By Geraldine Hughes
Since its January I feel I should be full of hope and inspiration and urging people to take on new challenges for the year ahead but here I am looking at a blank page and the words just won’t come, instead I have just spent the last 30 mins on Insta which is a pity because I spent a lot of 2020 and early 2021 attempting to correct all the incorrect people on Facebook, and the latter half of 2021 weaning myself off social media. Well not completely obviously. I have a quick flick through at least once a day to see what the government/ NEPHT/WHO/any other Heads of Important Things all over the world are concerned about now. They are always concerned about Covid/vaccination uptake/ Variants of concern yada yada yada…!
There is a lot of concern around. Sometimes they are very concerned, so we know then it must be more serious than usual. I don’t know why they are concerned or worried or even alarmed, because these are things you feel. They are emotions. We don’t need these people to be emotional wrecks seeing as they are at the helm of very important organisations. We need them to be cool and analytical, and centred and capable. Like pilots. I’m sure every pilot has lots of moments of concern in their flying careers but most of them know better than to come on the intercom and tell the passengers about it, after all they can’t do anything about it, so why burden them?!
But there is something masochistic in me that compels me to flick through the daily misery of news headlines so I can see, yet again, how concerned these people are. Their concern feels like our fault. They are the disappointed parents and us kids have let them down somehow. I’d rather they came along and said we were all doomed and they are off, and we can take care of ourselves. At least that’d be clear. Survival of the fittest after that and no more messing about! I can get all of this from social media in 5 minutes flat so that 30-minute scroll just blew my record.
I managed to procrastinate for at least another 20 minutes by retuning my new but very old-style kitchen radio, which has a very retro plastic dial to turn the stations with. I spent December retuning it from Christmas FM to my normal station which incidentally is full of concerned sounding presenters but I can never remember exactly where on the dial the station is. I did mark it with a sliver of black sticky tape but somebody helpfully removed that so between fiddling with the dial, repositioning the aerial and moving the radio about to get the best reception, I remember why the retro radios got replaced in the first place, but I got to write this and I put on some good music on Spotify and decided to try not to be too concerned at all for 2022