As Shell and BP both reported a sharp increase in first quarter earnings, industry experts said drivers who are currently sitting in a queue outside a petrol station in Scotland waiting to pay £1.25 a litre would soon work out the connection.

Read the rest

The socialist Nazi haters of liberty and freedom at the Food Standard Agency have declared war on food additives and one of Britain’s bright-blazing beacons:

Most of the foods affected, the agency assured us, could easily be made without the offending additives; most, note, but not all. Heading the list of foodstuffs at risk of going down with the colouring-laden ship was - you guessed it - good old Captain Battenberg.

This will not stand. As a child it was my fervent wish to, as a grown up, eat this delicacy every day. A lofty ambition, I’m sure you’ll agree, but one crushed by the vagaries of the thin, pale pseudo-reality that is adult life. Damn you, pancreas.

This will not stand. Where is Gordon Brown now with his flag waving and his ‘British jobs for British workers’? What about British cakes for British porkers? The man’s a traitor.

Speaking of which. The nannying Nazi’s at ths FSA should be marched to the Tower and their heads be put on spikes for the sport of crows. Along with anyone else declaring they do not care for our sweet, sweet heritage. Forget citizenship tests. Anyone who can’t cram down half a bar of Battenberg with a mug of sugary tea should be deported immediately. And that includes UK citizens.

It’s time to draw a line in the marzipan. Here and no further. I’m laying in stocks of Battenberg for when the inevitable shortages and desperate conflict come. Fifty-gallon drums of pink food colouring are now stored at a secret laboratory where production will continue when the final battle is over.

We will be the Battenberg Martyrs. Rally to my banner. They can have our cake when they pry it from our cold, dead, chubby hands. ‘Bergers unite! You have nothing to lose but your teeth!

This traitorous nonsense needs to be stopped right now. How is this kind of thing allowed to happen?

How To Be Happy: Ask yourself if you really need what you buy
‘I am spending too much, to the point where I am waking up at night worrying about my credit-card debt. What can I do?’ H.

The suggested solutions of ‘avoidance strategies’ and ’self-sabotaging over-consumption’ are nothing short of sedition. Shouldn’t these people be in camps or something?

My advice to ‘H’ would be to avoid this filthy fifth-columnist samizdat and stick to the cardinal maxim of our society:

With open wallet and closed mind,
You’ll be more accepting of the daily grind.
Turn that frown upside down,
It’s all for the good of Gordon Brown.

Spend till you’re spent.

We all love capitalism, don’t we? Who couldn’t? Just think of all the crap you don’t need that you bought with money you don’t have to temporarily fill the void you feel inside. It’s like a caressing, velvet glove. Almost sensual.

Now meet the iron fist.

Personal debt is at a record high of £1.4 trillion, averaging £29,684 for every adult in the country. And people now face the possibility of bailiffs being able to break into their homes and take possessions by force. The sweeping new powers will be outlined by the Government in May, when it publishes details of how a new Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act will work in practice.

‘Sweeping new powers’. Just be careful you aren’t one of the those being swept up:

In a statement to the Independent of Sunday, a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) spokesperson claimed that the new powers for forcing entry will be used only “as a last resort… in strictly controlled circumstances”, and only “once full independent regulation of all private-sector bailiffs has been implemented”. But it emerged last night that, despite bailiffs remaining unregulated, MoJ officials are proposing that they be allowed “to use reasonable force, restraint or violence against debtors thwarting the bailiff’s seizure of their goods”.

Define ‘reasonable force’, ‘restraint’ and ‘violence’. Define ‘thwarting’. I bet a debt collector’s lawyers are better at doing it than the poor schlub with the debts.

Define ‘desperation’.

I imagine most people reading that newspaper report will be white, educated and middle class. They’ll read it and think ‘these strong arm tactics aren’t for the likes of me’. I hope they’re right.

The thing is, it only takes a turn of misfortune here, a wrong decision or two there, to send you plummeting with dizzying rapidity. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. And you don’t have to be a stupid or bad person to end up there either.

The seats in the stalls aren’t reserved exclusively for the feckless lower classes of popular imagination. The banks will and do pull the plug at the first sniff of trouble and you can end up in the hands of a debt collector pretty damn quick.

As a slogan appealing to another brand of hope over experience once put it: ‘It could be you’:

Owen James, managing director of Interim Justicia, a debt collection firm that has almost a million “customers” in Britain, and which had group profits of £37m in 2007, told the IoS: “We are looking forward to controlled sustainable growth… there’s a lot of potential in this market.”

Think on. Don’t realise your ‘potential’.

(Via RickB.)

Jane Garvey, the new presenter of Women’s Hour says Radio 4 has ‘a massively middle class bent‘. Now, Garvey came to her new job from Five Live’s Drive, an execrable programme where she exchanged inanities with the woeful Peter Allen over a platudinous presentation of the day’s events*. On that form, I’m left thinking that Garvey’s definition of middle class starts with people who get out of the bath to go to the toilet.

You know, I’m not a particularly well-educated or well-read person. I’m not what you’d describe as an intellectual. But one thing I am, in my own way, is a self-improver, an auto-didact. The government wants us to be drones, repeating our allotted task in order to service the economy until we die. You want to smell the roses? You’re going to have to grow them yourself.

I listen to Radio 4 not because I’m middle class - I’ll kill any man who describes me as such - but because it’s didactic. And massively entertaining. Five Live is rotting my mind. Five of the sweetest words in the English language are ‘Victoria Derbyshire is on holiday’. Garvey’s suggestion seems to be that instead of elevating the lower classes, Radio 4 should sink to their level. She can fuck right off, frankly. And the mouth-breathers she rode in on.

Jesus, even an ill-educated prole like me can see the cultural desertification that’s creeping up on us. As Jim Bliss said about the reaction to Rowan William’s speech - it’s anti-intellectualism. And the frustrating thing is, it wouldn’t take much to reverse it. My life was improved forever when, as a student in Huddersfield, I found the second-hand bookshop in the town centre. The prices were cheap enough for speculative purchases and very soon I’d put down the James Herberts and the Frederick Forsyths and was reading Thomas Hardy, Joseph Heller, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene. The world suddenly seemed massive and inspirational.

I know life’s hard and day are long and people are knackered but just once I wish someone would put down that novel about the SAS and pick up Catch-22 (it’s about war ‘n’ shit). Or drop The Da Vinci Code and pick up Foucault’s Pendulum (it’s about conspiracies ‘n’ shit). Or Our Man in Havana (it’s a comedy spy thriller ‘n’ shit). They’re more of a challenge to read, granted, but then they don’t talk to you the way Five Live talks to you either.

Try an Elmore Leonard - they’re like crack. When I discovered his books I read a dozen on the trot. His plots, characters and writing are like nothing else. And he doesn’t sound like Patricia Hewitt sending you to bed without any supper.

If Robert Sharp’s right and we only get time to digest 624 books before we die, why not try a little chateaubriand between the burgers? Try Radio 4 between 6.30 and 7 pm on a weekday or on a Saturday morning (skip Fi Glover though, she’s from Five Live and shit as well). Turn off Victoria Derbyshire’s daily racist and yahoo magnet and go and smear yourself with your own faeces instead. Trust me, you’ll feel like an intellectual titan.

* In the run up to the Iraq war, I remember one day them going on and on about a dead badger than had been painted over by someone painting double yellow lines on a road. On and on and on and on and on and on they went about this sodding badger. I emailed in and said: ‘We might be at war soon and you keep going on about a badger? You’re at the cutting edge of the news agenda.’ And they read it out!

I’m in two minds about blogging and signing this:

We, European citizens of all origins and of all political persuasions, wish to express our total opposition to the nomination of Tony Blair to the Presidency of the European Council.

Sure, if he gets the job thousands will very probably die and the continent will be finally arrive back in the Dark Ages, a time to where it is already hurtling.

But think of the time bloggers, writers, columnists, poets and other assorted tragedians would have. It’d be a golden age for world literature.

I’m not sure why there’s all this fuss about McDonald’s being given permission to offer ‘A-level style’ qualifications. I’m going to get myself one pretty damn quick.

I mean, look at the way our civilization’s going. We have an ascendant, under-educated and over confident aristocracy, a descendant under-educated and over confident underclass, institutionalised idiocy, and looming war, disease and financial meltdown. In the scattered ruins surviving the impending cataclysm, people with burger-flipping diplomas are going to be the philosopher-kings of our society. I want to be on that gravy train.

One thing that did go unreported when the announcement was made that a fast food corporation is going to be allowed to educate our children was that I’ve been given accreditation to award diplomas as well.

The first will be ‘Cynicism and Pessimism PgDip’. You too can be never disappointed but very, very occasionally surprised. The course will run over a number of months and consist of a series of questions about the issue of the day. The first exercise begins now.

You will require: A pen and paper, 10 minutes and 35 seconds of your time, and the patience of a saint. You may begin.

Listen to this interview with Jack Straw denying the charge that the UK prison system is at breaking point. He talks of the expanding prison population and the building of huge ‘Titan’ jails.

Question: How many times in the course of the interview does Straw use the word ‘rehabilitation’?

Take your time. Write down your answer and put it somewhere safe.

Pens down.

I know I keep saying it’s all over, but now it’s a little more all over.

(Via Warren Ellis)

Of course, criticising (or even straying slightly from the accepted wisdom of) world capitalism isn’t a sensible thing to do these day. At best you’ll be called a fool. At worst someone with the proper sense of perspective will lump you in with the Nazis. A right-wing libertarian, or one of those New Labour zealots who think you’re weird if you don’t want to turn everything for a profit, will happen along and use the word socialist in the same tone of voice as paedophile.

Still, here goes. Watching the global financial meltdown and people running hither and thither screaming about the end of the world, several voices popped into my head. The first was Ben Elton, before his plummet from grace, reading from his first novel Stark:

At the beginning of the day a factory full of jars of jam might be worth a thousand pounds. At the end of the day; a day of ‘good trading’; a day of ‘rallies’ and ‘confidence’, we might be told that the same factory is worth two thousand pounds.

What has happened? Only a few hours have passed. The factory has not changed. There is no more jam in it than there was. There has been no time for the new slogan ‘Let him dip his fingers into something fruity, Mum’ to take effect. The slimmers’ version still tastes bloody awful. Nothing has happened and yet the factory is ‘worth’ twice as much. Where has the extra cash come from? Nowhere, that’s where. It doesn’t exist. It is entirely theoretical and if people choose to dispute the theory, if they all choose at once to say ‘but that’s impossible. All right then, give me the cash…’, the money would instantly disappear, like the puff of smoke it is.

And then Guinan from Star Trek: The Next Generation piped up (yes, I’m using quotes from Ben Elton and Star Trek to illustrate what I see as the absurdity of global finance. Sue me, all the posh books you like to quote from were popular culture once):

When a man is convinced he’s going to die tomorrow, he will probably find a way to make it happen.

Then the voice of my mother, her wisdom floating in as if from years ago:

If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you?

Five Live’s financial correspondent Pauline McColl was on the Midday News yesterday spilling the beans on how ECONOGEDDON is down to nothing more than the hunches, guesswork and herd instinct of stockbrokers. That five minutes of the programme is mysteriously missing from the Listen Again option on the BBC website. No doubt an urgent meeting was held in a smoke-filled room somewhere and the message was sent to the BBC ordering them to expunge the dangerous intelligence that McColl had dared utter.

I think about this often. Far be it for a fascist like to me - hellbent, as I am, on the ultimate impoverishment of all - to question a system that has made so very many deserving souls so very rich for so very long, but our financial institutions are basically built on bollocks, aren’t they? It’s voodoo. I’ve lain on my bed on many, may occasions trying to make things happen by willing them to be but so far I’ve had no joy. It’s not fair.

I’m reminded of the Ron Suskind essay, Without a Doubt, about The War Against Terror, and the faith- versus reality-based ‘communities’. I can imagine a champion of capitalism sitting me down and giving the same pitying lecture:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’m not the first person to think like this - there’s probably an asylum for us all somewhere. There’ll be a knock on the door soon, I imagine.

But if you were to run your life on the basis of rumours you’d heard down the pub, you’d soon find yourself chased down the street by a man in a white coat with a big butterfly net. You’d be skint, divorced, homeless and dead in short order. And yet the guys with braces sold billions as quickly as they could and then bought billions as quickly as they could yesterday on information little stronger than gossip.

You don’t need to be Derren Brown - these people are some of the most suggestible on the planet. If any of them are reading this, send fifty pounds to my Paypal account (my email address is at the top of the page) and I’ll tell you which way the market’s going to go tomorrow.

Try going to Sainsbury’s and saying to the checkout person, ‘A hunch tells me that the price of Stella is going to fall. Here’s 37p for 4,000 cans’ and you’ll end up thirsty. But go to work in the City, say ‘I think the price of Global Megacorp shares are going to fall’, convince enough people of the same and KERSPLASH! Global Megacorp is in the toilet.

It’s not as if I’m entirely ignorant of the mechanics. My degree dissertation (for which I got a first) was an examination and evaluation of the various predictive methods you can employ in order to derive ‘buy’ and ’sell’ signals from stock market data. All of them rely on historic data in order to give a ‘hint’ of the future. All of them come with the health warning that, despite the cliche, history is not doomed to repeat itself.

Unless the methods have changed radically and new predictive systems have incorporated chaos theory in the last 15 years, I can’t see past how all this isn’t just one big faith-based initiative. That the future of every last one of us is in the hands of a small group of (mostly) men who are at the mercy of their moods and whims. Putting Prozac in the water coolers on the floors of the world’s stock exchanges is an idea I wouldn’t sniff at in the current climate.

Most people will say that that I’m unwilling or unable to face up to accepted reality. I would retort that they are merely slaves to a prevailing orthodoxy. Still, that’s just me. Must get back to polishing my jackboots in preparation for the ultimate triumph of world socialism.

Mark Steel:

Even more confusing is why the livelihoods of most people on the planet seem to depend on the actions of share dealers. One day the traders spend all day selling instead of buying, and this means we could be on the edge of a global slump. How do they get to be so influential?

The Daily Mash:

Evan Davies, the BBC’s economics editor, said: “The world’s stock markets are like a finely tuned barrel of eels.

“As they plunge, sea levels rise, leading to a fall in the price of dogs. Even if cat prices remain stable a recession then occurs. No one knows why.”

Davies added: “People often ask me why they have to lose their job and their home because a man in an expensive shirt made some terrible decisions. I tell them no-one knows.”

And…

Meanwhile, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke urged people ‘to just buy shit and worry about it later’…

So anyway, I’ve been thinking about this:

An armada of robot submarines and marine sensors are to be deployed across the Atlantic, from Florida to the Canary Islands, to provide early warning that the Gulf Stream might be failing, an event that would trigger cataclysmic freezing in Britain for decades.

I’m not denying the technology isn’t clever and who can sniff at the amazingly cool idea of robot submarines patrolling the ocean floor? At least there’ll be someone left to tell visiting aliens what happened to our shagged-out planet.

Future generations will regard us as the selfish bastards who beat them to the bathroom and used all the hot water. The theory is O-Level Geography with a dash of eschatological sci-fi stirred in:

Without the Gulf Stream, the UK would be as cold as Canada in winter. Ports could freeze over and snowstorms and blizzards would paralyse the country. An extreme version of this meteorological mayhem provided the film The Day After Tomorrow with its plotline.

So far, so terrifying. I’m not looking forward to being chased to the library by a tidal wave, for starters. Although we might have end up being more competitive at the Winter Olympics.

But what’s the robot system’s practical application? The article doesn’t say if there are any plans to attempt to reverse any failure of the Gulf Stream that the system might flag up. No mention of asking Mexico to leave their hot taps running or anything.

It looks like Rapid Watch is going to be a warning system whose warnings we can’t or won’t act upon. Will there be a sliding scale of warnings, as the temperature plummets, like MI5’s terror alerts?

And like the terror alerts, just how useful to the general public will such information be? Maybe, unlike the terror alerts, the Rapid Watch alerts could offers practical advice as well as inform us how terrified we should be. How about…

Level 5: Put on a pullover
Level 4: Burn your furniture
Level 3: Watch the Kill it, Cook It, Eat It polar bear special
Level 2: Get your leaders to their helicopters
Level 1: Envy the dead

Wouldn’t the £16 million that Rapid Watch is going to cost be better spent on scotch and revolvers?

Maybe there is a reason to be cheerful at this time of year. We’ve been given a huge reason to celebrate this very week:

Planning an effective flood management strategy is as important as planning for terrorism or even preventing bird flu, an independent review by Sir Michael Pitt, who is the chairman of the South West Strategic Health Authority, has said.

“We’re all facing up to climate change and there are all sorts of implications for the country in terms of having to adapt to that change,” Sir Michael said.

Climate change and flooding are only as bad as terrorism and bird flu? Well, thank God for that. Maybe He exists after all. I mean, think of the rather small numbers of people who have been killed by terrorism or bird flu in the past few years.

If Sir Michael had likened the damage caused by climate change and flooding to the carnage wreaked by, say, cars, alcohol, botched invasions of Middle Eastern countries or those cancers that leave you screaming for death, I think we’d all have all been running round like Chicken Little this week.

But no, it’s all going to be all right. We can all relax this festive season and for many festive seasons to come. Hardly anybody is going to be killed by climate change. Except maybe quite a lot of brown people and most of those don’t celebrate Christmas anyway. Isn’t it always the way?

So, chin up. Happy Christmas!

Personally, I’m rather disappointed by this.

Greenpeace is making its first attempt to get lads to go eco-friendly with a risqué viral ad featuring men and women who literally have light shining out of their rear ends.

I know the climate change message is one that needs to be spread as widely as possible, but I was hoping that the demographic of wilfully ignorant, Nuts-buying, compulsive masturbaters would be some of the few victims of global warming.

Just think of the washing machines, electricity, detergent and other vital resources you wouldn’t need if these wankers were wiped out at a stroke. Maybe we should have at them before sea levels start to rise.

It’s all over, isn’t it?

‘America’s Next Top Model 8′: Week Four: Crime Scene Victims

Sarah
Pushed Downstairs by a Model

Nigel: The look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead. (later) I think Sarah is the classic example of someone who isn’t typically pretty, but translates amazingly well on film.

Guest Judge Photographer Mike Rosenthal: I think you just put a little bit too much thought in the pose. I thought with the facial expressions, you did a great job.

Why no ‘Beaten to death with a huge porcelain phallus by a Model‘? The poverty of imagination on display is only too wearyingly familiar. Someone with real balls would have recreated the murder of Sharon Tate. If you hate women - or yourself for that matter - that much, put some bloody effort in. Misogyny as a creative driver is so 1970s.

The most shocking part about this is that the image aren’t really that shocking. Most models look dead inside anyway; that glassy stare looks out from a million magazine. What are the pictures trying to say? Anyone trying to make a real point would have hung their model from a hook in a meatlocker. Or given us ‘Anorexia-induced liver failure by a model‘.

As it is, the whole exercise is a moral vacuum, exquisite in its amoral vapidity; pointless. The pictures don’t fuel any sense of outrage but merely top up the resignation to the fact that the human race is slouching towards a tyranny of the mediocre and not giving much of a toss along on the way.

I give us ten years at the outside. By then we’ll be so emotionally stunted we’ll be eating our own young and rutting in the street like animals. Those of us escaping this psychic cataclysm will be regarded as latter-day Travis Bickles. We won’t be the lucky ones.

(Link via Rochenko)

News that Britain has witnessed its second pedal-by shooting in as many months should give cause for alarm, hand-wringing and hyperbole. Just not for the reason desperate politicians and newspaper editors with their eyes on the bottom line are spoon-feeding you.

No, the spate of knifings and shootings are less to do with absent fathers (code from both sides for single mothers are useless) or a blood-soaked society swirling down the plughole to Hell than to do with a significant minority’s ingrained stupidity in the face of eons of evolution and/or a rank cowardice pretending to be swaggering machismo. Those who, in the first instance, pick up a knife or a gun for offensive or defensive purposes are labouring under one or both of two deficiencies.

(more…)

After the knives and paedophiles of previous summers, this year’s sun-stroked moral panic is shaping up to be cheap alcohol.

Booze turns people into arseholes apparently. Let me say something. I’ve been drinking for the best part of twenty years. I love to drink, I love being drunk and - this is unintentional, shamefaced machismo, by the way - I drink like some people breathe. In all those years of being drunk, I never hit anybody; never slapped the missus or the kids. I never stabbed anyone, robbed anyone or raped anyone, intimidated anyone on the bus home or harassed women. Nor has anyone in my social circle or they wouldn’t be there.

If you ask me, it’s not alcohol (cheap or otherwise) that makes someone an arsehole. It’s being an arsehole that makes them an arsehole. Let’s address the societal factors that cause arseholism, shall we?

But no, they want to raise the drinking age and put up the price of cheap alcohol. That’s collective punishment, isn’t it? Creeping prohibition. The idea that you can price somebody out of drinking is ridiculous anyway. They’ll just look for cheaper ways to get pissed until they’re drinking god knows what.

It’s the same with cigarettes. I gave up smoking not because it was bankrupting me (although it slowly was) but because I read some truly terrifying articles about lung cancer and its survival rates in this country and decided I really didn’t fancy it.

Now all I need is to read in stark terms about what all this cheap Stella Artois is doing to me. I’ve looked, I really have, but nobody seems to want to talk me out of my bibulous lifestyle. Putting seven pence on a can really isn’t going to put me off. Or anybody else, I would have thought, other than the pocket money crowd who, if regulations were enforced, wouldn’t be drinking anyway.

(And if life in this country was less shitty, particularly for those trapped on the work-bed-work-weekend-pissed-work-bed-work treadmill, fewer people would feel the need to be arseholed at every opportunity.)

Update: As ever, John Band is the voice of reason.

It’s doubtful whether Live Aid would have taken off quite as much as it did, if the song had been: “The river banks burst / So the carpets went first / And one woman’s fridge / Is now under the bridge. / It’s a tale of endurance / But they should get most of it back / On the insurance.”

read the rest

The other day, I wrote a ‘joke’ that, at the end of the new Harry Potter book, Hogwarts is closed after a poor OFSTED report only to be reopened as a City Academy specialising in training call centre workers. Whoops, a bit of satire there.

Of course, it’s rubbish, isn’t it? An absurd extrapolation of the notion that schools now only exist to produce economically-optimised drones. Bollocks, in other words.

But then…

A secondary school which has opened an on-site call centre where pupils can practise selling mobile phone contracts and answering customer complaints has been criticised for lowering children’s expectations.

Christ. I feel sick.

I’m trapped in a giddying Moebius band of conflicting emotions. It’s a relief to find that there are people on the planet who have a lower expectation of our species than I do. That my sociopathy is not total. But then I’m horrorstruck that people actually exist who loathe and despise humanity (children in this particular case) to such an extent. But, hang on, why should I give a shit? People are arseholes. And round and round.

The pinnacle of creation? You can bugger off. The only worthwhile contribution opposable thumbs have made to the planet is the opportunities they afford for self-abuse.

It looks like Tony Blair’s finally going to get a job to which he’s eminently suited: Middle East peacemaker.

It got me thinking about other people who are otherwise wasted in their current careers and what they’d be more suited to.

Obviously, I’m thinking along the lines of Pete Doherty as Drugs Czar, Gary Glitter as Children’s Minister and Stevie Wonder as Formula One driver.

Alastair Campbell as submissive gimp in a Berlin S&M dungeon. That kind of thing.

Please, join in…

And the decline of our once proud civilization runs on apace.

Amidst the tide of tabloid filth and emotional incontinence over the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the fires that threaten to devastate our culture are getting out of control.

Take national shame and disgrace John Prescott’s grotesque, contemptuous and contemptible display standing in at Prime Minister’s Questions today. A shaved chimp would have displayed more dignity. Its makes one wish that, rather than a well-fed and idle old age in the House of Lords and a blind eye turned to his sausage-fingered sexual harassment, Prescott might be rewarded by being pushed very slowly into a bacon slicer. Democracy? You can fucking stick it. That we’ve let that fat turd stink out our politics for so long should make mortified flagellants of us all.

Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, marking the resumption against all the odds of devolved government in Northern Ireland, thought having a podcast was the way to celebrate. Chaired by ‘wacky TV star’ and all round cultural pustule - the host of ‘Celebrity Love Island’ no less - Patrick Kielty. Patrick sodding Kielty. Presumably Chris Moyles was busy. Under my glorious and merciful rule bacon slicer manufacturers would be prized even more than emotional placebos, tabloid editors and buy-to-let landlords are now.

Don’t get me started on the fact that they’re remaking ‘The Long Good Friday’. By setting it in Miami and letting cinematic barbarian Paul. W. S. Anderson direct. Tower snipers have had less provocation.

Update: Listen to Prescott’s arsewitted gobshitery here and reflect that, for the last ten years, this oafish mediocrity has been an espresso away from being prime minister.

Please say no.

What’s this Facebook all about then?* I only signed up because I’m vain, someone was linking to here from inside it and I couldn’t find out who it was without joining myself.

I now find I have two friends there. The estimable island-traversing Nick Barlow and rolly-smoking posho J. Clive Matthews (he’s very sweet really). Two blokes I know and like in the real world and who I could probably have pint with at almost any time if only I could be arsed dragging my sorry carcass off the settee.

Nick kindly informs me that Facebook is MySpace for grown ups. Which, no offence to Nick, fills me with that free-floating end-of-days ennui that’s doing the rounds these days. Not panic as such, just a resigned sinking-feeling that it largely really is all over for us, culturally at least.

Are our egos so damaged in the swirling mass of eschatological turds that is modern life that we fluff them with online lists of ‘friends’? Christ, at least with MySpace you run the risk of stumbling over a decent tune or two.

Facebook, however and unless I’m missing something pretty fundamental, is culturally devoid of such rare treats. It merely serves the same purpose as a pen and paper and the nagging suspicion that you’re not as popular as you think or would like to be. Dammit, you’re going to make a list to prove it ain’t so. It’s a pissing contest against yourself. Grow up.

*If someone says it’s a ‘networking’ tool, they are banned from this blog forever and I will hunt them down and bludgeon them to death with a table leg. Networking, as I’ve said before, is the hateful and misanthropic practice of pretending to like someone you don’t in order to extract from them something you want.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NO.

‘And I saw when the Lamb opened the first of the seven seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the Four Beasts saying, “come and see”.’

Revelation 6:1

It’s said the great civilizations of the past didn’t disappear overnight in sudden cataclysms. Instead, they slowly and sadly declined over long years. The Roman Empire, for instance, slipped away through an embrace of decadence and lead piping in its plumbing. A lethargic and slowly lead-poisoned empire was - eventually - too tonto to survive.

And so, like standing in the calm eye of a hurricane, when standing at the centre of a slow-motion apocalypse it can be difficult to tell that anything is wrong. But the signs that we’re doomed can be seen by those who choose to look.

The first seal heralding our own slow demise was opened this week when the media went into febrile paroxysms over the significance of David Cameron’s changing hairstyle. What was the meaning behind Cameron’s switch from a parting on the right to a parting on the left? Articles that didn’t quote ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ by The Who were as rare as non-piss poor journalism.

Confirming eschatologists’ fears, the total length of column inches devoted to Cameron’s new hair was *exactly* 666 miles. Miles and miles given over to whether the shift of parting was symbolic of Cameron’s political journey. Only mere inches, however, recorded that within days Cameron had changed again to a far more symbolically apposite spiv’s greasy quiff.

Let’s be emphatic about this. David Cameron wants to be the next Prime Minister - one of the world’s most powerful men - and current opinion polls show him having a good chance. Yet the media have so little to say about him that they went to town on his haircut.

He was also given a free ride over his House of Commons speech responding to the Budget. What it lacked in anything meaningful it made up for in endless flaccid jokes about Stalin and Michael Foot, a man anybody born after 1980 has never heard of. Listening was like trying to eat a spare rib with no meat on it but smeared thick with lemon curd. Or as Lib Dem leader Ming Campell cattily put it afterwards, ‘Once again, I am struggling to match the intellectual rigour of the previous speech’.

In the Book of Revelation, when the first seal is opened, a man appears on a white horse. There has been much speculation through the ages as to the man’s identity. Is it Jesus? Is it the Antichrist? More worryingly, we have no idea whatsoever how he wears his hair.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

‘Come in and sit down, Mr Britain,’ the doctor said sympathetically. ‘What can I do for you today?’

‘Well…’ Mr Britain began and proceeded to list his ailments.

It’s true what they say, the doctor thought as he listened, getting old is a cruel and miserable business. He had many elderly patients, but whenever one of them sadly admonished him with ‘don’t ever get old, doctor’, it would never fail to chill his heart by another degree of disquiet.

Just look at old Mr Britain, for example. He was a small, still dapper man, despite the air of a slight threadbareness about him. He’d been a prize fighter in his day, punching above his weight, and there was hardly anywhere in the world he hadn’t visited. He’d done it all. But now the trophies were long dusty and the memories sepia.

‘…and then there’s sex, doctor,’ said the old man.

‘I’m sorry?’ said the doctor, startled from his thoughts.

‘You know,’ said Mr Britain, without a hint of embarrassment. ‘Fucking.’

Here we go again, the doctor thought. The only way to deal with Mr Britain when he was in this mood was to be as equally brazen.

‘Fucking,’ replied the doctor, evenly. ‘We’ve been through this before, haven’t we, Mr Britain. You might have given that German woman a good seeing to but that was a long time ago now, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yes…’ said the old man, his voice trailing off. He knew what was coming next.

‘The only other woman I can recall you expressing an interest in fucking was that Russian lady and the last time you mentioned her was in about 1989. And then it was all about some bizarre threesome with your American friend. I seem to recall the poor Russian woman had some kind of breakdown. Fell to pieces, you could say.’

‘But this Trident you have me on,’ said Britain, ‘it’s helped my performance up until now but I’m not sure it’s working any more. Haven’t you got anything else?’

‘Well, there is a new version in development. Mr Britain. But to be frank with you, if I were to prescribe it to you, who do you have to fuck with? And please don’t say those Middle Eastern ladies you say you’ve been chasing all over the place.’

‘Well, you never know when you might meet somebody,’ Mr Britain said hopefully.

‘I’m very sorry, Mr Britain.’ said the doctor, ‘Don’t you think your Casanova days are behind you? And you have other conditions that require more urgent treatment. What about your violent mood swings and your terrible diet?’

Mr Britain clenched his fists and closed his eyes.

Elsewhere, the sun was setting.

(First published in this week’s edition of The Friday Thing. Go and subscribe, it’s really good.)

Totally obvious, obviously, and not a patch on Beau or Tim, but I’m bored and avoiding work.