GETTING DUMBER

Under COVID-19 lockdown almost none of us has an excuse not to up-skill and educate ourselves.

Will we do it?

Probably not.

I've got lots of books on the bookshelves that I should read or re-read. Amongst them are classics of literature from Prowse Proust, Joyce, Dickens, Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolstoy, Wilde, Solzhenitsyn, Lawrence, Hardy, Kafka, Steinbeck, Pynchon et al but I'm bypassing them for Spike Milligan's war memoirs, Lee Child's Jack Reacher series and other pulp fiction novels.

In the cupboard we've got DVD boxed sets of history, nature and quality series like The Wire and The Singing Detective but we're watching the latest pap on Net-flicks and YouTube.


This lockdown might actually have the effect of dumbing us down.