I’m not really a great news follower to be honest. I always watch an hour from 5-6am Monday to Friday (1/2 hour on BBC1 before turning over to the lovely Phil Gale on ITV) and I have been known to occasionally watch the News At Ten depending on how knackered I am… but as a rule I don’t really have a clue what’s going on a daily basis in the world at large. Shameful, ridiculous, embarrassing. I know. Occasionally however, I do pick up on events around the world that grab my interest; sometimes horrific or amazing, sometimes fascinating or disturbing… and I’ll get all curious and what not, so I’ll log onto bbc.co.uk and try and find out a bit more about what’s going on. And sometimes this surfing will lead me to a question. I’ve got one now.
From what I can see, slapped all over the media last week was the controversy surrounding the ridiculous (and apparently fit inducing) design of the London 2012 Olympic logo, the get-out-of-jail-quick card Paris Hilton flashed after serving just 3 days of her 45 day sentence for being stupid driving without a license or something, and the nonsense about one blah bird calling another blah bird a word that I was convinced people of her generation found as abhorrent and offensive as people of my generation, and my parents generation, did….
So, that aside, here is what I wanna know. What the bloody buggery bollocks was the point of holding a (can’t have been cheap) G8 Summit last week in Germany, if none of the pointless leaders who attended could manage to agree to pretty much anything, or at least, anything new, without seeming to rub one another up the wrong way and open up some old scary wounds. Repeating a commitment they made back in 2005 at Gleneagles to double the aid for Africa by the end of the decade is great. Really great. But, come on, surely an e-mail could have tied that deal up. A bog standard conference call could have gone something like this: “Hey, chaps, remember two years ago we agreed to sign up to this “one world” idea, and try and help our fellow human beings over in Africa by sending them some money? Yeh? Great. Let’s definitely do that shall we? Yeh? Great!” Not exactly rocket science in my book.
So actually what I really want to know is this. Did I just miss the extensive news coverage of this sham? Or at least, did I miss the same level of news coverage given over to that of a logo, a rich blonde, and two blah birds? And if it isn’t that I missed it, what I also wanna know is - why oh why hasn’t more been made in the media about this wasted opportunity. Why haven’t the Leaders of the richest countries in the world been taken to task about their inability to lead and make decisions? What’s going on? Even someone who knows nothing about politics or world economics can see something is going terribly terribly wrong here. I thought the buzz words of global warming, carbon footprint, alternative fuels and energy were supposed to be discussed and resolved by the G8 leaders. I thought this kind of thing was really really important to the future of the world. Isn’t that why we all buy energy saving lightbulbs from IKEA now and switch the TV off at the mains at night instead of hitting SLEEP on the remote? Isn’t that why we are buying fair trade organic food that costs the earth and tastes of mud? (Kidding). Isn’t that why we recycle all our old paper and fizzy pop cans, and try to buy everything from our local stores and farmers markets not the evil supermarket conglomerates? Isn’t that why we’ve stopped using deodorant aerosols, and we now recycle our carrier bags, and cycle to work, and turn off the tap, and buy ethical gifts at Christmas like a share in a rainforest or a donkey or something? Isn’t that why we all feel guilty now when we book a flight?
So maybe I’ve actually got one more question…who’s got the answers?
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