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9 hours ago
5
Monday
The clocks have gone back. Which is to say, something happened overnight for reasons that I am no closer to understanding now than I was half a century ago as a newborn babe.
Every year we get the warnings and I dutifully follow the instructions on the two analogue clocks in the house. (Like everyone else, the car and oven have to fend for themselves until their time – literally – comes again in the summer). And then I stare at those two clocks trying to figure out what it means. Is this the one where I get an extra hour in bed or the one where I have one stolen from me? I know it will get dark earlier rather than later but that’s because I know it’s winter and that’s how these things go. But I don’t understand. I cannot truly make the connection between what is happening with clocks and what is happening outside. I follow a chain of thoughts and find it untethered at both ends.
So I grope in metaphorical darkness twice a year, regardless of where the sun stands, knowing what to do but never why. It’s as good a biannual (semi-annual? Therein lies another tale) reminder of the essential absurdity of life anyway.
Tuesday
Research has revealed that women use three times as many exclamation marks in emails as men. I know, right?!!!! The explanation is simple – like most things (with the possible exception of the clocks going back, which makes me warm to it slightly) it is because of Sexism Maths.
You know, like how it takes, for example, five years of wifely “nagging” (sharing of basic intelligence) or one passing suggestion from a male friend to get a man to change his diet/minor behavioural issue? Or – let’s take it up a notch!!!! – about 30 women’s testimonies to convict one celebrity rapist? Well, this is a less consequential manifestation of the same phenomenon. Women have to use three times as many exclamation marks to be perceived as fairly as men. Which in their case means having to seem happy and amenable and friendly – a state known for unfathomable reasons as natural womanhood – so that they can get their emailed message across.
It’s f!!!ing infuriating. Sometimes you feel that the clocks are doing nothing else at all but going back.
Wednesday
Do you know what’s trending right now on social media? It’s – excuse me, I just have to retch very unInstagrammably into a bucket – oysters. Oysters. People are now into eating lumps of snot, on camera and off, and pretending this isn’t the greatest perversion, in a crowded field, the internet has ever enabled.
Dear God, what is going on? Have you ever seen, smelled or tasted an oyster? Then you know I need hardly say more. For those of you who haven’t – do any one of these things for a picosecond and join us in our marrow-deep revulsion.
They claim they are downing the fleshy grey lumps of horror because oysters are a healthy, sustainable way of getting protein, Omega-3s and minerals. As if a zinc tablet wasn’t infinitely handier and more appetising. So dry! So neatly rounded! So not a noxious bivalve! Why are you eating something with valves?
They are really doing it, of course, because it’s such a wholly disgusting sight. The human eye and brain is a treacherous combination. Just as you can’t look away from a car crash, so too you are transfixed by the sight of a human being with free will choosing to eat phlegm. I don’t know what we’re going to do about us, I really don’t.
Thursday
And yet. At least oyster-eating is a closed circle – you do something disgusting, I am disgusted, you do something disgusting, I am disgusted, repeat until one of us has to get back to work. The other great current trend among influencers of surging ambition and entitlement is to head out to the Amazon rainforest, Asia and the Pacific to try to contact the estimated 90 Indigenous tribes there who have chosen to stay isolated from civilisation.
“All contact kills,” a report from the charity Survival International, which advocates for the rights of tribal people, said. A fairly unequivocal stance, but what are a few deaths and/or total wipeout of a population from unknown pathogens compared with clicks, eh, Survival International? Have you thought about the survival of the influencer ecology? If a twat under 25 is prevented from doing something, the ripples spread far beyond him or her – soon there could be no content to click on at all. And then everyone in the western world dies. Probably. Or something.
Friday
Halloween. Let’s all go as Prince Andrew – or rather, Andrew. The queen’s son has, in the wake of slowly mounting revelations and allegations about his relationship with the convicted predator Jeffery Epstein and Epstein’s currently incarcerated pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, been stripped of his royal title and is being removed from the 30-room grace-and-favour mansion in Windsor Great Park, to which he has clung with vigour in the face of previous efforts to remove him. Royal Lodge, it was reported this week, was where he hosted Epstein, Maxwell and Harvey Weinstein months after an arrest warrant had been issued for Epstein for sexually assaulting a minor. Who, to be fair, would want to leave a home with such happy memories attached?
Anyway, point is, everything that he, in his infinite unwisdom, holds dear – titles, money, free house – is gone for ever. He is suffering in a way we could wish all close friends and enablers of predators could suffer.
