LIFE IS VALUELESS

“And now for yesterday’s weather forecast for London. The day will begin clear, becoming cloudy during the early part of the afternoon. Temperatures will kick off around 2C and increase marginally to about 3C by late afternoon. There will be an overnight zero.”
Thomas clicked off the radio. For years he had accepted the habit of News forever telling him what was about to happen (today the Prime Minister will deliver a speech to the CBI in which he will say… etc.) but “Yesterday’s Weather” struck him as completely pointless. Not only that, despite its claim to be “always on the money” sponsored as it was by PaddyPower, it was not in fact always on the money. Far from it. A case in point: yesterday morning had been frosty. Surely there should have been mention of it. They most definitely should not have started the day at 2C. When Thomas had whinged to Greg about the lack of frost in the forecast, his oldest friend had shouted at him: “Who the fuck cares?” But if no one cared then where would the world be? It was the principle of the thing. That’s how Thomas had seen it.
Then there was “How Do You Feel Right Now?” where opinionistas would tell the nation how to react to the latest news, news that on occasion had not as yet happened. The little girl trapped up a tree over night by her snagged pony tale we were to feel immense sympathy and compassion for, although we were to feel anger at her mother, possibly because she was not married and also because she was out buying £12 worth of lottery tickets on the same day that the incident occurred. We were also to find the tale slightly and naughtily amusing even though the child in question had come out of it with frostbite.
Thomas wondered sometimes if the media was intentionally playing with his mind. Didn’t KFC offer some of their food in a family sized bucket? Wasn’t a bucket something you vomited into? Now we are being asked to eat from one. And then there was McDonalds: Being market leaders they had been serving burgers and fries in airline sick bags for years.
Thomas knew better than most that the only way to break even in business was to sell something costing almost nothing at an eye blistering price. He had once tried to run a café himself and failed. Shops like Poundland, The 99 Pence Shop and in Birmingham The 98 Pence Shop (going for the competitive edge) were embarrassing and eye opening exceptions to the rule. And yet in a way they were not exceptions. As far as Thomas was concerned they were as confusing as the bottle of water costing 80 pence when it was almost free from a tap. Price and value seemed to bare little relation to one another any more. Perhaps, he conjectured, they never had. And yet here he was attempting pathetically to ascribe value to yesterdays weather, surely a worthless commodity.
Finally and after much consideration Thomas came up with a foolproof plan. He managed to get himself prescribed an antipsychotic. It could have been any number of drugs but his Doctor gave him the cheapest generic phenothiazine on the market. Thomas realised that after the usual running in period, and once production of dopamine2 had been blocked in his brain, the world would either look just as insane as it had always done, in which case he would be sane, or it would look normal, in which case he would not be.
Too late for him he realised that either way it was going to be ugly.

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