Glib Bullshit

A sense of humour is to women what democracy is to neoconservatives. While women may say that they like a man with a sense of humour, what they really mean is that in a choice between Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt with a sense of humour they would choose Brad Pitt with a sense of humour. While neoconservatives say that they value democracy and want to spread it all over the world, what they really mean is in a choice between oil from Saudi Arabia and oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia they would choose oil from a democratic Saudi Arabia.

Thus, despite their claims to the contrary, women apply a strategy of Kissingerian realpolitik to their love lives and neoconservatives go for hunks.

Merry Christmas!

Gig Review

Joe Gideon (of Joe Gideon and the Shark) stood on the stage and looked out at the audience, grinning his guilty grin and apparently feeling no pressure to use this time to tune his guitars. We stood near the front of the crowd and looked back at him.

A group of three young women moved in front of us, each no more than five feet and one inch tall. I am myself strikingly short (so short, in fact, that when recently I asked a friend for what proportion of the people I know did he estimate that I am the shortest fully-grown man they know he replied, "Sixty per cent," and added that I am the shortest man he knows). Being faced with this group of even shorter people was exciting.

I turned to my friend and said, "Watch me tower over these girls." I raised my nose high into the air and waved it around. I squinted and looked down my nose at the young women as if struggling to perceive them through many layers of cloud.

The woman closest to me turned around in a flutter of long dark eyelashes. She confronted me with large brown eyes and said, "I'm sorry, I'm standing in your way." I began attempting to communicate the idea that she was not obscuring my view and that really she was causing me no problem at all. I did this by flapping my hands about and shaking my head. I used more hand gestures accompanied by low grunting to indicate that she was actually positioned somewhat to the left of the portion of my field of vision that I required for a comprehensive view of the performers.

She turned to face the front again and at once my mind was awash with sparkling quips and visions of the prosecco-fuelled four-in-a-bed romps that would have naturally followed the successful deployment of any one of those sparkling quips.

This fantasy faded to be replaced by the grim conviction that my breath stank. Putrid swamp-coloured air seeped from my mouth and coiled around the slender neck of the woman who had spoken to me.

At length my thoughts turned to Stephen Fry. Most probably he has been offered an OBE or knighthood, I thought. Why has he turned it down? Not modesty: what modesty is left to a man who was willing to have BBC Four devote two nights to his hagiography. Some objection to being associated with Empire then or some darker malevolence – no need for a paltry knighthood when you plan to seize the crown itself with an army of QI fans.

A reign of fruity epigrams; of mothers smashing the noses of their sons so that they better resemble the King; and of a nation bankrupted by gratuitous over-investment in Radio Four panel shows.

Joe Gideon and the Shark began to play – a song about love in the snake house.

Griddle Pan Me This

1^st Gent: Was Jesus with the fishes five thousand?
2^nd Gent: No, fifty.

Such were the words of two men in front of me in the queue at Feeding the 5000 yesterday: an event in Trafalgar Square to "highlight the ease of cutting the unimaginable levels of food waste in the the UK and internationally". The men went on to discuss national bankruptcy, Gordon Brown and those bastard Scots with their subsidised whisky.

The message of this event was clear: all of you with your fresh fruit and vegetables – you posers – you never eat it, you don't even like it, you just let it go soft and then throw it out, yous ought to stick to Mars Bars and the smaller sized baked bean tins – that way you won't be so fucking wasteful. I'm paraphrasing here – there may have been something about supermarkets as well.

Their plan was to feed five thousand or so people with food that would otherwise have been discarded. Naturally, there was a long queue and the organisers had been instructed by London authorities that the queue should not extend beyond a certain point so as not to impede the free flow of pedestrian traffic across the square. In deference to this instruction, a battalion of stewards had been hired to corral the queuers. Their leader was equipped with a megaphone and she moved up and down the queue, shouting at it, telling it to bunch up. In addition, it was snowing and there was a stiff breeze. The experience of queueing was thus something like being in a jolly Gulag.


The free food was very good: bread, fruit, a smoothie, a vegetable curry and an onion bhaji. The curry was tasty and nicely spiced: how had they got hold of such a quantity discarded spices? I'm sure supermarkets throw away perfectly fresh spices all the time but this must be almost nothing compared to the quantities of fruit and vegetables that they throw away. It's one thing to stew vegetables for the five thousand but quite another to spice the five thousand. Clever them.

Upon leaving I was distracted by this zombie bear.


It turned out to be a snare and I found myself fallen among operatives of the World Wide Fund for Nature. They had me on all sides and immediately I was set about by their representative Bex to whom I surrendered my contact details so that they could telephone in the coming days to arrange the payment of my ransom.

***My next aim for the outdoor part of my day was Christmas shopping. I had been given money by my grandmothers with which to buy presents for me from them: I buy them, I hand them over to them, they wrap them, I am presented with them on Christmas Day. It ill becomes you to scoff at the Christmas traditions of other families, so stop it: this is entirely sane behaviour.

The task was plainly a very simple one. I was aware, however, of a few things to be borne in mind: these items must be light and small as I will have to carry them in my luggage on the train; also, it would not do to spend all afternoon shopping for them – the Christmas spirit is not kindled by shopping for yourself. Beyond that, clearly I am well placed to know what I like so it should be easy.

So it was that, not three hours later, my attention was drawn to a cast-iron griddle pan. A few more hours carrying it all over town revealed that it really was of singularly robust construction – a welcome addition to my kitchen equipment. Having assembled a handful of other suitable trinkets, I was able to return home, griddle-panning London shoppers and commuters about the shins as I went.

Floreat Vaizeum

When I left school and met for the first time that strange breed of people who might be best described as people who did not go to my school, I was shaken. These were people who used words like wicked and mate without joking and who understood none of the usual cultural signifiers – so that when I referred to the Lucas Reunion or 'the sort of person who stands on the steps at the back of the school' they had no idea what I was talking about.

What's more, they would not accept that my way of talking is simply The Globally-recognised Natural Language of Man spoken in the Normal Accent. It is the way that God spoke when once He walked among us and it is the language in which He will proclaim His judgment.

I soon realised that these people were too stubborn to be taught the correct way of things and I set about trying to justify myself to them. Chiefly, this meant that when I was drunk I would begin to talk about schools – your school, my school – and also why all this meant that I am "not actually that posh".

In the mornings after these bouts of misrepresentation and pontificating I would feel an unbearable shame. It felt as if a demon had reversed the usual progress of fecal matter through my body, transfiguring it into terrible words and letting those words issue noxiously from my idiotic mouth.

This happened so many times I can't remember but gradually I mastered the demon and, with considerable effort, I banished him. I would still talk embarrassing nonsense shite when drunk but not about schools and not about class.

Many years passed. I remained always vigilant, fearing his return. But he did not return and I began at last to form a shaky understanding with these people who did not go to my school: a little wool for some corn; they taught me their names for the sky and the clouds and for the rain that falls with the seventh moon; I showed them a compass and demonstrated gunpowder.

And then the demon returned. He has visited twice in the last month and I felt as wretched as ever I did in those early days.

The demon's return has coincided with the re-emergence of the rhetoric of class war in British politics kicked off in awkward and jowly fashion by Gordon Brown and his "playing fields of Eton" jibe. Over the past fortnight we have been given the chance to see British politicians squirming and being forced to give protracted defences of their background in an effort to demonstrate that they are not that posh.

It is thus that I have come to realise that the business of justifying your privileged background is an essential skill that must be learned by all members of the governing class. It may be torturous and there may be a great shame to be felt in doing it but in the democratic age the old elites cannot expect to remain in power any other way. The only shame is in doing it badly: the demon is not laughing at you; he is admonishing you.

Ed Vaizey MP is an unrivalled expert at this game; in his deft hands it becomes an art form. He was titled from birth, attended a major public school and then Oxford. He is, in other words, as posh as it is possible to be and still be able to stand unassisted. And yet here he is in this video sitting down and making a convincing argument that, despite all this, he is not that posh.



He was not always such a master: I remember that the "About Ed Vaizey" section of his website used to make clumsy reference to his having attended a state primary school.

American politicians do this better than anybody else. Not only have they convinced their electorate that they are not posh, they have convinced them that they live in a classless meritocracy. George W Bush managed two terms as president regarded as a humble everyman despite being descended from vampires and educated at a school at the centre of the Earth run by Freemasons.

Little Private Schoolboy

Little private schoolboy
Shopping with your mum
Daddy's gorn till Tuesday
Ho hum, ho hum

Cunting bloody trolley
'Sgot a wonky wheel
Grab some Smarties cookies
And eat them before your meal

Little private schoolboy
Nintendo in your pocket
Daddy's off in Belgium
Maybe he'll bring back chocolate

Bring Back Nostalgia

Athelstan the Homophobe

I have made a song. It features all of the names of the kings and queens of England and excerpts from a homophobic article by Melanie Philips.

I welcome your questions.