No rush, no hope and not quite the real thing

There’s no rush anymore. Not really. Everyone walks so slowly. Perhaps because they have no real destination in mind.

At least people used to look like they were walking with a purpose. They gave the impression they had somewhere to be, someone to see. It may only have been “a man about a dog” but they had to get there quickly.

Even so, they still had time for a chat back then – whenever then is/was – but after a few pleasantries, asking about the family, giving it the old ‘have you heard about so and so? etc, they would politely say “anyway, must be off” and off they were.

Surely people have more time now? There are no jobs. Everything has closed down. They need to do something though, so they leave the house. They walk slowly as if that gives them more chance of spotting solutions to problems they haven’t even thought about solving.

The problems are too big. The hope is gone. So why waste all that added leisure time thinking about them?

People are broken, the buses are broken, the trains are broken, cars are the devil, homes are broken, families are broken, towns are broken, so is the health service and education. So why make the effort to get somewhere when there’s no real rainbow at the end of the journey?

Maybe the journey these days is a virtual one, so you don’t actually have to go anywhere, which is just as well. For some the on-screen version of life is better than the real thing. Even war games are surely preferable to the reality of being in an actual battle zone. You don’t have to leave your bedroom and there’s very little risk of a being wiped out by a bomb. You can smash the hell out of “Johnny Foreigner”, boast to your virtual friends about it and not have to lift more than a few fingers.

You can even gollop the bucket of fried chicken you have had delivered from the takeaway next door and gulp down the two liitre bottle of sugary drink that came free with it to satiate the hunger and thirst you have built up doing sod all.

Leaving the house to socialise isn’t even necessary. Why would you anyway? Social media has revealed most people to be complete morons – and I mean that in the nicest possible way.

You can’t say anything without someone remotely threatening you or wishing you dead. “If I was playing you at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 pal, you and your family would be the first ones to die. You’d be burnt to an eff*** crisp.”

Just to encourage your new found remote adversary to “chat”, you respond: “I am afraid I am unfamiliar with that particular game, but perhaps I could interest you in a spot of Connect 4, during which I would undoubtedly have the designated amount of counters in a line before you had placed one above the first row.”

"F off Nancy Boy.” Oh well, I did try.

No desire to communicate. No rush. Nothing to do. Nowhere to go. No hope.

Actually, not quite no hope. To be more accurate, virtually no hope. And maybe that is the point. Living in a virtual world with virtually no hope is a better place to be than the real thing for most people. Like the sugary drinks in their huge plastic bottles, it’s not quite the real thing. Not quite Coca Cola.