Things that make me think Armageddon might not be a bad idea

 Gregg’s cheese and onion pasties

A volcanic hunk of gristle that tastes like a brick of processed cheese fed through a chemical sludge pipe and inevitably burns the top of your mouth off, which means you end up gingerly teasing little bits of it into your gob like you were a porn-star trying to arouse the viewer with the sight of you eating a big fat turd made out of grease.

Constant and pointless reminders that the podcast is on a website, when you’ve just downloaded it from that website

‘You can find this and other podcasts on the BBC website,’ the voice tells you. ‘Just go to bbc.co.uk.’

          I know. How the fuck else do you think I got this shitting podcast? Why do you have to keep telling me, you pricks?

David Cameron’s “green” credentials

“I want this to be the greenest government ever,” David Cameron once said - a guy who spent the five years before being ‘elected’ (or, if we want to nitpick, ‘not being elected’) running around with a rhetorical watering-can trying to make the Tories look caring.

         Here are just some of the resounding achievements of Cameron’s leadership in the environmental sphere:

•        In 2006 David flew to the Arctic in order to take a photo of himself with a wolf 
•        Since getting elected he’s made some really passionate speeches about green issues
•        Maybe it wasn’t a wolf, actually, but a husky
•        Sometimes the podium in his press conferences is a bit green
•         Something with ears and a snout, anyway. Yes. Probably a husky  
•        He did his best for sustainability by trying not to choose to sell off large tracts of Britain's forests, but failed 
•        His team of cleaners and housekeepers only use green cleaning products
•        His 320 hectare lawn’s quite green

The shitty doors on Virgin Trains

Which never open when you want, meaning that you have to punch your way through the entire train as if you had anger management issues and were only taking the sodding train because you liked beating up small electronic buttons.

Julian Lennon

In the plaza of the new yuppiedrome ‘Liverpool One’ complex, a bit of sculpted public art bears an inscription quoting the son of the famous Beatle. ‘Dad once said to me that should he pass away,’ it says, ‘if there was some way of letting me know he was going to be okay… The message would come to me in the form of a white feather.’

          ‘Then… When I was on tour in Australia,’ it continues, ‘I was presented with a white feather by an Aboriginal tribal elder.’

So there you are: the mystical insights of the oldest continuous civilization on earth are utilized to speak to a poshboy millionaire touring his shitty vanity project around a desert.

Books: the 'irritate the Hell out of me' top 5

Cookbooks that seem to assume that the reader is brain damaged

‘HUNGRY?’ asks the ‘Recipes by Innocent’ book as you open it up. ‘The Innocent recipe book… for filling your family with good stuff.’

There are books that inspire, books that educate. There are books that herald the imminent end of civilization. Into this latter category must be placed Recipes by Innocent by the bottled Smoothie people, a fluffy, cutesy, wutesy gloop of smileys and stick-drawings which appears to have been written for cooks who have very recently learnt to use the alphabet.

‘We’re Innocent,’ it explains, ‘and we make stuff that tastes good.’

          It actually gets worse as you go on. At its best it’s like being taught how to make cupcakes by Beatrix Potter; at its worse it’s like self-harming with bake mix.

There’s even a chapter called ‘Bear Food’ accompanied by cute, dainty Winnie The Pooh illustrations of various kinds of bears enjoying the Innocent recipes. ‘Some bears are big,’ it tells us, ‘some bears are small.’

If ever Soviet Realism had done cookbooks this is what it might have looked like.

‘Neuro-Science’ books
Many-layered insights into human behavior – love, sex, philosophy, choice of political party – asserted with total confidence from the observation that when you stick people in a laboratory and show them stimulating pictures a portion of their brain becomes slightly brighter.

"Literary" novels with words like 'awakening' in the title and a picture of a sodding meadow or something on the cover 

So serious and profound you'd think that a fucking pressed flower was going to fall out when you opened the first page.

Girl-hating books written by girls

In ‘Beat The Bitch’ (How to Stop the Other Woman Stealing Your Man), author Tess Stimson, a sort of Bear Grills in a miniskirt, reverses about five hundred years of feminism with all the charm and sensitivity of a female terminator unsheathing a strap-on.

‘Somewhere out there,’ she warns us, ‘a scheming Bitch who can’t be bothered to train her own man to put the seat back down has set her sights on yours.’

A sort of malevolent femi-bot from Planet Misogyny intent on extinguishing all available sexual competition with a flamethrower, you start to wonder for Tess’s sanity as the book goes on. ‘Thumping the shit out of a punchbag while imagining the Bitch’s face pasted onto it,’ she says on page 144, ‘will make you feel one hell of a lot better about life.’

‘There’s an old saying that goes men need only four things in life,’ she concludes. ‘Food, shelter, pussy – and new pussy.’

Women burnt their bras in the sixties so that this could happen. 

‘Posh woman’ cookbooks

Astoundingly stylish recipes for meals that cost £2,485 to make intended to be consumed by tumbler-clinking shitbags in their retro-fitted cubist prisons.

          ‘Now some might just rustle this up on the hob, but I prefer to fire up the low-emmision charcoal-stove we erected beside our recent barn extension…’

If it looks like child porn, it's probably just being ironic.

‘Our models are real girls who are often employees or friends of the company,’ announced edgy retailer American Apparel the last time it was criticised for using startlingly young looking models in explicit poses in an ad campaign, something they found themselves in trouble for recently once again. 'They do their own hair and makeup and aren't Photoshopped. From time to time people are made uncomfortable by this, and it occasionally causes an unfortunate reaction.’

          Which evidently shows just how far we uptight Brits have misunderstood their vision. While they might have looked like predatory profit driven marketers peddling a kind of quasi-child pornography to lend an ‘edgy’ look to their products, they’re actually liberating us all from the tyranny of those plasticky Photoshopped models. A bit of reality. That’s good, isn’t it? After all, what kind of uptight prude could possibly label this

           as ‘pornographic, exploitative of women and inappropriately sexualised young women’, as the stuffy old Advertising Standards Authority would have it? 

You see, according to the hipster-targeted retailer, these are the kind of ‘real, non-airbrushed, everyday people’ that ‘normal people can relate to’. They’re the kind of images ‘people regularly share with their friends on social networks’. Nothing wrong with that, is there? I’m on Facebook, and I don’t think any of my friends on there would think anything odd about someone passing around a photo like

 that. True, you could say that stripping girls who look about seventeen and photographing them in their underwear for commercial purposes is the kind of thing which might get some people landed in prison, or at least get them a reputation as exploitative quasi-pornographers. You could say that a company that asks potential employees to submit full body shots of themselves before they’re taken on, that’s plagued by sexual harassment cases, and owes $121.5 million to Lion Capital and Bank of America because their sneering, faux-hip, looks-obsessed brand is starting to look a bit – well – eugenic, deserves everything it gets.

But only prudes would say that! You can’t call American Apparel ‘exploitative’ just because they’re exploiting people; they’re just part of the liberated entertainment industry that's empowering girls by stripping them and taking photos of them. After all, could there possibly be anything more empowering and liberating than

 that? If it looks like child porn, it's probably just being ironic. Imagine how great all these young women must feel with all this empowerment in the air.

Shitty jobs – that’s how we’ll make Britain great again

‘We’re looking for outgoing, proactive people here,’ the woman in charge of recruitment said joylessly, in a tone of voice that suggested she’d missed her medication that morning. ‘Would you say you fit that description?’

I watched the drizzle hammer at the window beside a sign that said ‘Performance Targets’.

‘Er, yeah,’ I mumbled. ‘Outgoing and proactive... Yeah, that’s a pretty good description of me. Sometimes, anyway.’

I really didn’t want to be here.

This isn’t just because I don’t like wet, miserable business parks. It’s because I don’t believe in this. In any of it.

 ‘We need to get Britain working by creating jobs,’ ran the Conservative manifesto in 2010. ‘Millions are living the misery of unemployment.’ Left or right, the consensus is that the panacea to our limping, staggering economy is jobs. Jobs provide income, income provides growth, growth provides jobs. Jobs are a Good Thing. Everyone thinks so. Jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs...

            Well I don’t. I think a lot of jobs are pretty awful, quite frankly. And unnecessary. Sit in rush hour traffic and you could self-harm your way through an entire Heart FM breakfast show before you saw one fulfilled looking face; alright, maybe you wouldn’t expect to, but are these jobs really all that useful for society? Builders and dinner ladies and teachers are useful. But management consultants? PR wonks? Ambulance chasers? How is it of benefit to society to have a load of people sitting in a business park cold-calling people at home who haven’t asked, aren’t interested, and would be better off without it? All those call centre slaves peddling junk loans or no-win-no-fee claims – how does that make a better, more trusting society?

I’m not trying to undermine just how horrible unemployment is. But does that really mean we get to justify any kind of job whatsoever on the basis that it provides ‘growth’? As far as I can see, drug dealing adds to GDP and employs people (and also contributes to at least one kind of ‘growth’, to judge by the number of students visiting garden centres to buy industrial numbers of window boxes) – does that mean we should encourage that too? How about jobs that involved mis-selling PPI, or ruining businesses, or bankrupting the state from the offices of a City skyscraper? Are they a good thing too? How about the jobs created by clearing up the financial wreckage of the biggest recession in half a century, created by people whose jobs were supposed to be good for growth? Is that good for growth?

I’m confused.

‘Look at the noble savage whom the missionaries of trade and the traders of religion have not yet corrupted with Christianity, syphilis and the dogma of work,’ says the nineteenth century revolutionary Paul Lefargue, in a book rather attractively entitled The Right to be Lazy, ‘and then look at our miserable slaves of machines.’ Well, I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but I did happen to see some ‘miserable slaves of machines’ with my own eyes recently when by some bizarre chance an agency picked up my dishevelled joke of a C.V. and got me an interview for a call centre position in a business park three and a half thousand miles outside of Manchester.

Or at least it felt like it as I rode there in the rain. The road began as a friendly, curvy little thing, like a partner making pleasant chit-chat on a date – and then suddenly without any warning tipped me unceremoniously into a ditch and announced that it was now a motorway, Thank you very much. I had to drag my bike through the mud another half mile just to get off it; finally, spattered and fume-choked, I escaped onto a slip-road, doubled back, doubled up, squinted at a bus stop, nearly went as far as the airport, thought about leaving Manchester via the airport, before I finally chanced on a building that looked like an oversized Kodak camera and staggered up towards the entrance lobby.

I have to admit it wasn’t exactly a great start. I was already appallingly late, and by now looked as if I’d slept in the field of one of the local farms, possibly cuddling up with a family of pigs to get me through the night. A woman standing at reception watched me in horror as I neared the entrance. For a minute I thought she was about to press the alarm button and have me manhandled to the floor by security, but perhaps they were used to people coming in to beg for change, because with a wary look she buzzed me inside.

‘Did the agency tell you the wrong time?’ my future employer said hesitantly, glancing at my dogshit trousers, my rain-spattered face.

‘Er... Yeah,’ I muttered, turning red. ‘Probably. The fucking road turned into this motorway...’

I tailed off. 
‘Yeah, they told me the wrong time,’ I muttered.

There was a silence.

‘I... guess you’d better come upstairs.’

I was led past a hive of call centre drones, all gabbling and babbling into headsets in long, regimented rows. It reminded me a bit of that scene where Neo wakes up in The Matrix, except the embryonic humans in the film weren’t attempting to get someone to sue their local swimming pool. Also, the ones in the film at least had the chance of suddenly waking up somewhere in a better reality. A beefy bloke on the end stared at me in amazement, as if I were the first outsider he’d seen for months. I suspected they might have kept him chained to his seat.

My interviewer walked quickly, like she was worried I might be about to pocket some of the electrical wiring, and promptly seated me in a little interview room where she cross-examined me with a checklist.

‘Are you working at the moment, Dale?’  

I cleared my throat.

‘Er, I’m sort of freelancing,’ I said, in what I hoped was an outgoing, proactive kind of voice. ‘Trying to get a writing career together.’

She glanced at me with the same kind of warmth you might regard a tricky carpet stain.

‘Writing career?’

‘Yeah.’ I felt myself wilting a little. ‘Er, I’m sort of putting a few feelers out there right now.’ 

A long silence.

She looked at me with a sort of vague sympathy for someone out of work. I looked at her with a sort of vague sympathy for someone working here.

‘Right,’ she said.  

The rest of the interview took about as long as it takes the average person to blow their nose. As I stumbled back out of there (rather unceremoniously shown the exit, I noticed, without much in the way of further contact mentioned), I gazed around at the drizzle, the voided landscape, the acres of asphalt, the gigantic motorway, and wished – just for a moment – that I could believe in all this: that I could readily spring out of bed each morning and burn a cloud of hydrocarbons along a massive motorway in order to sit in a cramped booth for nine hours ringing up people I didn’t know, making the world an even shittier place than it already is, and be glad I had a job. But I couldn’t. I just wanted to go home. They might call it growth, but quite frankly I think it's just an enormous waste of time.  

Urban Outfitters? It's like a hard-drugs version of Accessorize

 Here are just some of the essentials the style-conscious hipster can pick up in Urban Outfitters:

·       a mug that accuses you of being a ‘coffee slut’

·       some hip flasks with the injunction to ‘fuck my liver’  

·       a book that says ‘This is not a book’ on the cover  

·       a pair of retro ‘Vans Classics’ sneakers placed on a stone plinth like they were fucking Mesopotamian carvings on display at the British Museum

·       human hair from one of the less famous Nazi concentration camps, woven into a novelty pillow celebrating the 1981 Nintendo 'Donkey Kong' classic (this isn't actually true) 

·      a bathtowel decorated with pictures of worryingly young naked girls, which isn’t illegal, because it’s being ironic

·      another three floors of worthless posturing shit displayed with astonishingly high prices you’d have to be a dribbling moneyed scumcake to even contemplate buying

Security guards with radios, trainers on museum-plinths, Guantanamo indie blasted out so loud it makes your ears cry - the minute you walk in you know that this isn’t so much a shop as a prison camp for the terminally cool. Certainly it's hard to see the difference between most of the stuff in here and your average car boot sale, except that it costs twenty four times as much as you feel it should and somehow lowers your legitimacy as a human being if you purchase it. 

I couldn’t imagine wanting to ‘outfit’ my apartment here – not unless I was a millionaire cokehead reupholstering a Hoxton wankpad in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse – but I did at least learn one important axiom of twenty first century retail: that you can put any old rubbish in a deep brick recess under cold strip light and declare it a must-have. You’ve got to hand it to Urban Outfitters. They could make turds look cutting edge.

Let’s stop kidding ourselves: the only truly sustainable lifestyle option is to stop living

‘Transport was a green priority and, fortunately, Fishers Farm Park were prepared to supply us with a Shire horse and antique hay wagon,’ one green-minded bride reports happily in a Guardian piece about ‘sustainable weddings’. ‘After the wedding I crushed the empty champagne bottles and put them in our kiln to make cheese plates.’

... Shire horse? Kiln?

           I’m not resource hungry by western standards. I bike around, live in shared flats, eat mainly biscuits. I haven’t got as much a carbon footprint as a carbon tiptoe. So when I encounter the kind of smug landed gentry who spend their weekends rustling up vegan recipes on their five grand fitted kitchen, and then boast about it in a selfless, heroic way that suggests they're personally responsible for reversing climate change because they only buy free range – well, you know. I'm all for green, but green chic... 

Thinking green: BP''s contributions to sustainable energy

It’s easy to be sustainable, of course, when you have access to a large home and garden, and one or two cars, and money and time, and when you live in leafy hamlets that necessitate burning the annual carbon quota of Andorra just to drive to – the kind of ‘village’ filled with cottage industries who massage the guilt of middle class professionals by selling them artisan food and home-made crafts and allow them to indulge in the fantasy that they're a benign visitor from a Thomas Hardy novel. It’s hard to see how you could master anaerobic composting from a one bedroom tower block flat in Luton.

Still, it’s easy to see why ‘green guilt’ is a flourishing industry when you look at the examples we’re given. 

Cameron and right-hand hit man George Osborn are ‘passionate’ about sustainable policy, which is why they've passionately refrained from putting any in place. Sure, some might carp on about what the Coalition has so far done to reduce carbon emissions (nothing, basically) or promote a move from nuclear to renewable energy (nothing, basically) or improve infrastructure for cyclists (nothing, basically) or support the green economy (nothing, basically) or sustain grants for people to insulate their homes (nothing, basically) or not try to sell off large tracts of Britain’s forests (nothing, basically) or curb unnecessary car use or shorthaul flights (nothing, basically) or try to live up the promise to be the ‘greenest government ever’ – nothing, basically.

But it doesn't matter. Because they know the secret, and the secret is this: it’s not about being green, it’s about seeming green.

Just look at the corporate sector. Thought multinationals were just rapacious leviathans bleeding the earth dry? Wrong – they have to respond to democratic pressure too. The major dirty industries have now all realised the error of their ways and done what they should have done long ago – invest staggering sums of money in expensive PR to make themselves look more sustainable. Who would have thought that Shell and BP and Exxon would turn out to be green! Well, they are. Not in the sense of ‘good for the environment’, perhaps – but ‘green’ in the sense of ‘our website and adverts sort of look green’.

          ‘Look,’ they could say. ‘Our adverts sort of look green.’

          ‘But that doesn’t mean you’re green,’ one might reply to them. ‘You’re still extracting oil from brutal regimes at staggering environmental cost to be  converted into polluting hydrocarbons.’

The age of responsible oil 

          ‘We are,’ they would reply. ‘Go and look at the website. It’s really green.’

          ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ breathes the renamed BP – an odd name, perhaps, for a company whose business is, however you look at it, petroleum. ‘Petroleum’ is what they should have called themselves, perhaps – as in ‘British Petroleum’. Still, go and look at the website. It’s really green.

          It’s an example we can all learn from. Let’s face it, in environmental terms we’re all pretty much screwed – only this summer an entire United Kingdom’s worth of ice disappeared from the polar caps. Anyone who believes that installing a high efficiency lightbulb is going to save us from Eco-Geddon is indulging in a dreamy, planet-sized slab of self-denial, but at least we can make ourselves feel better about ourselves while we commit species suicide. The real challenge we have ahead of us is to learn to enjoy our plasma TVs and central heating in while telling ourselves we’re blameless because our house is built with 0.7% energy saving materials. 

Think I'm being ironic? Then ask yourself how willing you are to give up hot showers, and Wi-Fi, and shorthaul flights, and your phone, and a fridge, and all the other million things that you're certainly not going to give up. The idea that we can continue to enjoy these things without staggering environmental cost and concomitant human suffering is a bit like the citizens of Atlantis throwing down a few sandbags to line their patios even as the waves begin to lap at their shore. As far as I can see the only sustainable lifestyle option is to stop living.
But at least we can bring the mood up a bit. Buy an organic turkey this Christmas. Buy some soap made with marginally less harmful products or a 'bag for life'. Treat yourself to a little greenwash. Watch Al Gore's film again, where the earth's environmental crisis is reduced to a slideshow on an Apple laptop, a laptop made, presumably, with sweatshop labour using precious semi-conductor metals mined in an African warzone. Watch that beautiful David Attenborough thing about the ocean again - transmitted to energy-burning plasma screens all across the country to remind us just how destructive all our energy burning and plasma screens are. Greenwash is such beautiful therapy. The planet's ****ed, but at least we can enjoy the closing ceremony. 
  

Just remember: you’re all in this together

Britain: a place where people born into wealth
and privilege can rise into even more wealth and privilege

Learning disabilities, terminal illness and cancer? Sounds like you need to be getting ready for work, you little slacker.

Isn’t it annoying when you hear about workshy shirkers loafing around on sickness benefit when they could be filling call-centres and Primark store-rooms? Take twenty seven year old Ruth Anim, who apparently “can’t work” just because she needs a “one-to-one carer” and has such severe learning disabilities she can’t even cross a road. Since when did a terminal illness stop anyone manning the phones at Claims Direct? Are we going to let so-called ‘cancer sufferers’ lie around enjoying their chemo when they could be made to do low-paid shifts for big companies?

Another lazy good-for-nothing avoiding work

It annoys the government at any rate, who are busily turfing mountains of the idle sick onto jobseeker’s allowance with a secret weapon known as its ‘Work Capability Assessment’ (actually a New Labour baby, for the record). Because this is a party which believes in helping yourself. More of these claimants need to follow the example of Stephen Hill, who was successfully forced by the government back into work – so successfully, in fact, that he keeled over from a heart attack 39 days later. Now that’s the kind of determination everyone’s looking for! Just look at the Cabinet itself, which is full of inspiring examples of riches-to-riches. Did they just sit there lying around waiting for somebody else to make it happen? No: they pulled their finger out, gritted their teeth, and inherited substantial sums of money. And if they can do it, so can’t you.

Let’s face it, austerity has to be borne equally, which is why the hugely wealthy  families and friends of the Cabinet are committed to not bearing much of it. In fact the rich have fascinatingly novel approaches to taxation – which revolve around a complex Economics concept known as ‘not paying any’. Not that any of this ‘tax avoidance’ could be called ‘tax avoidance’ or anything dirty like that. It’s just a different way of working. Thinking outside the box, if you like. Currently the wealthy are thinking so far outside the box on the issue of tax that they’ve actually flown the box to an offshore haven, probably via private jet.

Cameron's pad: just like you and me, really

Top Shop owner Philip Green, for example, was so excitingly progressive in his approach to tax on his dividend of £1.2 billion (the biggest pay check in British corporate history) that he channelled it, excitingly and progressively, straight to his wife in Barbados, without paying a single penny – a £285m loss to the taxpayer. David Cameron was so impressed  he made him a senior consultant to the government.  

Of course you could say that it’s sickening to watch a Tory cabinet born into enormous privilege attack sick people for not having the energy to work in a call centre sweatshop twelve hours a day. You could say that all this is a cynical and predatory attack on the most defenceless in society from those who wield huge amounts of power, thinly disguised beneath a veneer of hard work and entrepreneurialism. Because ‘austerity’ is a magic word that’s full of magical surprises, and one of the most surprising of all is that it means something completely different when it comes to ordinary people – who instead face an exciting new era of falling wages and benefits cuts, while the government does everything it possibly can to protect its cabal of landed gentry, Royals, bankers, media moguls and fox hunting visitors from the nineteenth century from the tiniest bit of financial pain.

All of which raises a new possibility for trying something radical. You listening? Okay. Developed by economists and tested a little bit in places like Scandinavia, this drastic and untested measure is known by economists as ‘taxing the rich’, and could, if done gently, do some amazing things. Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton, has pointed out that the wealthiest 1,000 persons (just 0.003% of the adult population) in Britain possess ‘enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire current UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30 billion to spare.’ Luckily our own beloved Tory government is unlikely to listen to such crackpot ideas! So let’s get back to hounding those terminally ill, learning difficulties, heart-problem loafers into underpaid jobs, in the hope that it might raise a few pence here and there. That’s thinking out of the box – carry on like that and there’s a good chance some of these people might end up in one.