Talk Talk

We’re sitting around our kitchen table with the Guardian. The TV has gone away for the summer (jointly negotiated) now the clocks have gone back, after a TV winterfest. Though our 11-year-old son has gone to a friend’s to watch Heroes.

Our three teenage daughters and Dirk and I are having a rare good chat. Was it good that LSD was invented? Why? How do you know that being ‘inner-directed’ is better than being ‘outer-directed’; isn’t that just the theory of an inner-directed person? Is it true that we have been living in a dark age according to the Indian long calendar?

How long was man a hunter gatherer before he discovered agriculture 10,000 years ago? Why is Ishmael the best book you’ve ever read? Our 14 year old leaves the room as she absolutely is allergic to any mention of anything connected to climate change so we’ve agreed we won’t talk about it in her presence, but it’s her fault as she walked in on this conversation. What links the Mayan calendar with the year 2012 and what does it mean? (A friend of ours thinks humanity will go through a paradigm shift in 2012.) What is Maharishi and TM? If things are changing and consumption growing at a faster and faster rate, is that rate of development going to peak and decline or is it going to just keep going?

Why is Boris Johnson so unpopular with Guardian writers? Are the Conservatives all right wing? Does your love for Dad ebb and flow?If something is in square brackets in the paper what does that mean? What does ombudsman mean? Where does the word come from? (I said that a lot of Norwegian words ended in man and Dirk and Sophia laughed at me, which pissed me off, till I got the joke.) What is a junta? How many natives are left in the world? If it’s 3% could it really be that as many as 210 million non-agricultural people are still alive on this earth?

So if civilisation collapsed, original mankind could just carry on as if the agricultural revolution had been a very long bad dream?