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‘Danger? In danger of, eh …?’
‘Of being sexually assaulted,’ the old guy nods vigorously. ‘Of being subjected to the same kind of sexual assault as Mr Joly … there have been other incidents like this involving other, eh, celebrities.’
‘The suspicion is that this guy has been operating for several years, attacking people who have been famous but then slip below a certain level of public recognition,’ his partner explains, inexplicably ending by smacking his fist into his open palm.
I hold my tea in both hands like I’m nursing a Scotch. I try to think of a polite way of asking, then blurt out, ‘Who? Who else has he raped?’
The old boy flips open a notebook. ‘A lot of the presenters from The 11 O’Clock Show, Tony Slattery, Steve Punt, Sam Fox, Michael Greco, two … no, all three of the ladies from Smack the Pony, Frank Sidebottom, before he died. We can’t really name people.’
‘This has been going on for a while?’
‘It seems to be getting more active. And he seems to be focusing his anger on comedy.’
‘Everybody does,’ I smile.
As I show them out, Paul gets up halfway as some sort of farewell and it ends up looking like a curtsy. They both shake my hand warmly and, as the younger cop heads out, the old guy grips me by the arm and forces something into my hand. He fixes me with the liquid eyes of a dying spaniel and leaves without a word.
Half an hour later Paul and I are still smoking a joint on the couch, passing the picture back and forth. It’s a dressing room. I reckon it’s an ITV dressing room at LWT. In the foreground you can see part of a guy lying on the floor, his trousers off and a huge arse exposed. Is this Dom Joly? Is he fucking dead? Why would they take a photo while he was still unconscious? Did the rapist take it? On the wall is the real focus of the piece. Written in blood (presumably, we agree, Dom Joly’s arseblood) is a slogan in block capitals.
‘SHOWBUSINESS HAS NO BOTTOM.’
Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people: in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture. They were given a taste of its obscene underside, which forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. Bush was thus wrong: what we are getting when we see the photos of the humiliated Iraqi prisoners on our screens and front pages is precisely a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the US way of life.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence
Chapter 1 (#ulink_59565424-a800-529d-a1d3-647ecbe61b86)
It’s interesting that war is the ultimate in reality television and yet the British public couldn’t be less interested. Remember when they used to have to persuade the country to go to war? Fake up a dossier? Remember when they even used to announce a war? Now, it’s just, ‘Hey, we’re bombing Libya!’ Soon they won’t even bother with that and we’ll only find out who we’re fighting when our friends send us a postcard saying that their hotel buffet just got destroyed by a pilotless attack drone, or when we accidentally read a tweet that Liam Fox has sent to Fearne Cotton.
Of course, war to us seems so brutal, so unnecessary. That’s because we don’t own shares in arms companies. Those guys live in palatial penthouses full of shrunken heads and wank to the news. Still, we are members of our society, so we are complicit in what it does.
Look at it this way. Personally, I think we should have much more open immigration arrangements, we should treat asylum seekers fairly, we shouldn’t imprison them and we particularly shouldn’t imprison their children. Perhaps I can hold that view because I live in a country that does the opposite. Because I have the security of knowing that it won’t happen. It’s the same with war. We might say, ‘Not in my name’, but it is in our name, and with our taxes.
We are told we fight consequence-free wars. Drone missions are ‘targeted killings’, of people who have never stood trial. ‘Your judge is this flying bomb, your sentence is kaboom!’ We drop bombs from miles up in the sky and say they are surgical strikes. Ignoring the fact that there is no way to safely drop high explosives into urban areas. That surgeons don’t, for good reason, ever use explosives.
In the UK, as bailiffs cleared out protestors at the peace camp outside parliament, one was filmed stamping on a protestor. And with that one vicious act of violence, the area was officially no longer a peace camp and just another London park. The area is now going to be used as a holding pen for Boris Johnson’s mistresses.
I never understood why men go to war. Then I thought, men have children. The average length of a war is four or five years, which is also the amount of time it takes for a child to stop being really fucking annoying. Men are saying to themselves, ‘Do I want to be here, listening to this wee guy scream because I’ve cut his toast into triangles instead of squares? No, I’ll go join the army. I’ll send him a Christmas video message, when I’m beheaded on YouTube … screaming, ‘How do you want my head cut off then? In triangles or in fucking squares?!’
Reading about Help for Heroes, I think it’s sad that that’s left to charity. Give it a couple of years and we’ll be getting hassled in the high street to adopt a para for £5 a month. There was a story that a legless war hero couldn’t get into a charity ball where he was guest of honour because it had no disabled access. Organisers apologised for the mix up, and invited him to have tea with the Queen – on a bouncy castle at the top of Blackpool Tower! How could we treat a man who lost so much for this country like that? Well, we sent him into an unnecessary war with inferior equipment and a breathtaking ignorance of historical precedent, so it was probably pretty easy.
I really don’t understand the no-fly zone in Libya. How can we designate a no-fly zone and then whizz about it in our planes? It has all the logic of a parent in McDonald’s telling their kids they’re embarrassing them. Presumably the reason coalition forces have been blowing up tanks and buildings is because they’re worried they might take to the skies like migrating geese. Instead of a no-fly zone, Cameron should just parachute in whoever was running Britain’s transport network last winter. British Typhoons reduced some schools and hospitals to barely functioning messes. Not in Libya, over here – at a cost of £90 million each, they’re bound to have.
William Hague said that Britain will stop bombing Libya when Gaddafi stops killing his own people. They’ve managed to turn a war into something akin to a loved-up couple not wanting to hang up the phone first.
‘No, you stop shooting first …’
‘No, you stop bombing first …’
‘No, you stop shooting first … Hello? … Hello? … Are you still shooting …’
‘Yeah …’
‘Oh, you!! OK, let’s both stop killing together … 3 … 2 … 1 …’
‘Are you still bombing? …’
‘Yeah.’
The debate is whether the war is legal. It has brought pain, misery and desperation to hundreds of thousands of people. Does that sound legal to you? To me it sounds like the dictionary definition of the legal profession. Tony Blair phoned Gaddafi twice to urge him to stand down. Apparently, the delusional lunatic rambled on for hours about not being a war criminal before Gaddafi managed to get a word in.
Hague confirmed that Britain is supplying the rebels with mobile phones. That’s incredibly useful. It seems that they’ve been texting us saying, ‘We’re dying. Send guns please.’ I hope we sent them iPhones. There’s a wonderful app for finding your legs in a bomb crater.
People may be wondering where Britain is getting all these free mobile phones from that we are handing to the young radical Muslims in Libya. They’re mainly confiscated from the young radical Muslims that we put in Belmarsh.
An American fighter plane crashed in a field near Benghazi. If you ask me, that was enforcing the no-fly zone a bit too strictly. What a laugh it would have been if it had landed on the house of Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi. Not that he’d have been in; he spends most afternoons waterskiing.
The Scottish Parliament still argue they did stringent checks that al-Megrahi definitely had a note from his mum asking for him to be excused from prison. The claim is that it was the Scottish Parliament acting compassionately. Scottish and compassionate? Those words go together about as well as ‘Premiership’ and ‘consensual’.
BP lobbied over the Libyan prisoner-transfer scheme. If you’re one of those people who stick your finger in their ears and sing to themselves that Britain’s foreign policy is nothing to do with oil, that must be quite difficult to explain. It seems like the two have nothing in common. It’s like finding out that the manufacturers of Lynx shower gel had been demanding the release of Peter Sutcliffe.
The RAF pilots who flew on a rescue mission to Libya used maps printed straight from Google. Why bother? When I need a map of Libya I use a sheet of sand paper. Apparently, we have been dropping in troops as ‘advisors’. It’s all perfectly fine under international law so long as when they shoot someone they say, ‘I advise you to die.’
The public doesn’t seem to be behind the war in Libya. To engage them, maybe we should tally up the number of civilian casualties and use them as the numbers for the EuroMillions. You’ll have Jenni Falconer in a morgue as Graham, the voice of the dead, reads the results. 6, 22, 11, 4, 9 and, because last night we hit a primary school, 40.
David Cameron said he undertook military action because it’s ‘not acceptable to have a situation where Colonel Gaddafi can be murdering his own people using planes and helicopter gunships’. It also invalidates the warranties the British arms manufacturers sold them with. Amusingly, David Cameron was roaming around the Middle East with arms dealers trying to flog weapons while calling for an end to violence. He’s right. What these places need to solve their differences is more guns. The Tories see Gaddafi as a ‘legitimate target’ for them – after all he is elderly, Muslim and has children.
Gaddafi’s also been accused of using human shields. He’s going to have to do better than that. Our bombs will simply rip through them. He should have opted for steel or concrete. And they say he’s a tactical genius! Yes, it’s horrible that protestors are being fired on by jets, but what a way to go! Fighting a plane! It must be like unlocking a secret level of Grand Theft Auto coded by Raoul Moat.
Both sides have been accused of using rape as a weapon. The hardest part of using rape as a weapon is training the troops. The assault course is a very different thing at rape camp. You rarely see rape squads as part of military marches. You can hear David Dimbleby doing the voiceover at Trooping the Colour. ‘Visiting from Scotland we have the 4th Rape Squad. They’ve been raping for their country since 1935. They’re taking the salute from the Queen. Some of them have broken ranks, and are racing straight towards Her Majesty’s box. And from here, I think I can see a flicker of a smile come across her face.’
NATO says Gaddafi’s reign of terror is near an end – because we will soon have bombed everybody he’s been trying to scare. It’s an interesting policy. We just keep bombing everything around him, but not actually him. I presume if he gets captured they’re going to execute him by knife thrower.
We were told that military action helped to prevent a bloodbath in Benghazi. Thankfully, with our help the bloodbath happened five miles outside Benghazi. Libyans are gathering around military instillations, not to act as human shields but in the knowledge that it’s probably the last place that NATO bombs are going to land. Surprisingly, some people in Tripoli still support NATO. The undertakers. To most Scots, NATO’s just a description of their feet after suffering a decade of Type 2 diabetes.
Is it wise to fill Libya with melting corpses while we look for Gaddafi? He’s increasingly blending in. Gaddafi has a lot of money at his disposal – it can’t have been cheap buying Michael Jackson’s face after he died. He looks like the last surviving balloon from a children’s party. If only he hadn’t hoarded £60 billion abroad. He could have kept say £10 billion, and used the rest to create an unbreachable defence. Right now, a colossal golden robot bear could be lapping up the protestors like ants, its tortured attempts to sing ‘Bear Necessities’ in machine code sounding, to Libyans, like a series of garbled sex threats.
Our various wars are being fought purely to justify a £50 billion defence bill and maintain an army that is grossly oversized for the realistic needs of our country. Ours is the second largest military force in the EU. The last time Britain was successfully invaded was over a millennium ago in 1066. And our military is used to attack not to defend. Some critics of this will say that Britain has been attacked, by terrorists. But we didn’t need an army to prevent 7/7. We needed a bus conductor.
The bombs we’re dropping cost more than the buildings we’re dropping them on. In financial terms they’re winning. First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope says he’s sure if we’d had enough money to send another warship we’d have finished this conflict. Yes, Sir Mark, and if we had enough money for jobs people could feed their kids. Who’d have thought that a navy as powerful as ours would struggle to win a war in a desert? So we sold Gaddafi weapons and now he has more than we do. How do we get out of this sticky situation? Surely we could launch a product-recall notice?
‘An unfinished surface of the T-72 dashboard could cause a nasty cut. Please return, in person, to the nearest HM warship.’
Why should we believe the opinions of the First Sea Lord? I haven’t trusted him since he told his daughter she couldn’t marry a human and she ended up selling her voice for legs. Also, maybe saying we’re running out of money to carry on isn’t the best way of getting Gaddafi to surrender. Is this the Big Society? We all work for free to save lives while special funding is ring-fenced to kill people? We got stuck in Iraq for eight years, we’ve been stuck in Afghanistan for ten years and, for some reason, we set the timetable for a conflict in Libya at 90 days. You can’t even get a sofa delivered in 90 days.
Gaddafi shut down all internet communications in the country. Which is a pity, as there are always thousands of people trying to get on Freecycle to pick up a coffin. Libya operated tight state control over the media, that’s obvious. The rebels invited Britain to get involved in their war – they must have watched no television at all. Gaddafi banned the learning of the English language in Libyan schools, which is obviously why Libya did most of its diplomatic negotiations with the Scottish government. A succession of colourful noises was all the two parties needed to be understood.
Trumping even Libya, Tunisia had the harshest internet censorship outside of China. I wonder why so few of us knew that? The Tunisian revolution started when a street vendor set fire to himself. Ian Tomlinson’s inquest ended and the British people were watching TV’s Most Shocking Talent Show Moments, which was a revolution in a way, as you didn’t get to vote on what won.
Tunisia’s revolution inspired the uprisings across the Arab world, so maybe all the Arab refugees should go to Tunisia. Put all the exiled revolutionaries in one country and rename it ‘Spirited Arabia’. It will have a lovely climate and be very close by plane, but the customer service will consist of someone shouting, ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ and shooting into the ceiling.
These Arab states have had to fight with their lives to install a hastily-decided-upon, cobbled-together, temporary government. We did it simply by not bothering to vote last year. The Arab League. It’s not a patch on the Premiership. You just can’t get the ball control with sandals.
It was reported that Leila Trabelsi, the wife of Tunisia’s ousted ruler, left the country with 1.5 tonnes of gold, worth more than £35 million. The joke’s on her, though, as she fled the country on easyJet. Her baggage allowance came to just over £40 million.
Israel killed a bunch of civilians in international waters for trying to bring aid to the Palestinians. According to the Israelis, their troops started shooting because people on the boats threw stones. That sounds proportionate. It’s a bit like, well, someone throwing stones at you and you executing them in cold blood with a team of commandos. ‘20 soldiers airdropped onto the boat from a helicopter’ – what surprised me is, if you type that into Google, you get a Charlie Sheen sex tape.
Israel still claims land rights based on the Bible. That’s a bit like me pitching a tent beside your house and saying I want your garden because it belonged to King Arthur. I pity the Palestinians, who didn’t do anything to deserve what happened to them. Israel should have been given some of Germany to start a country in. Anyway, I’d better leave it there. I get a lot of complaints when I write jokes about Israel, mainly from the Mossad agent who has to update my file.
There’s a real sense of change taking place right across the Arab world as the old rulers are removed from power, making way for a whole new set of ruthless dictators. When will these corrupt rulers come to realise that guns cannot silence the people? Only reality television and talent shows can do that.
The people of Yemen have also overthrown their ruler, and now Syria is trying. The young lesbian from Syria who wrote an online blog was actually a 40-year-old fat American. As I discovered after arranging to meet her in a Travelodge car park. Despite common perceptions, lesbianism is actually becoming a more popular lifestyle choice for young women in Syria, now that all the men are dead.
What are all these Middle Eastern rulers going to do now they’ve been chucked out of a job? Become Northern Ireland peace envoys? Back home, people are asking why other Arab leaders haven’t got involved; given that most Arab countries are currently being ruled by an ‘out of office’ email, that might be a bit of a problem. The leader of the UN wants the world to have one clear opinion. The world won’t even buy the records of The X Factor winners they voted for – you expect consistency?
For all that I in my middle-class, lefty reality tunnel imagine that people aren’t behind Britain’s wars, I sometimes wonder if that’s true. I look at the Top Gear-style news items about the rockets we use, the computer games where we symbolically join in, and I think maybe everybody is right fucking into this.
Britain sent over new Apache helicopters and Typhoons to Libya. Are we just parading what they could have bought had they not decided to make things awkward? Our Tomahawk missiles have a camera on the front, which provides great clip-show footage worth £250 a go to help pad out the defence budget. There’s even talk of a couple of new ships if Channel 5’s controversial You’ve Been Maimed gets the go-ahead. They use the latest sat-nav guidance system, replacing an earlier model where two mice sat in a transparent nosecone yanking at a joystick as they bickered over a tiny map.
Some of our troops are to be issued with special bomb-proof pants. Yes, I can think of nothing that will ease the pain and suffering of grief-stricken parents more after being informed of the death of their son than being handed his perfectly preserved cock and balls.
Meanwhile, US soldiers have started using a futuristic rifle that fires radio-controlled bullets that can travel round corners. Now, they’ll be able to shoot British soldiers without even aiming at them. There are strict guidelines for their use and they’ll only be sold to rogue Middle Eastern states if they’re willing to pay more for them than their enemies.
The US army also wants all its troops to eventually carry military smart phones, with various battlefield apps. The apps will contain all sorts of useful military information, including phrasebooks. Though if you’re out of signal, a bit of paper with ‘You killed my wife, you western devil!’ should cover most of the things you’ll hear.
The US army are putting everything into this. They will have apps with training manuals, and the capability to order new equipment and downloadable maps of all the enemy’s positions. British soldiers will be getting a text message saying ‘Duck!’ Some soldiers are killed when protecting their squad, and some soldiers are killed when patrolling the streets. Future soldiers will be killed by replying slowly to a text message asking if you’ll definitely be home in time for Uncle Alan’s retirement party.
It will take a few years before the technology is developed for every soldier to carry a military smart phone. By that time, they will probably be quite useful because we’ll be placing phones in the hands of the first generation to have been raised by parents with mobiles. And if there’s anything to inspire a lust to kill strangers, it’s being given the object that prevented your mother from looking or communicating with you for the last 18 years.
I’m not sure why they say mobile phones are the weapons of the future? From where I’m standing, it looks like handing every child a cancerous stick of isolation and apathy has pretty much destroyed humanity already.
The US army also wants all American soldiers to have 24-hour internet access. It’s essential for operations that they continue to be anaesthetised by porn and Tekken, even when being begged to stop throwing grenades at a school.
The much-anticipated game Medal of Honor came out but it’s not realistic at all. You’ve actually got a chance of winning, and all the equipment works. The next one, however, promises to be just like the real thing. It takes 27 years to complete and, whenever your character dies, you get a crappy, badly spelt letter from the prime minister.
There was outrage because of plans to let you play as the Taliban. You can’t ban a game that has fighters in it just because they kill British soldiers. What about all the ones with US troops in? I’m quite advanced at it. The thing to do is be the Taliban. Then, when you get to Stage 3, sneak off and hide in a British coffin. Next thing you know, you can be pumping bullets into the till girl at Somerfields in Wootton Bassett.
France and Britain signed a treaty to share aircraft carriers. One week we’ll put nothing on them, then the next week France will put nothing on them. Having a military agreement with France feels like getting help with your school homework from Peter Andre. At a joint conference, French military chiefs told their UK counterparts they were looking forward to the cost-saving consolidation of their respective forces, and the English ones replied, ‘Hello, my name John is what I’m called, and my hobby I am cinema watching.’
David Cameron insists budget cuts won’t affect our fighting capabilities – we’ll keep losing. The army has to lose 7,000 soldiers. Probably the best way to do this is to put them on joint military manoeuvres with the Americans. I’m just worried that with thousands of unemployed troops, and Simon Cowell with a spare £100 million, The X Factor will move into its sinister second phase.
More than a quarter of the civilian posts at the Ministry of Defence will be cut over the next five years, following the Strategic Defence Review. Which will make James Bond films less interesting. ‘Ah, Miss Moneypenny … has gone … I keep forgetting she had to go off and retrain as a classroom assistant.’ Part of the defence cuts is the withdrawal of forces from Germany … Really? Do you think it’s safe yet? Do you think there’s a chance we could return them, only to have an 80-year-old Nazi try to destroy the tube network with a Doodlebug?
The British military are spending £8 million a year on parties. You can imagine how much they’ll spend if we actually start winning any of these wars. And there’s uproar that military bosses are travelling the country by helicopter. Why would they do that? I mean it’s not as if they’ve made it awkward for themselves to travel by tube. One general flew a military plane to Wolverhampton. But I suppose the only way to happily approach Wolverhampton is when you’re watching it through a missile-targeting system.
25 per cent cuts across the board for education, health, social services – yet only 20 per cent on defence? That’s like a family skimping on buying medicine, books and clothes so they still have enough money to catapult shit into next door’s garden. The army admits it’s lost more than £6 billion worth of equipment. That’s the problem when you cover everything with camouflage.
They’ve also scrapped HMS Ark Royal. What does it say about the safe future of our country when the first boat to be scrapped is the Ark? We’re building two aircraft carriers that, eh, won’t have any aircraft on them. Basically, we’ll defend ourselves by threatening hostile nations with a giant floating ironing board. What are they going to use all that space for? Sailors’ hornpipe practice or overflow parking? Why would you build an aircraft carrier if you had no aircraft to put on it? Probably for the same reason that my father built a sun room in Scotland. It’s a very handy place to store bulky furniture. Two giant boats that impotently travel about the world attracting ridicule. How on earth did they decide on the names Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles? Everyone is asking what will become of the Ark Royal? It will operate in the same manner as it did before being decommissioned. As a floating gay bar. Only now it will be docked in the Thames instead of prowling around the Persian Gulf in the dark like an old queen looking for trade.
Defence cuts mean fewer weapons – so at least it’s a break for Afghan wedding photographers. You’ve got to feel for them. Just setting up the tripod and in comes a NATO drone. You’ve got an 8 by 10 of shrapnel and body bits, and all you can think to put underneath is ‘The bride’s family’.
A beauty queen joined the RAF in Afghanistan. It’s nice to see someone in modelling who wants to kill someone other than herself. She has realised that there’s more to life than being beautiful. There’s being appreciated for your brave humour as they graft your bum skin onto your charred skull. Jodie Millward was pictured in a red vest and her RAF uniform – and I must say she looks better in blue – so I hope for her sake she’ll die in a gas attack rather than from shrapnel wounds. Most models hate bits of their bodies; Jodie will be able to have those bits shipped home ahead of her rehab.
Fears about women now being allowed to work on British submarines are just sexist – they are just as capable as men. And anyway, under the sea there isn’t as much call for being able to reverse. In the US, women have previously been barred from their subs because it was thought an unborn foetus would be affected from living near nuclear weapons and fuel fumes. It’s now realised that this child would still grow up to be a fully functioning American. Protocol is very different in the navy now. In the old days, a woman entered a submarine and all the sailors would stand. Now, for young male recruits, women being on board will mean they’ll be able to sit down for the first time in months.
Afghanistan has had a massive effect on me personally. Those shares in coffins and Union Jacks have gone through the fucking roof. I could retire tomorrow. According to defence chiefs, we have just completed the ‘first stage’ of the war against the Taliban. First stage? We’ve been there for ten years! What is the second stage going to consist of? Waiting for the tectonic plates to move and change the borders organically? Why is everyone talking about this as if it’s only just started? I’ve got news for the Ministry of Defence. If you thought you’d erased all our memories, it didn’t quite take. You may have to flash us again.
Support for the war in Afghanistan is at an all-time low. A lot of Scottish people used to say that Afghanistan was the only war we really needed to fight. But now that the street price of heroin is so low, even they don’t see the point.
Hamid Karzai won the corrupt election and now has sovereignty over, er, Kabul and a miniature golf course just outside Kabul. In fact, even the capital isn’t secure – they’re thinking about renaming it Kaboom. He beat Abdullah Abdullah, who was unfortunately baptised in a cave with an echo. Karzai’s brother was shot dead by his personal bodyguard. Never mind training Afghan leaders in democracy, we should probably start with interview technique.
The US army had to apologise for photos showing their troops posing with the corpses of Afghan civilians. Generals have been quick to say they’ve insulted the dignity of the rest of the US army. Is that the dignity of pissing on a Koran in Abu Ghraib, or the dignity of dangling from a rope ladder off the last helicopter to leave the US embassy roof in Saigon while your illegitimate children scream beneath you?
The Taliban are finding it impossible to get hold of essential supplies, so at last we’re fighting on equal terms. But let’s not get complacent. Just because they’re running out of bullets, we mustn’t assume our boys won’t get shot. Remember, US troops have still got plenty.
Children of troops killed in Afghanistan are going to have their university education paid for. Kind of ironic that some girls will get highly educated thanks to the Taliban.
The British forces have handed Sangin to US forces. Many middle-class liberals are asking how we can leave these vulnerable people in the care of poorly educated, poorly paid, selfishly driven rednecks? And then they pick up their children from the two 16-year-old work experience girls that staff the best local nursery.
To be fair, British generals do a difficult job. Usually very, very badly. The Taliban are holding us off with regular prayer, and guns they stole from the set of Rambo III. Still, good to see it’s all spilling over into Pakistan. A whole load of nuclear missiles and a bunch of people with different ideas about what Mohammed said. What could possibly go wrong?
The other day I was reading a book about how the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann (there’s a thrilling intelligence operation to check his identity, then they hit him on the head and throw him in a bag) and realised how little I knew about the Holocaust. In the course of reading up on it I found a collection of pictures – taken at the camps – of people on their way to the gas chambers, which is really something you should be certain you want to see before looking at it. It will remain with you. These are the people fresh from the trains, tired and bewildered. Children sit exhausted at their mothers’ feet as they unwittingly queue to become victims of this monstrous and inhuman crime.
It all seems so remarkably singular, and yet also you can see these sort of pictures every day – newspaper photos of refugee camps, of families in war zones, emergency rooms in Gaza, children from the dollar-a-day world. Some of these people are victims of dictators too, but most are victims of an economic theory, and of our affluence and indifference. Daily, you see pictures of people queuing for death and somehow the worst thing, the very worst thing, is that if you really tried you could do something about it.
‘Aye, it fucking is him an all’
Paul makes me a cup of tea – he’s one of those people who always makes half a cup of tea – and I get my panic list up on email. It’s the only group email list I’ve ever had, one I compiled to announce that my daughter had been born. It included anyone who might give me work. I’d just got home from the birth and knew I was so broke I didn’t have the money to get a taxi the next day to bring her home.
I’m flush nowadays – my company just landed a big advertising contract for an anti-speeding campaign. On dangerous stretches of road we are putting up family photos (the ones you get done in a photographers where the kids have been distracted by bubbles) of the actual people who have died there, over the words DEAD NOW. It’s a suggestion I made as a despairing joke after they hated our other ideas. Everybody loves it. It’s like the fucking ‘Glasgow Smiles Better’ of the post-Apocalypse.
I drag my suitcase out of a cab at Glasgow Central and take my glasses off. I’m trying to buy the papers for the train but I can see fuck all, accidentally picking up the Star, which has a front page about a mystery Old Firm player being blackmailed. I queue and wonder what Lovecraftian practice could set this young pervert apart from his peers.
The woman at the counter goes, ‘What’s with the beard, Frankie?’
I honestly can’t think of a single response. Eventually I say, ‘When I stop shaving, hair grows out of my face,’ and she laughs like I’ve made a joke.
I’m squinting up at the departures board looking for the London train. I’m normally OK without the glasses but some wee guys by the bank machine are nodding over at me. Eventually one of them walks over, stands about 18 inches away from me and blares, ‘Aye, it fucking is him an all,’ as dispassionately as if he’s noting that it’s raining.
On the train I’m trying to do some work on a pitch for tomorrow but every time I look at the screen I feel sick. There’s a slight smell of sewage but that’s normal on Virgin. My stomach pitches. The disabled-passenger alarm sounds continually. Someone thinks they are pressing the flush. I log onto the internet and check the BBC news. The top headline is ‘Prince William is a really good bloke’.
I look through the ideas I’m pitching. I was just going to be doing these for my company, but now I’m desperately trying to think how I can host or be involved.
Celebrity Land of the Giants. Eight of the UK‘s most recognisable celebrities have signed up for what they ‘think’ is a new game show. They are put up in a hotel and wake up the next day. What they don’t know is that overnight our clever set designers have built everything from cars to hedges to paving slabs outside at 10x scale, giving the celebs the impression they’ve shrunk overnight! How will they cope as each week the least practical star is eaten by what they think is a giant spider?
Unbelievably, that is idea number one. The other one is about a celebrity slave ship where young black rappers are made to live as slaves for a week. I can’t focus on the screen without feeling nauseous. Maybe it’s a psychosomatic reaction to this shit? Or the fucking roast-beef sandwich they gave me was so old it’s like a fast-acting poison. I sit watery mouthed in denial for a bit, then run to the toilet and puke loudly. The disabled-passenger alarm is painted red, illustrated with a ringing bell and the word alarm is written on it in large letters.
The young guy across from me recognises me and tries to start a conversation.
