Isn’t it about time the end of the world showed up?

I think the time has come to declare a new psychological phenomenon. It’s been at least five minutes since the last one. We’ve had compassion fatigue for a while, where we all got too sick of starving people to care, and then green fatigue because we were sick of sorting our rubbish and buying organic over-priced vegetables and pretending to care about the environment from the comfort of our 4×4 gas guzzlers. Now I think I have the next one for us all, and about time too.

Economic crisis fatigue. I’m tired of it. My patience with the latest media thrill is fast running out, as is my patience with the people who talk about it. It’s possible, if you don’t shop in Tesco where they subject you to TV screens with BBC News 24 in every aisle in case you should accidentally stray too far from a set and forget for a second that you’re supposed to be in a blind panic at the end of the capitalist era, to forget what’s going on. In the shops life seems to be going on as normal. People are still buying huge bags of rubbish from Primark made by people in Indian sweatshop factories and defective toys from China.

Dire proclamations abound from all the people who make dire proclamations. Accusations dripping with the venomous bile of the terminally hateful are pointed at, in this case, bankers, although not very long ago it was people who want to build motorways and houses and runways on green belt land. Before that it was terrorists on planes, and then I think we were back into fearing the end of capitalism, and before that, the Cold War. We seem to be stuck in a state of permanent crisis, end-of-the-worldism that puts all those End of Days cults to shame.

Maybe it’s something worse than economic crisis fatigue. Maybe I’m just tired of the whole crisis phenomenon. Last year, while the sub-prime mortgage market was still quietly imploding and wasn’t interesting or complex enough to worry anybody too much, it was still the end of the environment. We were all trying to stop global climate change (impossible, it’s a natural phenomenon) and the IPCC was releasing dire warnings that we were imminently going to die in some natural catastrophe. Now nobody cares because we’re all apparently going to lose our houses and money.

One of the things I notice is that whatever the media is telling us is going dreadfully wrong in the world, we all seem to carry on living. Life carries on happening. I studied environmentalism at university and saw the trends rise and fall with the predictions based on whether we’d freeze or burn to death in the next decade. Then there was the millennium bug. And 9/11. I’ve lived through a few Black days and the world has always righted itself. Whenever I hear politicians compare these days to the terrible days of the past I’m reminded not how bad that was, but that we came through it. Because we always seem to. And endlessly panicking over these things is so stressful you’d end up in therapy if you took it all seriously. In the end of course, much of it might well be manufactured by the press because they know one law operates in all circumstances: crises of all kinds sell more papers.

A lesson in bad crowbar plot moves

I’ve just finished reading one of those high-tech thrillers about hackers on the run from a secret unnamed government agency headed up by one of those supremely psychotic Utopians. As usual, man and woman both have a tragic past, and in this case, the man is the son of a serial killer and tormented, in that way that Good Men always are, by the thought that he is somehow responsible for the deaths of his father’s victims. Oh yes, and he doesn’t remember the night of the discovery, haunted by the fear that he may have actually killed somebody.

Now, all that’s fine. It’s the stuff of an easy read through the weekend, sitting in my library with the sunlight streaming in on me. A break before I start working on Book Two next week, I suppose. Most of the time, I can handle the twists and turns of these thrillers, even if they are a bit samey (the Good Man is always hopelessly troubled and bears an unreasonable guilt for the deaths of people that were nothing to do with him to the point where you want to slap him, the woman is always not utterly drop-dead beautiful but all men somehow fall for her, the psychotic is always a Utopian or distopian idealist). This time, however, I really was struck dumb by a plot move that just didn’t work.

Picture the scene. You’re a troubled man in your thirties, erasing your past, tormented by guilt that would be the envy of the entire Catholic church, on the run with a beautiful hacker woman you hardly know chased by men who can see you with satellites and have access to all kinds of technology, men and information to do away with you in minutes. At this point, you decide you absolutely must go back to the place where you found out the truth about your father and resolve all those issues therapy could never touch. A bit like me being on the run from the police and spontaneously wanting to visit the place where I went to school. I have to admit that although I’ve always been a fan of the thriller, and can suspend disbelief for a good story and entertainment, I was just stumped by that. There’s no justification for it. If it was me as the Lovely Woman with the not-quite beautiful but somehow captivating features, I’d have slapped him and told him, no we’re not going to relive your past right now. We’re going to head in the opposite direction and deal with your issues at some less lethal juncture.

I think I’m making an issue out of this because it’s easier to think about fiction than it is thinking about what’s really going on in the world, with all its attendant panicking and furore. The television anchors are practically standing on street corners screaming that the end is nigh. To cheer myself up I’m spending the evening watching Four Weddings and a Funeral and pondering the unique impact that gravity has on Hugh Grant’s face. I’ve never encountered anybody before who could be said to have a lopsided face, on both sides of it.