At first, I couldn’t be sure. Soon enough, it was a conclusion I could not escape – the clock on the computer at work was losing time. Seven minutes per day to be precise. This may sound like a lot of not very much – after all, what can you really do with seven minutes anyway? Turn up on time, for starters. Catch the right tram. When you think about it, dislocating yourself by seven minutes in each twenty-four hour period can really catch you off guard. Worse still, the effect was cumulative. Today it’s seven minutes. Tomorrow it’s fourteen. As I write this, I am not in the here and now but am stranded twenty-eight minutes ago. Spooky, isn’t it?
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Month: August 2014
To Thine Own Selfie Be True
It’s over. The battle between modesty and narcissism has ended with the latter emerging victorious, fists bloodied but raised and clutching a mobile phone. Doubtless, Narcissus will shortly be posting photos of himself, a triumphant grin slathered across his stupid face, bragging to all of cyberspace about how he vanquished his foe once and for all. Forget about holding anything back or leaving something to the imagination. Give up altogether on wanting to foster a little mystery. The information superhighway is much like an international airport – everything, it seems, must be declared. And in a world of over-sharing, nothing strips away any remaining vestige of mystique quite like a ‘selfie’.
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Balls Up! The Demise of Ping-Pong
Truth be told, I was never really interested. For me, it was something to do when stuck on holidays, when all televisions in a fifty-kilometre radius had malfunctioned. We didn’t have one at home. But at every caravan park we ever visited – from the dingiest lump of dirt with an adjacent toilet block to the self-proclaimed ‘holiday resorts’ – there was always a ‘Rec’ room and in that Rec room there was always a ping-pong table. As I approached the door, my heart could not help but hope for Pac Man or even a little Dig Dug. Upon pulling the handle, a dingy squat would be revealed, various incomplete board games in a pile that looked as though they had been recently assaulted and a decrepit ping-pong table.
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