As I sat down to write this column, I remembered that during last week I resolved to find something uplifting, cheerful, even funny. I was looking for just about anything that would take us away from the pervasive gloom and doom of the daily grind, something that might offer us a small breathing space in the week, some light relief in the overwhelmingly depressing glut of rape, murder, corruption, general violence, bullying and threats issuing from just about every quarter.
I promised myself that I would scour my daily routines and rituals to witness happy events. Naturally, I wasn’t hoping to be mindlessly exuberant or gormlessly jolly. All I hoped to find was a touching vignette of compassion or kindness or love made manifest. After all, just about all the major religions preach such wholesome virtues as guidelines for human welfare. So why do these things seem in such short supply?
In my search, I took my wife to one of our malls where we used to eat occasionally. We were almost immediately sucked into a bewildering maze of passageways leading apparently everywhere except where we wanted to go. Undaunted, we plodded on, despite a tide of hasty souls with very few manners and often armed with baby pushchairs. We sat down. A young lady came to help us. We smiled. She smiled! Then two loud-mouthed drunken sots staggered in. We stopped smiling, explaining why we were leaving. She stopped smiling.
We escaped to a local shopping centre. At least, no construction or demolition appeared to be going on. Then, in the parking lot, we saw a short thirty-something man doing a singularly poor job of packing the monthly groceries into the car’s boot. His elder son made a useful suggestion and got a hard clout. The younger boy laughed and got a hard clout. The wife told him people were looking at him. He told her to shut up and get into the bloody car. So much for love, kindness, compassion and happy families – and my column!
Actually, there was one happy vignette: Cyril Karabus getting back safely.