I didn’t, however, have long to wait for another bus load of distractables to steam into view aimed specifically at my middle-classy-arsey mind. Masquerading as an entirely different and utterly exotic test of mind-bending skills they came not single spies, but multifarious in their number crunching manner. Pretending to harken from the Orient, they call themselves Sudoku and Kakuro (and any other variant spellings), not to mention that one they nicked off Countdown on the back of the G2 section. Who but the terminally bourgeois or hopelessly student (and doesn’t the latter lead inextricably to the former?) has time to offer up at the altar of the Conundrum?

 I have sworn off them. Am threatening my fingers with breakage, my right arm with amputation, mine eyeballs with the plucking if they persist in twitching in that particular direction. When I think of the sweet hours I could spend doing NOTHING, daydreaming of tube journeys become flights of fancy, bus trips that delve to subterranean depths and you can smell the magma boiling or a Taxi that becomes on oldey worldey Hackerney Cab with horse and whip wielding Cabbie all stinking of shit! I shudder at the minutes, hours, nay weeks wasted in the pursuit of a clean Kakuro puzzle. And that’s all presupposing that there’s not something more interesting at hand, some mewling babe gurgling in it’s buggy, an haggard dwarf with a gnarled tale of woe, some strung out busker trying to make ‘Yesterday’ sound arresting. It all beats the crap outta figuring if it’s a 2 or a 9 third square down, fourth across! I coulda written a novel in the time I frittered away in the senseless positioning of numbers in idiotic squares. I coulda learnt the piano and written Concertos! So I’m gonna.

Might even do away with the old rags completely. Harsh measure to be sure, especially “IN” season, but the turkey must be frozen if it’s to do it’s work.. And here I must pause to congratulate Mister Levy for the banning of the Bog from The Lane. That nasty rag never belonged in such hallowed company. But seriously, how can ya ever get anything done with all that endless bleating? All them sections that pretend to offer you a better life but end with you and I suppurating under a tide of info we have little or no idea what to do with. Bin it. No. Don’t even buy it. Save a tree. Don’t read it online. Save a Power Station. Don’t care and save your heart. Do you need the media to tell you that there’s war in the Middle East? Do you need a Paper to tell you that Bush is an idiot (God please spare us another bully-boy invasion!) Need another documentary to reveal the starving millions in Africa or Asia, the internet to reveal the scale of tragedy visited by the Monsoons or Hurricanes? Methinx a little more conversation might alleviate the ignorance. And what exactly will you do with this adulterated, mediated information when you have it? Trot down to your local branch and make a donation? You might, but it might better behove ya to trot round yer neighbourhood and find some local in need of time, space or cash. Might lessen the fear instilled by the rags, might open up vistas closed off by the screen, might bring something tangible not offered by the www.com. Might take a little time, but the rewards will nourish far more than the completion of Kakuro, the smug misunderstanding of Ms Winehouse’s latest dilemma or the anger instilled by another jaundiced view of a political machination.

Sadly tho’, for one such as I, there is no treatment for the second condition of which Mr GBS so eloquently warns. I was, am now and shall always be bourgeois. (Or Morejois as we’ve taken to calling ourselves here in NW10) I was born here, raised here and, despite many and varied attempts at resituating, the sensibility lingers still. So, while so much of the world clambers to break down the doors to the hallowed halls of  Middle Classdom, I shall stand, like Canute, on the ramparts waving flags of warning, emitting shouts of hazard. “Turn back! Think again. Check your pulse. Beware, all who enter the Middle Ground. This place of middles, muddles and mediocrity, zone of comfort and conforming, of averages, acceptance and acquiescence will suck you in and bleed you dry, offering pensions that will fail, insurance that will baulk and employment that won’t employ anything but the least interesting part of you. Pass up all thought of excellence, extremity or hope of extradition, for you, your children and your children’s children. Turn tail and take your professions elsewhere. Be a Doctor somewhere without a hospital, a lawyer in a land without the rule of law, a songwriter in a land without a Pop chart, an engineer in a land without bridges or wells, an architect in a land where they build houses out of detritus, and live off your own joys and sorrows not those edited, shaped and doled out by those whose real interest is to keep you exactly where you are, moaning ‘It’s not fair’ or “That should be a 6”.