No News - is Good News

No News – is Good News

Once upon a time we were tour guides. We led bicycle tours in, among other places, the south of France and Hungary.

The cyclists would usually arrive at some ridiculously early hour in the morning after a long overnight journey. This was  before there were mobile telephones, yes, there was a time before mobile telephones and yes, I am old enough to remember it. Anyway, just about the first thing they would do was look for a public telephone. In no time there would be a queue of weary and bleary eyed travellers waiting to call home and announce that they had arrived safely. Now, I have never been able to understand why people do this. The majority of people who start out to go somewhere end up by getting there, and most of them do so more or less on time. Surely it's only when you don't arrive safely, at the wrong time or the wrong place that there may be a need to call home. I never felt the urge to do this, nor would I demand or encourage anybody else to do so. If nothing happened, there's nothing to report. 

Of course things are different now, with so many instant, easy and inexpensive forms of communication people are contacting each other throughout the journey and posting pictures on the way. So really there is even less need to report your safe arrival but I suspect many people still do! Maybe it's because we have so much news. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. There is always something happening somewhere in the world and we get to hear about it all day long: riots revolution and wars, epidemics, earthquakes and extreme weather conditions. The news is, per definition, about the new and the unsual but faced with a daily barrage of demonstrations, delays and disasters the extraordinary begins to seem like the ordinary. It is hardly surprising that many people feel relieved when they arrive unharmed at their destinations!  

Due to the 24/7 news machine our concept of what news is has become somewhat distorted. However in recent years there has been more attention on the distortion of the news itself. Fake, misleading or manipulated news has always been with us, modern technology just allows us to do it  bigger and better!  And it's probably fair to say that all news is manipulated in some way, even if it's only to fit it into the allotted space or time slot. 

The reliability of the news media was put into perspective for me by some Polish girls I met in London. This was before the collapse of communism in Central Europe and when it was still okay to call young women girls. These were fiercely opposed to the communist government so I was surprised to discover that they were less than enthusiastic about the free press in the west. “ In your newspapers”, they explained “ it's difficult know what is true and what is not true. In our country it's much easier...we know it's all lies!”

Anyway, tomorrow we're on the road again and I won't be troubled much by  news of any sort over the next six weeks.   
For the second part of our trip we have no definite plans. I'll probably be posting photos and stories on the way but if for some reason you don't hear from me you can simply assume that I'm okay and having a good time. 

No News – is Good News