Drivel Part One

As a wee boy I was sort of always aware of drivel; there was my mate's mother twaddling on about how she spoke Gaelic when she was growing up in Perth and me knowing that they don't speak Gaelic in Perth and thinking, "she's talking rubbish" and, of course, she was. However, that is only one example of how I realised at a very young age that even grown ups can talk drivel. A couple of years later there was my Auntie Jean telling me about how her son, Ian, was a great electrician and how he had fitted all the electrical fittings in Drumchapel and me thinking, "fucking hell, Drumchapel has about 60,000 people, there is no way he could have screwed in all the sockets, done all the wiring, etc. etc. and I just couldn't keep quiet on this occassion and said, "Auntie Jean, you're talking shite", my mum was flabbergasted, my Auntie Jean was stunned and I got a whack across the face and was told to apologise. Now I felt that I had been hard done by and in my rage I squeezed the pint glass I was drinking milk out of. It was one of those big thick mug type glasses and I was so angry i squeezed it until it broke and whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, there was blood everywhere and a big cut across the palm of my hand and there is still a funny tingling feeling in one of my fingers and around the middle of the palm a sort of numbness and it is amost forty years after it happened. Of course, there will be that tingling feeling until I die. Drivel can be dangerous.

Listening to Bush and Brown on BBC World this evening, the drivel was an insult to anyone of even the crudest half education. There was Bush thanking Brown and Brown thanking Bush and Bush saying things like, "it is in our interests that little girls go to school in Afghanistan" and "we don't have a quarrel with the Iranian people, it is their government" and didn't he say the same thing about Iraq, about it not being about the people but about the government? Now that drivel can be dangerous was obvious to me at a very early age and I have a scar on my right palm to remind me of that fact. Nevertheless, when I was a wee boy, I didn't quite realise that drivel could be quite as dangerous as it actually is.

The picture above of an American fatality in Iraq shows how dangerous drivel is if we don't ignore it.