Okay, sorry about the puerile click-bait. Welcome to 2019! Don’t you just love those adverts that pop up, missing the punch-line? I must admit I don’t click. If you do you’re guaranteed to enter a sideshow of the grotesque, one that’ll poleaxe your device to a drunken snail’s pace and have it stuttering for mercy. So, I suppose not clicking is the hack. Seriously, don’t click. Resist the bait.
But you can go further: hobble your device. Go on, I dare you: switch off ‘location’! And if you really must carry it with you, carry it in a Kendal Mint-cake tin. The latter ‘hack’ may be a little over the top, and it’s definitely weird, but theoretically effective at stopping the thing from tracking you, even via the cell masts, also preventing it from listening to your conversations, adding them to the daily mountain of data to be mined by those evil Pacman algorithms that are gobbling us all up.
And so what if people think you’ve lost your marbles?
But while we’re on the subject, don’t you just hate that word ‘hack’? It implies a sneaky means of getting ahead of the crowd in some way, when the only true advance is when the crowd moves as one in the same direction, that anything which advances the cause of the individual at the expense of others is ultimately self defeating. Everyone knows that. So, seriously, don’t hack, don’t cheat. Just find a way to love every moment, and every one, and simply be one with everything.
Life is too short for mind-games.
But anyway, I digress,…
The New Year dawns. It’s 6:30 am, minus five degrees and there’s a frost both inside and outside the car. It takes an age to shift. On the up-side, the commute is quieter than usual and, other than the shock of transition from nearly a month of leisurely lie-ins, back to the tyranny of pre-dawn get-ups, we enter the year intact, mostly on our feet and thus far running smoothly.
I have no resolutions – dry January possibly, but I’ve still a splash of Christmas Malt remaining, so that’s off to a shaky start already. I’ve reviewed 2018, listed its highs, glossed over its lows, and in anticipating the year to come I shall similarly look for pleasure in the small things of life, because that’s where the greatest pleasures are to be had. Meanwhile of course, I remain mindful of the inescapable minefields ahead of us, over which we have no control and as yet no map to facilitate our safe passage.
To whit: foremost in the nation’s psyche this year, we have BREXIT. This will become a reality one way or the other in 2019, with only the final details of damage limitation to be worked out and voted through, or not as the case may be. Talk of a second referendum will gather pace in the coming weeks and, as a remainer, I’m tempted to take some warmth from that, but it also strikes me as somewhat naive and dangerously divisive – and there seem not to be the parliamentary numbers in it. ‘The people’ have had their say, and it would be a reckless thing to ask them to think again lest they blow an even bigger raspberry than they did last time – polls showing no significant shift in opinion one way or the other. I’m more resigned to it now, exhausted by it actually, while remaining braced for impact.
There’ll be more disturbing news of course, perhaps weekly, coming from the United States, whom I liken to our bigger, brasher, richer and still much loved cousin, now locked in the downward spiral of mental breakdown, as we are ourselves of course, and while we wish him a speedy recovery, it’s likely to take a while, and in the mean time there’ll be a drift into ever deepening trade wars with China, further international destabilisation and isolationism as the Jenga tower of geopolitical relations is played for broke. Then at some point this year, according to those in the know, there’ll be another financial crash, like in 2008, only worse – or then again it may not happen. And while we obsess over all of this, the planet continues on course for climate Armageddon, but there’s probably not much we can do about that either, even if we could get our act together in time, because whose going to be the first to give up their mobile phones, their burgers, their SUV’s, and their air-travel?
But then,… on the bright side,…
There are still plenty of country miles to be walked. We have the spring green and the summer blue ahead of us, and we have sunsets from the beach. And you know, in spite of it all, we might just be,…
All right
The Rivendale Review 