Two Thousand and Elevenses

The party’s over my friend: 2011, the year we looked forward to for two thousand and ten years, is done. It was alright, wasn’t it? Not the unbroken period of wealth, sexual exploration and skytram rides that we were promised in the 1930s, but not quite a busted flush.

For me it began with a blog post much like this one; reading it back, making corrections, inserting the odd rude word. While never inducing orgasmic convulsions, the year wasn’t unkind to me. I remained alive (thanks 2011!), sheltered and gainfully employed. I tasted the life of a man with no imagination, with nothing to do but consume and acquire material goods. It was empty, a spiritual haemorrhage, but comfortable. I enter 2012, assuming I make it to midnight, bolstered by anticipation. There’s much uncertainty, many balls are in the air – they’re on fire, and much could change in the next 12 months. I can’t be sure what’s going to happen and I find that quietly exciting.

Despite the lack of achievement and activity in this globally turbulent year, I took some time out from visiting places and doing things to allow ideas about the future and the work that may be produced in it, to cohere. I put out lots of nonsensical toss like this. Mainly, this distracted me from the tasks that were proving more challenging but it also kept me in the habit of writing. Alright, this may be throwaway stuff but even tat can be collectable; some people make a hobby out of it y’know. Start archiving these posts now and who knows what they’ll be worth in thirty years. Nothing, you say? Well that, dear reader, is why you’ll always be on the outside looking in; no vision you see.

My hobby horse, film criticism, picked up in 2011. I’m not bored of it yet. I managed to get myself on Rotten Tomatoes and found a large audience who were only too happy to tell me what an imperious, wrongheaded fuckface I was. Honestly, is it my fault if I’m right all the bloody time? Still, I’ve enjoyed getting the word out and arguing the toss with angry cinema goers. That I’m better at the job than 96.2% of those out there and still largely unwaged for my efforts, does nothing for my sense of natural justice. Still, when we’re all that quintessence of dust that Shakespeare talked about and all the money we’ve earned in our lifetime counts for dick sizzle, all that will remain are the words. I’m happy with that, it’s those that will have cock all to show for their time on Planet Earth that should be concerned.

So yes, my beautiful blogheads, I wish you a wonderful 2012 and thank you from the pit of my sack for reading Is That All There Is in 2011. You did me proud. I knew you would.

Below are my favourite blogs from the past 12 months. I’ve arranged them into little themed clusters. Don’t worry, my loyal but disgruntled troupe, it’s only going to get better next year.

Good luck to us all in the big twelve and twenty.

2011 in blogs:

The Way We Live Now

• Motorists and murder
• Film Spectatorship
• New strategies for begging

Inspired by the news

• The true story behind the creation of Ed Balls and Miliband
• The London Riots
• The real reason the News of the World had to close
• Pies and student politics

Culture and the Arts

• The most complicated music ever written and John Barry’s tribute concert
• When radio sitcom met art
• The up and comers on the comedy circuit

Why the EastEnders Pat Swap Plot Must Be Stopped: An open letter to Bryan Kirkwood

Dear Bryan,

Earlier this year I was upset to learn that Pat Evans, an EastEnders institution, was to be closed after 168 years. All your viewers adore Pat; she’s the former prostitute and Grandmother we never had. I look at the folds in Pat’s puss and I’m reminded of nature’s bounty and time’s beneficence to my baby blues. I never felt I deserved Pat and now, as if to confirm that thesis, you’re taking her away. SORT OF.

I understand that Pam St Clement, one of the few people not to play herself on the show, is tired and wants to step away from the role after 25 years. It can’t be easy for a well spoken lesbian to devolve her speech and pretend to be sexually attracted to hulking hairy cavemen with ugly groin protuberances. All those scenes with Mike Reid must have disgusted her. It would have been difficult enough for a heterosexual woman. Pam’s suffered for her art and our cheap entertainment. Understandably you don’t want to lose an asset like that just yet, but your solution beggars belief. It might just be the most desperate conceit ever inflicted on the British public.

I first learned of the Pat Swap plot yesterday afternoon. I got a call from a friend who hangs loose in showbiz circles. She knows a man who knows a woman who once slept with Winston from the market and word trickled down after a member of the cast, who I won’t name to protect their job (Shane Richie), left a script open on the bar of the Queen Vic while extras rehearsed pretending to have a silent conversation.

Bryan, the entire plot is absurd. I’ve dealt with all sorts in my EastEnders viewing career, but this story doesn’t ask me to suspend my disbelief, so much as sack it. In scenes to be broadcast on New Year’s Day, you actually intend to introduce a new family, the Morlocks, who move in next door to the Butchers and who, it just so happens, have a dying, rotund matriarch, with an uncanny resemblance to our beloved Pat.

That would be hard enough to swallow but then, in a sequence of events that’s going to astound the nation, and not in a good way, you intend to show poor Ricky Butcher, a character already dumb as a rubber knife, coming home to find our favourite dispenser of home truths dead in her boudoir. Ricky, I understand, unable to revive Pat, panics, and rather than dial 999 (he can’t call the local G.P as he burnt to death on Christmas Day), hauls Pat’s hulken mass out onto the front porch, screaming for help. Having received none, because the other characters are too blind drunk on cheap whisky and crack, he flutters about in despair only to be stopped dead at the sight of the new Pat-a-like, lying pale, covered in a blanket and surrounded by packing boxes in the Morlock’s new front room.

Now this is the moment that EastEnders, in my view Bryan, jumps the jellied eel.

Ricky, doped up on grief, has a mini-nervous breakdown. He climbs through the part-open window of the Morlock’s house, the others no where to be seen, strokes Grandma Morlock’s face and says “Pat, it’s you innit, you’re not really dead. Nah, nah, you’re not dead.” Next thing we know Bryan, we’re watching Ricky put this uncanny look-a-like into Pat’s bed only to cut to a horrific scene with the Morlocks returning from their New Year’s drinks at the Vic only to discover the woman they think is the head of the family, dead on the sofa.

I’ve just got one question for you, Bryan; do you seriously expect anyone to believe this shit?

I can’t tell you how insulted I am, especially as a life long fan, to be treated with such unmitigated contempt by you and your writers. One only has to think about this storyline for a few seconds to realise that the problems just pile up.

Do you really expect us to buy into the idea that the Morlocks wouldn’t instantly recognise that it was a different woman? Alright, you’ve cast her to look a lot like Pat, from her build to her crumpled frontispiece to those earrings, but even so, they’ve known this woman all their lives! Of course they’d work it out! Then there’s the Butchers. What happens on January 2^nd when Grandma Morlock opens her mouth? Alright, according to my source she has advanced dementia so is soon convinced by Ricky that she is in fact her deceased neighbour, and fine, you’ve written a scene where Ricky explains to his family that Pat had a mini-stroke in the night that had a detrimental impact on her speech, height and ability to recognise her friends and family, but even a dead head like Bianca would see through that, surely? Tiffany’s sharp as an axe, she’s going to pull this shit apart in five minutes.

I’ve also learned that you intend to keep the plot running for a year. A year! Are you fucking mad? If this is a means of giving us all a soft landing – a way to cope with our grief at Pat’s departure, then you’ve badly misjudged your audience, Bryan.

As a life long fan of the show I’m begging you to reconsider this story. It’s not too late to shoot some emergency scenes, maybe bring back Poppy Meadow for a few weeks; just her talking to the rest of the cast about boys and makeup, while you film new footage to cover the fallout from Pat’s death. A story like the Pat Swap could break this show, Bryan. It could be the end. Think of the offence it’s going to cause to people who don’t watch the programme but have elderly relatives dying of cancer. Think about the older viewers with parents that have dementia who will learn about it in the Daily Mail about a week from now. You’ll get a million complaints, you cockend, don’t do it.

I love Pat and I’m going to miss her but I want a dignified ending for the character. Not this, Bryan. It mustn’t end like this.

Yours four times a week, not that you deserve it,

Ed

Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe

Dear Steven,

I hope you’re having a pleasant Yule. It can’t be bad, sitting down with your family to watch your handiwork broadcast throughout the land. I’ve recently started to produce and direct artistic, high quality pornographic films and it’s my hope that one day I can sit down with the fair Mrs Whitfield and our children, Masmouder and Punch, and enjoy the likes of I wanna hold your gland and Cleft and Wright. A pipe dream perhaps but…

I’ve now finished digesting your seasonal slab of Gallifreyan ganglinoid action, The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe and can I just say how refreshing it was to see C.S Lewis made over sans Christianity. It was an omission that perfectly captured the spirit of the season and immeasurably improved the material. In place of a furry Christ we had an all-together more enjoyable metaphor, a mother ship. This was the greatest visual pun since John Simm’s Master Race, and although you built your story around it, just as your predecessor Russell Dust did with his, in The End of Time, when he realised it could be both a play on words AND a plot device, your conceit worked better, primarily because it didn’t involve a multiplicity of Simms.

Alright, it was all a little saccharine and inconsequential, and you do love your modern idioms, no matter when the bastard is set (“this will be the best Christmas ever!”) but you stuffed this bird with plenty of good humour and inventive fuckery. I enjoyed Claire Skinner’s undercutting of Smith’s hyperactive shtick, “that man is quite ridiculous”, and lines like, “he’s turning your brother into a lifeboat”; something you won’t hear on any other show, and not just because it would violate the BBC’s copyright.

I won’t lie Steven, because you’d see through it of course; I was a little bored. I’m jaded and childless so I don’t feel any warmth watching parables about kids that open their Christmas presents too early, nor do I punch the air when Mum arrives to save her saplings. The mother inadvertently saving her pilot husband from death and returning him to his two strongest ejaculations was pure 50′s Hollywood, and a nice scene for Christmas Day, but I worried that all the kids watching with Mother, whose Dads were off fighting Hitler over the channel, would be given a ray of false hope. Those men have been gone a long time now; I don’t think they’re coming home.

The real reason to watch this guff was, naturally, to get to the final scene where perennial plotting was put to one side and we got our one bona fide series moment; the reunion of The Doctor and Amy. I think I saw Rory in the background too. My loins nearly had a heart attack when that Scottish beauty opened the door with her bubble gun. There they were, together again, and one wondered why you couldn’t leave them to it and let them enjoy the occasional reunion, rather than ruining my TV girlfriend’s life in the next series. I know, she’s a major character and must have a dramatic conclusion to her story but isn’t there some way she could simply leave Rory and her strange child, some twenty years her senior, and come to live with me, perhaps in a Notting Hill townhouse where we could live like Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg in Performance?

Yeah, you won’t do THAT for me, will you, ya bastard?

The responsibility that comes with festive specials

We wage slaves are simple people, Steven, who can’t hope to understand the rigors of producing an hour of Christmas Day television for a demanding, seen-it-all-before viewership, who look at the finished product and imagine it was as easy to write as it was to watch.

Morecambe and Wise spent half the year impotent, laden with sexual and psychological dysfunction, over active thyroids, groin sweats and subnormal, violent episodes, producing each year’s yuletide hour. We now know, courtesy of a BBC light entertainment whistleblower, that Eric and Ernie used to sit by the phone with a cyanide pill between their teeth, waiting for a call from the duty office and the report that summarised overnight reaction from viewers. If they’d brought us sunshine they could live, if we thought it okay, about as good as The Two Ronnies, they’d bite down. We can thank some creative lying for their longevity.

I’m not suggesting you’re under that sort of pressure, Steven, but you must worry that the BBC, in deliberately filling the festive schedule with repeats, terrible films, underwritten sitcoms, miserablist soap and Blackadder the Third transmitted in the wrong aspect ratio, in order to create a bountiful stock of goodwill and indeed, hope, for you to mine, have left you dangerously exposed.

If your episode is good then this strategy, known as the jewel in the dung gambit, ensures reviews laden with superlatives and twitter users drunk with relief, but if it’s poor, you’ve ruined Christmas for the nation’s children; you’re the Father that got drunk after dinner and announced his intension to leave his wife and kids over the crackers and mince pies.

Perhaps you’re not sent a memo sometime around the end of August, requesting that the episode be upbeat, celebrate festive values as they’re imagined to be and end on a mawkish note; after all you’d be acutely aware of the BBC’s expectations. However, given the show’s popularity, and indeed your, one imagines, unassailable position as Emperor Dalek, could you not, y’know, use your privileged position and access to the nation’s youth, to drop a satire bomb on the country’s attempts at making this appalling, contrived family festival of consumption pass like a fairytale?

I for one would be grateful. Millions would cheer. Christmas TV became ossified long ago. It’s so bland and formulaic. Why not use a programme like Doctor Who to piss on that turkey dinner and pop a fenugreek leaf into Uncle Silas’ mulled wine? The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe felt like having a funnel forced into my mouth and Christmas poured into it until it overflowed. I choked on the sentiment. Here are three things you could have done instead:

1. A story about a fundamentalist Santa who gradually succumbs to guilt about the culture of festive decadence he’s created and so delivers bombs instead of gifts to the world’s children. The Doctor attempts to stop him but thinks better of it when he too becomes disillusioned with the institutionalised greed he sees all around him; the story climaxing with a global cascade of house fires.

2. A story in which The Doctor and Amy visit Christ as a youth and conclude that rather than being the son of God, he is in fact a mentally ill teenager. They resolve to remove him from the historical record and build an alternative winter solstice celebration centred on the birth of their own fictional character that champions promiscuity and lewd poetry throughout December.

3. A story in which The Doctor spends the weekend with Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. Succumbing to Victoria’s overtures, he breaks Albert’s heart, effectively killing his Christmas spirit and changing history so now, rather than introduce Christmas Trees, the Royal Consort convinces the Queen to cancel the entire thing, which she does, resulting in a December 25^th where no one feels obliged to be cheerful, spend time with awful relatives or eat the same fucking food as everyone else in the country. The real message of the episode, however, would be that TV would improve immeasurably and this would be the great insight that a grateful nation would remember you for.

You may use any of those for next year’s special.

Yours in time and festive cyberspace,

Ed

Letters from the last series:

• Dear Steven Moffat: The Wedding of River Song
• Dear Steven Moffat: Closing Time 
• Dear Steven Moffat: The God Complex
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Girl Who Waited
• Dear Steven Moffat: Night Terrors
• Dear Steven Moffat: Let’s Kill Hitler 
• Dear Steven Moffat: A Good Man Goes to War
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Almost People
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Rebel Flesh
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Doctor’s Wife
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Curse of the Black Spot
• Dear Steven Moffat: Day of the Moon
• Dear Steven Moffat: The Impossible Astronaut 

Behind every dead man is a great fallacy

Christopher Hitchens, who died on Thursday, has, rightly I believe, been remembered as an important thinker with a keen intellect and gift for wordcraft. The obituaries outlined the force of his personality and the zeal with which he demolished charlatans and hypocrites. Better still, his refusal to reach for crutches like sentimentality, whimsy and received wisdom when discussing politics, art and religion, gave us cause to believe that the battle of ideas hasn’t been lost just yet.

Hitchens was an iconoclast and rationalist (or a Godless contrarian if you’re simple). Consequently, anyone writing about the man following his death would be disrespectful if they failed to evaluate his life and achievements with anything other than sobriety: not easy when writing about an unrepentant alcoholic. Hitchens, when writing obituaries, was famously unmoved by the fact of the subject’s death, never allowing the piece that followed to be corrupted by romanticism. If the individual had been a grotesque in life, he thought, then the piece should discuss their minus contribution to the sum total of human progress, uncowed by the sympathy and proxy fear we all feel when someone goes ahead of us into eternal nothingness.

In accessing him, most obituary writers eschewed Hitch style character demolition and worldview dissection, in favour of an honest summary of his contribution to journalism; a considerable contribution that saw him posthumously grouped as an essayist with the likes of George Orwell. It’s not an invidious comparison.

Many resisted political readings of his life, being content to document the, for some, inexplicable truth, that he held views belonging to both the left and right. Okay, this may be true for every human being on Earth, but Hitchens, whose pragmatism allowed him to slip out of an ideological straightjacket, was hated by many on the left for that relativist instinct. That it was informed by a mind that targeted the complexities and vicissitudes of each situation, however inconvenient, was incidental to those that didn’t care to bear down on the facts quite so hard.

Still, in the days following his death, his enemies, comprehensively beaten in life, had the good grace to remain silent, while his admirers kept hyperbole to a minimum, often quoting their subject in depth; he was permitted to speak for himself. In fact, all in the land of remembrance was well until the Independent columnist Viv Groskop thought she saw a chasm sized flaw in the obituary writers’ logic and moved to fill it: Hitchens may have been a great man but what about the great woman behind him? Wasn’t anyone going to credit Carol Blue, his wife, for her part in the man’s prestigious output?

You might think the short answer to that is no; Blue, no doubt a fine companion for the late writer, wasn’t responsible for his intellectual curiosity, his early drive, his political awakening, his fastidiousness or, and this is quite important, a single word of any essay or piece of prose written by him in his lifetime. At first glance, if one were to extract Blue from the scene, Hitchens would have been no less a successful journalist and writer, but hold the fuck on, says Groskop, we, like so many of Christopher’s detractors, are missing the bigger picture. She was there to mother him and that made all the difference, or something. I mean, it’s almost impossible to evaluate but it’s obvious, innit.

Our society’s numerous problems are offset using intangible covers ups; ideas that don’t quite have weight, form, indeed any kind of substance, but nevertheless provide reassurance; ideas that function to relieve us of the burden of having to think too closely about the root causes of certain difficulties. They’re terribly convenient because they explain away the everyday without recourse to time consuming trials like scrutiny, investigative thought and imagination. You and I know these fragments from a netherworld of bullshit, built from psychical bungaroosh, as truisms, a.k.a received wisdom; the sort of nonsense that Hitchens hated but is now, post-mortem, being used to retrospectively re-shape his life’s narrative by Viv Groskop.

Gender inequality is one of the scourges of our age; the only people who don’t think so are men that fear a feminised world. Women, it seems to me, have a choice; they can either accept they’re down and are achieving less, on average, and turn militant in a bid to emancipate themselves and challenge the existing patriarchy or they can try to feel better about male dominance with comforting lies like “behind every great man lies a great woman”.

In addition to being a thought terminating cliché, Groskop’s thesis, that Hitchens’ wife managed and tolerated his difficult persona plus a work ethnic “close to lunacy”, selflessly putting her own needs aside so he could work unimpeded, is disingenuous, not to mention a flight of fancy. Her evidence is a quote from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who noted that Blue “set a high bar in how to handle a flower like Christopher”. That’s one way of looking of it. Another is to say that Blue was lucky to be married to a man as interesting as Hitchens.

If we’re allowing our gender and imagination to intertwine and inform speculation, couldn’t we just as plausibly argue that Blue got more from spending her life with Hitchens than the reverse? “Most of the obituaries don’t mention her at all,” laments Groskop; clinical assessments of a dead man’s achievements that eschewed the domestic, the trivial, the sexual; what an embarrassment of relevance. No wonder Viv was bemused.

Groskop went on to cite Natalia Svetlova, wife of Solzhenitsyn, who answered the telephone on his behalf because he refused to do so. By indulging his reclusive tendency and allowing him to work uninterrupted, Svetlova, in Groskop’s mind, can take much of the credit for the literary leviathan’s oeuvre. “Imagine if that were your husband,” she says, appealing to the dutiful and economically inactive partner in us all, but Viv, we reply, if we’re lucky enough to be shackled to a genius we wouldn’t worry. Those of us that want a simple life have a million middling, bland people to choose from.

Groskop’s article, “Behind every Christopher Hitchens…”, though she could just have easily have gone for broke and entitled it, “the power behind the throne”, dangerously assumed that complicated people who are gifted in some way, always benefit from having a less complicated, less gifted partner in tow. Perhaps they do in the sense that it relieves them of the tedium that comes with an ordinary life; answering the phone, going to your kid’s parents evening, walking Shep; but as far as posterity’s concerned, this is an irrelevant sideshow.

Not one of Hitchens’ obituaries praised the role of his liver in keeping him alive during his lifetime of excess; no one heralded his fingers for depressing the keys on his typewriter. Perhaps Groskop’s editor cut those passages for space. And what of the reality that Groskop neither acknowledged nor considered? Isn’t it true that in many cases, your better half is a break on your ambition, not its facilitator?

If we’re to entertain the notion, buoyed by reams of anecdotal evidence, that men, and indeed women, are held back by poor partners; the kind that saddle them with responsibilities they don’t want, stunt their ambition with derision borne of envy or competition, and bully them into conforming to an imaginary archetype that cripples rather than compliments their personality; might we not agree that successful people may make an impact despite their love-squeeze, not because of them? Doesn’t it denigrate a person’s achievements to have them rooted in and ascribed to, the back room efforts of a less gifted fuckmate?

Hitchens credited alcohol as being his friend and sponsor. So why didn’t the Indy run a piece praising Johnny Walker Black Label as an integral part of his success? Most of the obituaries didn’t mention the brand at all. Probably because such a link wouldn’t make the vaginally endowed columnist feel better about the fact that there’s few female polemicists to match the deceased.

“Man cannot live by genius alone. So please, obituary writers, don’t let’s pretend he did”, concludes Groskop. Well Viv, I say let’s not pretend he didn’t succeed despite all of the nonsense that life puts in your way, or indeed that his achievements weren’t his own, however comforting it may be to assume otherwise.

Ladies: The author remains available for dates. Do get in touch.

NIMBYs, get out of my back yard!

The author makes no apologies for the metropolitan bias in the following blog post.

NIMBYs are the enemies of progress. They’re boorish, sentimental, parochial minded luddites but that’s not all; they’re also some of the most selfish people alive.

I’d dearly love to indulge in the kind of short sighted protectionism enjoyed by these closeted figurines, but I don’t have that luxury; I’m a descendent of the industrial revolution and technological progress. As a Londoner I also live in a real place; the kind of culturally rich, busy metropolitan centre, flush with humanity, where tolerance and a willingness to flex to accommodate one’s fellow citizens, of the kind already demonstrated, is a copper bottomed necessity.

I know you think you live in a real place but you don’t. Those six streets, flanked by pastoral beauty and evocative of 18^th century village life, are a romantic stain from a social dalliance long ended. I know, it’s nice for you to live in the village, with the old post office, red phone box, thatched public house and rows of lime plaster cottages; a place where you can hear nothing but Ravens and Cow bleats; where you’ve known the same ten people all your life, having slept with half of them; but this isn’t reality, it’s Britain as imagined by Hergé in the Tintin books.

To modernity’s eyes you’re cavemen. Worse, you’re lecturing us on the infrastructure projects conceived in the national interest. Worse still, the government is listening. This is ludicrous; like all adults agreeing to abstinence because a committee of five year olds told them that women and men touching each other was disgusting. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t wish to be condescending, it’s just that you’re a lot of backward, pig-ignorant bastards.

NIMBYs are lobbying hard to destroy belated attempts at improving our national rail network. The Victorians and Edwardians built it; it was the envy of the world. Sure, no one asked the world but someone who’d travelled around it spoke to someone who knew for definite. The railways connected communities, built many more, allowed industry and exploitation in the workplace to thrive and then, in the 1960s, technocrats, spearheaded by imbecilic, self-centred road users, like Doctor Beeching, dismantled a third of them and left the rest to rust. The Major regime finished it off, privatising the whole thing.

Now we’re ghouls riding the ghost train. Lost souls rotting in overcrowded, snail powered carriages. We cry out for investment, for modernisation, and when it finally comes in the form of the proposed HS2 link between London and Birmingham, a modest proposal to be sure, given the vast expansion and improvement required, the road lobby, holed up in a Chilterns country pile, cry foul. Do we realise that this line will destroy a field? Maybe even cut the walk cherished by Mary and Donald Westcott and their Shetland Sheepdog Jesse, in two? Yes, we know it, but those of us who see the bigger picture think it’s a price worth paying. We think this because we live in the modern world, not the novel Silas Marner.

Londoners make accommodations for each other every day. We’re constantly under each other’s feet; the transport network buckles and often breaks; and any space that isn’t accounted for is often co-opted for building projects; much needed new homes, a new rail link.

When Crossrail, the East to West railway, began construction, many restaurants and old clubs on Tottenham Court Road had to be destroyed because fresh track requires an expanded station. I had many happy memories of the buildings that got the wrecking ball but I didn’t stand there and weep into a book of old photographs or chain myself to The Mean Fiddler. Why? Well, I’d have been killed, but also because as a Londoner I understand that change and expansion is part of life and more importantly, that the city needs new arteries. If Londoners were as selfish and sentimental as those sitting in a damp farmhouse in ten acres of unspoilt marshland, somewhere north of the M25, then the entire system would grind to a halt. We get it and it’s about time you bastards caught up.

What’s true for London is true for the country. The transport system is hopelessly inadequate for the passenger numbers it carries. Journey times between major destinations are slow and major metropolitan centres must be served. The current lines can only be improved so much. The network must be expanded. We have to get moving. It can’t wait.

The plans are modest; too modest. If anything those High Speed lines should run from London to Glasgow; from London to Penzance. It’s not just green, if you care about that sort of thing, it also makes the country smaller; it pumps money from South to North and South to South West; it makes it possible for people to live in one city and work in another, meaning we don’t all have to live in the same overcrowded clumps. We can spread out a bit. We desperately need to spread out a bit.

I don’t want to be petty about this, but if the NIMBYs are going to scupper even the most half-hearted improvements, then reciprocal inconvenience should be vested upon them. I don’t have a real back yard; I gave it up, like most Londoners, so that one more person could enjoy the same benefits I do; the same museums, the same theatres, the same cinemas and pubs and restaurants; but what I do have is the symbolic equivalent, personal spheres of interest. Ideally, I’d want to stop any rural romantics intruding upon them, out of nothing but spite.

London’s a busy place so I’d decree that none of you could come here; not to work – you can piss off to the Chicken Factory like your school mates, and certainly not to enjoy any aspect of city life; that’s right you can forget that day trip to see your favourite band; instead you can stay at home and enjoy Annie Love singing the hits of Celine Dion at The Horse and Hoof. Enjoy theatre? Then you’ll love the Upper Horsham Players; that’s the local publican, his reluctant son and Mary from the pottery shop on Church Street; I believe they’re doing Sleuth at the old barn. Mary’s playing the furniture.

Meanwhile, because cars aren’t conducive to clean city living; we hardly need them in London given all these trains, buses and bikes; we should aggressively tax road users until their wallets scream, ignoring the needs of those in rural areas completely. Oh, you’re dependent upon your car to get around are you? Well that’s tough testicles. You should have thought of that before you opposed the changes that would improve the nation with a modern transport network.

Yes, you can look forward to fuel price hikes, road tax that you won’t be able to pay should you have any ambitions to feed and clothe your children, and, in a mirror of what your narrow mindedness has imposed on the train user, inflation busting increases on the price of a car itself. That’s right, a new wagon will be out of the question. Consequently you’ll have to put up with your old king sized roller skate until it’s little more than a mobile rusticle; a relic that it’s going to cost you the Earth to run. If you want a vision of the future I suggest you take your holidays in Cuba this year. We’ll see how nostalgic you are when you no longer have the means to modernise.

Sorry old fruits, but you didn’t expect us to subsidise paradise forever, while our lives ground to a halt, did you?

Oh. Anyway, as you were.