Asking Your Opinion

It was not quite the new dawn of all our hopes, more along the lines of yet another dull drizzly start to one more day of the daily grind, with the remote possibility of a brief escape up the steepening slopes of tedium towards the summit of the mundane where all the dreary landscape of an ordinary grey life would be spread out at our feet for several yards until it too was subsumed into the murky mists of mediocrity that wrapped around us like suffocating blankets.

On the whole though, we thought, it could be worse.

Then came the sound of ominous thunder through the gloom, a dread sound like thousands of takeaway menus falling through the letterbox at once. Not quite as terrifying as the prospect of a local by-election achieving national significance, but still a time to be wary of stepping out of the door, lest we be accosted by those who haunt the streets, lanes and byways of this drear land searching – mostly in vain – for that most holy of holies in our nation's slow struggle through the sloughs of despond.

Soon the streets and market places were full of rumours and quick talk, strangers regarded with suspicion and fear. Everyone went about their business as quickly as they could and hurried home to huddle in fear at the sound of footsteps on the garden path and the doom-laden tolling of the doorbell.

Those made of sterner stuff huddled together, pretending to be out, even going as far as turning the TV off, or - for those less brave - muting it for a while, until the intruder gave up and turned away, searching for more victims.

Some, though, would overcoming their fear and clutching their most holy TV schedules to their hearts to ward off the evil would with trembling fingers and thumping hearts open their doors, only to be confronted by that horror of horrors:

'Hello, I represent a company that would like your opinion on several current topics of interest.'

Some of us – even now – still awake in the heart of the night hearing those screams that once echoed all around us until the dread beasts slaked their thirst for opinion and moved on, no doubt in search of some new unsullied place where fresh unexpressed opinions awaited, ready to be plucked from innocent minds.