Irony

I tend to listen to Radio 5 in the morning when I'm walking the dog. It makes me suitably grumpy for the day whereas Radio 4 shifts me into angry. Anyway they had a report this morning on the Andy Murray game in Melbourne where apparently the temperature was very hot and immediately followed it with a piece about the release of the 1914-18 unit war diaries by the National Archives.

There was much hand wringing about a tennis player who had fainted, one who had vomited and one who had burnt her bottom on a piece of exposed metal. In breathless tones the idiot presenters argued whether it was too hot to make people suffer in this way. Maybe it was but I suspect that given the choice the soldiers who wrote the war diaries would have opted for the Australian heat over the wet and damp of the Passchendaele Ridge and a thousand other places. Radio 5 switched effortlessly from the tennis agonies to those of France and Flanders with no apparent sense of irony. Guess which item had the greater air time.

I dont condemn the tennis players. They appear to be getting on with it. It's the media that create the problem in their desperate attempts to report on something. Perspective, balance, common sense - they all seem to be lost. See, I told you it put me in a bad mood.