No news is good news, so they say, but the problem is that you start to worry about what might happen. Of course, he added hastily, if you were one of those people enjoying a quiet drink in that Glasgow pub the other night, or were a passenger on that New York train, or even worse, if you are sitting in a refugee camp somewhere in the Middle East, then life is anything but quiet and boring. But for the rest of us, well, me, actually, the only news is that there is no news! Even the Daily Express, whose, er, imaginative headlines are usually good for a laugh is reduced to a weather story - Snow Warning: Arctic storm set to blast Britain with 90mph gales and crippling blizzards - which, in this our 'septic Isle', in December, is the last resort of the sort of A1 crasher who would force you to take your pint from the Saloon Bar to the Public.
For a start, there are no wars, either immediate or pending! Well, yes, maybe there are a few shoot-ups going on somewhere but nothing you would lose any sleep over unless, of course, you were in no-man's-land; and all the pending wars seem to have been pushed to the very bottom of the pending trays. For example, the Chinese even out stumblebummed the Pentagon and our very own MoD by declaring a protected air defence zone over part of the South China Sea and insisting that all aircraft flying through it must report in to Chinese defence HQ but as they lack the necessary to enforce it there are so many American, Japanese and South Korean planes hurtling about in that particular bit of airspace that there is more danger of collision than war! As I wrote the other day, bang goes the theory that somehow those 'olientals' are much more clever than us 'long-noses'!
The Middle East is relatively quiet, by which I mean that the body count is down to about 5,000 a day so nobody bothers to report it. Europe continues to defy gravity by floating in mid-air without any visible means of support. Stocks and shares race upwards with a whooosh like those rockets on Guy Fawkes' night and all we can do is wait patiently for the inevitable pop-bang followed by the detritus fluttering slowly back to earth. The main story yesterday on my mate Rupe's news channel was the announcement by some young lad who earns his living by falling into swimming pools - dammit, I do that every morning and no-one puts me on the news! - has announced that he is in a, er, 'partnership' with another chap. Well, I hope they'll both be very happy but I really couldn't give a back, double-somersault, flying pike and I certainly don't want to see it repeated every 10 minutes for the entire day!
I know I should be happy and cheerful at this complete absence of anything newsworthy but I'm not. I keep thinking I'm missing something, somewhere - and then I remembered - my own portentous words from an earlier post - when everything goes quiet in Tel Aviv and Netanyahu stops telling the truth out loud that Obama and Kerry are the Laurel and Hardy of today, that is the time when they should start worrying in Tehran! There - that sent a shiver up your spine, didn't it? Got you worried now, haven't I? And so you should be, all this bloody 'peace and goodwill to all men' is no good at all - apart from anything else, it's boring!
