WHY DON’T YOU switch off your phone and go and do something less boring instead?

WHY DON’T YOU switch off your television set  phone and go and do something less boring instead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Don%27t_You%3F

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/11/put-phone-down-habit-reading-books-english-oxford

Smartphones aren’t as bad for you as smoking but are the reason our kids are intoxicated by their screens as glue sniffers. Most people in London know somebody that has their phone snatched from their hands by marauding gangs of hooded teens on bikes. Schools are locking up phones in the constant battle for attention.   

Sir Jonathan Bate has a novel solution. We should read more novels. He’s an English professor at Oxford. Credentials established. When he tells us current undergraduates aren’t a patch on the previous bunch. As evidence he suggests that with their impaired concentration the current cohort of undergraduates can’t be expected to read three novels a week on their reading list (I can manage that—give me a degree, please?) Rather Oxford has to dumb down. Read one novel in three weeks is the solution. As he reminds us only about half the population reads for pleasure (and most of them are women).

We’ve been here before. When I was at school in the 1^st century, Before the Commoner Era, Cicero used to complain about the morals and laziness of young pre-internet Romans who were more interested in toga parties.   

‘Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.’

Guilty as charged but not alas of being young.  

Having a phone impacts your IQ. Even if it is switched off. Mine is of the less than ten-quid variety and rarely switched on and when I bring it out, even passing muggers shake their heads and laugh through their ski masks. There’s no intergenerational conflict. I’m safer and smarter with my non-phone.

We’re advised to read books. Physical books were you turn a page and worlds turn. Make notes. I do that. Sometimes I can’t read my notes. But the act changes my brain chemistry. I’ve always wanted a chemistry set.

But I don’t want to share it with adults and advocates of the moron’s moron Trump such as Jordan Peterson. Everything they said about Bill and Hilary Clinton drinking the blood of children and Weather Manipulation,” is kinda true (reading between the lines) claimed a video shared by Michael Flynn, a former national security advisor to Trump.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a not-so-far-right congresswoman, wrote on X last week. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done”.

Retrain Your Brain suggests Daisy Buchanan. Read Yourself Happy. Stop Using SO MANY CAPITAL LETTERS! It’s hurtful. Fuck off, then.

Work out the optimum time and place to read. I usually keep a book in the toilet in case of emergencies—break wind. More than one book. Whisper it, poetry books tend to be at the bottom of the pile. I think I’m talking literally and not metaphorically here. But once at a party I did have to use a carpet tile to wipe my ass. I wasn’t daft. I stuck it back down, of course, when I was finished with it. I once brought up with old-fashioned manners.

Don’t tread reading as a chore. Wow. I could never believe that. It would be like telling a teenager sex was a chore. It’ll never happen.

Don’t forget audiobooks and (good) telly (no porn). I’m too old for that. Porn, I mean. I’m largely indifferent to audio books. I watch telly now and again, but it tends to be news, documentaries, films and fitba.

Get above yerself. Go and read a book. Read my book about intergenerational moral decay in Dalmuir?

Unleash the Beastie! https://bit.ly/bannkie