Sensible Shoes

It's hard to stay on the side of sensible when nonsense reigns supreme in most walks of life. I'm currently watching the X-Factor (in the TV background) and reading today's blogs on the Daily Telegraph. Neither position can be correct, the pushy despair and likely truth of the Telegraph's wry opinions and the grinning and smug optimism in X-Factor's all possible but not likely world of recycled pap. The British public's voice must be heard, we just can't quite understand what they are saying and we can't really credit them with thinking because that's slowly being educated out of them - but they will posses a number of useful skills suitable for a long career in the service sector.

2009 has been the year when the collapse of good sense has left us all sitting on tinsel couches angry and disaffected by the puzzling images on our old-style TVs, feeling guilty about sipping one too many unit of wine and refusing to phone the latest telly-vote number. The good news is that you can still lounge back at the end of the working week and laugh at the pompous madness that passes for government and authority and plan to vote for the Monster Raving Loony Party in the new year. Hopefully there will be such a candidate running in West Lothian, the only place in the UK where 2 miles of dual carriageway by-pass costs £200m compared to £12m anywhere else it seems. I'm referring to the HGV beleaguered village of Newton, 8 miles away from the Scottish Parliament but seeing only six buses a day and without a footpath or cycle path to connect it to the apparent but remote civilisation of BP M&S and Burger King, shame on you Alex.

Earlier I watched Tony Blair grin and (virtually) defend everything he ever did in one soundbite, believing his conscience to be salved by revisiting the tattered mess he allowed poor Gordon Brown to pick up and then make worse. No memory, no responsibility, everybody must be right all the time because we can't quite bring ourselves to push the red "no" button. Perhaps Simon Cowell should run the country after all and I'll vote for the vacuous but talented Stacy Solomon and her sensible shoes.