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Early in those few mornings that I choose not to run---and Hey! Before you tut-tut and get all “my health regimen is more grueling than you-urs!” at me, it’s my choice: to push my body up another notch of healthiness or not; to cut my risk of heart attacks and the like, or again not; after all it is still a free country, well it’s still a sort of free-ish country more-or-less to a certain extent, particularly where risk is concerned (but we’ll get to that in a mo). Well, anyway on those mornings that I choose not to run (rare events that they are---Really! Really rare!! I-I mean it!) I tend to listen to the World Service of the BBC. And so the other day, when it so happened that I chose not to---Hey it’s my life, so stop being so intrusive---I ended up listening to a programme (‘programme’ spelt with two ‘M’s and an ‘E’ of course since it was the BBC) called Politics UK which is (somewhat surprisingly for the BBC) all about politics in the United Kingdom.
One of this programme’s segments was on the subject of “... daring to speak out: why Britain's politicians [have] become timid about taking on the big issues?”
I listened, and the kaleidoscope of reality shifted into place; everything made sense; now at last paradigms have folded (to lend the rhyme of the poet1 to the beauty of my voice) their tents like the Arabs and as silently stolen away; and (most important of all) I’ve got a topic for an essay.
You see at one point in the fabled segment, one of the speakers (some sort of pundit or journalist, or perhaps he was a junditist, called, I think, Andy Miller) spoke the following; unlocked the word-hoard; linked loyal words... damn, sorry that’s just a reaction to that bloody dangerous Beowulf movie ... anyway Mr Miller, while talking about risk-averse politicians, pointed out that we are indeed a risk averse society, and further that much of this risk aversion is due to the constant 24 hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week communication we now suffer (not that there was any suggestion of suffering on his part, I added that myself) and; suddenly, and among all that shifting and folding and paradigmatic so-forthing; I realised that it is all the fault of you women!
Consider how for men their natural form of communication consists of a few grunts, the odd slap on the back or (for the really expressive man) a few lines of computer code or an equation; whereas for women it is an interminable loquacity. When, for example, was the last time you heard that a man spent more than 30 seconds talking on the phone, unless it was with a woman he was trying to impress (i.e. trying to have sex with)? And when (to complete our example) was the last time you heard that a woman similarly spent less that 30 minutes (unless it was with a man she was trying to avoid having sex with)?
Was it years?
Decades?
Millennia?
Ahh! I suspect that it was ever thus, from the beginning of time down to the middle of the last century: a time when women by various underhand and nefarious activities, like getting jobs and voting and becoming bosses and getting elected, started to take over the world. And with this anything-but-quiet revolution came all those womanly prejudices: that we should not only have feelings, but that we should actually express the bloody things: and not only that but that every one should constantly be informed about how our days went, and how everyone else’s days had gone, and inevitably we (or rather they) realised just how awful some of those days were, once they couldn’t be ignored any more, and how risky the world appeared now that we (or, rather, still them) finally looked at it after all those millennia of manly communication styles. And finally how all this risk must be bad for the children etc. and how we should be thoroughly averse to it.
And by now I’m sure that my women listeners (always assuming I still have any left) are saying “So what? That’s how things should be!” to which riposte I should probably be bellowing in triumph “That only proves my point!”
... But I don’t think I’ll risk it.
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
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Notes:
1 "rhyme of the poet..." bloody Longfellow yet again, The Day is Done (vide: this note to Lives of Great Men All Remind Us )
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