Off on a tangent

In the interests of full disclosure, readers should be aware that what follows has very little to do with travelling.

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The fact that The Daily Mail newspaper continues to exist - and indeed remains one the UK's best two circulating publications - is a constant source of vile repulsion. I have nothing against free speech and people saying whatever they want in print, but what gets me about The Mail is that some people read the half-baked crap they publish and not only accept it at face value, but actually allow it to shape their views.

To fill in non-British readers (or indeed uninformed UK-based ones), The Daily Mail is the most negative, pessimistic, cynical and generally unenlightend daily newspaper in the UK. Flicking through its first 15 pages or so is likely to provide you with a what's what of everything that could possibly be wrong with the world - you'll struggle to find an article that is't either blaming the Government for something, young people for something else, Europe or the USA for pretty much everything and, well let's not even get started on The Daily Mail's opinions about immigrants.

It would be fairly easy (and ironic) for me to blame someone or something for the existence of the above, but that would of course represent a regress to the cynical methods of you-know-what. And, more to the point, the reality of the situation is far more complex. For sure, there'll be a few lunatics around for whom The Daily Mail is like the Daily Word of God (and probably have a lot in common with viewers of Glenn Beck or FOX News), but (hopefully) most of those millions of daily readers actually have functioning brains that can think for themselves. No, instead there is another trait going on - one that may well be found to a greater extent in the UK than anywhere else. It is the love of bad news.

For some reason that I've never quite managed to get my head around, bad news sells. And thus creates a self-perpetuating cycle of journoboys seeking, exaggerating, and indeed inventing (as in the memorable case of slimeball-extraordinaire Piers Morgan) bad news with the knowledge that the psycho'masochistic tendecnies of the inately cynical British populace will lap up their garbage. The Daily Mail is, therefore, and tragic as it may be, just giving people what they want.

So the big question is what the hell any of this has got to do with travelling or South America. In many respects, very little - as previously mentioned The Daily Rod has occasionally diverted from being a travel-based blog to a platform for my various opinions on the world. However, on this occasion there is a vague ulterior reason - prompted by a couple of messages from blog reasons, the relatively simple realisation about giving people what they want dawned on yours truly. And more specifically, it applied to this very blog.

When writing for other people to read, the main aim is to be interesting. By and large, "interesting" implies "out of the ordinary" - something that is no more true than describing interactions between human beings. When normal day-to-day interactions are a succession of perfectly happy events, they make pretty dull reading... whereas the odd bit of conflict is somewhat different...

So - and in anticipation of upcoming blogs as well as in retrospect of previous ones - rest assured that Anna and I having quantum differences in outlook and world view doesn't equate to collapsing friendships... yet!!!