Why worry about things.....

Last night I was drafting a poster for the fundraising tea we're going to have at my son's school on Friday for the victims of the Haiti earthquake disaster when a film came on the telly.

Why oh why I picked Right at Your Door, on BBC 1, about a man who seals himself into his house after a chemical attack in Los Angeles just before his wife returns home, over Five Minutes of Heaven, on BBC 2- a fact based Irish drama about a 19 year old Catholic killed by a 17 year old member of the Ulster Volunteer Force I do not know and will not question now.

All I do know is that I've felt... I've felt...erm, I've felt, well I've felt all day.

Right at Your Door was described as a 'thriller'. I can't say I felt any sense of urgency watching it, but bloody hell, the ending... why did it keep me awake half the night, make me feel isolated all day?

The dusty landscape of the film reminded me of the ashen landscape I imagined while reading The Road. The toxins are airborne and spread, spread, spread. One can imagine London being engulfed in a nanosecond, Essex, Middlesex, Kent and Surrey in two nanoseconds, all from the same bomb.

I'm currently reading Iain Banks' Transition about suicide terrorism, global financial meltdown, and the all powerful organisation that presides over it all: the Concern (a christmas gift from my brother in law. I always read a gift though I'm no stranger to Banks' fiction).

These two books would be enough to get me into a post film tailspin but no, I bought the Sunday Telegraph (free dvd of A Place in the Sun) which reported the rise of the female suicide bomber who doesn't look Arab (reminds me of The Battle of Algiers - 1966 film) and is being primed to take us all out, and another article on the imminent threat of "a new 7/7" as more British muslims are being radicalised as terrorist techniques become more sophisticated.

There was little about the looting in Haiti, but I got that in the televised news.

My nights are often grey but it didn't help it being a bleak, foggy, cold January day. I usually ignore the sky on such days, but it hung over me today like a course blanket. The only way to deal with it is to write, right, write.

So this is it:
Terrible natural disasters are happening around us. Haiti had no control over its fate. The people there are desperately hungry, are thirsty, are in need of urgent medical attention. The UK doesn't sit on a tectonic plate. We are very lucky. We get storms though, floods.

Terrible man made carnage awaits us. I, for one, know I have no control over how, where, or when it will happen.

I could get very depressed about all this. I could become very, very afraid but of course, as I sit in my tower, I think why worry about what I can't control?

You know me, I worry about fecking everything, well, housing. This is so big though, so huge, that I apologise sincerely for posting about it.

I will not worry about Mother Nature and fundamentalist person. There is no point.

But if there's a moral to that film that if you didn't watch it last night, I wouldn't recommend it, it is that in the event of a chemical attack, stay outside.

There, I've ruined it for you, told you the end. Of the film.

Life?

I'll think sunshine,
on a cloudy day
When it's cold outside
I have my life today
I guess some might say
What can make me feel this way
My boy (my boy, my boy)
Thinkin' about my boy (The Temptations, featuring stigmum)

I always say a little prayer for my son
Forever, forever, he'll stay in my heart
and I will love him
Forever, forever we never will part
Oh how I love him
Together together, that's how it must be
To live without him
is inconceivable to me (Aretha Franklin slightly tweaked by stiggers)