Blinking

The Kogi people of Colombia, a spiritually and ecologically minded people, select a few baby boys from their newborn to be the next generation's priests. To avoid unwanted influences on their infant minds they keep them in a deep cave for the first nine years of their lives, with only artificial light and no human company except the adult priests.

On their ninth birthday they leave the cave and emerge blinking into the world, which is of course vastly more complex and beautiful than anything they might have imagined. The idea is that having seen the wonders of nature with fresh, unjaded eyes, they will then dedicate their lives to its defence. Every now and again they send us messages politely suggesting that the ecosystem might not be entirely well, which we studiously ignore. On the other hand we don't shut children in caves, so who's to say who's right?

However you view the data control approach to pedagogy, it's interesting to learn that you can partially recreate it as an adult by spending two and a half weeks on your sofa watching the World Cup, then going into town. It isn't that you haven't experienced town before, it just seems brighter and smellier than normal.

There's something else going on as well. You know when you first see your house after a few weeks away, and you breathe an inward sigh of relief that it's still there, and nothing disastrous has happened to it? Today was like that in reverse.

It wasn't the whole world that worried me. The newsagent's, for instance, I knew that was still there, and the Lidl at the bottom of the hill. Brazil also looks perfectly fine, as far as you can tell from the rectangular green parts.

As for the rest of it, though, some part of my mind needed to be reassured. Not that it's possible to check it all in person, but if the bit between here and central Bristol was intact, it seemed reasonable to extrapolate. Of course from a rational point of view there was nothing to worry about. Any significant act of global annihilation would have been mentioned on Twitter, plus the electro-magnetic pulse it generated would have interfered with my TV signal, so the senior parts of my brain were quite relaxed. The other bits, though, the lower lobes that still aren't quite convinced pterodactyls are really extinct, they need to see, hear and touch. And smell. Town was like a madeleine for me yesterday, it kept taking me back to other days, other times when I'd also been to town. Not quite Proustian, I know, but then I'm not quite Proust.

Of course, having confirmed that the world still exists, you're then left having to actually deal with it while your brain is carrying on like it's tripping. Is the music in the Galleries toilet really that loud? It's like a disco in there. And why is that guy singing loos are suffragettes? Because if they are it seems a bit reactionary to respond to their struggle for emancipation by shitting in their open mouths.

Mainly, though, it's the people. Town is full of them. Virtually no-one for weeks, and suddenly they're bubbling up all over the place. If you've got used to the deep sea isolation of your sofa, town is like the humanity bends.

So I'm not going back for a while. I've done the things I needed to do, in particular I've had a haircut, and now I can see the TV much better. And this afternoon the round of 16 starts with South America day. Colombia v Uruguay, nearly all of whom are allowed in, but before that Brazil v Chile. Bring it.