IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE…..

The winter months had dragged on, and our garden left to its own devices had flourished into a jungle….. a thicket of weeds….. wild and rampant….. bindweeds and chickweeds and oxalis with bees nuzzling greedily into their yellow flowers and stinging nettles and climbers that had climbed and fallen and taken root again. Yiannis and Jimmy, his helper, had donned their boots and gloves and were standing around soaking in the spring sunshine and discussing how to go about clearing the garden. I declared loudly that I would join them…..but not just yet…..I had business to attend to…..finish my morning coffee and read the news on my mobile. I scrolled down the bold screaming headlines to stop at a worthy piece of article to dip into, enabling me to make….. informed decisions. But they’re churning out the same old stuff, rehashing the gloom and doom….. .…vaccinations …..a certain brand is given the green light and then the red and now a flickering green again….. the air thickens with plots and subterfuges …..leaders flexing their muscles and locking horns with pharma companies….. ` Gimme gimme before you give them! ‘…..Now there’s not enough to go around. You’d like to shrug the whole thing off. But it’s already germinating this little seed of fear in you and it grows and grows and you run round in circles and say…..` Gimme my jab, gimme my jab!’ ….. before they run out. Not too long ago you were nodding your head to conspiracy theories and now you’re waiting in line with a hundred other people, hoping to get that shot that would turn you loose into the world, attired with this invisible armour of protection. Then you’ve finally got your jab and you’re safe…..` Hurray! hurray! I’m safe…..I’ve got immunity…..I can beat off the bad boys!’….. Then the next day you hear about creeping sinister variants which your vaccine may not protect you against…. waiting around the corner to sneak up and sink their fangs into you…..You shade your eyes…..nobody does this in the dark…..but anyway you do and hope to catch some faint glimmers at the end of this tunnel …..which keeps getting longer and has now branched out into a labyrinth. So what do you do now?…..Yes, yes, how about some distraction…..some comic relief. You Tube has lots of it. You browse through…..all very slapstick…..all fabricated and curated to seem authentic….. an insult to your intelligence. When friends and family inundate you with them on WhatsApp, you don’t even bother to look at them…..you delete delete delete…..

That’s what I was doing not too long ago until I heard this buzz on my phone this morning. My friend…..not the same one that did kung fu…..had sent me a video. It showed this man, shirt unbuttoned and sliding down over one shoulder, a look of dread on his face and a needle poised in some medical person’s hand to deliver the jab. I hit the arrow to take a little peek and was ready to delete if they were rolling out the same thing…..but the headlines flashed black and bold that he was the Health Minister of Thailand…..`  My goodness! A minister! Look at him! ‘ He was recoiling in fear and snivelling and going….`aiyou…..aiyou’  whenever the needle approached him. I chuckled, feeling the thrill of seeing someone in power being ridiculed and made it even more viral by sending it out to everyone I knew. Nobody bothered to respond except sister number one in Malaysia who asked…..` how come they’re speaking Mandarin and not Thai? ‘ Easy for her to say because she had done a bit of Mandarin and could tell the difference, Anyway I went into You Tube and checked it out and indeed it was all trumped up…..the poor minister looked nothing like that man in the video. I fell for it hook line and sinker and so did my friend. I swear this guy’s acting was better than Jackie Chan’s.

What about watching the news on telly then? I wonder who’s giving these people advice on how to present the news? I’m talking about certain newscasters on TV that not only spew out all the misfortunes of the human race…..accidents, escalating Covid outbreaks and deaths, floods, hurricanes, fires, missing persons…..the elderly who leave their houses and forget to come back…..but fire it off in a rising intonation, breathless and urgent, reeling you in before you have a chance to escape. It resembles the style of street vendors and pedlars pitching their voices high and screechy to hawk their wares…..the more spurious the goods, the higher the voice. It reminds me of this fruit seller in Malaysia when I was in my teens. He used to walk past our backyards, shouting in a sing song voice, raising it to a crescendo ….. ` Oranges, apples, come and see, come and see, follow me, follow me’…..and mum and the women in the neighbourhood left their kitchens and followed him…. the pied piper of the backstreet. He waddled ahead and they waddled after him to his van parked at the end of the lane. Mum would come back toting a bag of fruit and looking disgruntled …..they were too pricey…..she could have got better value for her money at the market.

Have you heard of the latest thing going around…..CANCEL CULTURE? I was a tad confused…..you get this way sometimes when you’re a retiree. I thought they were cancelling culture…..how do you do that???? So I googled it  [Thank God for google!]…..Ahh….. I get it! There’s this new culture whipping around, propagated by rabble-rousers, media and social media…..and even you and me, where you get to cancel people…..negate them, vaporise them and reduce them to an abysmally depressing 0 number of followers on instagram, twitter, facebook etc…..a fate worse than death. It’s a galloping contagion now. There’s A who is high up on the political rung…..his dirty linen pulled out and displayed in full view…..but nope…..` No cancellation for me.! ‘….. he says.  Then there’s B that tried to cancel C but got himself cancelled instead and claims he’s just going into…..hibernation. Then D jumps out of the woodwork expressing a desire to cancel C as well but is afraid to suffer the same fate as B…..but hold on a minute…..hasn’t D already been cancelled or somebody forgot to tell him? This is all very confusing…..but nothing new…..it’s just us, re-enacting our age-old squabbles from schoolyards to political stages…..now quibbling it out in the digital arena of social media and followers.

I read an article that social media is the new system of checks and balances to hold people accountable for misbehaviour. But in the same breath, the writer continues…..people make mistakes, so should we be so unforgiving and expunge them with a thumbs down or send them viralling into obliteration? Shouldn’t we give them a second chance to redeem themselves and make a comeback?…..Hmm maybe…..but just a little humble view here…..if you’ve entered into a Faustian Bargain to go up in a shower of stars like a Roman Candle….. whistling up to power and glory ……then surely it’s most natural to come down at some stage…..and sometimes with an unceremonious bump. Perhaps, it would have been less painful to malfunction like damp fireworks and buzz off in different directions. And then again, your downfall could just be these influencers and trend setters moving herds of followers to new foraging grounds. On a kinder note, I suppose THE CANCELLED could always pick themselves up, dust off the dirt and start again….. and a very good luck to them.

Oops! I can hear the two gardeners shouting out for me to come out and tug out the weeds. So off I go into the bright sunshine to bury my fingers into some good old fashioned dirt

See you. Do post some comments. Would love to hear some voices from the wilderness.