Blog entry #18 from www.mba-marketing.co.uk
Welcome to 2009.
It’s not going to be a great year, although it threatens to be an interesting one.
One of my resolutions is for my writing to be heavily influenced by Charlie Brooker. Here’s what the great man had to say about 2009 in his recent Guardian column.
Dim your lights. Here's the highlights reel. The worst recession in 60 years. Broken windows and artless graffiti. Howling winds blowing empty cans past boarded-up shopfronts. Feral children eating sloppy handfuls of decomposed-pigeon-and-baked-bean mulch scraped from the bottom of dustbins in a desperate bid to survive. The pound worth less than the acorn. The City worth less than the pound. Your house worth so little it'll collapse out of shame, crushing you in your bed. Not that you'll die peacefully in your sleep - no, you'll be wide awake with fear, worrying about the situation in the Middle East at the precise moment a chunk of ceiling plaster the size of a flagstone tumbles from on high to flatten your skull like a biscuit under a shoe, sending your brain twizzling out of your earholes like pink-grey toothpaste squeezed from a tube. All those language skills and precious memories splattered over your pillows. It'll ruin the bedclothes. And instead of buying expensive new ones, your grieving, impoverished relatives will have to handwash those bedclothes in cold water for six hours to shift the most upsetting stains before passing them down to your orphaned offspring, who are fated to sleep on them in a disused underground station for the rest of their lives, shivering in the dark as they hear bombs dipped in bird flu dropping on the shattered remains of the desiccated city above.
You’ll find more of Charlie Brooker’s work at www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charliebrooker . Watch his TV programmes and buy his books too. And I can do no better than repeat the ending to his article.
All things considered, this may be a bleak year but at least it'll be more interesting than, say, 2006, during which nothing happened. So grit your teeth and meet 2009 head-on, because it's not going anywhere until 2010 at the very earliest. In summary: happy new year.
Welcome to 2009.