I reckon this is a good place to curl one off
I've never watched one of Ray Mears's shows, I've never heard him speak before, and I'm sure, now that I have, that he would never have realised how philosophically astute he was on Radio 5 this afternoon.
In conversation with lefty, risk-averse, Comrade Beeb-cowed, tedious, righteous Richard Bacon, he came out with an unintentionally profound response to a quite lily-livered question (paraphrased).
Bacon: It must be awful for wild animals, living constantly with the threat of death. They could be eaten alive on any day, couldn't they?Indeed they do. Encumbered by worrying every day that they might be set upon by a pack of hyenas, wildlife would cease to be, err, wild. They'd just stand in a circle watching each other's back and fall asleep with their eyes open.
Mears: They don't think like that, they just enjoy living.
We're supposed to be more evolved than animals, yet daily we see wild scare stories in the press exhorting us to introvert our lives yet more to eradicate the mere whiff of a health threat. And the more we are hectored, the more absurd the threats to life become.
When we see legislation being tabled by homo sapiens to restrict the use of salt in cooking, you know we are reaching quite ridiculous levels of paranoia. We've already experienced alarmism on a grand scale, with innocuous substances being elevated to the level of mustard gas, with ancient brews being targeted as killers, with food we have eaten for billions of years being held up as evil, with simply seeing something unhealthy being a death sentence, with the world stopping over a disputed threat, crikey I could go on, but you get the idea.
No, sod it, just a few more.
Kids being deprived of play as it's too dangerous, lollipop signs being banned if they carry dangerous tinsel, life-threatening flowers, lethal 40 year old books, and when you're dead, you're still a threat to the living.
There is a saying. Oh, how does it go again?
Got it ... shit happens.
When and where did we forget this? At which point in time did we cease taking negligible risks and start merely existing? What event, specifically, transformed us from a species who would suck the marrow out of life, into one which has had the life sucked out of us by fear and hysteria?
And when can we go back to just enjoying living?
