Other Peoples Navel
I was shuffling up and down through the TV channels waiting for Mark to come in with the tea and biscuits before we carried on with our Saturday night film, when I found myself on a programme where the topic of interest was celebrity belly buttons. Basically these poor muckers had been sat on a beach, letting it all hang out when someone had snapped a shot of them and their oddly shaped innie and outie buttons. Finally Mark came back and sat down ready for the rest of the film, but before we knew it we were hooked and on our third navel.
Now we are fairly discerning about our TV viewing and tend to limit it to films and stuff we’ve recorded, so we don’t waste time watching crappy adverts, and yet here we both sat, sucked in as it were, into unusual shaped belly buttons. It was so smooth we hardly noticed the slide down, and like a drug addicts purging themselves of their addiction we had to pull the plug on the source and go cold turkey back to our film.
But what does it matter you may say. Well perhaps in our little lives, it doesn’t, but in the grand scheme of the world then yes it does. That same morning Radio 4 ran a trailer promoting a programme about UN workers in the former Yugoslavia, one of whom had witnessed a starving family trying to survive by consuming a cold horses hoof, and here we were consuming our third navel, so to speak.
It’s not that there must never be down time, a time when you’re just doing nothing, frivolity, it was how slickly we fell, succumbed to the twaddle and were suddenly lost. If we want to be truly happy and at peace with our place in the world then perhaps it’s about that twaddle time being consciously spent, and consciously ended.
