I was tired of all those old stories. So very very tired. They dragged so much. They dragged like lead. They dragged like something a lot heavier than lead. I was more than tired of them, it occurred to me – they were pure anathema to me at this stage. I had had too much of them. I had heard them far too many times; I had heard them more times than any man ought to hear any story – good or bad. I was at breaking point – “Not that old one again…” I would groan inwardly upon hearing someone open their mouth. They barely had to say a word before I found myself cringing in pain in foreknowledge at what they were about to say. They would barely even have got started and I would be cringing. Those bloody dirty rotten filthy lousy bastards with their ever-repeating old stories, I grumbled bitterly to myself. Is it too much to hope for that one day I might hear something new? Is this too much to ask? Just one new thing? What’s wrong with everyone? I knew of course that me grumbling away to myself like this was an old story in itself. That too was an old old story. That too was an old story than never changed, never varied, always followed dead on cue. Coming out with the usual crushing inevitability; issuing forth at regular intervals with a savage brutal inevitability that – paradoxically – never ceased to surprise me. How could anyone be that predictable? I’m like a crappy third rate satellite channel that shows nothing but superannuated repeats, I realized. A Golden Oldie channel. The old ones but the good ones. Only in my case not so much of the ‘golden’. Old yes but definitely not good. Not in any way good. Very far from good. I realized this but then realized at the same time that me realizing that I was forever coming out with the same old stuff, the same old stories, the same old complaints day in day out, year after year, was also part of the same old story. “Is there nothing I can do that isn’t part of the same old story?” I asked myself – in utter despair at this point – only to realize as I uttered these words that I had already asked this question of myself a thousand million times or more…
