I should know better

Not dead yet - just haven`t been back to this for a while. It seems that the last post gave great offence. I didn`t intend it - when I want to offend people, which I frequently do as I`m a bad old bitch, I like the satisfaction of doing it to their face in person., not sneaking about on a blog.

Also, I`ve been taken up with Jury Duty. One of those distasteful but necessary duties, not at all enjoyable...or so I thought. But the attitude of people around me was astonishing. They seemed to think I had been offered free entertainment. They wanted all the details of what was in fact a very unpleasant rape case.

The clue came when a friend asked what it had been like at Jury selection when I had been grilled by the defence lawyer. She was so disappointed when I explained that the Jury selection involves writing all the available names on little pieces of paper, putting them in a goldfish bowl and drawing out the required number, and that after that you are only excused if you know the accused or have a medical appointment that day.

"Not like on Shark, then?" she asked.

No, dear, Shark is fiction. And so is CSI. And Law and Order and all the others, right down to The Bill.

And there`s so much of it. Have you noticed how much of our entertainment is dominated by crime? And how our interest has changed? Fictional crime has come a long way since Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle. It used to take the form of a detection puzzle, when you worked oiut whodunnit., but somehow that slid into a fascination for police procedurals, and on into obsession with the gruesome details of the crime itself.....don`t pretend you don`t watch "Dexter."

Well, I am a real old retro. I don`t buy into the fusion of entertainment with life. I don`t think TV is real. I don`t want it to be real. I don`t think that I "know" people I have seen on it - or worse, fictional characters from it. And I don`t see the unpleasant parts of life as entertainment.''

I remember years ago coming out of a cinema showing "Jurassic Park 2" (yes, I`m that old), and the woman beside me saying that she hadn`t really enjoyed it.

"I think there was a lot of cruelty to animals involved in making it," she explained.

I kept quiet. What could I say?

I guess I`m just an old dinosaur myself.

And not even a CGI one at that.....