The troublesome offspring...

Think Louis de Bernieres, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam et al, and you might understand why I haven';t been blogging of late. They would do much more justice to my current situation because there are surely days when I feel as though this is either an episode of Yes Minister or a Monty Python skit.

This should explain why at 5:00 am I logged into YouTube trawling things like Love is in the Air, anything by Journey and other camp standards of the music scene of the late seventies and early eighties. Surely I have lost my mind because nothing could be so bad that you would listen to Time Life's best of Disco Hits. These were awful when they were first released and time has not changed that at all. Which brings me to late night television. Amazing those infomertials they run in the wee hours of the morning. All those inept women with fake nails disgustedly trying to saw through vegetables or stitch a hem with, gasp, needle and thread! Seemingly capable people unable to ply a simple potato peeler and in black and white no less, as though to imply that the methods that they are using are old fashioned fifties torture tools. And then the light dawns (we switch to colour here) and the latest handy dandy device As Seen On TV is revealed so that you can "set it and forget it" or have a knife that saws through wood but is gentle enough to peel a tomato.

That I know any of this is surprising in itself, that people actually watch these things and worse, get out their credit cards and hustle to the phone because "operators are standing by" is a sad indictment to the state of our lives in the early twenty first century. Have we really so little to do or is it that we have lost all perspective? Whatever, there must be a better way. It used to be that when I couldn't sleep my panacea was a trusty book that would lull me into a sense of security, now I'm so tired that I can't sleep. I'm reduced to trawling YouTube and listening to Love is in the Air. I love that cheesy 70's video with the pull frame shot, as the singer is silhouetted against the pinpoints of the overhead fill light. John Paul Young looked so cute then in those early pre-Final Cut Pro days. Then is was all tape to tape editing on Umatic formats and the camera man had to create the magic because we hand't yet figured out digital imaging. Many crimes against video were committed in those days when music videos were shot and edited as though everyone was having a psychedelic flashback.

Have I made my case yet, if this does not convince my boss that I am dire need of a real vacation...hmm.