My Saturday mornings always begin with me listening to Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie’s brilliant and often hilarious breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music. It’s a combination of great music – so far, I’ve been listening to Elvis Presley, Grizzly Bear and Jalen Ngonda, among others – as well as today ‘s theme ‘Sausages with the Stars’, as listeners tell us stories about how they have been with the stars as they have consumed sausages. And they’re celebrating Paddington Bear’s 65th birthday. It’s a feelgood show, as the best radio usually is, and it takes me away, however temporarily, to a different, less fucked-up place. Escapism, you might call it, and who doesn’t need a bit of that sometimes?
With a brain that hardly ever sleeps, as if driven by a motor controlled by someone else, God knows I need a little escapism from time-to-time and RadMac listeners like me are well-served every Saturday and Sunday morning. Even then, the news interjects on the half hour to remind me what a terrible mess the world is in and that when we say that tomorrow never comes, perhaps we don’t realise, what with everything that’s going on in Ukraine and Israel (and in lots of other places) it literally might not ever come.
One other way of escaping reality is to engage on social media where you can have hundreds of ‘friends’ you don’t really know and, in some instances, have never met. While there are elements of exhibitionism and pure showing off on the likes of Instagram and Facebook, almost entirely consumed by people of ‘a certain age’, meaning old. My point is that much of social media is escapism on stilts and while I have scaled back my use, and in the case of Instagram got rid of it altogether, it’s a welcome relief. Perhaps I shouldn’t, given that much of it contains things little more controversial than gurning selfies, exposing poor dental work and massive photo dumps – who really looks through scores of other people’s holiday photos? – and meaningless memes. But then, perhaps people would rather gaze at lightweight fluff than the mass murder of babies and young children in Israel?
As an avid news consumer, I can honestly say that I have never felt more pessimistic about the present, never mind the future. And even I have pared back looking at the rolling news channels and even regular news bulletins because – and how sad is this? – it really gets me down. The other day, when I was involved in yet another discussion with friends about the mass murderers of Hamas, I found myself evangelising, as I often do from my black and white world. It made me angry and ever-so-slightly depressed, too. Part of me felt like going on to social media to see photos of ‘friends’ telling us how great their lives were and by contrast in my twisted mind, how shit mine was. We managed to change the subject quite quickly, to the Netflix series Virgin River, or something else wonderfully trivial.
World War Three, anyone? The war to end all wars and the end of just about everything on Earth, more like. Do I really want to spend all day fretting about that, or instead to engage in the world of ‘Sausages with the Stars’ and social media photo dumps? The world of make believe is much easier to deal with than the real one and maybe people who live in it, a kind of land of make believe, are onto something?
