Derek Bennett on holiday, catching up on jobs.
Most people associate the word ‘holiday’ with ‘relaxation’, or if you are Dave, our PM, ‘chillax’. However, the linking words with holiday in the Bennett household here in Walsall is: ‘Hard labour’.
My holidays, which are not these days spent on the shores of some sun drenched tropical paradise due to having a very elderly pooch who is now past 17 years of age which makes it difficult to leave her with family, are usually spent catching up on all the neglected jobs at home. This week is a holiday week and as usual there is plenty of things lined up for me to do.
So, with a hard days labour in front of me the one bit of relaxation I was hoping to get was, at least, a bit of a lie in on the morning of Tuesday 7th August,. That was soon scuppered when the phone rang just after 7.30 am. This is where things go a bit strange, as far as I can recollect the way local radio stations work is the listeners rung their local radio shows to talk about the issues that concern them, not the radio station calling the listeners.
It came as a surprise for Mrs B when she answered the phone to hear Adrian Goldberg, who presents the BBC Radio West Midlands Morning Show, asking to speak to me. The reason soon became became obvious as they were looking for a victim prepared to speak about why they are not enamoured with the sporting fest called the olympics which is dominating just about everything at the moment - I was asked if I would go on air and give my reasons why I was not enamoured with all this orgy of running, jumping and other sporting pastimes.
Had I not been half asleep and a bit more savvy, I would most probably said no, go find another mug. But being a fool and not waning to let Adrian down, who had taken the time and trouble to track me down after reading my comments about the Olympics on this blog, I sad yes, it would do it.
The reason, it seems this had become an issue, was due to some bloke who goes under the name Morrissey who sings a few tunes who had written why he opposed the Olympics. Adrian suggested I look him up to see what he said, which I did before getting the now expected call to go on air just after 9 am.
From what I read this chap Morrissey is slightly left of Lenin and his politics are substantially different from my own. His reason for objecting to the Olympics were for very different reasons than those of mine. He used the Olympics to attack our Monarchy, which as a Royalist I could not agree with, in fact as far as I could see his rant against the Olympics was no way connected to my reasons why I am so fed up with them.
Despite this I did my stuff on air and pointed out that the whole of BBC One programming being nothing else but Olympics was really over the top, also that many news bulletins has twelve the thirteen minutes of Olympics before they then, almost as an afterthought, actually report the really serious news that is going on in the world. As I have pointed out before, there is murder, mayhem and abject misery going on in Syria, yet some odd bod managing go go a bit faster than some other odd bod, as far as the BBC is concerned, far more important than the atrocities and suffering taking place in Syria and other parts of the world - my priorities are somewhat different.
After I did my bit people began calling into the radio station venting their anger that the sporting agnostic who had just been giving his reasons why he does not see the Olympics as important or why they should dominate the TV listings on the BBC. By the sound of some of them you would have thought that during the five to ten minutes I had been on air I had shot the Pope, strangled the Queen and eaten Bambi in a venison pie. It seems the great God sport is a vengeful God and plague and pestilence is wreaked on those who dare speak against it. So, today was my day to be the pariah for 24 hours.
Do I really have the wrong priorities being worried about the suffering taking place in the world, the devastation being wreaked on this, and other nations in the European Union due to the folly of EU membership, the hardships in Greece, Spain, Portugal and other eurozone countries all for the sake of the EU’s vanity currency? Maybe I turn my brain off, crash out in front of the telly with pack of beers and a pile of junk food and say I am being involved in a great sporting adventure.
2 comments:
I'm with you Boo-Boo.
No, you not have the wrong priorites. Human suffering and jihadism in Syria (and similar around the world)is more important than sport, and so is being sucked further and further into the ravenous maw of the EU, which is an existential danger for this whole country. I don't think one can complain much about the massive Olympic coverage (I'm a refusenik, by the way), since I will happily listen to my chosen sport (TMS) the day long, but would not elevate its importance above reason. Balance in everything!
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