Final Word: Who’s doing the dishes?

by Paul Moore

I write these words on Pancake Tuesday. Growing up in Belfast Pancake Tuesday was, for my family, not a thing, and it certainly was not in England in my short sojourn there. It was only when I moved to these parts that I witnessed the spectacle of every house in the county making, at some point in the day, pancakes for the household.

The key thing about this pancake making, however, is that everyone in the family has to sit down and eat them at the same time which would suggest that the making of the food is not necessarily as important as the eating of the food.

The arrival of Pancake Tuesday coincided with my reading about the finds museums and archaeologists have been making over the last few weeks. It seems as though every day there is a new find in Pompeii, whether it is wall paintings never encountered before or, the most fascinating for me, the brain of an unfortunate civilian of Pompeii who was apparently overrun by the molten lava from the volcanic eruption which resulted in his brain being turned to black metal, known as obsidium.

This gruesome but intriguing information was then followed by the news that a new Pharaoh’s tomb has been discovered which, when fully-excavated, could be as important as Tutankhamun’s.

How such a find could have eluded the world’s greatest archaeologists is something of a conundrum to me but in fairness it may have something to do with the fail-safe nature of pyramid building.

All of these artefacts and traditions, even if one is not especially interested in the past, indicate societies with depth and skill and a profound understanding of the creativity needed to make a lasting contribution to the world.

The crucial question these finds and traditions pose, however, is what are we making and creating which have a similar lasting impact on global thinking? I have given this a good deal of thought and can come up with very little. My despair for our times was not helped by an encounter on television with something called ‘Who’s Doing the Dishes?’

This is a programme, on prime time evening television, where a clearly dysfunctional society of opinionated souls are made a dinner by a celebrity (one I had never heard of) and they have to guess from the meal and few clues who the chef is. If they fail, they do the dishes. If they guess correctly, the cook washes up. It was the television equivalent of the man in Pompeii having his brain fried. I should point out that this is not an attack by me on reality programmes per se and indeed one of my favourite such programmes, ‘Say Yes to the Dress,’ has the wonderful potential to show families at their worst which is how we actually live our lives.

It is impossible to imagine that future civilisations are going to think much of us if they encounter social media such as X or Facebook or that they will have the stamina to wade thought the billions of images stored on mobile phones of cats, dogs, or meals we have been served in average restaurants.

Ironically it may come down to all the analog art being produced by the likes of Tracey Emin which most of society ridicules believing, entirely foolishly, that they could do better than themselves. Perhaps, given the behaviour of Trump and co, we are all heading into oblivion anyway and when the final apocalypse comes we can only hope we all end up with brains forged into obsidium.

At least that will have some value for those left.