Dilapidated Narratives for Opinionated Goons

BREXIT DIVORCE BILL Spare me the political mumbo-jumbo on Brexit please, Liberals. So we can’t negotiate a divorce bill. During my appalling divorce I couldn’t even get my wife to put pen to the papers, but guess what? I still managed to move out, and what’s more I did so in one long, dark night, and I made off with over 57% of my belongings, plus the foot spa, which was technically my nine-year-old daughter’s. Britain will be fine. On the road to freedom, we too can sleep in the back of our car till we get straight. When I arrived in Worksop with a trunk full of Ken Hom: Celebrity Chef DVDs and a My Little Pony foot spa, did I sit in the disabled parking bay of Aldi, crying and wishing things had gone differently at the custody hearing? Not for long! I got up, brushed my flowing hair free of grubs, and sold the foot spa to a passing Polish beggar (or casual labourer) for five cents. I then took that five cents and converted it into British Pounds, which came out as £0.038 due to devaluation. I then took that abstract figure and invested it in scratchcards. Brexit is a gamble, but so too is the British National Lottery (and, admittedly, Euromillions), but here’s the rub: someone always wins the lottery. Did I win the lottery that day? No – nor on the subsequent days, when I managed to flog Ken Hom down at the riverbank to passing barge-folk – but one day I’m going to win the lottery, because someone always wins the lottery, and the sooner we kick those free-loading EU citizens out, the better my odds will be. NOSTALGIA UKIP loves to massage the national nostalgia gland, conjuring up a mythical idyll of yesteryear, lush bountiful meadows of unlocked doors, loyal Alsatians and respected elders. But how does this imagined past compare to reality? When does a misremembered idealisation of the past become nothing more than a Pavlovian 'wasn’t it better' twitch response? Flush-cheeked and frenzied, facing a manifoldly complex present, the mind slowly retreats into an imagined monoculture. UKIP’s rhetoric is wrong, not just because it is racist and nationalist, but because it is nostalgic, and all nostalgia is wrong. The past, just like the present, is actually very bad. The 1960s? Bad. The 1990s? Dreadful. Primordial Earth? Weak AF. All times were bad and all times will be bad. Suffering defines the human condition. We are each trapped behind glass, spectres drifting in and out of focus. Death itself inhabits the fringes of existence throughout human history. Perhaps the right could do with incorporating some of this rhetoric into their future campaigns. SEA CULPA The fossil fuel industry’s global summit convened today with a surprising announcement. Speaking on behalf of ExxonMobil, BP, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell and other oil and gas multinationals, a spokesperson issued an apology for the role fossil fuel extraction has played in the depletion of sea life across the globe. This is the first acknowledgement that the extraction, shipping and disposal of petroleum fuels have negatively affected the environment to be issued from the committee and marks a welcome paradigm shift in attitudes regarding corporate responsibility. To make amends, many national oil and gas firms have signed a pledge to raise the sea level by several miles by 2050 as a sincere apology to all the marine life that has been harmed as a result of their industry. There are some groups who are not happy with this compromise, but largely this has been seen a hard-earned victory for the many environmentalists and pressure groups, who have campaigned for such recognition for decades. Sean Morley, Christopher Delamere & Sam Nicoresti )