It’s taken me four weeks to do this, because I barely knew where or how to start.
Channel 4 showed the singular and vastly wonderful The Banshees Of Inisherin at the weekend, and as brilliant as it is in its own right, it also came loaded with all sorts of resonances and finally prodded me into action.
The equally singular and wonderful Jonathan Nash, who will be known to readers of this isolated and mostly-deserted internet island parish under a variety of names, died last month, of death. It was sudden yet expected, and in those respects very much the opposite of the man himself.
The process of simply buying the Xbox One took me either three days or eight weeks, depending on how you look at it, due to a combination of how retail works these days and the gibbering random madness that is GAME's pricing and corporate structure. But I'm not even going to get into that here.
I wish I didn't have to write what I'm about to write. There's no possible benefit to it for me. All it will bring me is hatred, abuse and threats, some from people whose feelings I care about. It won't make any difference to anything, because only a handful of people will ever read it and most of those who do will be outraged by it. But I have to do it anyway. I'm trapped – trapped by conscience, trapped by sanity, and trapped by the words of the smartest, most perceptive writer who ever lived.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." (George Orwell)
On the 15th of April 1989, ninety-six people went to a football match and didn't come home. They died in hideous scenes which were broadcast to the world and splashed across newspaper front pages, and they died as a result of a catastrophic combination of circumstances, which had any one of them not been present would have averted the disaster. Yet of all those factors, there's one that nobody is allowed to talk about, despite the fact that it's the one that actually killed every single victim.
Damn everyone whose cowardice means that the burden of saying so has landed on someone as stupid, inappropriate and hopelessly ill-equipped for the task as me.
Warning: the following piece contains distressing images.
"If you've got the crowd behind you, you're probably facing the wrong way."
- S. Munnery
Reality
"Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children, not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us."
