If you invited me into your home and when I came I smashed a few family photographs, spat on the carpet, broke the handle on the lavatory cistern in the guest bathroom and cut off a carefully cultivated flower for my buttonhole, you probably wouldn’t invite me again.
Fair enough.
If, in addition, I had threatened your helper with deportation, told your children I would remove their pocket money unless they sang my praises and used rather unsavory language, you might want to do more than remove my name from the Christmas Card list.
You wouldn’t want to do that? Also fair enough.
It’s your home, you can let people behave in it any way you like. You are clearly a very tolerant person, brimful of goodwill, turning the other cheek and being thoroughly understanding of my clearly warped personality.
I should keep an eye on the door, though, and use the peephole to see who is outside. It might be men in white coats, restraining vests. They know what becomes of the overtolerant.
Oh dear. This was going to be a fiction story to ginger up the creative minds of those planning next year’s horror episodes in the ‘Gruesome GPT channel’. See what’s happened? It’s a real life experience you and I are going through. Nothing fictional about this one.
But what about the finale, the coup de grace? Well, clearly it won’t worry you, nice, gentle, tolerant person that you are. Anyway you’ll be able to read about it on social media, if you’re old enough by then. It will be a nuclear attack, swift, retaliated, massive. Probably between ten and twenty million people will be killed instantly. Many more later, of course, as the consequences of the fallout take their toll.
But there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? We’ve put up with horrendous killings in Ukraine, Syria, Gaza and several other places we can’t quite call to mind. We got over all that. We’ll get over this too, I shouldn’t wonder. Take it a step at a time. ‘Keep our cool to keep our heads.’ So what about our sanity? Will we keep that too?
As an old man I can have these ideas, I suppose. What if I were a young man or women? I don’t know, of course. Anything I say will be pure speculation. I don’t want war. I don’t want loss of life, damage to humans, children growing up to the sound of gunfire and fear.
I do want freedom, freedom of the sort I get where I live in Singapore. Freedom of polite expression. Freedom to behave decently towards my neighbour. Freedom to think for the good of other people as well as myself.
But I suppose if you don’t want those things and if you just want a string of four-letter words to educate your day
– well, fair enough.
Good morning
John Bittleston
Please say what you think. I can take it.
Preferably at [email protected].
27 May 2025
