Me? Grouchy?
I am of course widely known for my calm placid attitude to life.
I was therefore somewhat surprised recently when Herself told me to calm down and stop yelling at the television.
I pointed out that I was merely commenting on a weather forecaster who was dancing around the screen like he was in desperate need of a piss and giving the forecast as if we were a bunch of five year olds, and that I could do a better job with five pints on me while juggling eggs at the same time. She told me to shut the fuck up and that the bloke was only doing his job. I pointed out that said forecaster was now showing us pictures of five year olds sent in by parents which has fuck all to do with the weather, but further strengthened my argument.
At this stage the advertisements had started. They all, without exception involved animations of stuffed toys or even worse, animations of the products themselves. All were accompanied by voiceovers using a singy songy tone usually reserved for infants. And these were all products aimed at adults. I gave another loud “for fucks sake” and promptly got told off again for being cranky. It was all her fault anyway for not giving the remote control to its rightful owner.
So I have been thinking. Am I finally becoming grouchy? Am I less tolerant?
Funnily enough there is one thing that has been irritating me for a while.
Where our lane joins the road there is a couple of manholes. The bigger one has developed a loose lid which rattles every time a car passes over it. So for some time I have heard this loud “clunk clunk” with every vehicle that passes. It is beginning to irritate me.
To make matters worse, the other manhole is starting to come out in sympathy, so now at regular intervals I hear the “clunk clunk” immediately followed by a “clink clink”. Sometimes a vehicle will pass without hitting either which then leaves me in suspense wondering how they did it. It’s worse than the Chinese Water Torture.
I am just waiting for the grand finale when the larger manhole lid fractures. It did that before when a bus passed over it and the fragments literally ripped the arse out of the engine. Said bus came to a complete halt with a trail of broken crank case, gears, bearings and bits of flywheel all over the place, while oil flooded all the way down the road. It was quite spectacular.
The anticipation almost makes the irritation worthwhile.
Why did Roman roads last so long?
Because they did not put drains, water pipes, sewers, electricity cables, gas pipes, telephone and broadband cables under them; and manhole covers for all the aforementioned as well as gullies on them.
But we know better now.
All this stuff should be beside the roads, not in it or on it.
This all dates from when every service was owned by the public so it seemed simpler and convenient to stuff all that under the road. Now it is all privately owned these companies don’t want to cough up for roadside access. They would rather inconvenience the rest of us. Probably bunging the council’s a few k.
They don’t do it properly so that road, gullies and manhole are all not up to having 40 tonne trucks bouncing on them. A bit wintry weather with hard frost does the rest.
Thought I did well with no swearing.
They are finally copping on to that bit of wisdom. So far as I know, all new housing estates now have services laid under the footpaths or roadside verges. However, seeing as 99.99% of stuff was built before this enlightened age, we are destined to live with bumpy manholes, badly filled trenches and assorted roadworks.
And don’t you just love it when they resurface a road and make it nice and pristine, only to have some fucking service company dig a trench in iit a week later?
Woops! A bit of swearing crept in there somehow…..
I never watch live TV now nor listen to the wireless.
Some friends have Sky News on 24/7 and whenever I visit there I have the same problem shouting, “Oh do fuck off!” at the screen and suchlike…
Mrs. Bloke in Cyprus sometimes likes to have BBC R2 streaming in the morning for that ginger bloke but if we go out and leave it on (for the dog obvs.) that cunt Jeremy Vine is often whining on about stuff when we get back and I have to shut it off ASAP for fear or a coronary…
TV and radio are shite.
Frankly I have no time for either. I am happy sit sit in silence [accompanied by the occasional clunk clunk from the road] but I tend to sit with Herself of an evening and she has to have either the radio or television on at all times. The suffering I have to do to keep the peace!
For myself, I’ve always been grouchy. Family trait and all that. On top of that my facial structure often makes me look angry (must be the overhanging brows and the sunken eyes?) even when I’m asleep. The good thing about that is people tend to avoid me when I’m out in the public. Since people tend to piss me off anyway it’s probably an all around good thing.
Strangely enough, now that my various physical disabilities combined with the aches and pains that come with older age and a somewhat abused body has made me a bit more creakier than usual, I’ve tended to mellow a bit. Mainly because it takes too much energy to be grumpy. Go figure.
“the overhanging brows and the sunken eyes?” Could you be the last surviving Neanderthal? Wow!
Personally I find I expend more energy trying to keep quiet at times of great annoyance. It’s easier [and more satisfying] to just let rip.
The last surviving Neanderthal? I’m afraid not. I lack the sloping forward forehead, the large muscular torso and the short bandy legs. I also have the distinct lack of desire to wear animal skins and bash things with my club.
Pity. You’d have made a fortune as a tourist attraction.
No doubt. Except up[ here in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont where almost all the locals seem to have a bit of the Neanderthal look.
I can remember watching a BBC programme back in the 1970’s called ‘One Man’s Week’. In one particular one the musician Ron Geesin was watching television and getting more and more annoyed. Eventually he threw his glasses on the floor and stamped on them. I can’t remember what he was watching, but I’ve often felt the same way about some of the rubbish on television. Nothing has changed in the last 47 years. https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/70796d34d58447a0822372594d646990
Welcome Brian! I’m afraid I have to disagree. Back in the early seventies there were three or so UK channels and one Irish. Those of us on the East Coast could be lucky and pick up the UK ones. Along came Channel 4 and RTE2 and we rejoiced in the greater choice. Now I can get hundreds of channels and without exception they are all crap. They have all sunk to the lowest common denominator and pump out endless “fly on the wall” shit and talent[less] shows. Night after night I flick through page after page of unadulterated sewerage and generally switch to Classic FM to calm the nerves.
Things have gotten a lot worse in 47 years.
Although we may lack the power to affect the infantilising of weather forecasts, we do have the wallet-power to stop the inane advertising. If we all deliberately stop buying those products with the most annoying presentation, including all those current ones which use a crow-bar to force in as many ‘dusky folk’ as possible into ridiculous situations, then they’ll soon get the message in their sales figures – but if we carry on bending over and taking it, they’ll carry on doing it.
I’ve already started, it’s time for the rest to follow – no point just complaining when we’ve all got the power to act.
I have been following that philosophy for some time now. Anything that’s advertised, and in particular anything that advertised with a really annoying cartoon or animation, I avoid like the plague. My only exception is Guinness but that can’t be helped. It is one of the advantages though of the ban on tobacco advertising.
If you want crap TV, try New Zealand.Of every programme hour at least 20 minutes is spent trailing a coming feature and another 20 repeating ads that we have been seeing for years.We now spend most of our time watching Youtube, Netflix and Lightbox to get the uninterrupted stories that now make sense because we have the full story.
Don’t worry – things are the same here. Even the BBC which nominally doesn’t have advertisement breaks spends quite a while advertising itself, its products or endless trailers of things to come. Thank God for the Dark Net!
I suppose the weather forecast is needed for people who plough the seas and farmers who need to calculate their subsidies n’such. I was astonished to find that weather-foretellers are actually a profession in and of themselves. I had assumed for a long time that they were the people who were ajudged too mad to read the news but something had to be found to keep them occupied and thereby preventing them from becoming primary school teachers. Maybe the whole thing requires an overhaul in the same way Guinness used to be the working man’s pint and is now in fact an upmarket cocktail, the ideal accompaniment to lobster, or something like that. “And now the weather report- starring Nicholas Cage as the Cloud, co-starring Melanie Griffiths playing the love-interest and the Pollen Count.”
Guinness is an upmarket cocktail? I never thought of it as such.
In fairness to weather forecasters, Ireland is a bitch of a place for predicting anything. The weather tends to change from parish to parish and they may forcast heavy rain but it will proably be sunny down the road. I use a combination of the Weather Radar to see if there’s imminent rain or windy.com where I can work out my own forecasts.
Try the seaweed method of weather reporting – you just hang a bunch of seaweed outside your door. . . .
If the seaweed’s dry, it’s not raining.
If the seaweed’s wet, it’s raining.
If you can’t see the seaweed, it’s foggy.
If the seaweed’s not there, it’s windy.