Hey Hey It’s iSnack Day

As is the habit of the ageing, I dozed off after lunch a few days ago. A pity I was driving at the time. Luckily, no harm done, beyond the complete loss of my own car and the one I ran into – my wife’s. Keep it all in the family, I say.

It was a bit like those two rockets crashing into the moon. But without the moon. Or the rockets. The crash bit, though, was similar. Very similar, if the moon-crash finds water. Because ours certainly did, around the time the Kia cannoned off the Commodore and into the fire hydrant.

A day later, I dozed off again, and while I was dreaming of a dishwasher that doesn’t leave grit on my sherry glass, someone must have solved the really big problems of the world, like global warming and hunger. I say this because, on awakening, no-one was talking about these concerns any more. Half the folk I saw were scoffing at a quirky new name for a slightly new take on a rather old spread. The other half were heatedly debating the rightness or wrongness of a television skit that had gone wrong – or right, depending on whether or not you worship Pauline Hanson.

For a short while I was euphoric, thinking: ‘The mega-issues have all been taken care of. Hooray!’ After all, an entire nation couldn’t be directing so much time and energy to the passionate discussion of these lesser matters if the ‘monsters’ were still at large, could it?

I can’t recall exactly, but I believe it was either Goethe or Godwin Grech who said, ‘Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.’ Seems that, more and more these days, the ‘matter most’ candidates are being banished to the sin bin, otherwise known as the too-hard basket.

Re Hey Hey’s farcical fiasco, it’s not the issue I take issue with, but the preoccupation with the issue by an increasingly tabloid media that delights in driving wedges between differing opinions in order to string the whole thing out, until the rubber band of public curiosity finally snaps and we can’t bear to hear another word!

(Aside: as a general rule, I’ll try to confine my rants to a single sentence. Others would do well to follow my lead.)

As a favour to the kinder kids of 2050, the next time an overpaid footballer does his Neanderthal thing, or Rembrandt’s step-son claims to have designed a yacht that got the chocolates 26 years ago, or some other distracting issue sets up camp on the plasma, would you lot mind forming a posse and jamming the talk-back shows with a comment like: “Excuse me, but there’s a melting ice cap outside my window. Any chance of doing something about it?”

Must go, as it’s not long after lunch, and I need another nap.

Cheers!