Save the Panda!

I don't get this Strictly thing

Strictly is an amazing thing. It pulls the biggest audience in the country into an activity that it will never occur to nearly all of them to try.

And even more bizarrely it attracts 13 million people in America, to a country known perhaps for bootscootin'. But ballroom? What's going on?

Why can you interest somebody in something they will never do? It doesn't even exploit the human back story in the same way other reality shows do. It just sits alone and oozes joy.

Can it just simply be the triumph of human endeavour, mixed with colour, tunes and a little sparkle. What simpler ingredients could there be? Because the entertainment certainly doesn't depend on whether the thumbs are up or the heel turns are actually heel turns, because the camera doesn't catch that. It's not even transmitted. Nobody really cares.

It sells us a big, wet, slug of humanity. 

We get told the band is the best there is but we listen to mediocre backing singers chime out-of-tune cover versions of songs we would otherwise love, and still they can't kill the experience.

That you can feel such joy in the joy of near strangers, when you personally have nothing at stake. And feel personal pain or at least a sense of (in)justice on their elimination is an extraordinary thing. It dismisses the German (who else?) invention of schadenfreude. It makes it nonsensical.

Sometimes maybe you just need a reminder of how you can learn to.....feeel...

The Value of Things

I don't have many… things.

Not things of traditional value. Not things I could Bargain Hunt. Not things I could Flog It.

I don't miss them, I don't want them, I don't need them. They take up space. In my flat and in my head.

I have one thing I like. You might call  it a memorabilium. (OK, I might call it that). But it would be a memorabilium from an event I didn't technically attend. In fairness, pretty much nobody did.

It places a small and, to many, insignificant piece of magical history, in its moment. 

But what I like about it most is this. 

Intrinsically, it's worthless. 

It's tomorrow's chip paper, it's pulp, utterly without value.

OK, what's printed on it means something, at least in my eyes, but it's not diamond, it's not jade, it's not the world's largest cubic zirconia. It represents a connection, an impersonal connection perhaps, but to a very specific moment in time. 

And I don't want to sit here bleating that I'm not "material" because frankly, I probably am. I hadn't really thought about it and I don't intend to start now. 

And it's not just the vague idea of worthlessness I like. It's the pure, absolute poverty of  traditional market value. In other words, the more worthless it is, the happier I am. Charm seems to increase exponentially, based on the basic basis of of raw ingredients. 

Don't take my word for it. Ask any child who has his latest masterpiece magnetically secured to the front of an American fridge.

I have a lot of… things.

Ask me to do a minor task that I have never done before and there's a pretty good chance I may be able to find a thing, that will allow me to improvise. 

It won't be the right thing. But you know what? It just might be good enough.

Things. 

They are too close to clutter.

That's the good thing about Christmas. 

You can give things.

Away.

And worthless things, like the things I like, cost nowt.

So put away those giros. 

Give a worthless thing this Christmas. 

Or failing that...some thing of thingless worth.

12-12-12

Did the Earth move for you.... or am I on shaky ground?

The Moral Jungle

Is it wrong to buy a small remote control from eBay so that you can turn over the channel of the TV in the local gym without anybody realising it was you? 

Is it more wrong if you are switching from Nicky Minaj's latest booty shaking video to discussion of the Leveson enquiry?

If you hover for more than a few seconds over Dickinson's Real Deal, should you shrug your shoulders and look up to the heavens as though there's been some solar interference?

I know, I know. 

There are no right answers.