A selection of stories from CJ Stone's Whitstable Gazette column, Written in Stone.

I’ve just bought a TV, but before I could watch it I had to assemble it. What is it about instruction manuals these days? Everything is packaged for the international consumer. There aren’t any written instructions any more, only illustrations.

First of all I had to install the monitor stand. This came in two parts, but there were ten pictures to show you how to assemble it. Picture one showed the monitor stand base and the connector separately. Picture two showed you the monitor stand and the connector joined together. Picture three showed you the screw underneath the monitor stand, which you tightened in order to secure the two together.

So far so simple.

It was after this that things began to get weird. Picture four showed the TV lying face down with a pair of hands touching the back, with a little arrow turning counter clockwise, and an inset showing a close-up of the hands doing something mysterious with the subatomic structure of the TV.

Uh?

It looked like something Paul Daniels might do before flicking a card from up his sleeve.

The hands seemed to be immersing themselves in the substance of the monitor in a way that would only be possible if you were possessed of telekinetic powers. This seemed less like an instruction manual, more like a lesson in quantum mechanics.

And so it went on. Picture six: more insets, more weird, ritualistic hand movements. Picture seven: more transcendental explorations of the nature of reality. Picture eight: obviously a picture of Mr Spock from Star Trek engaged in a Vulcan Mind-Meld with the monitor.

Picture nine showed two little arrows showing that the job was finished. Picture ten showed the TV monitor being held upside down by the base, with a circle around it and a dash indicating that this was something you weren’t supposed to do.

In the end I just looked at the TV monitor, looked at the base, saw there was a connection point, and joined the two together.

I’ve still not got the hang of that Vulcan Mind-Meld, but the TV seems to work fine without it.

An optimist is someone who believes that things will always turn out for the best. A pessimist is someone who believes that things will always turn out for the worst.

They are both right about half the time, and wrong about half the time. The difference is that the optimist has a far more enjoyable time while he’s at it.

But it’s kind of hard being an optimist these days. There is so much bad news to contend with, what with global economic meltdown, wars, rumours of wars, nations rising up against nations and all the rest. It’s all getting very biblically apocalyptic all of a sudden.

And if you go on the internet it’s even worse. There are some very disturbing predictions going about. Try putting “2012” or “Nibiru” into your search engine to see what turns up.

According to some websites, Nibiru is a an undiscovered planet even now reeling it’s way drunkenly into our solar system on a collision course with our world, while December the 21^st 2012 is the day the Mayan calendar draws to the end of its 5126 year cycle.

There’s talk of volcanic eruptions and giant comets, not to speak of polar shifts and mass extinctions which will wipe out the majority of life on the planet. Some people even say that it is the end of the world as we know it.

Mind you, people have been telling me it’s the end of the world for as long as I’ve been alive. The difference is that in the old days they just stood on street corners and shouted at you.

That’s the trouble with the internet. You might think it’s very high tech and modern, but actually it’s more like a million crazy people all standing on a street corner and shouting at you at the same time.

Personally I’m an optimist. I realised a long time a go that when human beings talk about the end of the world, what they really mean is the end of the human race.

And maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

“This is the day that the world came together to fight back against the global recession,” said Gordon Brown after the G20 summit.

It was also the day that the new President of the United States stepped onto the world stage for the first time.

I must say I’m sceptical. I’m sceptical about the G20 and I’m sceptical about President Obama.

The reason I’m sceptical about the G20 is that, despite the widening of the circle from the previous G7 or G8, it was still an incredibly narrow platform from which to make decisions that will effect the lives of 6.7 billion people.

It wasn’t really the world coming together to fight the global recession, it was twenty politicians from the richest nations, some of whom, including Gordon Brown, were responsible for creating the mess in the first place.

The sight of Saudi princes amongst their number was particularly revealing.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most corrupt and repressive nations on the planet. So while some of the democratic leaders were there - at least nominally - to represent the interests of their electorate, the Saudi royal family were there to represent the interests of no one but the Saudi royal family.

As for Barack Obama, he is clearly much more intelligent than his predecessor, much more laid-back and charming. But then that’s not saying very much.

The whole world has pinned so much hope on the figure of this one man, but on what basis exactly?

That he is the first black President of the United States, as if the lack of precedent tells us anything.

Colin Powell was the first black Secretary of State, and he led the United States into an illegal war, while Condoleeza Rice - also black, and a women too - continued by launching a whole raft of aggressive interventions around the world.

Margaret Thatcher was the first British woman Prime Minister. Where did that get us exactly?

Neither race nor sex have anything to do with it. What matters is the intention.

We have yet to find out what Barack Obama’s might be.

At the time of writing it is St. George’s Day. I’ve just come back from Tesco where I saw a car flying five St. George’s flags. There were two at the front, two at the back, and one in the middle of the windscreen attached to the aerial. That’s a lot of flags.

I’ve been seeing St. George’s flags all day.

Later I was watching the news and a man was being interviewed. He was wearing a red and white jester’s cap and was waving a small St. George’s flag. He had a drink in his hand. He said, “It’s to celebrate one man’s day. The Irish can celebrate their saint’s day by having a drink, so why can’t the English?”

Which would be true if it wasn’t also vaguely hypocritical. The reason the English don’t celebrate our saint’s day is that – generally speaking - we’re not Catholic, so we don’t believe in saints.

Another reason might be that St. Patrick was a real, historical figure, whereas St. George was not.

The Irish are celebrating real events. St. Patrick really did go to Ireland to convert the Irish, but there never was a dragon and there never was a St. George, and St. George never came to England. So what are we celebrating exactly?

The triumph of myth over history perhaps.

There’s one theory that the story is allegorical. The dragon represents the energy of primitive Earth-Powers being defeated by the Cross. Some say it represents the triumph of Christianity over paganism. Others that it is the triumph of reason over instinct, or of science over nature.

But it’s very definitely the triumph of the English over the Welsh, as the Welsh symbol is a red dragon.

St. George is also the patron Saint of Russia, Greece, Lithuania, Georgia, Ethiopia, Portugal, Aragon, Catalonia and Palestine, plus an obscure Hungarian-speaking part of Transylvania called Szekely-Land. I know this because I’ve been there. They paint St. George’s crosses on all the trees.

As to whether St. George’s Day should be a bank holiday: well why not?

I could always do with another day off work.

Aren’t you dead yet?

By the time you read this you will have received the government pamphlet about swine flu. You will also have seen the avalanche of media reports on the subject.

The way they’ve been going on you’d think there were bodies piling up in the streets while ghostly figures roamed around ringing bells, calling, “bring out your dead, bring out your dead.”

Some people are justifiably scared.

It might help if we got some of the terminology clear. What’s the difference between a “pandemic” and an “epidemic”? An epidemic is when a disease effects a large percentage of the population. A pandemic is an epidemic which is wide-spread geographically.

At the time of writing there were approaching two thousand cases world-wide, and 30 fatalities. I’ve just tried to work out what that would be as a percentage of the world’s population, but my calculator doesn’t have enough room for all the noughts. Let’s just say it is so miniscule as to be statistically irrelevant.

This is nothing like a “pandemic”. More people die falling over while tying their shoelaces.

Some version of this story seems to pop up every year. If it’s not swine flu it’s bird flu. If it’s not bird flu it’s SARS.

The problem is that the World Health Organisation has cried wolf so often now that if ever a real pandemic were to break out we wouldn’t believe them.

Some people with a conspiratorial bent are saying it is a media-led scare story designed to take our minds off the unravelling of the banking system, or the on-going danger of global warming.

The difference is, of course, that these crises are entirely man-made.

It’s as if, in contemplating our future as a species, we would rather blame our problems on some outside force rather than the human greed, mismanagement and incompetence that are the real threats to our future.

Meanwhile the first couple to contract the illness in the UK have signed up Max Clifford as their press agent, which tells you a lot about the real nature of this disease.

It’s a world-wide epidemic of media hysteria.