When you are only in your early seventies you can potter around, pretending to be an old person, without much risk of being challenged on your right to exist. However, when you approach the stage of being awarded a free TV licence, you should surely consider the future. Why have they assumed that you are so decrepit that you need to sit and stare at a TV screen ? Most of it is just packaging for cretinous commercial advertising. At times you wonder which is the more mind destroying, the programmes or the advertising. Even the BBC advertises itself and its wares inexhaustibly. Repeats are repeated and repeated again.
It's all very suspicious. If they ( you know, them ) consider that you are so far gone at the age of seventy five to need this degree of drug therapy, to keep you out of harm's way, what will they think of you when you reach eighty ? Will they look at the space you are occupying and wonder if somebody younger should be there ?
Think on.
7 comments:
Television as soma, your post conjures up images of Huxley's Linda in in her unmodified, hideous decay living vicariously through another medium. And that's pretty much how 21st Century Britain sees the old: drug them with television, chlorpromazine if they're in a care home, and wait for them to pop their mortal coil, out of sight, out of mind.
I wonder how many frail 75-year olds in receipt of AA would prefer the mobility component, paid to under 65-year olds with mobility problems, to a free, non-cashable TV licence? Life for real or life through the filter of a television screen, I know which I would prefer.
We've forgotten how to respect the elderly, to value them for their experience, to see them as an asset rather than a burden while we worship youth, beauty and celebrity.
In answer to your final question, Dugsie, I'm sure that "they" are already looking at your space, look at the age that health screening stops, try getting health care when you're over 80. At 80 you're just temporarily
keeping the space warm for a newer, sleeker, more cost-effective model.
I think that I may as well shuffle off now. No point in waiting.
Please put the contact for your blog here Parsifal.
I wouldn't do that, Dugsie, reading your blogs is one of the few pleasures I have left in life. I've been keeping a space warm since the day I was born, redundant from the start, and I intend to keep it warm for some time to come, imperfect I may be but I still have things to say just as you have.
There is nothing redundant about you.
All I meant was that I have lost the link to your blog, so I haven't been able to read it recently.
Take care.
Dugsie
You're not missing anything, Dugsie, it's in a state of what looks like permanent stasis, tempus fugit and all that, I simply don't have the time or energy to keep it going at the moment, the gardens call increasingly loudly as I try to catch up on the jobs I haven't done yet, time, tide and seedlings, not to mention the lawns and hedges, wait for no man. Or woman for that matter. I'm the victim of horticultural tyranny and I'm considering drawing the blinds and pretending the gardens aren't there.
And then there's the statcounter I installed to count visits, no-one visits it really so there seems to be little point in updating it. The link is in your pms or perhaps Rosemary can give it to you, I can't post it on here, I've just tried and failed.
I'm glad I misread your "shuffle off", your blog has it's own separate listing in my Favourites.
Oh well, I'd better go and do battle with the lawns before it rains, you can never trust the Met Office, if they say it's going to be dry don't put your washing out.
My father was a gardener, both by way of a job and by way of an obsessive hobby. I learnt at any early age that gardens were there to be ignored.
The idea of allowing gardening to stand in the way of your exceptional writing, your means of self-expression, is absurd. Stop it at once. The world needs you as a writer not a gardener. TV is full of gardeners. Far too many in fact.
Come back Parsifal, exquisite writer. We need you.
There's a new post on my blog, as my sole, and highly esteemed, visitor I thought I'd let you know.
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