EACH weekday I drive along the soul-corroding M53 to my job in the posh village of Aldford near Chester.
Usually I have the car radio tuned to Wirral's Buzz 97.1.
I'm masochistic that way.
But I'm fast getting sick of the station's weirdly restricted playlist.
You can only take the nasally whine of those McFly boys so many times without going mad.

And I'm even more tired of hearing the soppy, brain-dead, whinging lyrics of the current crop of girl singers, including Dido, Corinne Bailey Rae and especially Nerina Pallot's hopelessly naïve anti-war song, Everyone's Going To War.
Worst of all, however, are Buzz's terrible, cheesy, vomit-inducing local adverts.
For instance, are you dreaming of the perfect bathroom? Really, are you that sad?
Well, you can turn you dreams into a reality, according to one endlessly repeated ad. You just need to drive somewhere obscure along the A41 and part with shedloads of money. They'll even throw in a "free" loofah. Great ...
Even funnier and less credible are the ads that try to make out there are some hugely sophisticated bars and restaurants in Birkenhead.
In one particularly annoying commercial, a vapid-sounding AMW (actress, model, whatever) trills that you will feel you are in "the VIP lounge all night" if you visit the trendoid joint she recommends.
Yeah, right... The VIP lounge of some naff old sweatbox of a club in the roughest town centre in Northern England more like.
Give me Hell's Waiting Room, New Brighton, any day.

NOW at this point you'll normally find me banging on about something that has amused or annoyed me about Madford-on-Sea.
However, this week I have been mainly thinking about ... the state of humanity.
It is because I've just finished reading Michel Houellebecq's novel 'The Possibility of an Island' that I've been in such a contemplative frame of mind.
Houellebecq is one of the West's most important modern novelists.
He is writing about the fragmentation or "atomisation" of Western society, and about our rugged individualism and how, actually, that individualism is not serving us at all well.
The author also addresses the fading away of historic religious faith in the West, and its replacement by 'New Age' mumbo-jumbo.
Given the banality of contemporary popular culture in the West (Big Brother on TV, for example, it is incredibly moronic) it would make a refreshing change to turn off the telly and read a Houellebecq novel instead.
I have so far only read the one (mentioned above) and, though I didn't find it hugely uplifting, it was mind-blowing.
Like all great literature, Houellebecq's work addresses eternal themes: Why are we here on earth?; is there a God; and what happens when we die?
A warning about 'The Possibility of An Island', however. It is full of really filthy sex scenes.
I sat down in a comfy armchair to read it one afternoon with a nice cup of tea and a slice of Battenberg.
Well, things soon got so steamy that I nearly choked on the cake.
But now I feel compelled to read the rest of Houellebecq's books.
I know this blog has discerning and clever readers, so I recommend you all to do the same.
Such books take a bit of hunting down, however. They are certainly hard to find in Wirral's public libraries, which seem to prefer to stock trashy, bodice-ripping romances, cowboy stories and loony, feminist nonsense.
You should have better luck in a commercial bookshop ... once you have waded past shelves piled high with food pornography and the cretinous autobiographies of flatulent jackasses who appear on daytime television.
Go on, I say, make the effort to hunt down and read some quality literature.
After all, as Edna O'Brien once remarked: "One should never read rubbish ...or one might start writing it."

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