RESEARCH has confirmed my fear that the prevailing mood in our great country today is baffled fury. Those who complain that this finding is suspect – because I posed the question "Is your prevailing mood baffled fury? Just say yes," and carried out the research – can add that to their own list of grievances.
Not necessarily in order of importance, these topics are uncontrolled dogs, what dogs leave for us to step in or push baby buggies through, car radios pumping 190 decibels through open windows, chewing gum in public and spitting it out, dropping rubb
ish from cars, mobile phones, those who are drunk, aggressive, noisy or all three, and whoever parked their car for three days within an inch of my gate.
That's before the baffled fury provoked by a chief executive who has run a company into the ground getting a million pound payoff while 2,000 staff lose their jobs and small investors lose their savings; MPs cheating on expenses; and the return of a lying crook like Jeffrey Archer to radio and television. As for Sir Alan Sugar, Graham Norton and how BA has improved on the hell that was Heathrow by opening Terminal 5, don't get me started.
But what causes more baffled fury than anything else is if so many of us feel the same way about all of the above – and colleagues on this paper have written both seriously and entertainingly about several of them recently – then why no improvement?
It's tempting to think that if journalists and taxi drivers ran the country how much better life would be. But I've had experience of one of these groups trying to organise the equivalent of a party in a brewery and I fear that running a country might prove almost as difficult.
Nor is violence an answer. I used to joke about never having a baseball bat when one was needed – for use on Standard Life management or when a 4x4 with blaring radio was parked on double yellow lines and a chip wrapper was dropped out its window – until a colleague asked: "Is violence your answer to everything?"
Of course it isn't. It's not the answer to anything, as I should have remembered from my schooldays when an angry local householder shot a teenager dead for playing a transistor radio outside his window. Baffled fury has been with us a long time.
But if violence isn't the answer, what is? Not politicians. For example, how much do we all hate having to listen to someone else's mobile phone conversation, something disliked and ridiculed for more than a decade? Result? Mobile phones can now be used on planes. And it's not the better nature of those who spit gum, play loud music and let dogs run wild. Hope of that dies when you see several large deposits of dog shit round a poop-scoop bin.
All we're left with is trying to ensure that we're not guilty ourselves of any of the above and trying to remain calm while scrubbing pram wheels or removing impacted dog excrement from shoes.
I'm doing my best. Like actor George C Scott when asked if he had mellowed with age, I can only say: "I'm now the most mellow son of a bitch you've ever seen."
The full article contains 564 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
