And then Ms B arrives at the 11th hour and assumes everything's fine....

Meltdown in progress. Handle with care. Toxic.

What is wrong with people? Me and you and us and them and all that lies between? What’s wrong? I’m sometimes too spooked to leave my own home for the very real fear of meeting someone. I simply cannot bear the suspense of not knowing what lurks inside the stranger, of what dark disgrace he is ready to commit, of what sin he shields from view. And I live in the middle of absolutely nowhere. In fact, that’s exactly why I live in the middle of nowhere – the fear and loathing of others, the suspicion that all is not well. 

It’s just too catastrophic out there. The greed and the violence, the hate and despair, and such shocking indifference to pain. The me me me of the glass-eyed generation with their gadget fixations and simmering disorders and incomprehension of “wait”. Just wait. Please. You’ll get your turn, your needs will be met, and gratification will come. But please oh please just wait a fucking minute, why don’t you, my zombified chum?

And that’s just fat and corrupt westerners with way too much time on their hands (like me). It’s enough to make you scream internally and rupture something or other (with a weird sounding name) inside. Is there a doctor in the house? Taxi for soul - hopefully heading upstairs. The bubbling fear and near-surface implosion that waits impatiently, with a gathering guile, for the final and obliterating release. It doesn’t take much, to be sure. Oh oh. I’m going off on one again. How many words already?

And I’ve just got to quit my Rwanda habit. What is wrong with people? I simply cannot leave it alone after all these years. Book after book and film after film and nothing to show for the pain. These dark shrieks that pierce the air, a keening, an imagined abyss that is woundingly real, an affront – an absolute, straight down the middle, fucking affront – to our collective and shared humanity. Is it at all possible, really, please help me, that we all just sat back and watched? Did we actually do that thing? Did Rwandans actually do theirs? It rips into me.

What is wrong with people? Where in the name of God are the good guys? How is it possible to twiddle one’s thumbs as these babies cry out in despair? A club to the head and a knife through the heart and a mother slumped dead in her chair. A blood soaked mountain stinking of death. Too much to take in, too much to deal with, and all so very far away that it should feel just fine. It really doesn't though. I’ve got to quit this Rwanda habit immediately, because it simply does my head in. This shattering confirmation that the world has gone to hell destroys the will to live. Does it not, sweet Romeo? 

I’m going to get help from the UN. They should know a thing or two about quitting Rwanda. The dirty, self-regarding, bastards.

And how come the lefties seem to hate them the most? wtf?

“Esto peccator et pecca fortiter….” (Martin Luther: 1483-1546)

I thought it might make me look properly clever to start off with a quote in Danish, innit, because recent judgments in my head have found me royally lacking in the boffiny intellectual stakes - and foreign words help make folk look smarter than they is. Non, c’est vraiment vrai.

What a grubby pervert that Martin Luther must have been, though. Certainly not the kind of guy you want loping through the neighbourhood and worrying the horses as the winter sun glints provocatively on their swishing tails and brings a playful little sparkle to their come-hither eyes. And teeth. No. 

His quote is incomplete, of course, but I’ve seen enough to make up my mind about his distasteful propensity towards smut and depravity. Why bother disgusting myself further by finishing the sentence and everything? A lot of pious Protestants must be feeling very disappointed with Luther’s debauched outlook right about now. You’ll maybe think twice before ripping the church asunder and plunging Europe into crisis in the future, hmm? you naughty little puritans. Jeez - what a hypocritical monster the man was. (192 words already, oh God).

So I don’t trust him anymore, that’s for sure. I also wouldn’t trust my girlfriend if she started waking me up in the night to deliver match reports on, say, 20/20 cricket. She hates cricket. Refuses to watch it, in fact. And so her analysis would be necessarily flawed. She’d nail the basics, sure – there was grass today at the match, most handsome sleepyhead, and some sticks in the ground and a couple of gangs in colourful costumes who threw stuff at each other – but her stubborn absence from the match itself would quickly shine through.

Where was I? Oh yes. I bought The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian today, but chose not to read either of them. I held them out in front of me with a look of distaste as I wheezed my way back up the hill towards home. They both went straight on the fire. This firm and manly action allowed me to sit back and idly guess what might have been in them. I really wanted to have a strong opinion on the news today – I’ve been meaning to have one for ages – and so burning the papers created a problem.

Thank the Lord, then, for Celebrity Big Brother. I watched this horribly addictive trash today – as I do most days, in fact, because I’m interested in, let’s see, people – and tried to deduce from the show what might be going on in the papers (so that I, too, could have an outbreak of opinion).

Try as I might, though, I just couldn’t quite pull it off. It turns out that it is bloody difficult to assess the contents of a newspaper without first reading it. Who knew?

I’m not going to let that stop me from being utterly shocked about all the things I didn’t read today, however. Far from it. With their relentless insistence on showing the world as it really is - and by covering the dreadful actions of humankind in all its unedifying glory - newspapers run the very real risk of being seen to promote genocide, football violence, car crashes, famine, fatness and even, God help us, Doncaster.

These harsh insights into how so many lives are lived and lost can be very upsetting to those who would like to deny their reality by assuming a haughty disdain. And the answer, of course, is to ban the news. That way everything will get better. No doubt about it. Clever people are behind the idea – reasoning that a ban on the newspapers that report the ugly bits of life will very likely solve the problem of the ugly bits themselves. Admiration for this stance has been quite secret, unfortunately, but there is still time to squeeze your head up your own behind if you’re quick. 

The alternative – a momentous and nation wide debate on the ills of society – is almost too unbearable to think about. How DARE the newspapers force us to consider these things? - especially when we haven’t even read them. Filthy, money-grubbing, sensationalists.

Okay, enough already. Just one more thing. The sneering and bitter prejudice that has fallen upon the members of the Big Brother house has been perfectly dreadful to behold. Without irony or, it would seem, self-awareness, the middle-class hordes have been busily exposing themselves as distastefully vicious snobs with a fine line in bigotry towards the working-classes. Mockingly disdainful and at permanent pains to clumsily point out their own superiorities, they have gleefully joined in the bloodsport of hunting down Jade Goody and making her cry - laughing at her depressing inarticulacy as they do so. Quite rightly, it has to be said, her lack of education has been cited as a possible reason for her own horrible behaviours. She may, at some point, use this as an excuse.

I wonder if our journalists can use this excuse and I wonder, dear reader, can you?

Comments disabled, brain disengaged.....and unless I'm very much mistaken, I'm God.

Men are strange. The last time I actually saw another man was quite a while ago, right enough, but he was strange. He was walking his horse on the beach on Christmas Day. Who does that? I might even have talked to him – just to see – but didn’t fancy the look of his horse. This in itself is quite strange, because I normally find the hindquarters of horses worryingly attractive. There is just something about the shape that appeals.

There is a horse that lives right outside my window. Beautiful thing. Utterly laidback and really good with Emma (my dog). I’m not saying I want to lift up his tail and get atrocious – come on, give me a break, it’s freezing outside – it’s just that, well, I don’t know. So I’m strange too.

And Leo Sayer, it transpires, is not only strange, but also perfectly detached from reality. How in the name of Jesus is it possible to pack so much delusion into such a tiny little singer? The guy is a total cake, to be sure, and his fall from grace was meticulously gruesome to behold.

So three different men – me, Sayer, horse guy on beach – and all of us clearly doolally. It seems fair to extrapolate from this exhaustive survey that all men are strange. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this proves that all men want to caress horses on the beach whilst singing in a high-pitched voice and demanding clean underwear from TV producers. You know it makes sense.

And if you don’t, so what? My comments are disabled and there is nothing you can do. I can sit here pronouncing grandly on a whole manner of things, blithely indifferent to my own escalating pomposity and conveniently shielded from dissent and, you know, reality. I’ve noticed that this is something that quite a few bloggers like to do. They are invariably men. Like I say, we’re a strange lot – and there remains a suspicion that we are rather too in awe of our own fondly imagined sagacity.

How long do you think it would take for a man to start believing that others are as impressed by him as he is with himself? I’m thinking not long. And that’s just the shortest step away from believing that it is enough for you to simply say something for it to be the truth.

With that in mind – and because this is the last time my comments will be disabled – I want to say a few things which cannot be challenged by grubby interlopers. Your silence will be my confirmation and validation: 

1) I am simply magnificent in bed

2) I have no extra padding around my tummy

3) Or face

4) I know everything

5) Strangers find me magnetic and charming

6) I was a real laugh when I was drunk

7) My magnificent man-tool is not laughably small

8) I always remember to cleanse, tone AND moisturise

9) I am generous, wise, not at all needy, and I smile a lot

Now I just need to come back here every day, read these words, notice that they remain blissfully unchallenged, take this as proof of their veracity, and begin the gratifying process of congratulating myself on my own magnificence. Or have I missed something?

Shut it.

Operation Brevity: comments disabled, brain disengaged. Don't discuss.

It has been brought to my attention that I am a self-regarding wanker who loves the sound of his own clacking fingers. I hate it when I bring this type of news to myself, because shooting the messenger becomes markedly less attractive as a knee-jerk response. I don't rule it out completely, no way, but it does lack a certain appeal right now. So here's a picture of a bath I've happily splashed in. A little gift for the hard of thinking. Okay, time to stop talking so much. 

Except to say, however, that I strongly oppose the death penalty. The very notion offends my sensibilities and seems like a betrayal of our shared and common humanity. Better, surely, to rise above the bloodlust and (perfectly valid) thirst for revenge, and afford the lives of those we hate the kind of dignity they singularly failed to confer upon the lives of others. They may view us as weak and as lacking resolve, but the polar opposite is true. It sometimes seems futile to try to explain to dissenters why this course of action feels more like authentic victory. And it always seems weak and woundingly wrong to settle a score with the terminal option of death.

I'm just saying.

All the King's men - no, really.

The world, of course, is quite properly fucked – and that annoys me sometimes. Dark evidence of our malignant decline is hard to avoid and can often simply overwhelm the fragile defences of the moral rearguard action being fought (and lost) by the dwindling armies of the sane. Or, as I like to call these heroic fighters - Me. The ingestion of super big quantities of Lexapro makes it that little bit easier to view myself in these starkly magnificent terms.

But it would appear that during the pre-Lexapro years - in which I busily tried to figure a way of getting myself all dead and still have weeping mourners say what a guy at my funeral - bad people snuck in and made the world grubby (whilst my eye was off the ball and lingering on the oven).

Osama Bin Laden, Ariel Sharon, Wayne Rooney, Lembit Opik, my dad, Tony Blair, men in their thirties who play computer games, Peter Mandelson, Bill O’Reilly, Fox News, foxes (just pass me a gun), supermodels who allow misogynists to dress them all the way to their anorexic graves, people who actually take fashion seriously, Darth Vader, “Ron” in the Harry Potter films, Russian neo-Nazis, Richard Littlejohn, Nazis, incandescent right-wing political commentators, Polly Toynbee, overtly idealist and sentimental left-wing commentators, people with their heads in the sand, me, Ross Kemp On Gangs (Sky One), the Taliban, Dick Cheney, Martha Stewart, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Ashley Cole, Homophobes, Muslim extremists, any extremists, Robert Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, the North Korean guy and Bryan (my former neighbour).

All of them, in their own way, make it near impossible to love the world. You really, really need to be drunk to bear them. The rot set in ages ago, however.

When William Shakespeare wrote Humpty Dumpty in 831 BC, people flocked to cinemas to read it. This piercing satire showed that ruling-class hysteria was already up and running in days of olden yore. Reacting with blind panic to news of the fall, the disastrous overreaction of the authorities is detailed with forensic malice by Shakespeare. I’m sorry – how many men did you say were sent to the recovery operation? Jesus. But they must have at least left some horses behind to, you know, keep an eye on things? WHAT? That’s just plain mad.

And unless I am very much mistaken – which I’m not, because I’m a keen amateur historian – this led directly to Adam and Eve and Manchester United. It became inevitable, and I’m not just saying this with the benefit of hindsight, that someone would have to invent speech and Europe. Noah did the former at Dunkirk when he swept in and saved the day, and Einstein invented Europe early yesterday. Unfortunately, this made human beings feel they could lord it over zebras and allowed the newly created Europeans to steal from Africans. The only solution was reality TV.

Thankfully, this stopped the rot. And anyone who saw the overwhelmingly uplifting victory of Mark Ramprakash in Strictly Come Dancing will recognise the truth of this statement. 

I don’t wish to exaggerate the importance of his victory or to minimise the suffering of generations past, but I think it is fair to say that this is the single most important event ever and that the War On Terror is now all but won as a result of it. A simply breathtaking night for democracy and dancing.

So watch it.

Getting fit for The Ashes

I started training in earnest for the upcoming Ashes series a week ago last Wednesday. You can never be too careful. As I sipped my tea and watched the Sky guy affix one of those ugly dishes to my chimney, I felt a warm glow of contentment gently cloak me. Laughing at him through my window as his ladders swayed playfully in the vicious gale, it struck me that he had a totally horrible job. 

He will be rewarded for his defacing of houses and deliverance of far too many channels with tired and witless comments about the recipient never leaving the sofa again. How we laughed. And then, worse, he will endure the awkward moments as the slob customer tries to find the strength to ask if the wank channels are included in the deal. He never does and they never are. You need to pay extra for that - although I understand you can get a good deal if you opt for the multi-wank package. 

But there is only one reason and one reason alone that I joined the onanistic underclass and got Sky - cricket. The Ashes, to be more precise. And the fact that I now find myself perfectly hooked on stuff like Hong Kong Vets and Used Car Roadshow is neither here nor there. And any blame that needs apportioning needs apportioned in the direction of Rupert Murdoch and should stay the fuck away from my door. I am an innocent in all of this. An innocent and reluctant subscriber to Sky, forced into a corner by terrestrial television having its bid of 87p for the cricket trumped by Rupert Murdoch's one of seventy-three-thousand-hundred-trillion-ten-plus-some-twelve. A lot, anyway. I never stood a chance.

So now I'm in training for The Ashes. Staying up later and later each night, watching more and more garbage as I try to acclimatise to the stupid hours Australians seem to keep. What's wrong with these people? Who in their right mind starts a cricket game at eleven at night?

Anyway, my winter is to be spent in the wee hours and my love for the England cricket team is to blame. From the darkness of Ireland I cast my bloodshot Scottish eyes towards expected English travails in bright and hopeful Australia. This shouldn't mean so much to me, but it does. Come on, England.