Sunday 7 February 2010

Doing My Blog And Watching TV. Going To Write Hilarious Nonsense

www.antoniarolls.co.uk for my website
www.agracefuldeath.blogspot.com for up to date information on the exhibition coming to London in February
antonia.rolls1@btinternet.com

Doing My Blog And Watching TV and Going To Write Hilarious Nonsense.

Or not. I am going to have to concentrate very hard indeed as I don't multi task well at all. I am sitting with 13 Year Old Son in the telly room, using his laptop to do my blog. I have eaten lots of crisps and managed some chocolate and forced myself to have some more tea and now there is nothing more to stand in my way and the Blog Must Be Done. I seem to have set myself up to fail a little. But I am a Brit and I will just plug on and look grim and determined and even if I can't remember why I am in this room with this laptop and telly and amazingly addictive yet strangely unsatisfying eatables. What am I doing again?

I had a thought today which I will try and remember (while the film Wall.E scrambles my brain and 13 Year Old Son mounts a running commentary so that I will not be behind with the plot). OK. The thought. I heard a poem on Poetry Please that was so dull and dreary and worthy that it took me about 3 minutes to notice that it was so very heavy it stopped me in my tracks. "Someone" I reasoned to myself, "has written in to Poetry Please requesting this, their favourite poem, and is waiting in a state of fevered expectation to hear it read. Someone, in some quiet suburb of the UK sits with fresh hanky to dab tears from their eye as they are touched beyond measure by this long, wordy and deeply moral poem." This is when I got my thought. "If someone," I mused with gravity and insight, "wanted this poem because they love it, and it is so very turgid (to me), then all over the world there are people who love things I hate and get strength from things that pass my by. There are, in that case, people out there that like Jaffa Cakes, Marzipan, and Coffee." I sat down thoughtfully with washing up suds still on my hands and arms, the washing up forgotten. "In that case, there are even those that will buy and eat Bounty Bars." The list could - and did - go on. It means that the worry I sometimes feel that because I don't like something, it has no value in the world at all, and that in the case of, say, Creme Caramel or Beer, sales will suffer. No one will make a living. People will be unemployed, all the Marketing and Development of the Product will be as For Nothing. But. Someone, somewhere, wrote off for a poem that I can't imagine anyone being allowed to write, let alone understand, let alone even become moved by, so there are Those Out There who beat to a totally different drum to me. Heavens, they may even be indifferent to Tea in Teapots, Spotty Crockery. They may even say with a shrug and an exasperated "Eh? What for? Why on earth would someone even contemplate that" when listening to me talking about dancing to reggae and wearing red lipstick. And liking afternoon tea. And so on.

So that was a lesson in something or other. Possibly as profound as the poem that started the whole thing.

Now, I must get back to Wall.E or I may have another profound moment of enlightenment.


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