Tag Archives: alcohol

I’d rather be Pol Pot

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Everyone’s been fired.

More accurately, some abnormally lucrative contract in this barbaric government silo has been revoked, unrenewed or disavowed, or whatever the Tories do to consultancy firms in the age of tightening ringpieces. Each of that consultancy’s steeds is to be ceremonially slaughtered in favour of a set of baying replacements from a similarly rapacious private sector drone factory in the middle of next month.

I’m not part of the ruthless gang being run out of town by the Deloitte brothers, who have begun sending in a parade of precocious children in identical spectacles to replace the overpaid adults surrounding me. My contract is unaffected and they hoped I would stick around, not least to help with the ‘transition’. That simple word was enough to send me running screaming for whichever hill from which I last saw my dignity. Adopting some combination of solidarity and fear of being set up, I’ve decided to join the rest in raiding the stationery cupboard for A4 pads I’ll take home but never use – I have quit.

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A month in Marrakesh

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I lived in Marrakesh for a while, a few days, minutes or months ago. Time has never really been my strong point. I’m the type of person who says ‘a few days ago’ and that can mean anything from yesterday to when I was a child. Anyway, I went and lived in Marrakesh for a month, just for something to do really, to see if I could break the monotony of life, of which there is plenty when you live in a humdrum village full of pubs and gossips.

I went to Marrakesh during Ramadan. A few people had told me it would be an interesting time to go. I didn’t really know what this meant because any time going to a foreign land should be interesting, right? Basically what interesting meant in this context, as far as I can work out, was that nowhere was selling booze out there.

For people from anywhere other than the UK this wouldn’t be a problem. For us UKians, it’s a fucking nightmare. It’s shit being in a city without booze, especially when you have no idea when the religious festivities are going to be over so you can quench that thirst.

What do they expect us to do? Sit patiently and wait for them to decide that this religious nonsense has gone on long enough? Should they not at least build some sort of medical booze tent in the centre of the city for us sunburnt tourists to go and get plastered in? Perhaps a kebab shop just outside the tent for us to shout at the owners in after a day on the golden nectar. I really don’t think that is too much to ask for, do you? They should really put some sort of system in place for next year before the British tourists in the city begin thinking it’s time to reform the Empire!

Anyway, thanks to my British upbringing, after a few hours of being in the city I managed to sniff out the only place in Marrakesh that was selling booze. There are three supermarkets in the city and of course the one the furthest from my fucking apartment was the only one of the three selling beer. A walk of 2km every other fucking day was in order, to fill up a bag full of beautiful beverages and then walk home in the sweltering 40-degree heat. At least I was sweating out all of the beer from the previous day, can’t hurt I guess.

After about two weeks of this and just as I’d had enough of this walk, finally the religious barrier was lifted. I’m not even religious for fuck’s sake. Ramadan was over, the cafés, restaurants, bars and other supermarkets slowly began to regain their wits and put beer back on their menus. It was like the end of some natural disaster in a film, the dust settling and people emerging blinking onto the streets.

And finally they allowed us tourists to take over once more. Travellers could be spotted climbing out of their holes, dusting off their Hawaiian shirts and swimming shorts and walking into bars where they smiled, laughed and drank merrily. It was a magical time.

What are they thinking taking religious values over money for a month anyway? Throughout the two weeks of Ramadan I was there, I had countless tourists coming up to me asking if I knew where to buy beer. I don’t know why they asked me – perhaps the comfort in my stride lead them to believe that I was half cut. I was very proud of myself as the only bastard in the city to know where to buy booze, at least for those two weeks.

I promise you that I did a little bit more than just drink beer while I was there. I also walked around half drunk, pointed tourists in the direction of the oasis that I had found, got into amazing conversations with Moroccans about their drug habits and my drink habits, and even drank the wine as well. It is fair to say that for the most part I was a typical English tourist for a month in Marrakesh.

The tyranny of rope

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Let me tell you a story. At about 11.15pm on Monday night, a very un-Monday number of Strongbows to the good, I skipped gleefully out of a kebab shop beside a tube station that’s closed for maintenance for months. With a 15-minute walk up the road to the next station it seemed wise to eat my spoils en route, and what should appear in front of me but a battered office chair. I’m almost certain it wasn’t an ABV-induced mirage; either I was sitting on an office chair or I’ve turned into a fakir.

This chair had been dumped in the small forecourt of a place called Maple House, the front of which is covered with metal bars, CCTV cameras and a distressing sign saying ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY: Circle Anglia Residents Only’. Nevertheless there were no lights on inside and there seemed to be no-one who might object to me giving this chair one final hurrah before its trip to the incinerator.

I hadn’t reckoned with the British people’s inherent need to be told what not to do.

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More orange than orange juice

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Many years ago, one of those misguided souls forced to interact with me from time to time was finding it hard to accept my dismissal of the power of prayer. Would you never, ever pray, he asked me, “Not even when the plane’s going down?”

Considering I have little intention of going to Malaysia it seems a moot point, but I honestly contend I wouldn’t turn to prayer in such a case. This is because there’s only one thing that can cause an antitheist such as myself to dismiss everything I know to be true and bow before an almighty God, beseeching Him to ease the suffering of my soul in return for a life of penitence, worship and, as a coincidental by-product one assumes, kiddie fiddling.

Hangovers.

It’s quite impossible to explain the strength and breadth of the hangovers I get, increasingly just from walking past a pub much less going in one. They vary in sharpness and duration, sometimes don’t involve a headache, frequently include a draining of all energy from the body, are often accompanied by a less than regular movement and always, always come equipped with a level of nausea not even long-term chemotherapy patients could comprehend.

The sickness of a proper hangover cannot be compared to any other human experience. Imagine sitting in the back seat of a car being swerved about by an 85 year old with acute myopia, while reading a book about being in a storm at sea and being kicked repeatedly in the groin by a vomit-covered child with a faecal smearing habit, simultaneously chewing on a freshly microwaved chicken leg rolled in batter made from off milk and rotten eggs, wrapped in a used sanitary towel. That is the imagery I use at the midpoint of a hangover to make myself feel better.

A hangover day doesn’t always start with the appalling knowledge that you will soon crave death; sometimes the body allows you a little window of hope, perhaps up to a couple of hours, during which you begin to wonder if you’ve gotten away with it. You never have. You can eat and drink whatever you like in that glowing morning spell of health and good cheer, but it won’t help. A little forward planning is called for – will whatever you put down the pipe make a smooth reappearance when mixed with stomach acid and fired like a devastating series of projectiles at the toilet bowl? You might want to avoid anything scratchy, like toast.

Very little helps prevent a hangover. Drinking pints of water before you sleep does nothing but make you piss all night, disrupting your much-needed unconsciousness. Aspirin and ibuprofen seem to have no meaningful effect. Kebabs are not the answer, much as at times in my life I’ve been quite certain that kebabs are the answer to absolutely everything.

Thus it becomes all about the cure. Pizza is the universal fixer, and though it can take its time it does generally work. Sadly my situation dictates that I can’t always have a pizza when I need one; pizza every other day appears to be frowned upon by a society with little interest in my well-being.

Other alleged cures include fizzy water, a magical liquid that somehow manages to be even more fizzy on the way back up, tearing your throat to ribbons like an Arab Spring revolutionary waving a cardboard banner at a water cannon. Bananas supposedly restore something you’re likely to be short of, potassium or sodium or one of those other elements that sometimes you need and sometimes will kill you, but keeping down something with the consistency of a banana is a pipe dream. Some people swear by tea. With a hangover, I swear at tea as it shoots out of me like the brown outrage from a Joskin Tornado 3, with Free Steering axle plus many other extras.

Having experienced countless hangovers in the last quarter of a century, it’s tragic that I’ve only recently discovered something to mitigate the discomfort of being sick as a border collie after a grass bender. An ice-cold bottle of water from the fridge by my side, between each retch I pour a healthy dose down my throat, ensuring cold water is the most likely substance next back up the tube. The idea of swallowing while the body’s trying to push stuff out is tricky for the brain to deal with, though it didn’t seem to do Linda Lovelace any harm. It seems the body just wants something out, be that water, last night’s 12th Guinness or the only liquid known to man that can be more orange than orange juice.

My grandfather told me once that his hangovers got worse up until the age of about 50, then slowly eased after that. That would mean over 12 more years of this and I don’t think I can take it. And yet obviously I can’t stop drinking, or contemplate drinking less, because allowing light and focus into all other areas of my life can only end with me in either HMP Wandsworth or trundling slowly into Euston beneath the wheels of a Northern line train.

I ask just this of you: please don’t belittle my hangovers. They may be avoidable, all other consequences aside, but if I drink half as much as you and yet I’m the one feeling like Alexander Litvinenko the next morning you can believe that the words “it’s only a hangover” will be ringing in your ears as I blow groceries all around wherever you’re standing. There has to be a measure of justice – I don’t need you haranguing me when my body’s already doing a fine job of that itself.

Accept that I’m seriously ill, and leave me be. One look at my harrowing face should be enough to tell you this plane’s going down without you flashing a laser pen into the pilot’s eyes.

The cormorant

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At lunchtime today I went to sit by the Thames. I sat on a bench a little way west of HMS President for about 15 minutes, during which time I completed as much work of importance as I had all morning in my valueless non-job.

As I sat there I noticed a bird, standing on a large post protruding from the water. Its wings were unfurled as it dried itself in the faint sunlight emerging between cracks in the impressive clouds overhead. I know a little of birds from a few years as a youthful twitcher, half a life ago. It was a cormorant.

These can be angry beasts, but they’re uncommon enough to make them a pleasant sight during a lunch break away from desks, computers, meetings and people using words like ‘solutionise’. As I stared at the cormorant, at those fearsome clouds, at London, at the river, and considered life, one question struck me above all others.

What the fuck are all these people jogging for?

Hundreds of them, heading in both directions, most of them past their prime already. Where they’re going I have no idea and how they’ll deal with reeking like a turd rolled in Camembert when they get there is anyone’s guess.

The cormorant wasn’t fat, and didn’t seem overly concerned about flapping its wings to stay slender. It also didn’t seem to care much about eking out the very longest period of years it could before it became the sort of mess that even rats turn their noses up at as the corpse washes ashore at Rotherhithe. In all, the cormorant seemed perfectly happy with its place in the Milky Way.

Nobody could accuse me of being happy, I’ll grant you, but as the days tick by it’s becoming increasingly clear that this is all there is and moaning about it isn’t helping. I even said to someone the other day, “If I was really likely to top myself I probably would have done it by now”, which may or may not be true but speaks to a slight relaxation of the existential angst in my mind, if not the underlying rage-laden desolation.

As we’re all well aware, there are constant stories in the press about how walking 20 minutes a day makes you immortal one week and fucks your knees up the next. Today’s is: ‘Having heartburn for three weeks or more could be a sign of cancer’. I don’t know a man alive who doesn’t get heartburn regularly. I chew through Rennies like a six year old overdosing on Fruit Pastilles.

Until around a year ago I was a semi-regular visitor to the gym. I hated it more than bile could express but I went in the faint belief I was holding back the inevitable tide of fat-bastardry. It didn’t work; I was slowly rolying anyway. And since I stopped, I neither feel nor look measurably worse. Just older.

Because old is coming, regardless of how much you sprint past Cleopatra’s Needle at 1.15pm every day, head bobbing like a drunk on the tube home, clad in your tightest shorts so I can see every bulge of your astounding balls, though given your horrific sweaty face and pollution-matted barnet you could just be an ugly woman and those could be flaps for all I know.

What you hope to gain from your lunchtime exertions is between yourself and the last nurse who asked you to cough while she cupped. Perhaps you’re hoping to spend extra time with your children in later life. There’s nothing your children will thank you for more than you spending your healthier days in an office, then running, then back in an office, then too tired to function when you get home, before slowly succumbing to dementia and decay so horrifically your grandchildren’s nightmares become populated by slowly necrotising old codgers holding out their arthritic digits to scratch at their skulls with yellowing nails.

On my way back from the impromptu London marathon taking pace by the river, I walked past a man sitting cross-legged in Milford Lane. Sound asleep, glittering gold can of Special Brew by his side. Can you joggers honestly tell me you’ve a better life than him? You get back to your already humid office, sweating like Paul Merson in Ladbrokes, as he wakes up fit as a spring lamb, ready to take on all-comers just as soon as he can find the next course of his breakfast/lunch/dinner of champions. He might well be dead within the next 12 months but he’ll know very little about it once it’s over, just like you. You don’t find many regrets beneath the graveyard grass.

Because the cross-legged jakey is the cormorant. He doesn’t care, there’s no obvious reason why he should, and he makes more sense to me than an entire battalion of Lunchtime Linfords. I’d be more likely to share his dazzling chariot to oblivion than your never-ending race for deathlessness if I didn’t know he’d sooner jump up and down on my throat than let me share his tramp juice.

Perhaps he’s dead already. When I looked back along the river, the cormorant had gone. Run all you like; just be in no doubt where you’re running to.

The precipice

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The bittersweet tears of the first of London’s autumn rains drip down the window, as I stare at the computer screen staggered that I could type such scalding horseshit in a sentence. It is nonetheless autumn, which is edging ever nearer Christmas and will probably last for around three weeks before the world freezes for months and Nigel Lawson pops up to remind us how he told us all along global warming was a load of bollocks.

Autumn matters to me for a number of reasons. It signifies the beginning of the busy period in a social life that revolves around music and drinking, as bands from faraway places such as Bolton and Brighton simultaneously try their hand in the Big Smoke in order to shift a few festive units. It also signifies the darkening of days and that glorious moment where, once a year, I find out whether I’m going to go mental.

Every year around this time, the retirement of the sun from most of our days either triggers the joy of a man who basically really fucking hates the sun and all it stands for (heat, happiness and the continuation of life on Earth) or brings forth his more sunny colleague, who greets the fireball hiding with a mixture of horror and outrage. I don’t know which of these two clowns will inhabit my brain for the next few weeks; I don’t get to choose. They both show up, there’s a duel around mid-October and the winner spends until at least mid-December gloating over the vanquished corpse.

Sometimes it will be a happy autumn. I genuinely like rain, much as the fact stuns those very people who shower every morning yet greet outdoor water from above with terror, scattering to doorways as though it’s still the 80s and acid rain is still a real thing. Walking the streets of London in a downpour can, some autumns, be one of the joys of my life.

Other autumns I may hold my hand out to catch a few drops, squeeze them to death in fury and then punch the nearest lamp post just to ensure the last few water-based microorganisms have been extinguished. Even if I get to be an old man, punching inanimate objects will never get tired or seem futile, logic be damned.

Some autumns I will surround myself with friends in pubs, acting the way I always do in pubs, cracking imbecilic one-liners and behaving in ways best classed as ‘low-level hooligan’ for the amusement of others, all the while wanting to be anywhere but there. Anywhere but a pub; I know, I can barely believe I typed that either. Some autumns I’ll be watching the next big rock band at a toilet venue in Camden, watered-down Strongbow in my hand, one of my favourite pastimes, and spend the entire gig thinking of nothing more than a nice family-sized tub of aspirin and an ice-cold Jeff Buckley album to wash them down with.

Tonight I’m going to the pub with a group of people I know well, though they are still mostly in the realm of colleagues rather than friends. Nice people, pleasant bunch, and it’ll be fine. Yet if tonight was two weeks from now, I might either be gulping happily at my fourth pint of ruby red ale or putting on the type of rictus generally worn by a Carry On actor before the cameras stop rolling and he sprints for his second bottle of gin that afternoon.

There’s probably a clinical diagnosis to be had here, perhaps some pills to take, but being the type of bull-headed idiot who’d rather die of rectal cancer than let a nurse look up my hole – an average man, in other words – I prefer to soldier on until that special October snapping sound that alerts me to a decision. What will the fortune cookie say this year? ‘All clear’! That’s brilliant, that’s fantastic, I couldn’t be more oh wait no it just says ‘Run’, I wonder what that could mean?

Yes yes, just get on with it, I know. People have far worse lives etc. My issue, though, is that it could go either way. If I was a miserable bastard who couldn’t be around people, pets or anything with a pointed edge at least I’d know. But there’s a choice coming, and it’s not mine to control. Will this be the year I run screaming from the football at half time and find myself sitting on a bench in Regent’s Park the following afternoon with little idea how I got there? Or will this be the greatest run-up to Christmas since the year Bad Santa came out?

We’ll find out, in due course. This is the precipice. I sit and watch the autumn rain tumbling down the pane, each drop reflecting the fear in my eyes, safe in the everlasting knowledge that at least I can finish this bloody sentence however I like.

Cats and dogs dressed up like cakes

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There’s so much shit going on in the world it can be hard to stay on top of it all. I am concerned about the shit stuff, like the wars and famines and so on, but I can’t spend all day every day reading about it. I have to find something more light-hearted to drag me through the endless minutes of what can feel like an interminable day at work.

This regularly leads me to stories about animals. I can spend hours looking at pictures of cats and dogs dressed up like cakes, or other animals, or in people-uniforms. I know the animal isn’t complicit in the decision to wear fancy dress, so I do know on some level it’s a bit cruel. It’s a moral conflict I regularly choose to ignore, going in favour of kittens in cardies and dogs in clown outfits over finding out any more about the Islamic State and whether or not Cameron and Obama are going to get all up in their faces or not.

When the animal pictures run out, more often than I care to admit I find myself immersed in stories about the moderately well-known as I traverse the countless pages of crap that are slowly unpicking the very fabric of society: the celebrity gossip pages. I know this is wrong on just about every level. People are being blown up for no good reason, children are dying of hunger, innocent people are suffering day in, day out. The world is going to shit and, instead of reading about it so I can at least make that last sentence sound in some way informed, I’m reading about Paul Ross.

It’s been quite a turnaround for one of daytime TV’s faves; he’s been having a bit of the other behind his wife’s back and getting off his tits on Meow Meow the whole time.

I’m not a drug user. Not in a smug “my body is a temple” way, because I can and do imbibe my weekly allowance of alcohol units several times over, several times a week. I’ve had the occasional flirtation with some chemicals but it has never appealed to me enough to make it a regular thing. It’s expensive and the days of suicidal thoughts that followed my rare indulgences have proven enough of a deterrent to keep me on a straight and narrow, albeit slightly wobbly, binge-drinking path.

Although my experience with drugs is limited, I’m fairly certain of one thing, and this is where I think Paul has got more than a little bit confused; drugs don’t turn you gay.

If I wanted some Meow Meow I would have no idea where to get it from. I would have no idea how to take it (snort it? smoke it? eat it? shove it up my arse?) and I would have no idea what to expect, side-effects wise. However, if street drugs came with labels, I very much doubt they would come with something like this: “Warning: may cause episodes of sodomy and long-term homosexual relationships”.

You cheated on your wife, Paul. And of all the fucking unpleasant things you can do to someone that doesn’t involve causing them actual physical harm, that’s pretty high on the list. The fact you cheated on her with a man really is neither here nor there, so trying to blame the homosexual nature of your infidelity on the drugs is just pointless.

It’s the shaky, pointy finger of blame that comes out every time. I’ve used it myself. Alcohol has been cited as the reason for most of my misdemeanours. Most recently at a wedding when a classic 80s Madonna song came on and a friend and I apparently launched into the kind of synchronised dancing that looked like we’d been practising a routine for weeks. The quantities of white wine we had knocked back had imbued us with such appalling confidence and our uninhibited minds became as one. It was because we were drunk, Paul. Never in a sober moment have we managed or even attempted to recreate a pop video.

But it was done and dusted in a night, Paul. Sure, we’re both embarrassed and wish it hadn’t happened. We don’t want people thinking that as women in our thirties we’re going home and choreographing moves to pop songs and then Skyping each other to practice. But in the end no-one got really hurt.

The clear difference is this: none of my drunken mishaps have lasted for 14 months. Because if you’re doing something for 14 months, there is at least a hint of autonomy going on, whether you’re prepared to admit it or not.

I don’t doubt it would take an enormous amount of bravery to come out. Daytime TV doesn’t strike me as the kind of place to nurture and coddle an individual wrestling with some heavy-duty emotions. The viewing public want their presenters straight and married, and the world remains a homophobic place. I don’t envy you, Paul, but for fuck’s sake take responsibility for what you’ve done.

Being gay isn’t a crime. Well, it is in some repulsively narrow-minded countries, but it’s not here, thank Christ. Be gay or be straight; be whoever you are, which can sometimes be the hardest thing. Just don’t be a cunt to someone who trusts you and then blame it on some party drug.

If only I was as concerned with world affairs as I am with Paul Ross. Ah screw it. I’ll stick with the cats in costumes from now on.

A little extra timber

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About an hour ago a tune I love came on the radio. Unable to resist its fiendish melody and beat I started jumping up and down on the spot, something I don’t tend to do at my level of cynicism.

There are people I know who make a healthy living out of telling me I am not, and I am not getting, fat. I would dearly love to be able to explain the sensation to them of feeling as though the entire front of your body is made of tits, and not just the actual tits which probably shouldn’t be that size on a bloke. It feels like the momentous movement of tectonic plates made of fat being slowly but aggressively shifted back and forth across the body of a thin person I haven’t seen for fucking years.

I have scales in my flat and they tell me, depending on whether it’s before or after I’ve made a male disaster of the bathroom to drown out Thought For The Day, that I weigh one or other side of 15 and a half stone. This, for a man of precisely six foot tall, is on the boundary of overweight and genuine fat bastard and is the heaviest I have ever been.

When my calf muscle popped like a child’s balloon a few months ago I was in reasonable shape, playing squash a couple of times a week and going to the gym whenever I could bear it. Since my leg no longer lets me spank a ball around a little box, something I actually enjoy, I’m now utterly demotivated from hauling weights back and forth while a shirtless fuckwit groans and moans at himself raising a gigantic dumbbell and staring in the mirror at his pulsating muscles – one in particular it looks like he plans to haul back and forth the moment he gets home.

The mirror in my flat doesn’t lie. If I try to breathe in any more when I look at myself I’m going to force my belly button through my pancreas. And yet when I tried to explain this to a mate I’ve not seen for months the other night, he said “Really? I’ve seen you look bigger.”

Because that, people think, is what I want to hear. I’m not telling you how disgraceful I’m slowly allowing my body to become because I want you to assure me it’s not true – I’m telling you for the very specific reason that I want you to tell me you’ve not seen bloating like that since that whale washed up on a beach a while back and everyone thought it was going to explode.

I’m not a complete ignoramus; I know the primary cause is my diet of beer and kebabs. It’s not the cause of this I need help with, it’s the motivation to do something about it. If you tell me to drink less or stop moaning, I’ll put you straight to the head of the list of people who will soon require a blindfold and a chaplain. But even those people are helping more than the ones who tell me I’m not fat when the jeans are beginning to hurt like sodomy at the number waist I’ve had for about two decades.

And yes, I’m also aware that there are people with far bigger weight issues than me. I personally know plenty, and they don’t seem to give a shit. But I spent as much time as anyone as a skinny schoolboy winding up the fat kids and if there’s one thing I’m not it’s the type of hypocrite to bemoan the state of morals in Britain and fuck my sister-in-law on the same day. It helps that you wouldn’t, but that’s beside the point.

I will have to sort this out one way or another. I could happily give up food but the hangovers are already bad enough to make the simplest tasks akin to scaling Kilimanjaro dressed like Scooby Doo. I could do more exercise, but ball games won’t work until the leg does, and there’s little that makes me more aware of the pointlessness of my life than the fucking gym. I could have some quack suck the fat out of me or fit one of those inner devices that squeezes your guts tight but it strikes me as the Devil’s work, and in any case I don’t have the money because I spend it all on drink.

But if I am to have any hope of stopping the slide into cake-based oblivion I need people to stop ignoring the issue themselves. I am going on holiday with friends in a couple of months and there will be toplessness involved, and if my massive white frame doesn’t dazzle a few of them into a stream of abuse at my expense I will be drowning them individually in the hotel pool. At least that would be exercise I suppose.

I know it could be worse and that there’s a degree of vanity involved in caring about this at all. I know I don’t look like Barry Austin quite yet. I know carrying a little extra timber about isn’t at the top of the list of the world’s problems right now. But halting the descent into self-inflicted, insulin-based chaos isn’t going to be made any fucking easier by you telling me that everything’s fine.

We noble carousers

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It’s a shame just how much we take technology for granted. It should never cease to amaze us that a tiny metal box that fits in a trouser pocket can communicate with just about anyone in the world with the flick of a few fingers. Computers can do dazzling things and we still moan when they don’t work, disregarding the wonderment of being able to type 140 characters in a single tiny box and witness the entire human race not giving a shit.

And a remote control can now, incredibly, pause ‘live’ TV, and even let me rewind it to check whether I really did just hear that news story more or less predicting that the end of civilisation is upon us.

It’s a little hazy now, because it was over 20 minutes ago and I’ve decapitated a bottle since then. But from what I can gather, the Mayor of London was on the TV saying something like this:

“We can attach this device to you, which records whether there’s alcohol entering your bloodstream, and if you drink even so much as a beer or a glass of wine you’ll have broken the terms of your agreement. We’ll have you back in front of the court before you can trip over a bar stool.”

I have a particular dislike of the idiot who nominally runs my city but I’m hardly alone in that. This, however, is new. London, as the principal city of the country with the ‘worst’ drinking ‘problem’ in the world, is the official capital of the drunkard and I am proud to be in the vanguard of its army of elbow lifters. And our intolerable Mayor just said he’s started tagging people to make sure they don’t drink.

Again: tagging people to stop them drinking.

I’m sure the people in question have committed some terrible crime to be tagged in this way. No doubt their crime was drink-related, as statistics will tell you is the case for a majority of crimes in Britain. Of course, as anyone who has worked for Opta will know statistics are made of little more than hangovers and regrets and have no serious place in an enlightened society.

More of us drink than don’t. The number of people in Wetherspoons pubs at any given moment is likely larger than the population of a medium-sized country – Israel, say, or the Central African Republic. Those nations’ current concerns matter less to me than the idea that many of my countrymen face an attack on their civil liberties akin to the commissioning of yet another series of Downton fucking Abbey.

You could argue that it’s no different from banning someone from driving for mowing down a squadron of Hare Krishnas on the pavement outside Sainsbury’s. You’d be wrong. Alcohol is the lifeblood of this nation. The equivalent would be banning the same driver but then not letting him drink himself to death with guilt.

We noble carousers are under constant attack from those who boldly claim they have our best interests at heart while at the same time refusing to open their fucking cobweb-riddled wallets at the bar.

Enough is enough. I drink a fucking hell of a lot and I’m not ashamed to say so. Everyone knows it’ll kill me, and not suddenly when I fall and bump my dome against a paving slab but slowly, cirrhotically and surrounded by an appalling bloody mess. But I’m an Englishman and that’s what we’ve been doing for centuries and yet there are still millions of us here.

And my alternative proposal is therefore this: tag the fuckers who don’t drink enough. Not the people who don’t drink at all – they don’t tend to be the people who squeal and fucking moan at the rest of us – but those people who can drink in moderation. The ones who can have ‘a nice glass of wine’ or one single beer when they get home from work, then a cup of tea an hour later. I know, it’s astounding that these people can even get out of bed in the morning but there they are, pointing and judging and dying about five years later than the rest of us of something just as painful and grim, but sober, and confused as to why their healthy masterplan has failed.

Tag these fucking people so we can all use our amazing pocket metal to track and avoid them. Technology will allow us to ban them from pubs, so any time one of them enters there’s a sudden high-pitched screech and they have 10 seconds to turn around and leg it before their head explodes like that bloke at the start of The Running Man.

With this magnificent technology in place the rest of us will be freed from these smug bastards who want nothing more than to drag us into their world of work and boring, intoxicant-free play. We’ll be left to drink and fight and be sick and do awful and brilliant things to each other just like the British have been doing for centuries. We can once again be great, restoring us to our proper place in the world.

We might even discover some previously unknown point to the fucking Commonwealth Games and there’s not a man or woman among us who wouldn’t drink to that.

The international dick-waving contest

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We all know somebody who is comprehensively full of shit. Often they take the form of the alcoholic propping up the bar. We exchange pleasantries with them whilst purchasing our drinks, nod politely at their idiotic delusions then beat a hasty retreat to our table with a wry shake of our heads.

Their diatribes are filled with speculative theories about what they could have been, or what they might still be if only they could be bothered. Every now and again, after passing their eighth pint through themselves, they may become aggressive and start hurling abuse and threats across the bar, threats which they cannot possibly hope to back up.

“I’m gonna fakkin ‘ave you!”

“Say it to my fakkin face you cant!”

“One more word sunshine, one more fakkin word!”

As we all know, when called upon to actually back up their words with meaningful actions they quickly fade away, continuing to mutter oaths beneath their breath before slipping quietly out via the toilet window at the earliest opportunity.

People like this make us feel better about ourselves; we warm ourselves with the comfort that we are not, and never will be, anything like them. The second from last thing we would want is for these people to actually matter and the very, very last thing we would want is for these people to actually be in charge of our fucking government.

I lost my patriotism at around the same time as I lost my faith, and though I yearn to have both back I have long since resigned myself to a permanent separation. Our current government’s pathetic posturing in the wake of the Malaysian plane tragedy has caused me to trace my family tree back through the centuries in the vain hope of finding a twelve-times-great grandmother born in County Cork so I might prove to myself I am not, after all, entirely of this Saxon blood.

“You’re going to regret that you nasty little Cossack oligarch. You won’t be welcome here on your holidays, oh no!”

“You’d better not try and put your money in any of our banks! What’s that? You don’t have any money in our banks? Well that’s just as well. You’d better not try it. Oh no!”

You don’t have to be a political scientist to understand the British government’s plan. Cameron and co are going to make threats and a lot of noise in a pathetic bid to outdo the French in the international dick-waving contest, and then, when it eventually simmers down and the whole sorry affair is forgotten about in favour of the revelation that Zippy and Bungle from Rainbow conducted an international child trafficking ring from a caravan in Clacton in the early 1980s, they’ll quietly claim the credit for helping to bring about a ‘peaceful solution to the crisis’.

Put simply, words aside, the British political classes aren’t going to do shit about Ukraine. The real insult to the victims of this outrage is that Cameron and co keep claiming that they might.