I hate moving on....

About ten years ago, I began to develop an almost pathological aversion to people who used the word "overview". In truth part of this was based on the fact that my own analysis of the situation was very often garbled and long-winded and thus rejected. However there was also a profound suspicion that those who had signed up to this particular verbal tic were experimenting in a kind of professional shorthand serving towards the achievement of two clear and concise objectives. The first was to avoid any binding decisions regarding the matter at hand (the more urgent the requirement, the more keenly was it avoided). The second was to imply a sort of superiority upon proceedings, that is to say that the speaker was the only person seeing things clearly and glimpsing a possibly hidden but surely inevitable outcome. Along the lines of eggs being eggs. In a couple of cases these suspicions were confirmed horribly and irredeemably and the thought of those people still makes me shiver (and laugh when I get together with a former colleague of those times now a dear friend and we bitch pointlessly and cruelly).....

Now a similar dread is invested in me by the use of the words "moving on" except that now these woeful words are to be found not in the echelons of middle-management but in the political vocabulary, now showing signs of filtering down into the voluntary sector and at chief executive level. Our last Prime Minister made it something of a catchphrase, and I am reminded of someone like Jim Bowen frowning through his bi-focals and saying " aren't they a smashing couple ladies and gentlemen now step up have a listen to Tony" and why did we not listen to Tony because that "moving on" started with the house in Bristol and ended with a war. The plea to "move on" became another way of saying "can we please forget that this ever happened" and beneath such a fancy lies the tacit admission of error, blind ambition and the probable stain of blood on the hands.