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A stupid tweet from one of my comedy heroes (I guess he was opining for the fjords) set me worrying about the ageing process.
I will be 52 pretty soon. Does anyone know - do you gradually become racist or do you just wake up one morning and it's all in one go?
I'd appreciate it if only white people responded to that one.
I know that as our brains age our filters come down and we start saying everything that crosses our minds - it's basically the ethos of the stone clearing podcast - but are the reactionary beliefs ones that people have been forcing down their whole lives and only now expressing now they can't stop themselves, or are such opinions just the result of getting older, more scared, less relevant, less listened to.
Some of my contemporaries have gone another way and become conspiracy theorists - though to be fair this is often just an extension of the racist thing - believing in fanciful political theories or cover-ups, believing only they are the ones able to see through it all, grumpily shouting down anyone who challenges their paranoid nonsense. Is it better to be that type of old person than the racist type? Is it possible to be old and retain a sense of your place in the world? I hope so. The older I get the more life confirms how irrelevant and unimportant I am and have always been. I am happy with that. The understanding that the world doesn't revolve around you is an important part of growing up and one that many people (mainly men it seems, perhaps because some of them get fed that illusion for longer than just their young childhood) fail to be able to grasp. Embrace your basic worthlessness and the meaningless of existence and rejoice in the fact that you live in a time and place where most people can have at least partially enjoyable lives before disappearing into the abyss.
I don't hark back to a golden time when the UK was great, because if anyone is honest, that time never existed. I still hope that things may be shaken up and changed in a positive way (sadly at the moment, the death-rattle of the elderly is sending us backwards, but surely eventually young people will realise that the world has to be more fair and that they won't have anywhere to live unless they overthrow the ideas of the older generations) and am still delighted to live in a country that is cosmopolitan and liberal (admittedly only to a small and perilous extent).
But might I wake up tomorrow, pining for the world of the 1980s with an illogical fear of skin pigment?
And if it happens to me will any of you be able to step in and save me and remind me who I really am? Or will I just bluffly refuse to apologise and insist that it's you who should apologise for ruining my brilliant country?
You can direct me to this blog entry and see what I make of it.
As it is I am just going to try and invent some kind of social media app which will run old people's tweets through a filter and let them know if they are about to say something that will land them in all kinds of shit.
My wife was out so I watched the football. Usually I am happy to support the English team in a contest like this, but both sides were from London, so there was no one to cheer for.
A genuinely heart-warming and entertaining RHLSTP with the very open, honest and down to earth Les Dennis went up today -
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