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I’m alive but have much stuff going on in the real world right now which makes one realise just how much of a grotesquely irrelevant pantomime – with almost zero effect on day to day living – British politics really is. There’s nothing quite like it to engender violent teeth grinding disgust, when you’re under pressure in real life, than to watch the Brown-Cameron-Mandelson-Osborne daisy-chain in full cry.

Plus, the fair Victoria finally married me a couple of Saturdays back. And it only took fifteen years of pleading, begging and threatening suicide on my part to get to her to do it. Learn from the master, lads, learn from the master.

It turns out I’ve been churning out this godawful rubbish for four years today. Yay, me.

Four years. The squandering of that much time on this much futility should be a criminal offence. Let’s face it, I could have spent the intervening years playing Minesweeper and achieved as much. It’s certain fewer people would regard me as an arsehole and vice versa. You could use a rolled up copy of my political enemies list to cosh rhinos. They’ll rue the day, let me tell you*.

Anyway, onward and upwards!

* My enemies, not rhinos. Not yet.

Do it. Do it now. Let’s crash Cowell’s Christmas.

In other news, this is the last Saturday for a bit when I’ll be relegated to the back room while puffed-up ponces prance about in the front. Result. I’m about to extort 14 weeks of my own where I have control of the television on a Saturday evening. What shall I inflict on the rest of the family, do you think? Obviously I won’t be able to stretch to anything as ghastly Strictly Come Dancing. I wonder what an eight and four year-old would make of a Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano restrospective…

You know, I know I’m not the most in-touch-with-reality person. I spend my days wishing we could just all be a little bit nicer to each other. Nobody ever got in life with that kind of attitude. I’m an underachiever on that score. It’s sometimes a matter of regret.

Then I read this by Tim and I realise that I just don’t care. I’m quite enjoying life on what-planet-are-you-living-on as it turns out.

That meme’s caught up with me, like a virulent strain of clap. Cheers to Dave Cole for passing it on.

Without further, when I heard about…

Princess Diana’s death in 31st August 1997… me and my other half were staying with friends and rose late after a heavy night. There was a documentary on the telly about Princess Diana. We laughed at her clothes and her stupid, simpering ways. Then the documentary ended and a news reader said she was dead. The shame was momentary and then I think we probably went to the pub. Looking back I can’t see what all the fuss was about. I couldn’t at the time to be frank.

(The same day, The Verve went to number one with The Drugs Don’t Work. Looking back I can’t see what all the fuss was about.)

Margaret Thatcher’s Resignation – 22nd November 1990… I was in my second year at Poly. We watched her crying on the steps of Downing Street on the telly and laughed like hyenas. I think drinking and the playing of a certain Elvis Costello song were probably involved later on.

Attack on the twin towers – 11 September 2001… I was at home surfing the Internet. I think it was on the now defunct Warren Ellis Forum that somebody said a plane had hit one of the towers. At that point it was thought to be an accident and a light aircraft. I went down the hall and turned on the news. I hardly moved for the next ten hours.

England’s World Cup Semi Final against Germany – 4 July 1990… At my Auntie and Uncle’s house. I remember David Platt’s goal against Belgium more clearly. There was more laughing and dancing about involved.

President Kennedy’s Assassination – 22 November 1963… Ahem. I’m afraid the files are sealed until 2029, get me? Don’t ask again, ok?

(As The Meme-Slayer, I’m slaying this meme. It’s rubbish – I only did it because Dave asked.)

So, a man releases his dead friend’s art pamphlets into the wild to be discovered by the next generation.

It only happened to me once, discovering a grumble mag in the undergrowth, that is. I must have been ten or eleven, maybe, on the way home from school. She’d kept her socks on. It was a blood-thumping, head-spinning, heat-raising experience. Just the once.

Thinking about it gives me a warm rush of nostalgia.

(In my heart, perverts. In my heart.)

(Via Jamie)

So, according to How Clever Am I, (via Matt T) it turns out I’m a triple-A student.

That being the case, why did I spend the early 90s at a poxy West Yorkshire poly and not at Oxbridge? How come now I’m a soulless misanthrope sitting in the spare bedroom in my pants and not a soulless misanthrope on the fringes of the Cabinet making poor people’s lives even more miserable?

I tell you, there’s no justice.

Unwanted tickets for WOMAD have been brandished and so we’re off to sunny Wiltshire for the weekend. Squeeze, Chic, Billy Cobham, and Mavis Staples are all on the menu (unfortunately we’re arriving to late to see the mighty Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry). Hopefully those ace curried new potatoes they had last year will be on as well.

Anybody else going? Drop me an email if you are. The festival site has wi-fi access this year so I’m taking the little laptop. Might even try a bit of open air blogging.

I took the offspring to see Kung Fu Panda this afternoon. Once the very slow start is out of the way, it’s quite good.

As my mind wandered while it waited for the cinematic action to kick in, a moment of clarity came upon me and it was this: I may have a mundane life of few achievements but I have at least one thing to be proud of…

MY KIDS KNOW NOT TO BLOODY JABBER JABBER JABBER ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE SODDING FILM.

For that at least, my soul may be saved.

Why do people pay £4.80 to get their kid into see a film if said kid is only going to run about and talk bollocks at the top of its voice for THE WHOLE BASTARD 90 MINUTES? And if they’ve paid all that money, don’t they want to HEAR THE COCKING MOVIE THEMSELVES?

It reminded me of when we took a glass-bottomed boat tour in Greece last year. The crystal clear Mediterranean wherever you turned. Iridescent shoals of fish darted, flashed and glittered beneath. A family of corpulent Little Britainers across the gangway READ AIRPORT THRILLERS THE WHOLE NAFFING TIME. I don’t believe in physical punishment but sometimes people could do with a good clout.

Why not take an iPod to a pop concert? Or a comic to read in an art gallery? A packed lunch to Gordon Ramsay’s? Why not take a snooze on the London Eye? Take your portable DVD player to the Sistine Chapel. If you’re going to take your ill-disciplined, gobshite nippers to the pictures, then why not? They need a kick in the pants, the lot of them.

The venerable Jim Bliss has tagged me with a music meme. I’m to, via Phil…

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

I’ve been asked to put a playlist together for a wedding this September so I’m currently trying to create a list of songs that spans the groovy, cheesy, oldie, slowie, floor-filler gamut. Not an easy task but one this old compilation tape veteran feels up to. Eschewing YMCA and Agadoo, spring and early summer have thus far been spent putting look for ‘credible’ crowd pleasers. And so…

1. Check out the drum fills and strings on by Beggin’ by Franki Valli. Also have a listen to the damn fine theme tune from Grease by the same – the only diamond in that turd of a film.

2. Great DJ by the Ting Tings is a bloody fantastic tune, capable of bringing grins to the faces and shaking to the hips of small children and wheezing, chubby bloggers alike. Shame then, that their album is, for want of a better word, bollocks.

3. The Birds and the Bees makes me want to loosen my tie, grab a scotch on the rocks, lean on my mic stand and burble away. I don’t do karaoke but if I did, I’d nail this. The horns on the recorded version are MASSIVE and aren’t done justice on this live performance. It’s amazing played in the car very loud with all the windows down. Fuck you, Johnny Boombox and your Renault Clio.

4. Minus the tedious preamble (skip to about three minutes on the YouTube clip), this version of Steve Wonder’s You Are the Sunshine of My Life by Frank Sinatra is the version I insist they play at the wedding. Sinatra is either drunk or knackered because he utterly murders it. However, the band arrangement is impeccable and a (drunk or knackered) Frank shouting ‘YOU! Are the sunshine of my life’ makes me laugh like a hyena. Imagine the old fool jabbing a finger a someone while he sings it, the deeply threatening romantic.

5. Dig, Lazarus, Dig by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds is one of the most exciting albums I’ve heard for years and years and years. And I’m not a Cave fan as it goes. It’s ruddy marvellous and I’m considering glueing the CD into the stereo – I don’t think I’ll be taking it out soon. I’ve sneaked the title track onto the wedding playlist in the hope it’ll coax one or two beered-up uncles into Mick Jagger impressions. Myself, I’m tempted to grow my moustache and learn to strut.

6. Dr Kitch by Lord Kitchener. A long time favourite of mine. A filthy, filthy lyric that makes me giggle like a five year-old but one that should also get the fat aunties wobbling around the dancefloor.

7. I’m A Man by The Spencer Davies Group. Hammond and handclaps – was there ever a finer combination? Gentlemen, put this on the iPod, slide on the sunglasses and slope out for a walk on a sunny day. You’ll feel like a sexual tyrannosaurus.

In my role as meme killer I won’t pass this one on. But it’s nice and jolly – if you fancy giving it a go, consider yourself nominated by me.

By complete coincidence, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been employing very similar tactics as Charlie Brooker:

Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other. You know: Cash in the Attic, something like that. To help sustain the illusion, imagine a cheapo theme tune playing each morning when you wake up, and again each night before you go to bed. Before long, the day in between will feel like zero-consequence schedule-filling fluff, thereby lifting an almighty weight from your shoulders.

It’s surprisingly easy to do, ignoring the news, digging out the dusty old PlayStation, wallowing in a bean bag blinking dumbly at the telly. Finding yourself less informed on the issues of the day than just about anybody else around you comes as a slight shock to begin with but after a while you start to enjoy it in a fuzzy, stupid kind of way.

Ignorance isn’t just a state of mind. It’s a place you can visit. It’s very nice there and you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.

A pox upon Mat for this.

What I was doing ten years ago:
Staring in blank futility at a computer screen, whoring myself to bastards. No, sorry, that was this morning. Hang on, it was ten years ago as well. Yes.

Five things on my To-Do list today:
- See a penny and pick it up
- Boil my pants
- Finally make sexy chit chat with that lollipop lady
- Finish the application to MI6
- Find out where that smell’s coming from

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Tesco have got buy one get one free packets of custard creams.

Three of my bad habits:
- Grocery shopping in only a cock-sock
- Jumping out of people’s wardrobes dressed as the devil
- [THIS ENTRY REMOVED BY COURT ORDER]

Five places I’ve lived:
- My mummy’s tummy
- In a state of denial
- I’ve spent a year living Staines
- I’ve spent 37 years living in stains
- In that cold, dark, empty space inside all of us

Five jobs I’ve had:
- Painting Christopher Hitchen’s kitchen
- Unblocking Saddam Hussein’s drains
- Serving Robert Mugabe’s wasabi
- Babysitting Hu Jintao’s huge twin cows
- John Prescott’s proctologist

Five books I’ve recently read:
- So You’ve Decided To Form Your Own Death Squad
- The Toilet Cistern Vodka Handbook
- It’s Not Your Fault: Blaming Others For Everything
- The Anal Trauma Pop-Up Book
- Don’t Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus

Five people or communities I’m going to tag:
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- Peter Rabbit
- The Muslim Community
- The 1966 World Cup winning side
- Jesus

I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t mix with Catholics of a certain age or if it’s the sign of an increasingly heathen nation or if I had a particularly twisted religious upbringing, but I never meet anyone these days who’s heard of, or participated in, the veneration of the cross.

One of my indelible memories is of attending the Good Friday service at St Joseph’s church in Blackpool aged about six or seven. There’s nothing like having to kiss the feet of a life-sized crucified Jesus – perfect in every bloody detail – to instill the requisite religious awe required at this time of year. Or terror, as I now call it.

I can’t remember what I got for my sixth or seventh birthday but I can still see and feel myself queuing in the aisle to kiss Jesus’s feet. My heart thumps like it did then. The altar boy had a cloth and wiped Our Lord’s instep after every kiss. No anti-bacterial spray in them days.

Are there any other recovering Catholics out their who want to join my group and help each other through it?

Hi, I’m Justin and I’m a Catholic.

Remember the Riverdance, the ferry that went down in a storm near Blackpool a while back? The seagulls had a field day with some of its cargo which was more palatable than that of the Ice Prince at Worthing.

My Dad’s been following its progress which seems to consist of it slowly and stubbornly settling into the sand. I went have a look myself a few weekends back and I can’t see, short of leaving it or cutting it up, what they’re going to do.

Here it was on February 13:

And here it is today:

Here’s another law of politics: all public service tends towards infantilisation. It’s a law in two parts.

I have a seven year-old daughter. She’s not particularly tidy. Most days her bedroom looks like how I imagine how Daily Mail readers imagine how Eastern European migrants live. You see, she can and does make the most stupendous mess without the help, input or consultation of anybody.

But when it comes to tidying that mess? Ah, that’s not a job for a single person at all. No help is begged in making the mess but much is begged in its reversal. There are tears and shouting. A team effort tidies the room but a few days later…

And so it is with government. Or at least this government. Think of all the messes it has made in the last eleven years. Now think of how little clearing up has actually been done. How much mess has been edged away from, swept under the rug of media manipulation and generally ignored? Because all public service tends towards infantilisation. Someone will be along at some point to clean up for them.

The second part of the law involves respect for property. My daughter has a cuddly sheepdog toy called Charlie which is her most treasured possession. She’s always losing him in the house. Panic ensues at bedtime.

I always know where my keys, mobile, money and mp3 player are because I remember where I left them. Even I’m bored at the sound off me giving this lecture. But does it go in? What do you think? My back hurts from all the looking under the sofa I do for that sodding dog.

And so it is with government. Or at least this government. Think of all the important, important stuff it’s lost over the years. Laptops, laptops and more laptops. Data, data and more data. Dignity, dignity and more dignity.

The latest is military ID cards. Eleven thousand have been lost in the last two years.

Like my daughter, the government know just how important these things are to them but will they learn? But does it go in? What do you think? The loss is blithely announced but nothing much else seems to be done. And then there’s another announcement. We rarely even get a ’sorry’, not that that would do much good.

Sorry, as I’m also bored of lecturing my daughter, carries an implicit promise to improve one’s behaviour. It’s not merely a placatory or assuaging device to smooth things over until the next crisis. Sorry’s no good without an attendant change in behaviour.

Because all public service tends towards infantilisation. Lost your laptops, data disks and military ID cards? Here’s some money to go and buy replacements. It’s an adjunct to the magic wallet theory.

Now, all this would be more forgiveable if the government didn’t itself treat us like children. The whispered conversations behind closed doors. The ‘this is for your own good’. The ‘do as I say or go to your room’. The ‘do as I say, not do as I do’. Being infantilised by the infantile is demeaning.

It’s like hearing a disapproving sigh at your behaviour from a seven year-old. Trust me, I get it all the time.

(Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy)

Ah, but what flavour was it, true believers?

It says ‘used to’ but I still do occasionally slip on the old tights and cape and go out and give him a slap. I don’t see him that often any more, if truth be told, not since his mum got ill. And then there was that unpleasantness when we were seen in the park together. Two men in tight clothing rolling around together in public is frowned upon in this less innocent age.

I’ve calmed down a lot since reaching my thirties anyway. It’s more cats stuck in trees, VAT fraud and dog mess these days. Evil never sleeps.

Talking of long versus short, how about this:

Elderly and disabled people in England are increasingly being denied social services, a report says.

In 2005, I gave up smoking, oh how I miss it. In 2008, I’ve yet to have a single alcoholic drink. It’s proved easier than I expected, I’m not missing it, actually enjoying it and part of me wonders if I’ll drink again.

And then I read the above and I think, what’s the bloody point? I’ll have a thousand Camel Lights and a Jeroboam of Absolut, please landlord.

Those of us found wanting by the Blairite meritocracy don’t want to be any more of a burden to our children than anyone else. Conversely, maybe paradoxically, I think my kids should work for themselves and not expect to inherit anything. Which is just as well, really.

My legacy to my kids will – hopefully – be shit-hot bullshit detectors and coping strategies for life in a world where simple compassion seems to be going the way of the dodo. They will, it seems, inherit one thing however. Me, aged 75, to look after. Soiling myself and drooling and frightening their kids all because I was selfish and gave up fags and drink in my mid thirties.

I’ve been tagged with a meme by the dastardly Mr Teabag. This one involves citing seven things of which I am in favour, in order to disabuse people of the notion that I am a ‘negatavist’ of popular legend.

Mr Challinor also provides an excellent list but rather shoots my fox when he says:

Any miserabilist with a modicum of low cunning can disguise a negative as a positive by subtly darkening the shades of meaning.

A shame. Apart from describing me to a tee, he’s ruined my planned strategy. The first thing was going to be air-dropping pro-war journalists and bloggers on Basra – they can have their glorious liberation but they have to fight for it themselves.

Now I feel compelled – by Challinor’s fine example – to play nice: a rather harder proposition. Here goes:

1. This.
2. This.
3. This.
4. This.
5. This.
6. This.
7. This.

I don’t usually tag but I like this one – it’s positive. So, those under no obligation are: Jim, Tim, Mike, Rachel, Eugenides, Bookdrunk and Mahmoud.

I love technology, I really do. I’ve got my iPod, digital camera, DVD player, bittorrent, mobile phone, tiny remote-control helicopters, blah, blah, blah. We really do live in the future. I first listened to the Beatles’ White Album on my parents’ radiogram some time in the early 1970s. Now, I carry those songs around in my pocket.

And now I’ve got my PVR – Personal Video Recorder. It’s basically a Freeview tuner bolted to a hard disc drive. You set the timer for a programme using the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) and the box records that programme onto the hard drive for later viewing.

Except, what’s the point of an EPG that says a programme starts at X o’clock and ends at Y o’clock when the programme doesn’t start at X o’clock and end at Y o’clock? Or rather, what’s the point of a broadcaster who can’t begin and end a programme at the advertised time? It’s just as well bomb disposal experts aren’t so cavalier about time keeping. Imagine Olympic sprinting if everybody could start when they bloody well liked.

Video Cassette Recorders were clunky and the playback quality was naff but at least it would have recorded the end of ‘Three Men In Another Boat’ the other night and not cut out just before Griff Rhys Jones finds out how much his boat is worth. (I’m not proud I recorded TMIAB but I quite like Dara O Briain and it was the visual equivalent of Horlicks that brought my heartbeat back down to a safe level after having been to see I Am Legend.)

If I have to endure another session of tears from the kids because the PVR has clipped the end of Doctor Who or Robin bastard Hood, I’m going to find the home phone number of the Director General of the BB-shitting-C and phone him every time it happens so he can endure the lamentations of my children as well.

Like a government that was never going to be able to clean up the street of Basra when it couldn’t even scrape the dogshit off the streets of Brighton, surely we’re unlikely to see the cure for cancer (and, more importantly, jetpacks and flying cars) until we can get a television programme to begin and end on time?

No, it really isn’t:

Prince William is to train as a pilot during a four-month attachment with the Royal Air Force.

How come this military dilettante gets to fly helicopters and I don’t? It’s not like he’s going to make a long term career out of it or be allowed to be a decoy for Exocets like his uncle. After several flight hours in this baby, I reckon I could.

This is like those unpaid journalism internships at places like the New Statesman that you can’t afford to take unless you’ve got a rich daddy to foot the expenses, isn’t it? The great and the good just keep on getting greater and gooder, the bastards.

I’d quite like four months learning to fly combat aircraft and then I can realise my long-held ambition of carpet-bombing Hove job centre, the scene of so many miserable months for me back in the century.

(Actually, it’s now an architect’s offices so I can’t. What I’m actually going to do, when I’m rich and famous, is buy the building and have it pushed brick by brick up the fundament of then Secretary of State for Education and Employment, David Blunkett.)

Well, then. Nearly over for another year. Hope you had/are having a good one. They say Christmas is a time for giving and my liver is giving me gip. In return, I shall shortly be giving it a holiday.

Anyway, Mammon was very good to me this year. A shiny new camera and not one but two tiny remote control helicopters.

One of the highlights must surely be the present from my mother-in-law. One of these babies – a Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.

I’m 37 next birthday but my partner’s mum always pitches her presents at my level of arrested development with frightening accuracy. The remote controlled thises and thats. The Star Wars DVD box set. The enormous model of the Starship Enterprise that also doubled as an FM radio.

While tottering around the house in my helmet issuing quasi-fascistic grunts, I noticed this message stamped on the inside:

‘WARNING! This is a toy. Does not provide protection.’

Which makes you wonder about the kind of person who might consider using the Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet as a hard hat and therefore require said warning.

‘You be careful when you’re up on the roof adjusting the television aerial.’

‘It’ll be ok, I’ve got my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet.’

…or…

‘Fancy a spot of pot-holing at the weekend?’

‘Too right, I’ll dig out my Doctor Who Judoon Captain Sound Effects Helmet and I’ll be as safe as houses.’

Surely, the warning message should be left off the helmet, you know, for the good of our species. We could have a whipround and buy one for, well, you know.

I’ve gone off the idea of being cremated when I die. I really want a Viking funeral but I’m pretty sure there’ll be a local by-law outlawing them.

I like George Monbiot’s idea and fancy being buried in the roots of a tree. It’s a kind of reincarnation – my molecules become the fruit and the leaves which are then eaten by caterpillars that then become butterflies. Or die of alcohol and cholesterol poisoning.

But then I read something like this…

The average cost of dying in the UK is nearly £6,000, research has shown.

…and think, sod it, just put me out for the bin men. Two and a half big ones just to drop my carcass in a hole in the ground? You can spend 98 quid on a death notice in the local paper and £149 on a funeral notice but the number people attending your send-off will be largely dictated by the weather.

Six grand? I’d rather my missus spent it on attracting a decent and reliable stud muffin who was nice to the kids. Nah, not really. I demand she commissions a forty foot statue of me that glows in the dark.

Being both physically too weak and mentally too apathetic in the last few day to escape it, I’ve found myself taking another spin on the witless, churning carousel of popular culture that is daytime television.

And, like last time, I’ve been inexorably drawn to the music channels. For instance, I’m fascinated by that clash of the cultural titans that is ‘Ayo Technology’ by 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake and which is being endlessly looped at the minute:

Apart from the video being some kind of stalker or sexual harasser’s instruction manual, it was this lyric that caught my ear:

I’m tired of using technology, why don’t you sit down on top of me…

Now, I’m jaded and cynical to a singular degree but doesn’t that translate to:

Hello, I’m sick of looking at pictures of mucky ladies on the internet, please help me…

Similarly, I’m gripped by the poetic and emotional shallows plumbed by erstwhile Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger’s Baby Love. Couldn’t they have tried just a little harder? I had to drag myself upstairs to administer the antidote of Northern Sky by Nick Drake.

I know her song isn’t supposed to be a hymn to the ages and isn’t even really aimed at people who like music but I have a three year old with a better grasp of emotion, soul and, yes dammit, diction.

Looking at the video for the song, it seems to be aimed more at people who prefer more furtive and solitary pursuits. I suspect Ms Scherzinger’s management have shares in Kleenex as a financial safety net should her ‘pop’ ‘career’ stumble.

One of the advantages of living in a modern society, as opposed to say, Athens in 500 BC, is our flexible approach to refuse collection.

Brighton City Council, for instance, have taken to the not unreasonable policy that, should your wheelie-bin be full, any excess refuse bags placed beside the wheelie-bin will be ignored by the refuse collector and left to rot. (And yes, I do sort through my garbage like a starving racoon to separate out the glass, plastic and paper).

That is why, at 3.15 AM this morning, I was woken by the sound of not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE urban foxes having a violent and protracted Mexican stand-off over the (double-bagged) chicken carcass I put out yesterday. A truly unique sight, I hope you’d agree.

Now, I love foxes. There are loads of them round here (clearly). Amazing animals. I spent a very pleasant hour watching the five little pranksters foxy-boxing, howling at the tops of their little lungs and generally trying to tear each other to bits.

But when you knock on the window and all five brazenly stare up and don’t move, their minds clearly fixed on the prize, you have to wonder how far we – and specifically the abject Brighton City Council – have progressed since the Cretans invented the landfill site in 3000 BC.

And that’s why I’m knackered and feel like I want to thrash a council representative this morning.

(See also Seagulls. This year’s incessantly squawking and rutting contingent seem to have finally buggered off from the roof. Looks like we’re going to have to give the seven-year old the ‘where do babies come from’ chat before they come back as I suspect my ‘oh, she’s just giving him a piggy back’ excuse is wearing thin.)

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.