What A Bloody Swine!

People generally don’t panic like they used to do they? In the good old days the threat of economic meltdown or a global flu pandemic would have had everybody hugging their knees to their chests, eyeballs bulging with fear, rocking gently back and forth on the floor. In the good old days these kinds of things were met with a widespread and utterly irrational urge to hide indoors clinging to the walls until the crisis passed, but no more. Since the internet came and ruined everything by granting all equal knowledge, global crises have just gotten dull.

I realised this last night when, upon watching the evening news and hearing about the first confirmed case of swine flu in Europe, I felt a pang of panic in the pit of my stomach. As a person with moderate to low levels of medical expertise, I simply put together what I had heard coming out of Mexico (about the swine flu fatalities), and added that to the announcement of the case in Spain. My brain then proceeded to calculate that I would be dead by the morning.

I figured that if it had already arrived in Spain, which is only a two hour flight from where I was, then it would surely have taken over the UK by midnight at the very latest; the simple calculation was made and my fate sealed, there could be no avoiding it. I considered leaning over to my sister to tell her the sort code and account number for my savings which she could have used to fund my funeral, and what music I wanted playing (Decades by Joy Division probably).

At this point the panic would only have snowballed in simpler times. The rest of my evening would have been spent going over the same questions in my head again and again, never getting closer to any actual answers. Questions about the threat posed by the virus, the risk of infection and the possible complications for someone of my health, the symptoms…ah the symptoms. This is where things would have gotten really scary. I’d have imagined steaming volcanic boils sprouting all over my skin, my limbs seizing up, my hair falling out, my feet falling off, my tongue swelling to fill my mouth and my eyes turning into my head or something. It would have been truly awful. Yet instead of the torrid futile suffering that would have ensued years prior, I simply got out my iPhone and Googled “swine flu”.

Literally less than a minute later and my mind was eased. I learned that my feet wouldn’t be falling off anytime soon and apparently here in the UK we have a natural basic immunity to the particular strain of flu in question and I wouldn’t be dying either. The deaths in Mexico were being viewed as something of an anomaly and we were being encouraged to wait and see what happened in Europe before making any major decisions. I put my phone back in my pocket, safe in the knowledge that I would live to see another day at least. I’d even go so far as to say that I might have even stood up to mild questioning on the topic, and this only a minute after accepting the inevitability of my impending doom.

This is what disappointed me today as I read about more confirmed cases of the virus in New Zealand and Israel. Before the internet we might have all grown closer as a people, united in our crippling fear of the absolute unknown. We might have sat around the TV eagerly awaiting further news or instruction. I can picture us walking around with those funny surgical masks on and stocking up on bottled water (which seems to be our national reaction to any such news – we are but a nation of hypochondriac water hoarders), something we could have told our grand-children about and hear them laugh at the very concept of illness, because of course by then people will all be intricately engineered super-robots of the future with full immunity to all ills (And they’ll probably roll around on laser guided silver rollerblades as well; powered by mere thoughts). These days the camaraderie created by such an event is more likely to manifest itself in a “Top 5 pandemics that never were” list on Facebook (My particular favourite being SARS).

Is it too much to ask for me to be able to induce some undue panic in my office tearoom by nonchalantly mentioning, in full earshot of my colleagues, about the increasing number of swine flu deaths, without being shot down by some smart arse in the corner with a Blackberry?

It’s all such a let down isn’t it? But still, nice we’re not going to die.

That In-Between Age

How often do you hear people say things like, “Kids are looking older all the time,” and “Kids grow up too fast these days”? Whilst it is true to an extent (I have to admit some 15 year old lads achieve a more convincing facial hair look than me) this apparent early ‘maturing’ can only be attributed accurately to superficial facets of their personalities i.e. the way they can hold down 3 whole Smirnoff Ice’s without puking; just like a real grown up! Or the way they carry their Blackberry like they are anticipating an important phone call any…moment…now (Of course they’ve probably just ‘pranked’ their mum so as not to waste any precious credit).

I say this because I believe there is a point in an adolescent’s life when they reach that in-between age, caught in flux between being a child and believing themselves to be a young adult. Now this age does not necessarily mean 15 or 16 etc, it simply means that stage in their lives when they are consumed by an unrelenting, fanatical drive to convey to all that they are no longer kids; nay…they are adults! However these contrived attempts to do so ultimately, in my eyes anyway, serve to fortify the fact that they are indeed still childlike in all but attire.

Case in point; I was on the train from Manchester to Poulton-le-Fylde the other day, sat on a table all by myself happily reading the news (If you can call what the monkeys at the Metro write news) when all of a sudden I am joined by a pair of girls, seemingly of around 20 or so years if their look was anything to go by. They had the typical ‘BFF’ dynamic of one of them being the dowdy one and one of them being the bubbly one. Of course these ‘friendships’ only work through a careful distribution of esteem between them; the more salacious one of course gets a larger share of male attention and the other one piggy-backs her way into ‘cooler’ social circles whilst acting as an almost omnipresent confidence boost for those tough private moments when the glamourous one stands in front of her full-length mirror and stares at her reflection; wondering “Will Jason fancy me if I lose some weight?” Before being convinced that she is attractive enough already through a quick glance at the photograph of her drab ‘BFF’ that’s stuck on the mirror.

The dowdy one wore her brown hair in an inoffensive, unremarkable style. What initially convinced me of her age was her clothing; a corduroy jacket over a light blue t-shirt that seemed too understated to be adolescent. Her friend on the other hand just looked older. For a start she had one of those massive handbags that are so popular, made of shiny black leather with a large gold buckle on it with the name Chloe engraved in Black lettering. I believe a Chloe handbag that size would set you back around £600; surely therefore this girl had to be a grown-up? Her hair certainly seemed grown up; wavy, red, shoulder-length all combed the right way unlike a tell-tale adolescent hair style at the moment; the back-combed ‘out-of-crackden’ look (It used to be the ‘out-of-bed’ look that was trendy wasn’t it?) made popular by Winehouse et al. Her clothes were decent too; black t-shirt with gold lettering with sensible brown jacket over the top. My point of course is that to the eye these two girls looked like adults.

What shattered the illusion was just the small matter of their speech and behaviour. A couple of stations went by without incident; just the incessant pecking of their whiney voices to contend with. We then reached Bolton where quite a few passengers alighted, which must have given them the confidence to up the ante in the ‘acting adult’ stakes. The red-head reached inside her Chloe handbag (Which after what came next I can only presume was a fake or paid for by Daddy) and produced a pregnancy test. You can imagine my disbelief at her wanton flaunting of such an item in the first place, but the conversation that followed it was just unbelievable.

“I’m so glad I’m not pregnant,” Said red-head.
“I know,” A typically non-committal retort from dowdy brunette.
“Do you think I should tell him I did one?” Red-head stares imploringly at the stick.
“I don’t know.” Brunette answers for it.
“No I’ll just leave it. Besides, he probably wouldn’t sleep with me again if he knew I thought I was pregnant.” Red-head clearly has her adult priorities straight.
“What are you gonna do with it now?” An important issue raised by dowdy brunette.
“I don’t know. Can you re-use them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, if you wash it.”

At this point I think my mouth was actually agape cartoon style at the sheer air-headed stupidity of these girls. Clearly they weren’t grown ups after all; a fact hammered home by the red-head’s subsequent disposing of the negative (phew!) pregnancy test under one of the seats across the aisle.

The dowdy brunette alighted at Horwich Parkway taking all the red-head’s bravado with her, reducing her to rummaging feebly around inside her Chloe handbag. You see at this point, an adult would be too embarrassed to do anything other than sit in silence, sat opposite a stoic man who played witness to such a public atrocity as she had displayed mere moments earlier, but her inescapable adolescent pining for acceptance into the adult world beseeched her to take out some more sundry grown-up items. I was then privy to a fumbling attempt at switching a SIM card from her 2G iPhone into her new 3G iPhone, and then back again; heaven knows why! When it came time for her to alight at Chorley, the whole gruesomely cringe worthy episode was concluded with her hurriedly attempting to throw all her belongings back into her Chloe handbag, resulting in her spilling at least 4 bottles of perfume onto the floor and table. I was too mortified to help her retrieve said bottles, which resulted in her leaving a couple behind to avoid missing her station. Just as well really, the one that fell onto my lap was Christina Aguilera’s stunning fragrance: ‘Inspire’. Wasn’t very grown up of me was it?