Between bouts of despair brought on in no particular order by morphine patches, chronic pain, the ultimate futility of existence, the false promise of a glistening spring day and the fact that Sony Media Manager can't be persuaded that each movement of Beethoven's 9th belongs in the same folder, I was struck between the eyes by yet more confirmation of what I used to think of as irrational cynicism.
Engrossed as I was in my almost-daily bout of prescription masochism in the gym at work, I couldn't fail to notice that yoof had trumped male menopause and prevailed upon management to make the fixed-volume, fixed-channel, plasma-screen media-multiplicity show only TMF rather than BBC News 24.
I'm not entirely hostile to TMF. 'Pimp My Ride' is trash of the highest order, unashamedly materialistic, outlandish and responsible for many a set of bitchin' forks. 'Pimp My Ride UK' is pure comic bathos, not unlike listening to Billy Bragg covering 'Still DRE' in his broadest accent while wearing a miner's helmet. But I digress.
I found myself randomly roped into the kind of target audience that cynical cops and Daily Mail readers everywhere will be very familiar with - the terminally feckless, those whose subsidised 60" TVs are never switched off while their aspirations are never switched on.
The ad that triggered this shallow epiphany invited me to text mine and my partner's (i.e. baby-farva's or baby-muvva's) names to a given premium rate service which would then use some ingenious algorithm (or bored clerk in Mumbai) to suggest the offspring's name.
Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but does it say something about our society that people will contact a remote computer recommended by a rolling torrent of digital dross to be told how to label the accidental issue of their organs?
I should have passed this burning nugget of zeitgeist to FlamingCross. It absolutely fits his sclerotic agenda. Time for a little lie-down.
