Here’s mystic Andy’s news forecast…
I guarantee there will be some very bad weather in the UK this year – it will be windy (trees will fall), snowy (roads will clog) and very hot (Bournemouth will, for a couple of days at least, be hotter than Malaga). There will be several floods where people will have put sandbags against their door but the water still seeps in. Chances are, they will blame the government.
Globally, the weather elsewhere will be much worse. Some homes in the USA will be taken away by tornados. Bushfires will take out some houses, most likely in Oz.
There will be wars. This will lead to terrible tragedy and displaced people.
There will be several natural disasters. In one earthquake zone whole towns will be razed to the ground and the BBC will linger for six days, just long enough for somebody to be pulled from the rubble, alive.
There will be several inquests into ‘what went wrong’. Most of these inquests will force the nation to re-live a terrible tragedy from 20 years ago. The focus will be on finding someone to blame but, chances are, the victims, whomever they are, will not find closure (whatever that is?)
The various cricket and football teams will get beaten and somebody at the top will get sacked. There will be an inquiry into why we’re so rubbish at sport (except sitting down sports, like cycling, horsey stuff and rowing). There’s a fair-to-middling chance that the rest of the world will catch up with us at sitting-down sports and there will be an inquest into that too. To remain world-beating we will have to invent a lying down sport.
How do I know this? Because I’m nearly 50 and these things happen every year, with news crews pursuing each event, staying just long enough to capture their hideous essence before their story is trumped and off they dash to a fresh rumpus.
There are so many different versions of reality, it is impossible to speak of the nation as if it were a single thing that could be daily captured. The news portrays itself as impartialised reality were each side gets to rant, but more importantly, the news assembles the picture that citizens end up having of one another. The power to dictate what ‘other people’ are like; the power to invent a nation in our imaginations.
It will not surprise you to know that in my research it turns out that happy people consume less news. Not ‘no news’, but less than those around them. This is part of what I call ‘life-crafting’ – being proactive in organising your life in such a way as to maximise your wellbeing. So they shield themselves away from constant negative news, consuming enough to be in touch but not so much that they get affected.
I have followed their lead. Not only do I consume less news but I have also changed my thinking about those who criticise. After all, critics are called ‘critics’ for a reason – it’s a shortened version of the word ‘criticism’. Film critics, theatre critics, restaurant critics… they’re not called ‘advocates’ or ‘supporters’ or ‘praisers’.
I’ve decided that the people who create value tend not to be the people commenting, they are the people doing. They are not the ones who speculate from the sidelines but the ones who fall over and scrape the skin off their knees and elbows, pick themselves up and carry on. So I’ve stopped being a critic or a hater. I recently had a word with my son. He’s a teenager and spends an inordinate amount of time on the internet, and he’d got into the habit of hating things. So, for example, his sister would mention a film she wanted to see and off he’d go, criticising it, regaling what he’d heard about it on the internet. There’s an insidious sub-culture of haters, often online, who join forces to spit bile from the sidelines. So, he hasn’t seen the film, he’s just learned about it from the online haters. So, I told him, you can be part of something nasty, defining yourself by what you don’t like, whether it be a political party an uncool pop band your rival football team or French air traffic controllers.
But rather than defining yourself by hating why don’t you express your passion for what you love? Be pro rather than anti.
He listened politely and is (I hope) bright enough and young enough to change. I can’t help feeling it’s not just about him?