7
Being Left Out
What the media does, TV, phones, Ipads, the internet, is to include everyone on their terms.
What if you are someone who does not want to follow the trend; then my friend you feel left out.
I remember a time when quizzes and crosswords were about general knowledge, which everyone had a chance to answer. Now far too many quizzes, crosswords, puzzles, tv and internet shows/pages are about ‘celebrities’. If you do not go to watch the latest blockbusters as soon as they arrive on the big screens, with your especially provided Wednesday tickets of course, then you know nothing.
No longer are quizzes fair game, if you do not follow celebrities then you do not know the answers.
Twitter, the great twitter, is nothing but an adoration shop for the rich and famous. Our children must know these people or they have nothing to talk about with their friends.
I hung on to one of the last vestiges of communication, so I thought, by watching a few shows on tv so that I could discuss with my daughter those events. I remember a time when she would ring me half way through X Factor and say Mum did you see that last act, brilliant.
No more I am afraid. The media companies have put her in touch with her control. The media companies have enclosed her in the fold, which she pays dearly for of course and if I attempt to discuss last nights show I get told: “Do not tell me; I have recorded it; I will watch it in my time; when I have that prime time and I can sit with my glass of wine after my designer meal and watch it at MY leisure”.
Straight away I am outed, I am outside that elite, which I must aspire too of course, who can watch their tv programmes when it suits them. Therefore another communal activity, even one at a distance is gone.
Those people who do not or cannot enter into the great communications revolution are adrift, they do not belong, they are oddities, or so those within the bubble think.
But to be on the outside looking in is not a bad place to be, especially when you watch every swing in the economy being used most vociferously to try and get some more blood out of the stones.
Look at the great sewing drive, we have had the house buying programmes, we have had cooking programmes until they are spilling out of our ears so now we have the great sewing drive. Magazines with free patterns being touted and the same old people being dragged out of the embers of a struggling corporation to take up the baton of the sewing bee. When I see someone who all of a sudden used to make her children’s school dressing up clothes amid her life as a high powered executive, staying up all hours with the sewing machine on the kitchen table while the nannies slept is going too far for me.
I have suffered aristocrats telling me how to be thrifty and showing me the way to designer chic on a budget, all for an enormous fee and a slavish following on Twitter and I will suffer them no more.
Ordinary people never stopped making dressing up clothes on kitchen tables, it is how we live. Yet we are shown a dream on the media. We are shown a dream of the perfect couple, the perfect mother, the perfect life, which does not exist, never has and never will.
When I was a young child I would wonder at the first celandines and violets that emerged in the hedgerows as we walked a few miles to school, yes walked. The milk flowers in the meadows and the daisies were like carpets arrived especially for us. We would picnic in the thistle field; as it was the only one not full of sheep or cows and we would tumble down the banks in the spaces between the thistles. But we did these things, not watched them on a screen and craved doing them as others did.
These things were what it was possible to do, within our lives; it was what made us laugh and what made our summer days into memories. What memories are the old of the future going to have? Memories of constantly craving more and being disillusioned?
The reason the flowers looked so good to us is that we were not inundated with the colours of a television screen; we were not shown constantly what others had which was better than what we had.
Ignorance can be bliss and it would do a whole lot of good to a lot of the population to ignore that which is sent to tempt them and look around and see what is possible and get out there and do it.
The sewing magazine shows us vintage sewing paraphernalia; brings us nostalgia, to think that we need to go back and learn how to be like our mothers and grandmothers again. But when you go out to shop for the necessaries you have to pay for a brand new sewing machine, a brand new scissors, pins and needles (all probably imported from China, not Sheffield), material, not from the mills of Lancashire but India or some other eastern country.
All a ploy; someone is, as we speak, bringing out books on how to be that perfect mum, which you will have to obtain and so toddle off and buy to follow the dream.
Will it work, who cares, you bought the TV package which allows you to control when you sit down to watch tv; you have spent your precious time slavishly following the latest icon on Twitter or Facebook; you have bought the sewing paraphernalia and material. Now you are on your own, now you can watch the latest programmes on the dream.
Me? I might not be up to date for the latest quiz, but I can play scrabble with like minded people out there. I can cook for the children in my family and make then dressing up clothes with my sewing kit which was my mothers and grandmothers. I can no longer tumble down the thistle field but I can watch my offspring do it and I can try to teach them the beauty of life outside the box.
Come on join me, it is far cheaper, healthier and more rewarding, I can vouch for that.
