Is no news good news?

As a retired media studies lecturer, I certainly know how the gathering and distribution of news has changed during my lifetime.

In the middle of the last century, news was mostly confined to the street which you lived in, occasional

national news on the radio or by the local paper you are reading today – The News.

Looking back at that time, it tells me that you could never worry about bad news, if you didn't know about it, eg. the news of Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar took 16 days to reach the Admiralty in London.

Today, of course, news is with us every minute, a lot of it gloomy. Technology has given us information from every part of the globe instantly. We can now worry about a lot more.

The BBC and ITV did a wonderful job of that last month – announcing on the national news, at some length – a shortage of fuel in the UK.

Result – next morning – all 32m cars in the UK queuing up at garages, not 'filling up,' 'topping up,' adding fuel to the fire.

The level of those in our community with anxiety problems has now been raised and together with pandemic issues, to a lot of people, it has been raised to an earthquake-style scale. The concern about those with anxiety problems should be more thought about before organisations and companies promote their business.

We have had insurance policies over many years, quite sensibly so. However, the promotion of funeral plans saturating advertising slots on commercial TV is certainly 'over the top', their number of showings and their content.

Almost every advertising slot now contains cremation ads. We have – Direct Cremation, Pure Cremation, Simple Cremation. Waiting now for the ‘Difficult Cremation’ to appear. I think one woman is trying to say: ‘I'm so happy, I've just arranged my funeral!” It's a good idea for councils short of cash: as well as supplying green bins for general refuse, blue ones ones for paper, brown ones for garden refuse, etc.

Why not – purple ones, for a fee, to put your elderly relative in for collection day? With all that's going on, rising fuel and energy prices, there's probably a lot of elderly people that can't wait to go!

However, I can offer an hour's respite from all of this – watch The Larkins on ITV about a family with an idyllic life in the 1950s.

Hold on! Its ITV. There's probably cremation ads in the middle of it... Roger Clemons Leith Avenue, Fareham