About a year ago I had a mid-life crisis. Now, popular wisdom has it that men having mid-life crises should buy red sports cars and have affairs with younger women. As for the first – I am quite happy with my old but tolerably reliable Volvo 850 (135,000 miles and counting). As for the second – well, Mrs Crox wouldn’t let me. Even had I the energy. Which I haven’t.
Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, I have adopted two precepts which, I feel, I should impart to you, my readers (yes, both of you).
Proposition: I have decided that I will spend no more time with computers that are needlessly hard to use, go wrong, and take ages to boot up. At my age, life seems much more finite than it once did. I just haven’t the time to waste while computers spend endless aeons noodling around their own nether regions and making grinding noises.
Action: get rid of PCs as far as possible and enter the Mac universe. I did this a while ago now, and, honestly, having made the move I feel the same sensation as one who has stopped banging their head repeatedly against concrete.
Proposition: There is some ancient and sage advice which reads ‘avoid vexatious persons’. Now, I’m a Tory, through and through, and I am fed up having to apologise for this. If Vince Cable, a senior LibDem minister in the current LibDem-Tory coalition, says (as he did earlier today) that Tories are calculating, ruthless and tribal – well, I’m proud of it. Better tough and ruthless than rough and toothless, but more of that in a longer post I am now brewing.
Sad to say that most of my friends are lefties, enamoured of political philosophies that are bankrupt, unrealistic or demonstrably nonsensical. I’m tired of being a lone voice and dubbed by Dr A. E. of regions not entirely unadjacent to this as a ‘lone maverick’ when the truth is that we Tories are very much more common than those in the rarefied bubble of academic chatterati seem to understand. If I’m a maverick, I’m a maverick Tory – as most people who vote Tory tend not to make a huge fuss about things on teh interwebz.
I am also very, very fed up of the frequent caricaturing of Tories, among my so-called friends, as a bunch of braying, evil toffs, when most Tories I know are ordinary people trying to make a living who are fed up of being bled dry by leftist politicians wedded to an ideology (they call it ‘intellectual politics’) that is known not to work – why should we throw yet more good money after bad? Much to the dismay of my so-called friends, the electorate threw out their daft dreams of Alternative Voting by more than two to one, a thumping mandate by whatever voting system you choose. Not everyone in this majority is a witless moron, you know. In fact, I think the joke is very much on the Yes2AV camp. Is this minority made of morons? Of course not. Over-wedded to idealism rather than pragmatism? Very possibly.
Action: I am slowly unfriending such vexatious persons, and disentangling them from my networks. I now listen to or watch the BBC very rarely, with the exception of Dr Who and match-day commentary on Radio Norfolk. The posturing Leftish bias of BBC Radio 4 no longer finds in mes oreilles a willing audience. In the same way that I know longer engage with creationists, I no longer have the time to get riled up by the repeated idiocies of the political Left.
Those who’ve made rude generalizations about Tories on FB recently have found that my pilum is a good deal sharper than their sternum.
And that’s the way it’s gonna be, folks.
Location:Cromer
You are not alone!
Thank goodness for that. It often seems like it, though.
It’s always a breath of fresh air when I escape from Cambridge to overhear people on the train speaking good old fashioned (dare I say Tory?) Common Sense.
Around here at the moment I’m trying to refrain from arguing with friends about politics. It’s unlikely I’ll ever persuade them of anything and trying would just frustrate me and irritate them…
(S)
If I unfriended everybody who occasionally disagreed with me I’d have no friends left–on Facebook, twitter or in the non-virtual world. I will block or hide people who are incessant though. Life’s too short to be getting pissed off all the time. I think I’ve unfollowed precisely two people on twitter for mouth-foaming, and ‘hidden’ an equal number of facebookers.
I’ll also deliberately seek out those (respectable) media with which I disagree, just so I know what the other side is thinking.
I mentioned at the pub the other day to a colleague that I didn’t vote in the referendum. I tried to explain that this was a deliberate choice, because I saw no advantage to AV but did not support FPTP strongly enough to vote for it, and would live with whichever system came out on top. Didn’t get a chance–he was spluttering about how it was impossible to vote anything other than ‘yes’. Find a way of ‘hiding’ people in the non-virtual world and you’ll make millions.
A post on AV will be making its way to these shores soon.
I assiduously avoid getting involved in exchanges of political views on-line, as all too often they replace cordiality with acrimony between otherwise tolerant individuals. If occasionally I appear to express a political view, it is only to defend to the hilt the funding of science, the right to (affordable) higher education for all, and our wonderful NHS, and I will lambaste government stupidity whatever its political flavour.
And I must confess to tiring of reading about AV – I thought it a reasonable idea poorly sold. If I am to read another post on AV I hope it will be about adenovirus.
Henry – your post about AV was instructional, but I confess I got halfway through and decided I didn’t care enough about the issue to keep reading (could just be election fatigue though, not to mention the workplace survey I just completed online, and the upcoming census). I hope this little lapse in Cromercrox-reading doesn’t make you block me.
As for your propositions, both avoiding Vexatious Persons and Vexatious Computers seem quite reasonable to me. Avoiding the obligatory Red Sports Car though… now that’s crazy talk. But you’d expect me to say that, wouldn’t you?
/putters off in 11-year-old Mazda compact