Ben 10 or bust

I walked through the crowded streaming streets in the centre of the capital today and I must say it was difficult to find that many cheerful faces. It was strange because this is supposed to be a time of great cheer and it was as if a blanket of some kind of emotional diffidence had instead been draped across the day. Was it all the post-party hangovers? Spiritual inertia? The cost of everything? Dissatisfaction with relationships? Parental worry? Annual depression? Was it the rumours of imminent recession? Wave after wave of consumers passed and I felt briefly uneasy. Increasingly, I must say, I am finding far greater satisfaction in one-on-one conversations than in anything gleaned among crowds. I was saying this to a friend this afternoon as he sat opposite with two rolled-up and polythene-wrapped carpets from the desert at his feet. There was a time not so long ago when both work and social persuasions took me through some of the more crowded and chattering venues in the land. Issues of the day were being discussed at speed, or so we thought, and there were all manner of views expressed. Now, in quieter moments, I am not so sure that anything much of note was discussed by me at all. Other people may have been coming out with sparks of truth, but I was more often than not regurgitating well-worn points. Everything was something prepared earlier - not necessarily invalid, but not always original. If by ignoring such social frenzies now I am missing out on anything and in-so-doing creating a kind of vacuum, it is a vacuum more than satisfactorily filled by thought, by contemplation, by art. Indeed art is the great and obvious cure to much of our culture's artlessness. At one point today I stood on an escalator in a toy shop, one of the largest toy shops in the land, and as I was going up, others opposite were going down, and I smiled and nodded at one or two of the faces looking back at me, but on each occasion people looked swiftly away, invariably down. Furthermore no one was saying a word and it all felt inappropriately eerie. Even some of the children looked frightened by the sheer assault of all these toys. Why is it, I wondered, that we spend so much time wearing our so-called despair on our sleeve? Are people in fact trying to tell us all something the whole time? Or was I wrong not to get with the programme myself and show I was rankled they didn't have the Ben 10 toy bus I was looking for?