who was once a fine journalist, covering commodities, but decided as so many do to turn to the dark side, to in effect sell his soul in exchange for riches, and become a trader. But … you’ve got to deliver, you’ve got to prove you’re worth the price paid. And he didn’t, and out he went, got a bonus in the form of a P45. A man who sold his soul but what remains … has no market value. He’s got kids to feed, a mortgage to pay. What will he do?
He’s scraping 40. A time when all of life’s great questions come … but what will he have to answer them with?
He could go back to journalism, but wasn’t he too big for that in the first place?
Will it afford his expensive nasal tastes?
Will he turn to them all the more in a desperate bid to bridge the yawning fissure of his ego, as self-loathing bubbles up to the surface?
What will he write about except what he knows best, but who’ll credibly talk to him seeing as he went back to hacking not out of some higher calling, but because he had to?
Who’ll support him?
A man who denounced a stressed-out friend and colleague to his employer as mentally ill.
A man who dabbled in cocaine, MDMA, dope and drink while decrying the addictions of others addicted to substances he introduced them to.
A man who sought to escape his miserable relationship by having an affair with his lonely boss, only for him to bottle it, and as her heart bled and her mind split, he denounced her too as mad.
A man who …
A man who …
A man?