Universal boredom.

Apparently Lewis Hamilton is not a happy man. He’s complained about the fact that this Sunday sees a clash of sporting events – The Cricket World Cup, The Wimbledon men’s final and The British Grand Prix. I expect he wants to look like he’s championing the sporting viewer but in reality he just wants as many people watching him and him alone for as long as humanly possible. What he also seems to forget is that he is a spoilt cock with all the charisma of a BHS lampshade and that Formula 1 is shit. With the possible exception of horse racing (sorry MK) I can’t think of a duller, less appealing sport; just watching things go round and round until one goes round and round a bit faster than all the others and then the person who got the thing round faster than everyone else gets thrown a huge bag of money and thinks the sun shines out of their arse. I suppose horse racing has the slight bonus of lots of vertically challenged Irishmen with squeaky voices. That’s not very PC but just look – I’ve written it anyway.

But even though Formula 1 is fucking rubbish it’s not the most boring thing you can do with your time. That title, I feel almost ashamed to say, would go to space travel. That might seem a bit stupid, nay unenlightened, but when you think about it space travel is probably really exciting to start with, though if you’re going on a proper long journey then I imagine that thrill starts to dwindle a bit. Earth from space will just carry on looking like earth from space, only smaller, and the time it would take to travel to another whole planet would involve a hell of a lot of not a lot. Of course you have to also factor in the fear. When you’re not being bored you’d be shitting yourself with fear: what if that stops working, what happens when I get there, will I get back, what if the entire craft explodes after being hit by an asteroid, what if a Klingon lands on the bonnet?

The reason I mention this is, obviously, because it’s been almost 50 years since man set foot on the moon. I should say humans but in the end Neil Armstrong was a man, unless he was a secret member of the LGBT community and it was all covered up by the CIA. Which I think you’ll agree is highly unlikely, though it would have added an extra layer to the story. A very 21st Century, all inclusive layer. Since then not much else has happened really. Neil, Buzz and that other bloke landed back safely, everyone got a slap on the back and that was it. It’s not like we (and when I say we I mean NASA, and so I don’t mean we at all I mean they) didn’t try but we probably didn’t try hard enough. OK, we’ve landed a probe with a dodgy battery on an asteroid and we’ve taken lots of funky photos of stuff happening millions of miles away but that’s pretty much it. No aliens, not even a decent sign of life. Hardly anyone has come back because hardly anyone has gone out.

And what that tells me is that while there may be a lot of big talk about the future of space exploration and people colonising another planet and Richard Branson and Elon Musk engaging in mutual masturbation on Saturn the hard fact is that we are fucking decades, if not centuries, from getting anywhere near any of our spacey goals. And that includes Kevin Spacey, who’s life goals must be radically different these days. Don’t get me wrong, I find space absolutely fascinating and I love the idea that there is other life out there and even Brian Cox, despite being wetter than an otters pocket, can’t dull the awe and wonder of our universe and the one next door. That said I don’t feel that landing on the moon 50 years ago was quite the start to conquering the universe that we hoped it would be.

I would hate to travel in space and I would soil my britches pretty much constantly, so I’m very happy to let some other idiots do that instead. I’m not scared about what’s out there I’m scared about what isn’t out there. You have to remember that there’s a million times more going on in my fridge right now than there is in the cavernous space that sits between us and Mars. And while space travel may just save our species I’m fairly sure that’s not going to happen for a very long time and many generations will have been and gone and by then the history books will just remember us as those twats who thought Facebook was worthwhile and paid good money to watch cars go round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and…………. see, I told you it was boring.

G B Hewitt. 14.07.2019