Has the world gone completely mad?

Has the world gone completely mad?

All it seemed to take was one horrifically worldwide deadly disease to send the world into a ferocious firestorm of madness. Suddenly the streets of America are in flames, a little girl who went missing years ago has now been brought to public attention again and the world, hitherto peaceful but crazy at times, is now in complete meltdown. In a way we should have seen this one coming, totally prepared for even more negativity, bleakness and incomprehensible behaviour. But we didn't and now for another news agenda with equally as  mind blowing consequences.

The unforgivably racist killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has once again concentrated all of our thoughts on everyday themes such as revenge, retribution, social unrest, violence and bloodthirsty aggression. This is just another day in the life of a world that just doesn't know what to do with its seething anger, its bleeding hearts and its air of racial injustice.

The events of the last couple of days may just as well have been a heart wrenching re-run of the last 60 years in the American heartland. The burning streets and buildings of Minneapolis are more or less a metaphor for the inexplicable deaths of black men throughout recent decades. They took to the streets in their hundreds and thousands, shouted the odds vociferously, pleaded for their voices to be heard and then discovered that, as usual, nobody was listening to them at all.

Wearing the topical masks of the moment, they gathered together en masse and bellowed out their slogans, their hurt, their flagrant sense of rejection, their understandable bile and bitterness before charging huge ranks of police with giant shields. It could have been a news story from any era of our lives but it was taking place here and now and you shared their grief and their fury. Flames leapt high into the American night sky, an innocent 75 year old was thrown senselessly to the ground and nobody seemed to notice the 75 year old bleeding and prone, the totally unwitting victim of circumstances.

At the beginning of the year we all assumed that 2020 would mark the beginning of not only another decade of a new century but a brightly auspicious new beginning for all of us. We hoped it would be the good one that John Lennon had so touchingly sung about just before he became the most famous public figure and was then assassinated because somebody decided to claim Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame and notoriety. What on earth is happening to this beautiful planet and can humanity save themselves? Oh for our loving and supportive families because some of the screws do seem to be loose in the most senior positions of world officialdom and authority.

For instance our politicians are beginning to behave like those jovial characters in a Punch and Judy show, the health of the world has now taken a complete battering and we're still being asked to remember a little girl who went missing years and years ago in a Portuguese restaurant. There are those who may believe that the parents may have shown perhaps just a little more responsibility or maybe this is too harsh a judgement.

When Madeleine McCann went missing in the early 2000s, Britain was both shocked and appalled without realising that the little girl with an infectious grin had been kidnapped. For what now seems a wild goose chase, the McCann parents have been torturing themselves, crying themselves to sleep and praying for good news. But here we are in 2020 and the longest kidnapping mystery of modern times has been resurrected in the middle of a global disease, a racist killing and much more besides.

The cynics would insist that we should have known better. Your biggest fear and concern is that somewhere in an empty Hollywood studio, an already obscenely wealthy director is collecting all of the information they need, composing the script, designing the set and then piecing together all of the essential details that would inevitably lead to a film called 2020, an epic movie weaving together all of the strands of a vast documentary about this year.

Of course every year brings with it all the trials and tribulations that are somehow unavoidable. We know what's coming but we can never be sure how hard and painful it may turn out to be. This year is becoming so astonishingly eventful and historic that it may take some social historian the best part of the next decade to come up with an accurate and comprehensive record of those tumultuous events in precise chronological order.

At the moment it really feels as though the whole of 2020 has just gone, disappeared into a dark tunnel and left to smoulder in some charred ruin. Some of us would even go so far to suggest that perhaps we should turn the clock back to New Year's Day and just have another go. After the terrible bush fires in Australia at the beginning of January there was a brief lull before, quite literally, the storm. A steady February that was superbly accident free and nowhere near as bad as January, now turned into the March from hell. The rest, as they say, is cliched history.

So here we are on the first Saturday of June and today takes the memory back to the D- Day Normandy landings which will now be beautifully commemorated by a Britain and the rest of the world which still feels as though it's battling another war. You saw the soldiers wading through the war torn waters and you could hardly contain your swelling pride.

More so than ever before you bowed your deferential head to the men and women who laid their lives on the line ,realised quite importantly the soul baring sacrifices they made, the dangers that had to be confronted and then overcome in the time it took for the bombs and bullets to subside. And so they will huddle together in front of their Zoom cameras before wiping away the rivers of tears and remembering.

And so here we are well into the third month of lockdown and the world keeps revolving on its axis. At times you begin to seriously wonder just how much longer the world will have to remain in shackled suspension, shrouded under a cloud of indecision and indecipherable facts, figures and statistics. The hours, months and weeks inch their way forward laboriously and awkwardly but we'll see the back of this. You see.

From Monday Britain will, by the law of the land, have to wear a mask on either train or bus which to some of us feels vaguely disconcerting and, to be honest, extremely worrying. But we won't panic because we'll see through this period with that trusty British stiff upper lip. Freedom of expression and global harmony are just around the corner. It's just taking a little longer than we at first anticipated. Patience will be our redeeming virtue. Hold on everybody we can see the light now.