Blimey there's so much to worry about isn't there? Getting skewered on the way to the pub (or more likely coming back), getting so incredibly obese we'll all explode like Mr.Creosote, fat cat bank bosses running off through the overheated traffic with all our money. Well, help is at hand in the soothing- well, most of the time- words of Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams (you have to trust someone with a name like that) in their Panicology, just out in paperback. And so I don't have to panic about a neat quote, The Observer puts it very well - 'Gloriously deft in their rebuttal of some of the more egregious cases of media-fuelled herd idiocy'. That's the thing isn't it? We only ever hear or read of all these terrible things that are going to happen to us by tuning in to the wireless or, God forbid, picking up the Independent someone's left in a Little Chef. I don't go out into my back garden on a hot summer's day and think 'I wonder if the ice caps are melting today, those poor polar bears', (or penguins, arctic foxes, Michael Palins), and I certainly didn't when I stepped out into six feet of snow. Briscoe and Aldersley-Williams are the much-needed voices of reason. Not that we don't need to worry a little bit. Earlier this month I ended-up in the cottage hospital having stitches put into my hand from a broken glass, and only this morning a screen flew at me from the cooker ventilator thingy and sent my bacon spinning to a secret place I've yet to find. Both accidents were in my kitchen. Didn't tell me not to worry about that did you Simon, Hugh. Eh?
7 comments:
I do hope your cut hand is recovered - was the injury drinking related ? Some body once trod on my hand as I was trying to leave a very smart resaurant in Vienna, my knuckle still aches in the cold.
In the good old days, it was just nutcases with sandwich boards on Oxford St and crackpots at Speakers' Corner who went in for this stuff. But it does now seem that they're running the media these days. I hope you're going to get a helmet, safety glasses and industrial gloves for entering your kitchen in future...
Thankyou for your concerns, Sue and Diplo. It was a little spirit glass that caused the damage, but it was 10.30 in the morning, so not really drink-related I suppose. Honest.
Sounds a great book - and sorry to hear about your accidents! (As someone who will fall over her own feet if there's nothing more dangerous available, I won't list my own recent mishaps...)
I've got this book. It's an ideal foil to the doom-mongerers that infest every pub, bus stop and letters page, especially the ones who think the grass is always greener over there. Wherever "there" is.
I think I would like to see this book reviewed by Ford Prefect.
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