We have lost so much lately. We definitely appear to have lost the plot. The loss, which I wish to bemoan this issue, is our loss of the ability to tell the wee white lie. Of course, the white lie has gotten a lot of bad press lately.

White lies do not actually fit the bill when talking about whole economies. The white lie I refer to is the slight bending of the truth so as not to hurt someone’s feelings or when the truth will serve no actual purpose other than cause further damage. Yes, it is a very grey area, but when you do mix black and white you get grey, as evidenced by my salt and pepper hair colouring.

The reality is that when someone asks you how do they look, the last thing they want is for you to actually tell them how you think they look. They really want you to tell them how you think they want you to think that they look. This is a very mind bending concept indeed and the area where the white lie has served us well for centuries.

Over the Christmas I witnessed a friend being subjected to the process of having others be truthful to him over the period of a long night. By morning he was a shell of his former self and, indeed, was shocked and hurt by the process. The ability to tell the wee white lie seems to have been replaced with the overwhelming desire to blurt out the big black truth. Many would appear to have had a truth serum implant, a bile duct rerouted and a venomous voluminous voice inserted.

Personally, when I go out at night, I do not really want people to feel they have free reign to comment on my expanding waistline, my retreating hairline, my moveable chinline, my likeness to identikits on Crimeline or my place on the ageline. My laundry is something I prefer to attend to myself and not something for others to do in public. The thing is that those that seem the most likely to want to tell people to their face where exactly their life is bottom over top, these self appointed counsellors who have learnt their pop psychology from daytime TV, would appear to have divorced themselves from their own mirror and no longer realise the darkness of the posterior of their own pot.

Even our media now feels the need to tell the big black truth. For months they were derided for talking down the economy and talking us into recession. Then, reality bites, and they feel obliged to be overly truthful and feel hard done by for having been accused of scare mongering. In recent weeks, it would appear to me that there is an over abundance of big black truth. It is so much harder to spot the feel good story on the news or in the newspaper. It becomes increasingly difficult to read the paper or hear the news and say that things can only get better.

I have adopted the ploy of trying to avoid the news and newspaper until after midday in an attempt to start the day with some positivity. This was prompted by one young radio announcer who proclaimed lately that, unfortunately, she had no deaths to announce that morning, but that hopefully by mid afternoon she would have a few. It definitely seems that good news has to be very, very good to get any sort of headline lately.

The one time I change from this tactic is when driving in the car. Last Friday morning, I heard a fella encouraging me to swallow a wriggly frog. I thought to myself this one must have escaped from the Paul Goldin school of weight loss. Funnily enough the ad was for Weight Watchers. The logic was that if you can manage to stuff a wriggling frog into your mouth in the morning and swallow it that things could only get better. It does seem that he was referring to a metaphorical frog, before the lunatic fringe tree huggin professional campaigners latch onto this one as being an infringement of animal rights.

Maybe, some of them could swallow a Natterjack toad or two. Only recently did I discover that we rerouted roads down south to save this species of toad that are, in fact, poisonous. Maybe they anticipated Patrick’s staff cuts and in an effort to avoid redundancy sprouted legs and learnt to hop it and are indeed a small fat snake in disguise.

I am afraid I do not have any answers for you. Then again, those of you who manage to read to this point in my articles realise that I usually have more obtuse questions than answers. I suppose in a round about way what I am saying is that in times like these we really do need to find some positivity in the small things and sometimes we do need to be a little bit more economical with the black truth. The old saying goes that a closed mouth catches no flies and its modern equivalent would go along the lines that a closed fly catches no………

Be nice to each other. Let 2009 become the year of the friendly comment!!!!!!!