One returns to the desk — after rather too long an interval on the pavement, I might add, enduring the damp chill that perpetually clings to this infernal city — to find oneself confronted with, shall we say, an 'article.' Not a dispatch from some beleaguered capital, nor an analysis of the latest fiscal folly from Whitehall, but a rumination, if you please, from the perspective of a dust bunny. A dust bunny. In my four decades of filing copy, from the Falklands to the — well, one needn't list them all, the point stands — I had genuinely believed I had seen the nadir of human interest pieces. Evidently, I was mistaken. The chaps at the digital content farm, or whatever they're calling themselves this week, appear determined to plumb new depths, compelling one to analyse the inner life of household detritus.
This particular accumulation of refuse, apparently residing 'beneath your bed,' offers what it imagines to be trenchant observations on one's 'life choices.' It describes itself as a 'veritable Everest of epidermal flakes,' a rather American flourish for hyperbole that one finds quite exhausting, particularly before one's second cup of tea. My dear fellow, if your greatest existential crisis is the 'monotonous' existence of floor-dwelling lint, marked solely by 'shifting light patterns,' then perhaps you've simply not been paying attention to the actual world outside your rather unkempt boudoir.
One recalls once, during a particularly gruelling stint covering a by-election in some forgotten industrial town — the rain, the sheer, unadulterated dreariness of it all, not to mention the ghastly lukewarm buffet — interviewing a chap whose entire livelihood was, quite literally, sweeping up industrial dust. He offered more profound insights into the human condition in five minutes than this anthropomorphic fluffball manages in an entire, lamentably long, digital screed. He spoke of dignity, of hard graft, of the creeping decline of the industries that once sustained his family and nation. This dust bunny, meanwhile, frets about the 'rhythmic creak of your mattress.' One yearns for a proper story, something with substance, something that requires more than a mere dusting of imaginative fancy, or indeed, quite so much conjecture about the internal monologue of household debris.
The author, one surmises, believed this to be terribly clever. A novel conceit, perhaps. One notes, however, that the novelty wears thin rather quickly, much like the patience of a seasoned correspondent compelled to read such frippery. The incessant 'judging your life choices' trope, delivered by a clump of hair and skin cells, strikes one as rather presumptuous. And frankly, a shade tedious. If I wished for judgment, I'd simply ring my Aunt Mildred; at least her pronouncements are based on actual, albeit often erroneous, observation, not the peculiar perspective of an overlooked agglomeration of fluff.
Still, the copy must be filed. Such is the peculiar, often disheartening, nature of modern journalism. One reports the facts, even when those 'facts' involve the imagined inner life of a floor-dwelling aggregate. Perhaps tomorrow, I shall be asked to interview a loose sock about its feelings of abandonment. One lives in hope, though largely in vain. One just hopes it isn't quite so *damp* beneath the bed.
