Fascinated by the ending of Lost, not for the story (on which I gave up years ago, somewhere around episode two) but for the decision to broadcast the finale to the UK at the same time it airs in the US. Part event television, part anti-piracy measure, the simulcast won’t stop bit-torrenting, but it will presumably please advertisers, sure that at least some consumers will watch in real-time, and have to sit through the commercial breaks like mere mortals.

For modern youths, who find it so achingly difficult to wait a few days to see a TV show, this might be a welcome measure, but if I may make a modest proposal, why not broadcast *all* American television as it happens, direct to the UK? Primetime will come for Britain in the small hours of the morning, but why should that bother those of us who want to live on US time?

If 20% of the British population starts living their lives on US time, we can lose 20% of our morning rush-hour to one in the afternoon. Companies will get better use of their plant and machinery, running 24 hours a day like Japanese dubbing studios. Meanwhile, students who pour themselves out of bed “late” can be reassigned to a schedule that means their leisurely shamble into class can put them in the lecture hall bang on 9am.

The idea of a citizenry divided between night and day isn’t new. Chuck Palahniuk posited a near future scenario in Rant (2007) wherein Daytimers and Nighttimers take the strain off contemporary urban infrastructures by staggering their schedules. Don’t we do this already? If someone wants to go to bed at 6am and wake up in the early afternoon, wouldn’t this make them an ideal recruit for all those new night-shift jobs this idea will generate?

Meanwhile, everyone gets their TV as soon as it happens in the US, cutting out the middle men of bit torrenting in favour of old fashioned timeshifting and home-taping. And because nobody will know who will be awake when, we can make mobile phones illegal and force all communication to be by email.

People of Great Britain, why not write to your new coalition MP, eager for something to make his or her name, and suggest it? If you do, please suggest that we hold the London Olympics at midnight, officially “for the sake of foreign broadcasters”, but actually so I don’t have to watch any of it.

For reasons not worth going into right now, I once had to climb a mountain with a group of Taiwanese special forces. I was assured that I would be in perfectly safe hands, as I was accompanied by some of the toughest men in the world, whose final examination supposedly comprised being dumped naked into the Taipei sewers and forced to subsist for three days on whatever came to hand. They were the ultimate survivalists, able to stay alive with hardly anything. It was only later I realised that this wasn’t good news for me.

They couldn’t light a fire. Nobody had brought matches or a lighter. None of the commandos knew how to rub wood together or use flint and steel, because… well, they had never needed to. Far from preparing them for the world at large, the Taipei sewer experience had left them utterly cavalier in their attitude towards survival. Nobody thought to bring a tent; they could just sleep under the stars. Food, they had decided, was an item only suitable for lazy schoolgirls. Instead, they planned on munching on any bugs that were unlucky enough to wander into their path, or possibly strangling an incautious squirrel and eating it raw.

This wasn’t much help to me. Two hours into our journey, we were hit by a typhoon. It then rained continuously for seven hours, in a relentless, pelting storm that caused mudslides and rock falls. It cut off the road back into town. The river also flooded, somewhat to the detriment of the camp site we had pitched on the bank. I was wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. Somebody finally managed to get a fire going in a cave, and, during my ten minute shift in the dry before I had to stand outside again, I ate something in the dark that later turned out to be a pig’s small intestine.

And that’s why I don’t like camping.