Dead chicken media

Having taken a week off I am seriously struggling to get back into the swing of blogging. You would think a week away would give me a backlog of issues to address, but in reality the media's inane chatter is so far behind the curve I could six months off and still be more up to date. Their world is so far removed from mine. Where the EU referendum is concerned they're not even close to being on the same page. Everything is filtered through the narrow prism of Westminster politics and to them, anything happening outside of that simply doesn't exist.

As a political animal, there are days like today when I feel completely alienated from whatever's going on. The media throws out a story in the same way a burglar might throw a dead chicken laced with sleeping tablets at the guard dogs. Twitter looks like a pack of dobermans ripping the decoy meat to pieces, and the resultant snarling and shredding becomes background footage for media coverage of it. Meanwhile, as the dogs are distracted, the thieves move in through the front gate in broad daylight and steal the family silver. 

Every day it's a new dead chicken press release laced with industrial strength tranquillisers. What's more depressing is that anyone would think the dogs were never fed judging by the enthusiasm and urgency the dead chicken is torn to pieces. But the dogs are fed. They have prime steak fillet on a golden platter placed before them every day. It's ignored because there's something addictive in the tranquillisers. Some days it looks like the media has a tennis serving machine stuffed full of dead chickens, lobbing them over the fence at a rate of one a minute. The older wiser dogs ought to know by now not to chase the decoy but they do. They never learn. They are happy with this arrangement. 

This is one of those days when I ask myself why bother? Today, I don't have a good answer.