Too Much News

Honestly – seems like you never need to get offline these days. There’s so much going on online that life off it is positively boring. Most evenings I go to the gym for an hour, and even that seems so much more relaxing than pressing the News button on Google, which can keep you glued to the screen for hours!

This is why I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid the news. It’s way too much excitement and worry for a Cupcake, and it keeps me awake at night. Last night I was still top fit and tossing and turning at 2 a.m., so I decided to get up and read the news, which I can tell you did nothing to help me at all!

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As you may have read in a previous post, I’m still shocked about the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which about 60,000 people died on the first day. So you can imagine that I’m really not coping very well with all the news going on at the moment.

I can remember being really worried back in about 1967 that World War III was just around the corner, as I had just figured out that there were only 21 years between the end of World War I and the start of World War II, so according to my theory (we Cupcakes are a simple-minded lot!) World War III was already a year late. I can remember the exact moment I realized this. I was walking down the street, back home from school in the little South-East London suburb where we lived, and I just stopped dead in my tracks. I was kind of frozen to the spot for several minutes.

Since then I’ve tried to avoid the news. It’s never good when I turn on the TV, the radio or call up CNN. Last few days though, I’ve just been accidentally bumping into it. Yesterday morning driving to work, I thought I would be safe from the news if I turned on the radio, as it was only ten to nine – the news comes on at 9 o’clock. But there was a special report about the winds in North-East Japan and water in reactors. I froze like I did on that day back in 1967 and seems like I just didn’t even think of turning off the radio.

This evening I was watching satellite TV and after a while the thing (I think it’s the receiver) displayed a message that it was going to turn itself off and did I want that? So I pressed the “No” button. And guess what? It turned itself off anyway! And my TV switched automatically to CNN because secretly I do watch the news sometimes and that is my default channel.

And just guess what. They had “an expert” on and he told us about the worse case scenario. He actually used the word “Apocalypse”. Maybe you saw it.

Anyway, my son said that I don’t need to worry as he had read and viewed several experts’ opinions which said nothing of the kind. He hastened to add, he is of course not a nuclear physicist himself.

Never mind. It’s all just too much news for me at the moment. I can’t be worried about all of the people all of the time. And I am getting awfully tired with lying awake every night.