A View From The Sofa; Ennui And Pain

I’ve hardly been out of the house since I got out of hospital. I’m sure some of you will know what it’s like, believing you’re fifty four when you’re actually twenty years older than that and consequently find out that doing laps of the living room (sans crutches) within the first week of recovery isn’t the best idea you’ve ever had. To be fair to Mrs. C, she did offer up a word or two of caution, but I’m a curmudgeonly and obstinate old fart, so took not one jot of notice. Back to the sofa and a week of crap telly, back issues of The Spectator (Honourable mention to Forester Dave, here) codeine, ibuprofen, paracetamol and self recrimination, before venturing out for a couple of short walks up the village. Just as I was getting used to the exercise it snowed and the paths became sheets of ice, back to the sofa and the telly, but with a few less pills. Talking of telly, and I’m again sure you’ll have noticed it if you watch any “drama” shows, that “Happy Valley” syndrome is clearly alive, well and robustly kicking. My loyal reader may remember that I wrote about this back in October 2019, I won’t bore you with going over it all again, but every male character in the said show was portrayed as deeply flawed, misogynistic verging on maniacal, terminally stupid, or a combination of the three. Here we are in 2025 and just about every drama offered up, American or British made, offers up the same fare. “All Her Fault” and “The Beast In Me” (not too bad story-lines, TBF) will  give you an idea if you want to be bothered. Be warned though, Claire Danes can never be accused of “under-acting” the part of a tortured, slightly neurotic, rather butch lesbian with both a grudge against the male of the species and a massive shoulder chip. On the other hand, “Train Dreams” treats the male human condition a little more sympathetically. I quite enjoyed it (I’d never have watched it had I been even halfway fit) but it won’t be for everybody. Don’t get me started on “Riot Women” written, surprisingly enough, by the same misandrist that penned Happy Valley!

The emergence of the puffin as both a statement of benign rebellion (wear your Puffin with pride) and as an insult of understated and simple effectiveness in its bastardised (Wankpuffin) form is now well established and it’s approaching its tenth year of existence within our collective psyche. EJ Recklam and others deserve another honourable mention (it’s funny the things that come into your head when you have time on your hands). I still wear my puffin lapel pin on occasion, although it’s rare that I get to meet any of my like minded brothers and sisters these days. I suppose, in a small way, we were forerunners of something or other, standing up for what we believed in and choosing to voice our opinions, albeit in something akin to an echo-chamber, without fear or favour. I only mention this because, as various councils and regional police authorities tacitly condone the flying of the Pakistani, Palestinian and (on occasion) barely disguised ISIL flags, the flying of the flag of St. George is seen, by these same councils and police, as threatening, “racist” and detrimental to the well-being of the “community”. The irony of this isn’t lost on me. Small acts of “rebellion” are possibly all we’ll be left with, in time. In my more pessimistic moments I do start to wonder if we’re so far down this particular road that, as much as we’d like it to not be this way, we’re going to have a decreasing say in the matter.

My regular reader will probably remember my “Postcard From Puglia” (for what it’s worth). One of the images I used to illustrate it showed four women sheltering from a heavy downpour of rain in Lecce. Although the streets of Lecce are cobbled and the drainage system appears to be somewhat antiquated, the downspouts and the road drains coped remarkably well with the sudden influx. This was the open courtyard which could be accessed through the gateway in which we’d sheltered, no more than an hour after the “storm”. I’m guessing that, for all their faults, the Italians take something of a pride in their municipal awareness, especially in those regional areas yet to be fully “enriched”. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the sharp actions of the B&M department on the thirteen of this month, my garage would have been flooded, for the second time in a couple of years, because the three road drains close to my drive were all blocked with leaves. The council had been informed, prior to the event, but I suppose the “Klimate Khange” committee at Westmorland and Furness Council hadn’t had time to get round to addressing the problem, given that they were in the middle of making the decision to reduce our waste bin collection from weekly to fortnightly and levy a charge for taking away green waste. Local government in action, innit?

Like I’ve already said, watching the world go by from the discomfort of a sofa allows plenty of time for both musing and reflection. When I saw this abandoned boat moored up in the Inner Hebridean harbour of Eigg, some years ago, I was fascinated by it. It was one of those “if only” moments, as I romanticised as to how it had arrived there, what it had been used for and why it had been (apparently) left to the mercy of the sea. I’ve briefly tried to glean some further information but there seems to be no record of who the owners were, when it was last tied up or even what its name is. The romantic in me would like to think there’s a story behind it, but, in truth, it’s probably served whatever purpose it had and, rather than go through the rigmarole of seeing it scrapped, somebody simply walked away from it. Is this a visual metaphor for our lives; a washed up old wreck, fit for nowt but the scrap yard, or in our case, the “assisted dying” pod?

It isn’t all doom and gloom, this recuperating lark, at least you get to spend a bit of time scrolling through social media but, by the same token,  if you’re not very careful, you can end up falling into the trap of watching the news on the old telly-box. You start out with the best of intentions, switching it on to catch the weather forecast, even though the telly’s next to the kitchen window and you already know that when it’s early winter in Cumberland it’s either blowing a gale, chucking it down with rain, or cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, but you’re five minutes too early and one of them’s there.  A junior minister, or even a senior one, telling us how everything they’re going to be doing, at some indeterminate time in the future, is aimed solely at “putting more hard earned money in the pockets of hard working, working people, so that the hard working people of Britain can feel that their hard work is paying off, by putting more hard earned money in their pockets”. Forgive me for sounding a little bit cynical, but Heidi Alexander telling me that “freezing” some rail fares is going to make working people better off, Ed Milliband telling me that having the highest (and rising) energy prices in the western world (by some margin) is going to save me £300 a year, Matthew Pennycook telling me that 1.5 million homes will be built during this Parliament, when house building is stagnant, if not falling and Sir Keef (toolmakers son of the parish) telling me, with a straight face, that he knows exactly what it’s like when “money is tight” leaves me with an incredulous and somewhat ironic grin on my face. They really do think we’re stupid, but at least, with the new immigration rules being introduced by our future PM, Ms Mahmood, there’ll be plenty of doctors, engineers, architects and computer scientists coming to work in Britain in the next few years to secure all our financial futures!
 

© Colin Cross 2025