Daft Old Duffer is back with his view of the day. Ed
Way back in the grey dawn of time I was faced one day with a looming Geometry exam, together with the absolute certainty that I would not be able to answer a single one of the questions.
This was mainly because I’d entered on that stage of life where girls were really all that mattered.
Frantic not to spend an hour and a half staring desperately at the clock and submitting a paper crammed with doodles, I spent my lunch break feverishly committing to heart the proof of the Pythagoras theorem.
Of course, it did me no good at all.
No-one wanted any such proof that afternoon, and I went unshriven to my well deserved humiliation.
Onward and upwards?
Years later I was employed at a small subsidiary of an international organisation – a subsidiary specifically set up to develop and manufacture a promising new project.
Unfortunately the whole affair was a complete failure. No saleable items were ever produced or ever seemed likely to be.
Inevitably the day came when a trio of executive directors arrived from head office, curious to learn if the unfortunate General Manager of the project had anything to say for himself.
And all he could think of was “had they noticed the brilliant safety record board he had installed just inside the main gate?”
Just like me before my geometry exam, he had convinced himself that the side-show matter was important enough to cancel out the dire trouble he was in over the main event.
It’s called, I think, displacement activity.
Enter my third example, David Cameron
Knowing full well that the steps the government are taking are the only logical ones in our present circumstances – and at the same time knowing if he is honest enough to admit it, the people who really run the Tory party will remove a fundamental part of his anatomy – he is reduced to the displacement activity of threatening MP’s canteen subsidies and even their salaries.
He might as well hand round large kitchen knives and unbutton his jacket.
Image: Naufragio
