Jack Averty: Have some perspective, folks! Missing Corrie isn’t a ‘disaster’

Apparently, the biggest bomb threat was actually right here in the West Midlands, sat innocuously on a building site just waiting to be unearthed.

For those of you so concerned about nuclear oblivion you locked yourself away in a bunker with no contact with the outside world, then you missed the everyday occurrence of an unexploded 225kg Second World War bomb being uncovered in Birmingham this week.

Yeah, 500lbs of explosives that could blow you and your bunker to smithereens.

Picture a giant sweet potato or a pig smeared in what it loves to roll around in and you’ve got yourself a German Second World War bomb that has been buried underground for decades.

West Midlands Police revealed it was discovered by workers on a building site ‘going about routine work’. You can just picture it – some poor bloke, maybe a Frank, just harmlessly digging away before hearing a ‘donk’ as his shovel hit something that wasn’t dirt, then innocently continuing to prod away at what – in about 30 seconds – he discovered is a massive unexploded bomb.

‘Hey Bob, I think I’ve found something’

‘What is it?’ Frank? Erm, Frank, why are you screaming and running away?’

Somehow the scene in Hot Fuzz springs to mind – remember when Simon Pegg and Nick Frost find an unexploded bomb in the old man’s shed and, all in slow motion, watch it groan and make a thud, before something starts ticking? Cue the three legging it out of the warehouse faster than you can say Second World War.

And here we have our Birmingham boys Frank and Bob, just like comedy duo Simon and Nick.

But this tale isn’t just about how the bomb was found, it was about where it was found. Pick a place in Birmingham aside from the city centre that could cause utter chaos if it was forced to close and you’d probably pick the Aston Expressway coupled with a couple of M6 slip roads. Bingo.

Shut the main route in and out of Birmingham for two days? Gotcha.

We’ve all experienced road rage, but try driving round in your tin can for two hours in circles along with 500 other cars as you hit road closure after road closure and see if you can keep calm and carry on.

The look on some drivers’ faces made you think the bomb was not the only thing at risk of blowing up.

These poor people just wanted to get on with their lives, get to work on time and make it home in time to catch Emmerdale. Fair enough, right? Not asking for a lot, just a dash of normality.

But, while we were sitting there fuming in our comfy cars with heated seats (granted, some were heated by the sweaty panicked state some of us were in), sat navs and radios on, you realise just what a privileged generation we live in.

What if this was 70-odd years ago and this infuriating bomb that has ‘ruined our lives’ because it has made us late for work actually did ruin our lives? Imagine if it landed on your house and wiped out everything you owned and had ever worked for.

A depressing thought, but one worth bearing in mind nonetheless. Thousands of people suffered because of these bombs, some lost their lives, and here we were moaning because we have been inconvenienced on our journey to work and back.

A bit of perspective never hurt anyone, we may have been late getting home but at least we had a home to get back to.

This is one of the main problems with the world we live in at the moment – we seem to have lost all perspective.

We’re all guilty of it. Yes, you sat in Pret a Manger, looking at your iPhone 7,000 and ordering your coconut latte and quinoa porridge, you are part of this too.

We know all about the Second World War and its horrors because we were educated about it in school.

But we do not seem to actually understand what people went through. Of course, it’s difficult to understand because it was a lifetime ago but situations like this should help.

We’ve all seen the footage of this week’s bomb blowing up by now. Now imagine if that was dropped near us with no emergency services to help, no police cordon, no bomb disposal experts working around the clock to keep us safe.

It would have been a disaster. An actual disaster, not our kind of ‘disaster’ where we spill half a box of muesli on the floor (#firstworldproblems).

Of course, that was a different time and somewhat a different world. But it doesn’t mean we should forget about it when we are stuck in traffic complaining of the ‘worst day of our lives’.

We should praise the emergency services and the army for doing everything they can to keep us safe and make sure the bomb is safely disposed of.

While we were stuck in traffic some people were stuck in Alexandra Stadium having to spend the night there because they were evacuated from their homes because of the bomb.

This does not require a knowledge of history to get perspective, this is people in the same city at the same time, having a worse day than us.

What is worse, being late for work or having to spend the night tucked up in a sleeping bag in an athletics stadium?

Bob and Frank will have had perspective when they saw their lives flash in front of their eyes as they thought they were about to be blown to high heaven. Now we need to follow suit and learn the immortal life lesson – things can always be worse.