Run for the hills above Drumquin

Where there is life there will be love, and where there is love, there will be worry.

Those sound like the words of some long-dead literary icon, right? Well, they aren’t. I’m only after making them up there now.

But don’t let their unimpressive provenance undermine their worth. Not everything of insight has to have been written by somebody who wore a powdered wig and had their portrait far-too-flatteringly painted.

For example, I remember during one of the lockdowns, a Travelling lad I met in the shop asking me when I thought the restrictions were going to be lifted.

“It’s hard to know, Paddy,” I replied. “I suppose that’s right, Emmet. ‘Tis hard to know when you don’t know,” he said, sagaciously. But I digress.

Most of us are born with a lust for life; an innate passion for people, the world around us, and that all-encompassing experience they call being.

Unless I am grossly mistaken, that is what this whole earthly enterprise is about. Pouring your heart into that which you care about, enriching your own life and those of the people around you.

However, every outlet for love is equally an inlet for worry.

All our affections have their opposites.

And the deeper our affections, the darker their opposites.

I think this is why we as a species are so fond of fantasising about implausible threats and contriving catastrophes for ourselves to worry about.

With so many legitimate avenues for the anxious mind to wander down, we like to manufacture fake crises to distract us from the real ones.

After all, there is no time to fall apart thinking about your parents dying, when you are busy ruminating on the remote risk of a zombie apocalypse, eh?

Speaking of which, I recently read that Fermanagh and Omagh would be the best place in the North to be held up in, were an undead uprising to arrive.

According to a study by JeffBet – who are, presumably, a think tank led by some chronic catastrophist – our wild and rugged homeland is the fourth most zombie-proof district in whole of the UK, losing out only to three places in – or off the coast of – Scotland.

When I first saw this revelatory press release land in my inbox, I laughed pitifully for whoever put it together.

“I know the social contribution of some of my columns might be questionable, but whoever took the time to devise a system of analysis by which to grade how safe or screwed a place would be in the event of a totally fictive Armageddon must have an existential unravelling at the end of every working day,” I thought, with so little punctuation that it caused my brain to go out of breath.

However, perhaps the researching of such trivial hypotheticals is not the total waste of time and energy that on the surface it so obviously seems.

Maybe, just maybe, the authors of this paper understand that the neurotic needs a faux-threat like the maimed man needs a
crutch.

Or maybe, just maybe-er, the good people at JeffBet have more money than sense and decided on a whim to fund an – almost – utterly pointless study.

I say almost, because, well, it was not totally useless. There are probably a small army of tin-hoarding hermits making their way from the back-arse of Arkansas to the hills above Drumquin as we speak.

And, as well as serving as an important document for doomsday preppers, it gave me something to do 600 words of pseudo-philosophical semi-sententious slabbering about.

So, actually, thank you
JeffBet!