Having Covid: A Worrier’s Tale

I recently had Covid, which means that I now possess a sort of temporary super-immunity. I could invite you all to cough in my mouth, I could lick every surface and door-handle in your house, and I probably will, because I’m dirty like that.

Having Covid is like someone standing on the spongy surface of your brain and ripping into it with a pneumatic drill, the force of it sending tremors down your limbs and through your hips like some malevolent Mexican Wave. Somewhere down below, a man with unfeasibly large palms plays your balls like bongo drums. One minute you’re cold, like an ex-girlfriend; the next minute you’re boiling hot, like you’re trapped in your 78-year-old grandmother’s living room on a balmy summer’s day while she’s got the heating on full bung cause she’s ‘bloody freezing’.

The shakes were intolerable. On the second or third day I went for a piss in the dead of night and genuinely couldn’t stop my body from shivering and spasming. I felt like some sort of James Brown tribute act. Or the Ghostbusters when they crossed the streams. I certainly gave my young sons a run for their money in the ‘pish all over the floor’ stakes. But then I often do.

My sister, my youngest son, my girlfriend and her kids all had Covid at the same time. The worst aspect of this virus is the worry it places on you for the people around you. I can take it – you think to yourself, as hope and scepticism battle inside you – but what about them? After all, this isn’t the flu (although that can kill you too – fat grandpa, I’m looking at you). Headlines like ‘PERFECTLY HEALTHY DOUBLE-VACCINATED MARATHON RUNNER DIES OF COVID’ don’t help. Especially since the marathon runner was hit by a train the day he tested positive, but that information’s buried in the last paragraph of the newspaper report, and who the hell reads past the headline these days? Unless it’s an article about two celebrities shagging each other, of course.

The second worst aspect is the isolation: feeling like a leper; desperately missing all of the mundane rituals you’ve always fervently hated. So you actively plan a two-week comeback safari around every supermarket within a fifty-mile radius starting the very second your quarantine ends. There soon will be photo albums filled with snaps of you shaking hands with the Tesco security guard and laughing fondly with the old checkout lady at Morrisons.

Covid fucks with you. It’s a trickster God. A few days into my viral experience I felt an inexplicably powerful surge of energy and enthusiasm. I woke up feeling not just better, but superhuman. Cheery, vibrant, ready to seize the day. Was it my one little dose of vaccine starting to turn the tables on the Cov and kick its bat-munching ass? Was my immune system doing a victory lap? Had someone slipped crack into the water-supply? Whatever the reason, I was on fire. I set about re-organising furniture like a Tetris champion; ridding cupboards of junk in the same manner a lion would rid an antelope of its intestines, and taking to housework with the zeal of Magda from ‘There’s Something About Mary’ after a gub-load of speed. The next day, however, I woke up feeling like a dragon had shat in my brain, then flambed it. The headache was back. The virus kicked in the saloon doors of my internal organs and went on a rampage, visiting first the stomach and bowel, then moving upwards to fuck with my lungs. I felt exhausted. Depressed. Wretched.

I still had to look after my youngest son, thankfully with some help from my similarly afflicted sister (great name for a death metal band, that). Christopher was infected but mercifully asymptomatic. This meant that he had bags of little boy energy and I felt like an old man breathing his last on his death bed, which admittedly isn’t that different from the norm. Luckily, I was co-parenting with the nearest thing I could get to Dr Spock: the television. God bless you Peppa Pig and Ryan’s Toy Review. I promise I won’t mutter so much about killing you in your sleep once this is all over.

Once our isolation ended my son and I journeyed to Aldi. I’ve never been so pleased to stand at a check-out while shopping was being launched at me with the speed of a champion tennis serve. On the return journey my little boy said to me, ‘You’re the best daddy ever.’ That’s beautiful, I thought. He realises how hard it was for me to nurture and entertain him in my weakened state. He appreciates me. By god he appreciates me.

‘What makes you say that buddy?’

‘Because you just let me watch TV all the time.’

Great. Just add ‘always cooks me chicken nuggets’ and ‘never makes me wear ironed clothes’ and we’ve got the Divorced Dad Hat Trick.

I was due my second vaccine jab the same week I got Covid. Great timing. I got my first jab earlier in the summer at a walk-in Vaccination centre in my home town. Over-40s are – or at least were – automatically ear-marked for Astro Zeneca. For some reason I was very worried about the well-documented risks of strokes and blood-clots associated with Astro Zeneca, despite spending very little time worrying about the reality of being a middle-aged Scottish man who smokes, eats junk food and takes zero exercise (at least if any of those things cause my head to explode I’ll have earned it). It does boggle my brain, though, that we’ve taken care to shield the aging and the elderly from the worst effects of Covid, but think nothing of subjecting that same age group to a dose of something that might cause their cerebrum to burst like a soggy grape.

I’m not anti-Vax. I’m simply anti-positive-interpretations-of-my-own-luck. If something harbours the ability to give me a fatal blood clot, I’ll get a fatal blood clot. If I walked into a money-filled room wearing a jacket made of sticky-back plastic I’d snag a cool few million, but later die from paper cuts. Lady Luck, it seems, is just not that into me. So I told the people at the centre that it was Pfizer or nothing. They acquiesced to my request, though the man dispensing the vaccine told me I’d bought into propaganda. He did have a sense of humour, though, as evidenced by our little pre-needle exchange:

‘Have you any preference for which arm you get the jab in?’ he asked.

‘Surprise me,’ I said.

‘OK,’ he said, leaning forward in his chair, with a mad glint in his eye, ‘I’m gonna give you Astro Zeneca!’

You don’t have to know the relative merits, risks and drawbacks of the two vaccines in order to make an informed choice. Just switch off the investigative part of your brain and listen to how the two names sound. Take Astro Zeneca. It’s terrifying. It sounds like a 300ft tall killer robot from outer space. “I AM ASTRO ZENECA. I WILL BATHE THE EARTH IN BLOOD AND SET FIRE TO IT USING THE BURNING HEART OF THE SUN. AND I WILL DO IT JUST FOR A LAUGH.” Pfizer, on the other hand, sounds like a goofy cartoon rabbit. The sort of heavy-lidded nincompoop who’s shite at everything, but adorably shite, so he gets away with it. He just spends his days laughing at his own farts, and wondering what clouds taste like, as the animals around him scrunch their faces and coo, ‘Ohhhh, Pfizer!’

But, obviously, my aversion to Astro Zeneca wasn’t solely shaped by a terror of ungodly space robots. In reality, not every reservation about Astro Zeneca can be filed under ‘c’ for ‘crackpot conspiracy theory’. At one point, most of Europe had banned it, and you can’t chalk all of that down to some Eurovision Song Contest-esque political point-scoring in the wake of Brexit. Plus, plenty of medical data (find your own fucking sources) suggests that Astro Zeneca, more than any of the other available vaccines – and I’m going to be using some very esoteric scientific language here, so do try to focus – fucks shit up.

To a point, you can’t blame people for being sceptical. Conspiracies have always existed, throughout all of human history. At a minimum, all you need is three human beings, and time. Here in our dog-eat-dog modern times, capitalism’s long and lasting legacy of greed and inhumanity – its veneration of luxury and profit and excess – encourages, nay sanctions, the use of conspiracies and corruption and psychopathy as handy tools to drive share-prices up. The only limit to success is a corporation’s imagination: it certainly isn’t ethics.

In the 1970s, Ford incurred a record-breaking fine when it was discovered that executives had known about and declined to fix a potentially fatal design flaw in Ford’s Pinto model. Ford’s own tests had shown that owing to the position of the fuel tank, a rear-end collision would be pretty likely to result in fire and death. However, Ford’s own cost-benefit analysis determined that it would be cheaper to run the gauntlet with law-suits than to take preventative – and life-saving – action, so they kept quiet. People died. Quelle surprise.

Medicine isn’t without its share of hubris, greed, miscalculations and scandals. We need only look at the opioid crisis in modern-day America, or the recent hefty fines slapped on GlaxoSmithCline and even on Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant I appear to trust, for some insane reason. And let’s not forget the horrifying scandal of the late 1950s and early 1960s when thalidomide, marketed as a safe treatment for morning sickness, was ultimately responsible for thousands of lost pregnancies, birth defects and deaths.

So it’s not inherently crazy to think, ‘I wonder if the profit-driven producers of this piece of medicine really have my best interests at heart?’ That being said, some objections to Covid vaccinations in general have flirted with full-blown insanity, particularly those pointing to the satanic nature of Bill Gates.

It’s hardly a new idea to point out the cognitive dissonance inherent in someone of the tinfoil-hat-variety decrying the vaccines for containing tiny, liberty-thieving micro-trackers, logging your every movement, whilst that person is doing all their decrying on a mobile phone, a device that actually does log your every movement. Bill Gates doesn’t know that you went to your grandmother’s last night and then went home to whack off over dwarf porn, but Google and Microsoft sure as shit do. Some conspiracy-minded folks among us even suggested that nanobots inside the vaccine would allow Bill Gates directly to control the vaccinated, perhaps through use of a joystick or PlayStation controller. Perhaps in concert with Elon Musk, the two of them playing real-life Grand Theft Auto using wee Jeanie and Ethel from Motherwell as avatars.

“Christ, Bill, Ethel must have gout or something. She’s not getting away from the cops fast enough! Jesus, I didn’t notice she was on fire.”

“Ha ha, Elon, I’ve just made my old Scottish woman do a loop-the-loop in her wheelchair INSIDE Home Bargains, so fuck you.”

“Damn it! Ethel’s burnt to death. YOU’RE USELESS, ETHEL! Hang on, taking over another avatar…. Senga…. age 76, from East Kilbride. Let’s see how much vroom this old bitch has in her tank.”

Anyway, I’m going to get my second jab as soon as I can.

Don’t tell Bill Gates. And if the vaccine kills me, feel free to come back to this blog-post and piss yourself laughing. Be well.

The Art of the Trump: A Deal for All Seasons

“I don’t do it for the money. I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”

Just as Ronald Reagan once plundered the toolkit of his former career – namely his screen presence and charisma – to power the presidency, so too has Donald Trump been plundering his toolkit, bringing to bear on the Oval Office a mixed bag of dirty tricks gleaned in the convergent worlds of the boardroom and the red carpet. Trump is renowned for – whether or not some or indeed all of it justifies the renown  – his business acumen, his big-balled risk taking, his chaotic and quixotic sex life, and especially for being a merciless, sociopathic, bullying ball-bag of a man; all of which made him a compelling TV star, precisely none of which qualifies him to safeguard the health, happiness and financial well-being of 327 million souls.

Trump may have been an entrepreneur, but he made his gambles knowing he had a multi-million dollar safety net behind him. Trump may have generated vast profits, but much of his success was built upon his aversion to paying tax and contractors – the real truth of his assets buried and obscured behind bank loans, off-shore accounts and IOUs.

I’ve read a lot of books about Donald Trump, but until recently I’d never read a book by Donald Trump. I plumped for the most famous and influential of them, the New York Times’ Best-selling The Art of the Deal, first published in 1987. However, it’s perhaps something of a stretch to say that it was written by Donald Trump. Anyone who’s ever read Trump’s Twitter feed or listened to his speeches knows that eloquence and coherence aren’t his strong points. Any book written by Trump and Trump alone would probably scan like a version of Jack Kerouak’s On The Road as penned by Narcissus after a massive head injury.

The Art of the Deal was ghost-written – aka simply written – by journalist Tony Schwartz. In 2016 Schwartz publicly lamented his part in helping to cement Trump in the public consciousness as some sort of munificent emperor, an image that, in concert with Trump’s appearances on The Apprentice, somehow convinced the American public that a dead-eyed orange cabbage was the best choice for Commander-in-Chief. I can well imagine the quantity of Prozak Schwartz would’ve needed to ingest to keep calm during those long months with Trump translating his grandiose, slogan-centric puffery into something palatable.

Trump’s distinct lack of empathy and rampant sense of self-righteousness and entitlement blinds him to the fact that he’s more redolent of Mr Burns and Biff Tannen than Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Let’s see if we can divine in his writing the man we see at work on the world-stage today, be it on the golf course, or tapping away on Twitter as he takes a shit.

I’ve tried to group my selected quotes into categories, with catty asides where appropriate.

The White House as boardroom and battlefield

“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

Trump’s certainly taken that insight with him to the White House, only remove the bit that says ‘within legal bounds’.

“I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.”

And doesn’t America know it.

“Most people are surprised by the way I work. I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. You can’t be imaginative or entrepreneurial if you’ve got too much structure. I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”

Yep. Still seems to be his signature style as president. A sort of nonchalant dictatorship.

On the Trump Organisation: “With so many regulators and regulations to satisfy, we had one major advantage: the fact that we are not a bureaucracy. In most large public corporations, getting an answer to a question requires going through seven layers of executives, most of whom are superfluous in the first place. In our organisation, anyone with a question could bring it directly to me and get an answer immediately. That’s precisely why I’ve been able to act so much faster than my competitors on so many deals.”

“I’ve never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me. The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world. The only thing that makes it different from the average casino is that the players dress in blue pinstripe suits and carry leather briefcases. If you allow people to gamble in the stock market, where more money is made and lost than in all the casinos in the world put together, I see nothing terribly different about permitting people to bet on blackjack or craps or roulette.”

The NYSE is a casino, except for when Trump wants to claim he’s directly responsible for its robust performance.

Man of the People

Because he really is just like one of us, right?

“And while I can’t honestly say I need an eighty-foot living room, I do get a kick out of having one.”

“In the middle of 1985, I got an invitation from Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian and a billionaire at the time, to come to his apartment in Olympic Tower. I went, and while I didn’t particularly go for the apartment, I was impressed by the huge size of its rooms.”

Yes, that Khashoggi family. That dude was the uncle of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was butchered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Interesting connection there.

“I rarely go out, because mostly, it’s a waste of time.”

I guess when your house is the size of a city park, and you own scores of buildings, you don’t need to.

“For me the relevant issue isn’t what I report on the bottom line, it’s what I get to keep.”

Trump and the press

Trump knows the press, and has learned how to wield it as a weapon. It helps that he has Fox News and the Murdoch press on-side.

“First, the press thrives on confrontation. They also love stories about extremes, whether they’re great successes or terrible failures.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from dealing with politicians over the years, it’s that the only thing guaranteed to force them into action is the press – or, more specifically, fear of the press. You can apply all kinds of pressure, make all sorts of pleas and threats, contribute large sums of money to their campaigns, and generally it gets you nothing. But raise the possibility of bad press, even in an obscure publication, and most politicians will jump. Bad press translates into potential lost votes, and if a politician loses enough votes, he won’t get reelected. If that happens, he might have to go out and take a 9 to 5 job. That’s the last thing most politicians want to do.”

“Most reporters, I find, have very little interest in exploring the substance of a detailed proposal for a development. They look instead for the sensational angle. In this case, that may have worked to my advantage. I was prepared for questions about density and traffic and the mix of housing on the site, but, instead, all the reporters wanted to talk about was the world’s tallest building. It gave the project an instant mystique. When I got home that night, I switched on the CBS Evening News, expecting to hear news from the opening of the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Dan Rather was in Geneva anchoring the program, but after summarising the day’s developments, suddenly he was saying: ‘In New York City, developer Donald Trump announced plans to build the world’s tallest building.’ It demonstrated how powerful and intoxicating a symbol I’d found for my project.”

Prescience with a dash of irony and a sprinkling of ‘Oooo, bet you regret saying that now, Trumpy’.

“I discovered, for the first time but not the last, that politicians don’t care too much what things cost. It’s not their money.”

On Mitterand: “It wasn’t just that he was a socialist, and that he began nationalising companies, it was also that he turned out to be a dangerous man. What can you say about a guy who goes around selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder?”

Yeah, Trump would never do anything like that. Too much integrity.

“Atlantic City’s reputation had also been hurt by corruption charges growing out of the FBI’s Abscam sting operation. In 1980, the vice-chairman of the Casino Control Commission, Kenneth MacDonald, resigned after admitting that he’d been in the room when a $100,000 bribe was passed to a local politician by potential investors looking for help in getting a casino license.”

Imagine being in a room when some dodgy deal, bribe or attempted extortion was going down. Trump would NEVER do anything like that.

On Conrad Hilton: “His son Barron joined the company in the 1950s, and of course it was only a matter of time before he took over. It had nothing to do with merit; it’s called birthright.”

Remind me just how many of your children are prominent figures in your administration?

“But Conrad believed very strongly this inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation. I happen to agree that it often does.”

(cough cough)

“You can probably guess how much stock I put in polls.”

Yes. It very much depends upon how favourable they are to you.

“There is nothing to compare with family if they happen to be competent, because you can trust family in a way you can never trust anyone else.”

(cough cough, IRONIC, cough cough, MAFIA)

On Ed Koch: “He’s presided over an administration that is both pervasively corrupt and totally incompetent.”

(sound of someone taking a machine gun to a barrel of fish)

“Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen Koch appointees and cohorts have been indicted on charges of bribery, perjury, and accepting kickbacks, or have been forced to resign in disgrace after admitting various ethical transgressions.”

Imagine that…

“The irony is that Koch made his reputation by boasting about his integrity and incorruptibility. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that if the people he appoints prove to be corrupt, then in the end he must take the responsibility.”

That sort of thing doesn’t occur to a lot of people, to be fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Donald?


Simply put: guy from the big house and the guy from the book? Same crook, different deal.

To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter

Major, Theodore; Man in Bleak Landscape; Wigan Arts and Heritage Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/man-in-bleak-landscape-162632

Modern life is awe-inspiring and hyper-stimulating, but deeply confusing, and to a maddening degree; made even more so by the myriad ways the rich and powerful have devised to deploy that confusion for tactical gain; lobbing fireworks and flash-bangs of panic and distraction at us to keep us moving, always moving: never stopping, never thinking. We don’t need much of a shove in the direction of distraction: our eyes are already blinded by the gadgets we clutch in our claws; our thoughts over-run by the endorphins they release into our brains, like we’re trained rats pushing buttons for treats.

We’re made to run the Orwellian gauntlet down every street, along every junction of the information superhighway, as we’re assailed on all sides by Facebook feeds filled with fakery and fury; the weaponised worthiness of a hundred-million keyboard warriors; and incendiary headlines that boom out their daily beat of hatred from beneath war-like, blood-red banners.  At any given moment we’re being accused of, or being pushed to commit, thought-crimes, hate-crimes, and crimes – to both body and soul – of every stripe imaginable.

We spend our days spitting out words as though they were bullets, rat-a-tat-tatting at people about values, identity, sovereignty, tolerance, intelligence, and truth (whatever that is). We wax lyrical about the good old days, the never-was golden ages of peace and prosperity.

Human societies have become so intricate and complex that we tend, more often than not, to ascribe commensurately complex motivations to the people who comprise them. This muddles and over-complicates the often very simple impulses behind the things that we do, or are done to us.

Take Brexit. We frame it as an ideological schism being fought at street-level among the ordinary folk, with the forces of progressive change, shared humanity and multiculturalism on one side, and the forces of culturally-conservative, insular and isolationist protectionism on the other: but what if we’re all just pawns being moved around to satisfy the unslakeable thirst of the rich and powerful for yet more money and power? Spoiler alert: we definitely are. (see the Private Eye article at the foot of this piece of writing for a flavour of the sort of behaviour that’s driving and helping to maintain the country’s current political and economic condition)

Some degree of fight is inevitable, even healthy, in a society. It’s the engine of change: the sword that breaks the chains of oppression, the fire that burns the old ways to dust. But what happens when those who rule over our lives – the oligarchs, the corporate heads, the media barons, the greedy dictators and the billionaires – turn the apparatuses of our freedoms against us? When they use smoke, lies and mirrors to set us at each other’s throats as they smile and sneer from the shadows?

We, the masses, the 99 per cent, are often to be found hacking at and goring each other in the gladiatorial arena, as the 1 per cent watch dispassionately from the high seats, occasionally deigning to flick a wrist to seal our earthly fates.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the 1 per cent have won, and have done so without ever having to fire a shot (not in this country, at least; and not recently). They convinced us that they were just like us, and we were just like them. They re-made us in their own image, minus the power. Made us ants who think we’re Gods; slaves who think we’re emperors, gazing up at the high seats of the Coliseum  and seeing our own face reflected. The belief that we have more in common with the greedy, the royal and the tyrannical than we do with our own brethren in the gutter is as ubiquitous and dangerous as it is sad and delusional.

It’s the worst kind of Stockholm Syndrome; the worst kind of twisted vanity. “They’re taking your jobs!” say the corporatocracy. “You’re paying for these people!” jeer the politicians. “They’re laughing at you!” cry the newspapers. “We, the people, shouldn’t have to accept this!” say the multi-billionaires.

So the people with their hands pressed around the throat of the body politic make a proposal. “Let’s make this country great again/take back control/drain the swamp/return to the old values/delete as applicable!”

“YES!” the people scream. “YES, YES, YES!”

And so freedoms are rolled back, liberties are re-claimed and vital provisions are shut down or torn apart: all in our name, of course.

And all the while, we, the people, scream at the poor souls on the rungs and decks below us, so loudly that we can’t hear the whips being cracked at our own backs. We cheer as the poor and disadvantaged are punished for the sin of being born unlucky, forgetting or ignoring the role of chance in our own fates.

When the policies rolled out by the hyper-rich hurt us, too – as they always do – we cry out in anger and pain: “This isn’t fair! Why would you do this to me? I’m worthy. I’m good! I supported you! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM, not me. This wasn’t the plan! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM.”

But you ARE them. The prisoners, the drug addicts, the jobless, the struggling, the single mother, the single father, the immigrant, the outcast. You’re as much them as you are the doctor, the lawyer, the electrician, the musician and the nurse. WE are in this together.

Never forget: to the emperor, all but the emperor belong in the gutter.

The way we’ve chosen to cover and govern our planet is absurd. We all crawled from the same primordial soup. For millennia after we were nothing more than scattered bands of cold and frightened proto-people, huddled together in caves and forests trying to fend off the darkness and protect ourselves from the savage indifference of Mother Earth. Always striving; barely surviving.

And then one day – we can suppose – a man looked down at his fists, or perhaps surveyed the pile of shiny stones and animal furs he’d amassed in his cave, and felt emboldened to declare to his tribe: ‘I am your King.’ And those four little words were powerful enough to bring forth a future world of crowns and slaves and jets and castles and guns and flags and great golden skyscrapers towering into the clouds as children, in countries not so very far away, choked and died in blackened, smog-filled pits.

Still, many of us think, It’s not so bad here in Scotland, or here in the UK. Sure, some people are unlucky, far unluckier than me, and life for all of us could certainly be better, but I’ve got free health-care, a relatively high life expectancy, a car, a TV, a house, and holidays. Things can only get better, right?

The dark ages may have stalled our species’ scientific and technological advancement for a millennia or so, but we’re in a post-enlightenment age now. Everything is illuminated, even the darkest corners of the farthest reaches of our galaxy. We can split atoms, land robots on asteroids and make the hearts of dead men beat in the chests of the once-dying. We’re moving forwards, right? Always forwards. Nothing can happen to drag us back, right?

It’s foolish to believe that the changes we make, and are made to us in turn, are irreversible; that progress is inevitable and unstoppable. History is cyclical, not vertical. World War I, World War II, Korea, Darfur, Vietnam, Iraq. The lessons we learn day-by-day die by the billion-load, year upon year; and like children, our species has to learn how to crawl, walk, talk and remake the world anew, every century, every generation, every blessed day. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong, but throughout it all our development is guided, stilted, thwarted and dictated by the rich and the powerful and the decadent, a set of parents whose cruelty, corruption and indifference leaves a stain on the souls of all the children of the earth.

How can you fight a group with the power to destroy the world? How can you vanquish a group who owns the tech giants, the media companies, and the banks? How can you vote down a group with tentacles that reach into and around every government and politician?

You can’t.

The only weapon you have is time. That, and an unwavering belief in our shared humanity; the resolution to keep hoping and trying for a better world, no matter how futile or unrealistic the outcome may seem.

Maybe with enough time we can remake the world in our image; force a new cycle of history into rotation: a perfect squared-circle.

We are the tide.

Some of us roar from the sea in crashing waves, some of us rise and fall gently at the shore-line, but day after day, year after year, together… we’re the ones who wear down the mountains, and turn the rocks to sand.

 

 

EXCERPT FROM PRIVATE EYE

“There may be rules against rigging the financial markets, but not if the move is big, brazen and political enough.

Last weekend Mayfair-based hedge fund boss Crispin Odey told the Mail on Sunday he would support Boris Johnson in the event Theresa May is forced to resign. The purpose would be to see through a hard Brexit. “If we walked away from Europe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” said Odey. Not for him it wouldn’t. He admits to shorting the pound and would make millions from the currency’s inevitable fall even as it wreaks havoc on the UK economy.

While backing the man who calls leaving the EU ‘liberation’, Odey isn’t averse to the EU’s fiscal and regulatory charms. Eight of the 14 funds in his Odey Asset Management stable are domiciled in, er, Dublin, while just four are UK-registered (the other two are in the Caymans). What Johnson called the ‘over-regulatory instincts that have held the EU back for so long’ in his recent Tory party conference speech don’t seem to have stood in Odey’s funds’ way. Nor does it seem that, when it comes to the most important aspect of handling Brexit – making serious money from it – the billionaire hedgie thinks too much of his great political hope’s rallying cry to ‘believe in Britain’.”

 

How Tesco Takes Over the World

t1Tesco won’t assume total control overnight. Other corporations and multi-nationals will pave the way. These companies will take over the nations of the earth in bloodless, though economically aggressive, coups, and then re-brand them in their own hellish images. The United Kingdom will become the United Kingdom of Benetton. And later Great British Home Stores.

Ireland will become Iceland. Iceland will become Farmfoods. I know they had first dibs on the name Iceland, but there’s only 40, 000 of them, and even the town of Irvine could take them in a fight. Besides, we owe them nothing. They tried to bugger our economy a few years ago… I forget the details, because it was all incredibly boring, but I’m pretty sure they did something to us, whatever it was. Gordon Brown got mad, like really furious, and I’m pretty sure he said, ‘Some cunt’s getting fisted for this!’ I’m paraphrasing slightly. But he is from Giffnock, so it’s a believable outburst.

And let’s not forget that Iceland’s pesky volcanoes could stop us from flying out to Benidorm AT ANY SECOND. For that alone they should be cast into a deep ocean trench for all eternity. TO NEVER AGAIN SEE THE LEANING TOWER OF BENIDORM? THE GREAT WALL OF BENIDORM? THE HANGING GARDENS OF BENIDORM? I don’t want to live in that fucking world.

Scotland will become Poundland, because it’s full of fat people with no money. England will become B&Q, because it’s full of planks and tools; and Wales will become the Original Wool Company, because I’ve just been possessed by the ghost of Jim Davidson – a nifty trick, considering he’s (unfortunately) still alive.

The pig will have its revenge.

The pig will have its revenge.

Eventually, Tesco will take over the United Kingdom of Benetton, and change its name to Tesco Island. This won’t happen until after the great Supermarket wars, of course. Morrisons and Sainsbury’s will fall first. In fact, Tesco TV will broadcast the messy public executions of Allan Hansen and Jamie Oliver. They’ll be suffocated to death by Tesco carrier bags. And it won’t be quick, either. Cause it’ll take the executioner about 20 minutes to separate the bags from each other, even after he’s rubbed his hands on his jacket and licked his fingers. Jamie Oliver’s dying face will then be used to advertise Turkey Twizzlers, with the catchy slogans: ‘Ding Dong the Snitch is Dead,’ ‘What Are You Waiting For? Get Scoffing, You Fat Little Cunts,’ and ‘Now With Added Jamie Oliver.’

Lidl's mighty soup range: full of spew-trition.

Lidl’s mighty soup range: full of spew-trition.

Asda falls next. And thenceforth, anyone caught playfully patting the change in their back pocket will be shot dead. In time it will become the underground symbol of resistance, and only the most heroic will dare to pat their ass pockets. Lidl will put up the best fight, drawing Tesco into a dirty guerilla war in eastern Europe. The mighty Tesco army will advance across the plains: six million mechanised shopping trolleys armed with ballistic coin dispensers. Brave Lidl workers will fire deadly cannons filled with tins of 12p soup from the former Yugoslavia. Any human prisoners caught by the Lidl rebels will be forced to eat the soup, which is even deadlier in its liquid form than ballistic. I say liquid… we all know that stuff comes out of the can looking like a gelatinous 3D representation of a can of juice, and smells like a meaty urine infection. You could knock someone unconscious with it AFTER you’ve removed it from the can. Whatever: one forkful of that syrupy shit, and death is certain.

t4There will be so many branches of Tescos that asking for directions will assume the complexity and pointlessness of a Dan Brown novel.

‘Ah, you’re looking for Tesco Elms, in Tescoton? Certainly, sir, head down Tesco Boulevard, take a right on Tesco Lane, left on Tesco Street, past the lights on Tesco Grove, through Tesco Avenue, on to Tesco Street VIII, hook a left, and you can’t miss it, it’s just after the seventh Tesco on the right. You know, you’ll pass the Tesco Megastore, the Tesco Hyperstore, the Tesco Superstore, the Tesco Metro, the Tesco Compact, the Tesco Micro, and the Tesco Teeny Weeny… it’s after that one. Across the road from the Tesco Titty Bar. Next to the Tesco funeral parlour.’

Because you’ll get a Tesco funeral; a Tesco Finest one if you’re rich. It’ll be great. You’ll be buried in a golden coffin, and they’ll serve chicken Balmoral and expensive French cheese at your wake. A bit skint? Never mind. Have a Tesco Value funeral. Your coffin’ll be a giant plastic, Tesco Value pedal bin. Versatile, because if you fancy an open casket funeral, your loved ones can simply stand on the pedal.

‘Oh, you’ve done a lovely job on his face. Why the whiskers though?’
‘Tesco Value, love. Mortuary guys are expensive. We could only get a child’s face-painter. He thought a jolly pink tiger best captured your dead husband’s essence.’

 

This picture's existence means some other cunt beat me to the Tesco Value funeral idea, but let's just pretend I made this picture myself, right? Good.

This picture’s existence means some other cunt beat me to the Tesco Value funeral idea, but let’s just pretend I made this picture myself, right? Good.

Your relatives will stand at the wake devouring tubes of 48p poloni slicing sausage, washed down with that lemonade that tastes like it’s been devised by a homeopath – a millionth of lemonade dribbled into a litre of fizzy water; that shit makes Soda Stream taste good.

Eventually there’ll be no more room for Tescos on the surface of the Earth, or even on the Moon. They’ll have to pump money into Innerspace technology. Shrink them down. Eventually open a Tesco inside a minor celebrity’s body:

‘This is the 10 o’clock news. PM David Cameron, Howard from the Halifax ads and ex-Eastender’s heart-throb Pat Butcher were just some of the special guests shrunk down to the size of a bacterium to attend the grand opening of the world’s first Tesco Intestinal store… up Keith Chegwin’s arse.’

Culture Jamming Gallery – Pt1

Culture Jamming emerged as a response to the dominance of brand advertising on our streets and in our culture. It’s basically a form of politically-motivated vandalism, through which the often false sentiments and claims promoted by ads and logos can be manipulated to reveal the horrible truths that lurk beneath.

The most popular targets of this sweeping movement are those large, ruthless, multi-million-and-billion pound corporations that permit sweatshops to operate in their name; that put children to work making gaudy trainers and stitching logos on T-shirts for 20 hours a day for a pound a week; that ignore human misery, hardship and death so long as their cash registers sing and their shareholders can buy second homes; that despoil and pollute the environment; that support fatally-corrupt regimes and brutal dictators; that silence, threaten and sue those who attempt to expose their callousness; that lie, cheat, swindle and pillage their way to the top of the FTSE in the name of liberal capitalism and expect us to be grateful for their efforts: and that will attempt to obscure their evils with an innocent shrug, a reassuring smile, a slick slogan or two and a dazzlingly colourful ad campaign.

And sometimes, just sometimes, it’s simply funny vandalism. Here’s a selection of some of my favourites: