I had the unfortunate experience of staying in today (couldn’t do my bitumastic painting because of adverse weather conditions!).
I thought I’d use the time by going through the website checking up on links and generally faffing around as we say. Very productive I thought.

Anyway, all day I could hear the 24hour television news. It was quite a good day for this. We had ‘breaking news’ about the severe weather conditions throughout the country. My goodness, some parts got five inches – whatever next – and – in the middle of winter too!

But the thing which got me was the continual repeating of news items over and over again.

Then I heard ‘Coming up on XXC News, Bla Bla and Bla Bla. Well one of the ‘Bla blas’ sounded quite interesting, so as it was ‘coming up’, I took a rest to pop in and watch it.
Some 35 minutes later and after two repeats of the main stories and Weather People standing in the 2″ deep snow, it finally came around.
It was worth waiting for, at least two minutes, then back to ‘breaking news’, which started exactly the same as the previous six headlines.

I know I’m heading towards an Honour for being a miserable git, but how on earth did we get by some 30 years ago or more.
‘When I was a lad’, the TV shut down from about 4 – 6pm. You only heard the news, when the News was on or in the Newspaper the following day. Other than that it was the National Radio with ‘The Home Service’ and ‘The Light Programme’ but even then that was subject to a valve blowing and sitting in silence for hours upon end.

Thereagain, we did have other things to occupy our minds then, like reading, doing jigsaw puzzles and even talking to each other!

Breaking news can be good in some national crisis, but for a couple of inches of snow causing Schools to shut because the boilers were made with global warming in mind, seems quite ridiculous.

But, as they say, it employs people and, as I heard someone say, it’s nice for the elderly. What a lot we have to look forward to in the autumn of our years – the News 24/7. I’ll get a few DVD’s I think. Do they have any ‘Lone Rangers’? !