As I settled down to write this week’s offering, I wondered how many readers stop to wonder about how their local newspaper gets from a weekly starting point of zero, zilch, de nada on the pages to being neatly sitting in your local newsagents awaiting your arrival.

It is not as easy as the newspaper production team make it look.

We ‘opinion piece’ columnists have the easiest bit. This is not to say that writing regularly is as easy as we make it look, but once done and sent to the editorial team, our work is done.

Unlike the editors or reporters, we don’t have to be ready for breaking news, requiring an urgent change to the front page, or to update an item already written, or deciding what to remove to make space.

We don’t have to worry about what was once ‘type setting’, or page layout, including the advertisements that bring in the revenue.

Time management is also key to the operation. The teamwork of producing the edition you are now reading started before last week’s edition was on the newsstand.

It is the same every week, so those of us contributing a column are respectfully requested to submit ‘copy’ one week in advance of the paper ‘going to press’.

Opinion pieces, advertisements and public notices submitted well in advance of publication enable the editorial input to start once the previous edition is signed off as ready to roll.

You will be reading this column on or after Thursday, October 10, but as I write this, it is only the afternoon of Tuesday, October 1.

Time fascinates me. I have been known to waste time just thinking about it.

We can measure it, manage it, use it, lose it, waste it, but we can never get it back once it has gone by.

We don’t really even know what exactly we mean by ‘time’.

Scientists have always struggled to understand the physics and the nature of time. The latest theoretical study in quantum physics suggests that time could actually be just an illusion.

The ‘quantum level’ is the space in which knowledge, especially in physics, is not about what is a certainty, but about more about the where the limits of possibility lie about what the right answer might be.

I might just be a ‘quantum level’ thinker.

*****

I am always surprised by the lack of curiosity of the average adult compared with the insatiable curiosity of children.

When did we get too old to wonder, to ask how, who, what and when, and then, why not?

I am a bit of an exception to that general rule, although I confess to being curiously disinterested in what is generally described as ‘small talk’ and/or gossip about individual personal and private lives, fashion trends, and the like.

These seem to make up a significant amount of adult conversation, together with conversations exchanging views on, and agonising over, the fictional happenings of the soap opera world.

I have no idea – and really don’t care – what is happening in Coronation St., Emmerdale, EastEnders, Ros na Rún, Fair City or Hollyoaks.

I sometimes read the summaries in the paper just to be able to keep up and ‘pass myself’ in company so as not to appear totally disinterested, rude or give a mistaken impression that I consider myself above watching these fictional accounts of the lives of ordinary communities.

I can and – from time to time – do watch the odd episode of any of them. But I then just get them mixed up.

‘Fite fuaite’ is the Irish phrase for that, meaning intertwined or interwoven, and also, as Ulster Scots might translate that: ‘through other’!

The ‘to-be-continued’ stories may not be real, but they definitely reflect elements of the reality of the lives of common folk, or more correctly, how the lives of working class communities are perceived by those who probably consider themselves at least a rung or two above them on the social ladder – professional writers, producers, and the like.

What I do be curious about is whether, how and to what degree these ‘soaps’ influence, rather than reflect, the attitudes and expectations of their regular viewers.

As I dip in and out of the various but similar storylines, I sense that the wider social questions of attitude and prejudice on race, gender, sexual orientation, domestic violence, coercive control and marital (or civil partnership) infidelity, and inter-personal relationships all get touched upon at some point, as some character or other wrestles with the fallout of not fitting in, or fails to resist temptation to break one or several of the Ten Commandments, or the unwritten rules of the community.

No one in the script, however, seems to have the slightest interest in a world beyond the street, the village, or the local community.

Nobody talks about the impact of inflation, welfare benefit freezes, or universal credit on themselves or their neighbours, or suggests organising a campaign.

Nobody has had an argument over whether supporting Palestine is or isn’t an anti-Semitic thing to do because of the Nazi Holocaust.

There doesn’t seem to be too many Far Right agitators putting up posters saying ‘Homes for locals only’, or young activists taking on Fascists toe-to-toe.

Nobody in soap-land has the slightest idea that in the real world, the United Kingdom might again be on the brink of entering yet another war on the coat-tails of the USA.

Am I just missing out on those interesting bits by not being a regular soap watcher?

Or do script writers, consciously or unconsciously, think that the less the common people hear about that kind of stuff, the better?

*****

Israel has invaded neighbouring Lebanon with tacit support from the USA, and the United Kingdom.

Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes far in excess of those of Russia, in my opinion.

The USA and United Kingdom have now committed to war to protect Israel’s interests, yet Kier Starmer has the brass neck to claim Tehran ‘for too long have been a menace to the Middle East’.

Is regime change in Iran the real intent of the USA, just as it was in Iraq, Libya, in Syria and in Afghanistan?

Who made the USA the world police?