Farewell to Ceefax

Pages from Ceefax

'I'm worried about the future,' I say,
racing a single car around a Scalextric track.
Twitter trends with 'Man worries about the future.'
'What a loser!' some kid replies.
I spend the rest of the evening correcting the typos on his website.

'Maybe there are too many television channels,' I think,
tuning in to a channel devoted to people discussing
whether there are too many television channels.
'I just liked it better in the old days,' I tell the studio audience
when I am invited on the show.
A small section at the back applaud.

These are my people, I think, waving.
People who can't get to sleep at night
so read pages from Ceefax
as hot chocolate warms on the hob.

'There are too many blogs,' I write on my blog
and immediately it disappears
like when a little girl says 'I don't believe in fairies,'
and at the bottom of the garden a family of fairies
grieve their mum, taken so young.

'We are all on life support machines,' I tell the studio audience,
stomping on a Macbook.
'We are being drip fed by these tubes
having God knows what pumped into our veins.’
I theatrically unplug the USB cables I had plugged in
in preparation for the analogy.

'Let's all quit Facebook!' I type as my status update
and we count down together
‘10, 9, 8 ...’
and after ‘3, 2, 1’
it's like when you've been in a traffic jam for so long
you say ‘right!’ and take off your seatbelt,
switch off the engine.

Pages from Ceefax appears in The New Blur Album by John Osbourne, published by Nasty Little Press.

Image from meldrum.co.uk