I can make you hate Read Online Free PDF

attention. Without leaving my seat I can access virtually any piece of music ever recorded, download any film ever made, order any book ever written. And the end result is that I hardly experience any of it.
    It’s too much. I’ve had it with choice. It makes my head spin.
    Here’s what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one programme or movie a day. If I don’t watch it, it gets replaced by the following day’s selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other.
    And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.
    In short: I’ve tried more. It’s awful. I want less, and I want it now.
    *
     
    I eventually watched
Scenes From a Marriage.
It was good. Still haven’t got round to
The Seventh Seal
though.

The Great Inescapable Time Disaster
11/10/2009
     
    George Osborne’s Tory conference speech last week left me in a state of shredded despair. Not because of anything he said, but because I’d just discovered he’s younger than me. Only by two months, but still: younger.
    In a correctly functioning universe, my advanced age would make me his superior. If I deliberately knocked a glass of milk on to the floor, he’d have to clean it up. He’d be on all fours, scrubbing desperately at the floorboards while I reclined in my chair, resting my feet on his back, reading the
Financial Times
, occasionally glancing over the top to harrumph at his efforts, grinding my heel into his spine to underline each criticism. You missed a bit, boy. For pity’s sake, show some gumption. Tongue, Osborne! Use your bloody tongue!
    Wild fantasy, of course: there’s no way Osborne would prostrate himself before me, lapping up my mess like a prison cell Betty. He’s of grander stock than I. He’s worth ten thousand hundred billion pounds, wipes his arse on back issues of
Tatler
, attended a public school so swish that even its coat of arms looks down its nose at you, and spends his weekends running around his estate, dressed like the Planters ‘Mr Peanut’ mascot, wildly thrashing at the backs of chimney sweeps’ legs with a cane. I went to a comprehensive and have the social standing of a plughole.
    But I’m resigned to the class difference. It’s the age difference that rankles. In my head, senior politicians are supposed to be older than I am – forever. No matter how much I age, part of their job is to be older and drier than me. At 38, Osborne feels too young for the world of politics. At 38, I feel too old for the world in general.
    Age has been a lingering obsession of mine since I left my teens. However old I’ve been is too old.
    At 26, I felt totally washed up.
    At 32, I regretted wasting time worrying about my age as a 26-year-old, because now I was convinced I really was totally washed up.
    At 38, I look back at my 32-year-old self and regret that he wasted time with those regrets about wasted time. Then I regret wasting my current time regretting regrets about regrets. This is pretty sophisticated regretting I’m doing. That’s the sole advantage of ageing: I can now effortlessly consolidate my regrets into one manageable block of misery. Otherwise, by the age of 44, I’d need complex database software just to keep track of precisely how many things I’m regretting at once.
    Age is an odd thing. As well as fretting about it, at every point in my life I’ve regarded those both above and below me on the age ladder with unwarranted contempt. Anyone younger was a barking idiot; anyone older, an outmoded embarrassment.
    But rather than mellowing into acceptance as I ascend the ladder, my distaste for both groups sharpens