As well as home decorating I can also offer good valuse on minor surgery; hernia transplant, gall bladder removal, spite bladder removal, depression duct bypass and blow-lamp depilation (For permanently silky legs). Just drop me an email if you are interested.
I shall now use the rest of my coffee break to ansewr (I like the look of ansewr, it is as sensible a spelling as answer, so I'll leave it ) some of the points raised by Liz in her comments.
I do think we live in a rather depressing age and though there may well be common cause among like thinking people there is no current ideology that successfully addresses the problems that arise from capitalism, gross inequality, exploitation and destruction of the environment, consumerism and so on.
That is not to say that there have not been huge improvements in medicine, education, welfare, wages and social attitudes for some under capitalism; there have but it has been a slow process and terrible inequalities still exist.
When I think about climate change, population growth and destruction of the environment I cannot help coming to the conclusion that we are on the brink of an almost unimaginable catastrophe.
There are as Liz says lots of good people doing good things but they do not have the power to change the direction in which we are moving. Even the Green movement has not managed win over mass support and can only capture the odd parliamentary seat, despite global warming, disasters like Fukushima and mass extinction of wildlife.
So I see depression over the future as the realistic response.
But why not have some fun before the ship goes down?
The old man or woman going back to a flat with a can baked beans as an example of solitude and lonliness.
Why is it always the old who are singled out? In fact is it not often the young who have most difficulty coping with solitude?
If we are honest I think we have to admit that solitude inevitably comes with feelings of loneliness. But is there any state of life that does not have a negative side? Living in a family, or just with a partner, may bring much joy but it can also be horribly miserable.
But society does not seem to pity couples and families in the way that it does single people. An moral attitude I think may be left over from an earlier age religous certainies and the primacy of the family. In Indonesia you are considered very strange if you choose to live on your own.and that was once the case here in the UK too, and not so long ago.
With an aging population and the social changes of the last fifty years more people are choosing to live on their own and I think that will bring about some interesting changes in both attitudes and the social structure of the country.
I think this is what we may be seeing starting in Japan.
So you may well see more old men and women heading home, not with a can of beans, but with a lobster, bottle of fine wine and a copy of that film you have never found the time to sit down and watch. And you will be overwhelmed by a profound feeling of envy.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I like miserable poets, because in an age without religion or socialism and with Nature on the run I feel that they are the ones that really conjure up the zeitgeist. I like the Three Witches, Plath, Sexton and Rich. They all have a little of Yeats, but without the mumbo-jumbo.
Sadly gloomy writers don't usually get Nobel prizes for literature. This is probably because Swedes already have more than enough of their home grown gloom without importing any more.
After writing this I was reminded that I have Glen Gould's Solitude Trilogy radio programmes on my laptop and listened to these while painting. As you know I am fascinated by the mythology of place and the creation of imaginary lands: Glen Gould's North and Jacques Brel's Le Far West, Calvino's Invisible Venice, and so on.
I can hear a can of paint calling, Break Over!
I hand you over to JB and GG.