Ignorance was Bliss

You can’t know everything.
Even if you look at it from all sides you still can’t know everything.
So now that I know nothing I don’t confess to be an expert – on anything.
I know more than some about music, but not enough to riff with Eric Clapton or scat with Claire Martin.
I know a little bit more than some about cooking but not enough to chop for Ken Hom or slice with Angela Hartnett.
I can read; write, a little; identify wild flowers, up to a point; I can swim and perform a passable downward dog but I wouldn’t put myself in the same category as Iyenga.
I can drive, grow herbs proficiently and slap on a lick of paint but I wouldn’t presume to identify as Chagall.
So looking at my life from all sides and then looking at yours, or the old git’s or any of the people surviving in Iraq and I would have to admit that I know very little about the human condition. As I get older I seem to know less. There’s so many books and bands podcasts and social media websites – there’s noise and guff and experts galore.
There’s opinionators and commentators, hidden agendas and theories that are conspiratorial.
There’s Know-Alls and Speculators, Smart Alecs and Windbags. They tell me what I should know, think, and feel whilst they know as little as me.
There’s War mongers and braggarts who try to convince me that weapons of mass destruction exist; there’s self servers and scumbags, gas bags and egotists who are so convinced of their own rhetoric that they beckon us into a false sense of insecurity.
So as the virus seems to be taking a second swipe, and mask-wearers attack their naked neighbour, as Spain attacks Johnson and De Niro dismantles Trump, as peace loving people struggle to survive in Mosel, Basrah, Baghdad and Fallujah. I am left gasping for clarity. Who is doing what to whom and why? Why are hangings and decapitations, rapes and stonings being allowed to happen not a plane ride away and in whose names?
If I drive via the A3 I can get to Mosul via, Surbiton and Austria, Romania and Turkey, in 51 hours, I can park my car in rubble, take pictures of broken buildings and blown up mosques. I can eat out of the sewers and pray that a man in a burqa won’t come and chop off the old git’s hand for having a nip of Lagavulin, or stone me because I smeared my mouth in Russian red lipstick.
I am agog at the hypocrisy coming down from them that’s supposed to know, appalled at the vicious callousness of the arms dealers that supply the weapons of mass destruction to countries that can only dream of a mug of builders tea in front of Coronation Street.
I am horrified that humanity is now left in the hands of hooligans and liars. I am humbled by the women who hold their children close as piss swills over their feet in the refugee camps. I am an old Jew whose family was saved by the hands and hearts of strangers, and yet I bare witness to clean shaven fascists who table motions in the White House to enable ignorant thugs to smash open heads in Portland.
So, as our government now makes obesity illegal and bike riding compulsory who will be the first to tell that complacent pile of shite in the Palace of Westminster that enough is enough. I thought by now I knew everything, that politics was just a game of the intelligent few, but now that I know nothing and Politics is fingered by the likes of the slimy Cum, I drink my coffee alone and shout at the invisible world for help.
I talk to the trees, I talk to the clouds I talk to the local council, but they’re as bloody confused as I am.