It stands for No Thank You. Any variant of thank you is pretty dated. I have never forgotten the silly girl whose her boyfriend said “It would be nice if you thanked my mother, she’s gone to a lot of trouble” to which she replied “Oh I don’t like saying thank you. It makes me feel obligated.”
On the contrary, I use it as a bridge, punctuation, conclusion. |I have had a lot of help in my life and it has not occurred to me that, proportionately, grateful was a terrible thing to feel.
Faced with all sorts of heavy duty happenings, let’s start with – you are an ordinary member of the public and you just don’t know.
No matter what political system we are discussing, it is predicated on your compliance and relative ignorance. Of course there are impressions and impressions are shaped by personality and life experience, who influences you, what you feel, what you think – and that can change.
I doubt we would ever have heard of Charles Spencer if his sister had not married the then Prince of Wales, now King. And 29 years of fester is a good example of fixation. Do we see mistakes more clearly when looking back?
Just other people’s ? Or our own too?
I am not a great Royalist. People are people, some you like , some you don’t. It’s to with face and images and the latter are manipulated by clothes and contexts for a start. And I am very aware of placement – how you look, who you’re with, what you do, gesture – because reading and interpreting that is a living for many.
So response to the long ago death of Princess Diana is – for me – best characterized by letting her rest in peace.
Her life was unquiet for a whole slew of reasons I am not going to discuss because so many other people have. Here is my position: it was long ago, it is at some level a private matter. Do I want anything to do with a book by the lady’s younger brother, a muck raking exercise I’d bet he has never mentioned to his older sisters ? Bad taste. NTY.
There was an item in the press this week about the difficulties which followed surgery abroad – this time on eye lids, but in the recent past on breasts and bottoms. Heaven knows who you’d trust with penis enlargement… we won’t go there. And young men turn to silicone too which may be a benign substance but if it’s wrongly placed, it’s in the wrong place. And you will want it moved.
We used to talk about an extension to the house – a new kitchen, another bedroom, a shed in the garden. Now many of us endlessly discuss what used to be called plastic surgery
as if it were something to do on holiday and when it goes wrong, we bring it to the beleaguered overworked overextended NHS for help and resolution.
If you can take what you see as a fixable problem abroad for a certain sum of money, the same cost should be mandatory to rectify it here – paid over several months if necessary, but paid. In what is an increasingly medicalized society, to the detriment of the training, commitment and hard work of many medical practitioners, I don’t see why anybody who pays into it or works in it, should be used like this. NTY.
Why can’t we let the Pope and Macron have differing points of view without referring to the Pontiff’s “snub” of the French president ? Couldn’t we just have two grown ups who have to represent difference ? You mean , for a political visit to be judged successful, it must end in total consensus ?
NTY.
Why is it wonderful to have opened special Christmas counters in September ? NTY
You can understand why people shun conventional media which endlessly chews over AI, the state visit of the Chinese President to the USA, Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage, what Andy Burnham said – leavening our helplessness with endless stories of bad news, malpractice and conjecture, the end of the world as we know it.
What I want to know is where we go from here. I am about as far from Pollyanna as it is possible to be but the endless recital of ugly ? NTY.
