Oh the Irony

1st Jan 2021

Oh the Irony -  I know I can’t be he only person who can see the Irony of having David Attenborough’s voice espousing the need to save the planet whilst exploding tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere.

After seeing news reports the London New Years Eve fireworks had been cancelled in September by the Mayor Sadiq Khan, I thought what foresight, here seemed to be one Politician who can read a graph and has the courage to make unpopular but necessary decisions. They are destined to not be caught by surprise by the totally predictable rise in Covid numbers, such as we are seeing by this time of year (which were predicable without the confounding factor of a ‘variant strain’).  Unfortunately Midnight rolled around and I was disappointed to see the London skyline fill with the usual cocktail of harmful chemicals.

The laser light show, music and drones aspect was fantastic, like most people my heart swelled with pride to see the tributes to the the NHS, Captain Sir Tom and other inspirational figures and events marking a challenging 2020.  Again, I can’t have been the only person for whom the fireworks were an irritating distraction on the left hand side of the screen, whilst my focus was on the drone display on the right.  

I thought this year, we could make an Environmental statement and not have fireworks, based upon no crowds being there expecting them, and we could possibly downgrade expectations for future years.  

The environmental issues were again conveniently overlooked. More national headlines were given over to the fact that the ‘hard of thinking’ can’t understand that Black Lives Matter is a cause every right minded person can get behind.  By this point, people who don’t understand what the movement stands for are either being deliberately awkward, or are just wilfully uneducated, either way there is no point wasting breath or ink trying to explain it.  Why give any oxygen to their unknowledgeable viewpoint.

Some people have said don’t be such a whinger, the whole thing was scaled down and the pollution was only the same as 300 people driving 30km, probably trying to placate me and suggest that nobody travelled to see it and so that is an offset.  I find the numbers fascinating, why use an example keeping the numbers so low?  Why not say it’s the same  as 1 person driving 9000 miles, or the equivalent to a car engine travelling at 110km/h non stop for 82 hours, perhaps because that sounds bad for the environment.    

Other acquaintances’ I’ve discussed this with said, why are you moaning they were raising awareness of the Environmental plight.  To them, I’d like to draw upon a  comedians’ response to their friend doing a parachute jump to raise awareness for Cancer, ‘I think we’ve all heard of Cancer, you just want to do a parachute jump’. 

What saddens and frustrates me now, is that because theoretically we’ve skipped a year, seeing in 2022 NYE will be back, and on steroids.  The usual 100,000 person crowd will be larger, mostly travelling an average of 30km to be there, so we can do that maths.  The mind set from the organisers will be that the audience will be expecting a bigger show than ever, and so this years £1.5million effort will be dwarfed.  Adding insult to injury, instead of heeding Sir David’s words, we’ll stick our collective heads down and hurtle towards the tipping point.  At this stage if people don’t know what the Environmental tipping point is, they are either being deliberately awkward, or wilfully uninformed!  They should Google it!