We voted in Conservative clown and floppy right-wing Bullingdon waffler Boris Johnson as our mayor. We knew it would probably be crap, but we also knew it would screw it up for other people, so it seemed worthwhile at the time. As it happens, Boris has taken the coward’s route and done surprisingly little that his predecessor hadn’t already initiated. This is a good result for London, as many of us feared that British Bulldog, Wiff Waff and ‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ would be made city-wide compulsory weekend activities.
As someone who has chosen to live in a city as part of the battery human project, I have occasionally fantasized about moving out to the countryside. I have often heard tell of a sort of magical utopia that exists out there where strangers greet each other with a sunny if toothless hello, neighbours help one another with windblown fences and snowed-in vehicles. The jolly six-fingered landlord of the local pub knows everyone in the village. He does a lock-in on a Friday with flat beer and singing that lasts until the roast is served on Sunday. Everyone knows it’s roadkill, but it’s worth staying for the legendary Yorkshire pud – over a metre across of partly burned, partly raw batter mix. A place where babies are born on the living-room rug with the vet making do with a cleanish towel and a pair of nail scissors and everyone’s fine. The countryside – honest folk, living simply where the only purpose a child will find for a PlayStation 3 games console is to use it to dam a stream as he fishes for sticklebacks …
However, first-hand experience has led me to believe that this vision of British country living is, in fact, bullshit. Come to think of it, on many trips to the countryside you can actually smell bullshit in the air. ‘’Tis the smell o’ the country, moy dear,’ claim the aggressively patronizing bigots who live there. ‘No, it’s definitely cow shit,’ says the judgemental, impatient urbanite.
The countryside I’ve seen, and by that I mean the nice bits where restaurants don’t ‘shut for lunch’, is usually manned by a few disgruntled, sour-faced ‘locals’ and the rest is made up of empty second homes for chinless city knobs looking for something to do with their bonus. A place where Giles and Fiona can spend the weekend with their ever-so-slightly-racist friends talking boorishly and without a whiff of self-awareness about what’s to be done with benefit cheats and only a moment later how their marvellous accountant saved them a packet by putting their cash in a country where no one cares about anyone else.
Perhaps this view is framed by my time in London. Perhaps its impractically high density of people has made me hard, fearful and a cynic. If you think that, you can piss off. You don’t know me … There’s a reason strangers are called strangers and it’s because they’re strange.
What is it about living stacked on top of each other that so appeals to us? Close-quartered city living is as irresistible to us as a greasy box of onion rings and every bit as disappointing. And yet most of us are afraid to stop doing it. It turns out that ‘people’ are ‘the opium of the people’. Why jostle for position to be slotted into the vile human Jenga that is the London tube? Why queue with the sad, smelly and frustrated to join the queue who are waiting to be shown to the queue for … onion rings? Why? Who knows, but we do it in our millions and for this Londoner it has seriously eroded my ability to put my faith in people.
As a Londoner, you get home, bruised and frowning, at the end of the day and grudgingly conclude: Well, I’ve had a reasonable time of it, I suppose. I barged some people on the pavement unnecessarily. That was pleasing. I stopped very suddenly in that stairwell and made the woman with the suitcase fall all the way down into the underground system. I watched somebody struggle with a pushchair in an automatic door that looked a lot like it was actually chewing her Bugaboo. I drove like a selfish, petulant tosser and shouted at other people for doing very much the same thing. One guy was driving and talking on his mobile phone … I had to end my call to tell him what a twat he was being. I nearly crashed. Down came my window, mobile dropped into my lap, ‘Look where you’re going, dickhead, and get off your phone.’ Then I had to mash the Nokia back into my sweaty ear and explain, ‘Sorry about that, some pillock on his mobile, not looking where he was going … Ooh, hang on, a police car’s just pulled alongside me … I’ll send you a text … Wait, I’m trying to hold the wheel with my knees … Look out! Shit. You don’t have a number for Injury Lawyers For You, do you?’
It’s hard to put your faith in humanity. People can’t be God. They can’t be my God anyway. To worship one of them individually would be creepy and I’d probably end up with a restraining order. Collectively humanity is too flawed to be worshipped or relied upon for much more than the odd cuddle or a cup of tea. Tea and cuddles are vital and excellent but the spiritual yearning I experience requires a little more than that. People have a horrible habit of dying. That’s what my friend James did, and he was a really reliable mate. I need something rather more permanent than just people for reassurance. Statistically we’re crap at living. Eventually we all fail at it and give up.
We present a very strong case against ourselves. None of which is to say that humans haven’t been simply wonderful, imaginative and deserving of great praise. The pyramids in Egypt, The Wire on HBO, my daughter’s giggle, the defeat of Nazism in World War Two and Stilton are all worthy of tremendous admiration and should be celebrated. Brilliant human achievements, but crucially human and not God-like. The few people who have bestowed upon themselves the status of deity have without fail turned out to be deeply unpleasant and more than a little bit rapey.
It’s my firm belief that the greatest threat facing humanity today, perhaps the greatest threat we have ever faced, is the one posed by climate change. I realize this is a divisive issue. Not everyone’s on the same page with climate science and the conclusions of its practitioners. Some people agree with me that it presents a clear danger to our continued existence and well-being – and the others are wrong. So, as I say, an immensely divisive issue. Fortunately, as divisive issues go – this one divides up along very simple lines between those who’ve read up on the subject and tried to understand it and some idiots with their heads shoved so far up their own arses that the only shift in temperature they’re likely to perceive is when they fart. I’m being flippant (and vulgar, too, I hope). Of course, there are lots of different and worthwhile takes on this massively complex data and what to conclude from it. I read in the Telegraph only last week a fascinating new study that actually shows the ice at the Arctic isn’t melting, it’s merely hiding in liquid form. So, again, an interesting and different take on it, depending on … how retarded you are.
It’s very difficult to get people in the UK to take climate change seriously. Not as difficult as it is to get the people who do take it seriously to see there might be a funny side to it. What a tedious, sanctimonious bunch of smug bastards we’ve become.
‘Oooh, look at me, I’m better than you because I live in a yurt made of my wife’s pubic hair and we knit our own hummus.’
Since I took a serious interest in environmental issues, these people have become my friends. Judgemental, tutting friends with thin vegan fingers ready to wag. It’s a nightmare. Everyone’s desperately trying to ‘out-green’ each other.
‘How did you get here?’
‘I cycled.’
‘Oh really? On a bike, made of metal and oil?’
‘Er, yes?’
‘Well, I actually crawled here on my lips … so I win the big green prize and get to pull the patronizing, smug face I’ve spent all week working on in my mirror made from the recycled tears of a panda.’
Climate change at current speeds, according to over 95 per cent of climate scientists, is unprecedented and dangerous. Apocalyptic predictions range from the chillingly convincing all the way through to the hysterical and preposterous. In any case, I have become convinced that we need to act to mitigate now (yesterday would have been better but I’ll settle for now if you’re offering). It strikes me that to wait until we are 100 per cent certain as to what the endless streams
of climate data will mean for humanity before we act would be as unbelievably stupid as sitting in the fast lane of the M1 discussing whether or not the lorry hurtling towards you is red or blue. The available information suggests with very little ambiguity that this is something worth taking pretty seriously. But if it is taken as seriously and with as much finger-wagging as many ‘environmentalists’ currently do, then frankly I don’t want to fix it and I’m not even sure our species deserves to survive. I don’t want the future to be populated by the kind of people who spent their time enforcing the washing-up rota at college because ‘it might have only been one cup, but it’s the principle …’ They weren’t fun. Survival of the smuggest isn’t what Darwin began to explain and isn’t what I want to see.
I don’t wish to see the survival of the shittest either. I’d hate for the environmental movement to get it so wrong in selling the idea of change that the future falls into the hands of panicky arch-capitalists like the Lawson clan insisting there’s nothing wrong as the delta slowly swallows Bangladesh. Nigel, the ex-Tory MP; Dominic, the blinkered columnist and disappointing son; Lord Christopher Monckton, the pantomime evil uncle and oil man to the right of Sarah Palin – are all determined that over 95 per cent of climate scientists are liars. I don’t wish to see the future of the planet influenced by the likes of the three witless boars who giggle and grunt a warehouse full of cretins through a Top Gear recording. ‘Sure, the poor and least able to defend against it will die first but look at the torque on this … she’s a beast!’ I don’t wish to see humanity, no matter what regard I hold it in, hoodwinked by lazy, deceitful writers like Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, James Delingpole, Ann Widdecombe and Simon Heffer. I am certain that the sum total of climate research these people have carried out before spewing forth on the topic is to read whatever it was they wrote in their own column last week. On a really good day, when they fancy being properly thorough, perhaps, at a push, they might read each other.
The case for change is being lost. It’s not exactly a mystery, is it, that a bunch of refugee socialists, anti-capitalists and other such angry warriors in search of a fight are now camping out in the environmental cause and are failing to inspire a responsible and empathetic move towards sustainability. If only freshly wagged fingers turned out to be the green fuel of the future, we’d be all set for clean energy for ever.
It’s difficult to get people to take climate change seriously in the UK because in this country it will probably mean two, maybe three degrees of warming. When you explain that to most British people, especially at the moment, they say:
‘Two or three degrees warmer? Well, I think that sounds rather nice. I might grow a peach tree on my lawn. The whole wheeze sounds tremendous.’
So I try to bring them back to the reality of what we’re looking at.
‘No, no, hang on a minute, if we have two or three degrees of warming here, that would mean most of continental Europe would be an arid, uninhabitable desert.’
A bad ploy …
‘Well, I like it even more now. I’m eating peaches and Frenchie is fucked, I couldn’t be happier. Up yours, Pierre. Can’t you swim, little froggie?’
I persist. ‘No, please, we’re talking about millions of people with nowhere to live.’
You see, it’s hard to put your faith in a species that seems to choose to act against its own best interests and may very well have an inexorable urge to destroy itself. In years to come, lemmings may well warn their little lemming children about the mysterious suicidal folly of the human race. They could see the cliff, and they ran right off it … in Range Rovers.
For us in the UK, the European Union has intervened. They legislate for us or against us, depending on which way you choose to see it. In order to mitigate dangerous climate change, they say we have to get rid of all our old light bulbs and replace them with ‘eco’ bulbs. This was received with a similar welcome to the one Tiger Woods’s wife gave him when he came home with lipstick on his club and bragging about sinking a hole in one. Perhaps you already had ‘eco’ bulbs in your home before the EU insisted upon it. If you did, then you’d be used to the fact that you will spend the first ten minutes in every room in complete darkness. You’ve no idea where you are, glaring through the gloom at the switch, thinking, hmm we should never have put a dimmer on that, should we? It’s just making a horrible buzzing noise now. Then that pale flickery green light comes on and you realize you’ve peed all over the floor.
Oh, and on the duvet as well. ‘Sorry, darling, did I wake you? Wasn’t even in the right room. Who knew? My mistake.’
But it’s all right, it’s not a disaster. The new bulbs are just that – new, and as such are capable of terrifying a great many people if the spicy catalyst of hysterical journalism is allowed to do its bidding. Suddenly you have a fear vehicle capable of driving us straight into a pit of irrationality, wide-eyed, ill-informed and muttering something about Hell and handcarts. When we made the move to eco bulbs, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph ran a nostalgia campaign for the old ones. Not a considered appraisal of the facts. Not an exploration of the pros and cons. Not even a lopsided weighing up of ‘change because science says we must do something to mitigate’ versus ‘inaction because we don’t like to be meddled with’. No, a nostalgia campaign – for light bulbs. They put their years of experience and journalistic knowhow into creating an emotional and patriotic response to a frosted 60-watt screw fit. There were beautiful pictures of bulbs on the front of the newspaper. The entire front page was filled with a close-up of a light bulb. It was as if the right-wing press had suddenly struck on an idea … ‘too many foreign types’, ‘taxes too high’, ‘youth run wild’, ‘something about Diana’ and PING the bulb appeared. As it turned out the ‘light bulb moment’ wasn’t an idea at all, merely a pathetic bit of foot stamping because someone had asked someone else to try something new.
The right-wing press wouldn’t refer to the old bulbs as tungsten bulbs, or filament bulbs, or shitty wasteful bulbs. No, instead they chose to call them ‘traditional bulbs’. Traditional? Huh? The ‘traditional’ British bulb we’ve used in this country for well over a thousand years? As integral to the British way of life as cricket, bunting and grumbling about the weather (though never that it’s getting dangerously warmer)? Long before electricity was created, the traditional British family would gather round the traditional British bulb and wonder what the fuck it was for.
‘What is it, Mummy?’
‘It’s a traditional light bulb, son, a good, honest, British light bulb.’
‘What’s it for, Mummy?’
‘It’s traditional, son, that’s all you need to know.’
‘Does it work well, Mummy?’
‘No. But it’s traditional.’
‘If it doesn’t work, Mummy, why do we—?’
‘Oh do shut up. Just stare at it and feel that senseless British pride swell within you.’
In one piece of exquisitely poor journalism in the Telegraph, the old bulbs were described as having Rubenesque curves. Now, I don’t know about you, but that sounds to me as if whoever wrote it might well be having a closer relationship with the old filament bulb than most of us would care to imagine. Screw fix or bayonet, I wonder? Neither sounds terribly comfortable. Rubenesque curves? What on earth could the writer mean?
‘Look, look at the lovely, pert, rounded, traditional bulb. Her Rubenesque plumpness so alluring and soft. Ooh, the sexy round bulb, with her bulging bottom and cheeky, almost see-through skin. Frosted … yes, and yet so invitingly warm and naughtily inefficient. I want her. I want that bulb, want to rub her curved, forgiving smoothness all over my body. She’s my bulb, my sexy traditional bulb – not like these new “eco” ones that curl round and round like a black man’s hair. No! A traditional bulb we can all be proud of and just occasionally back on to whilst singing “Rule Britannia” and wearing a pith helmet in the old tin bath.’
Going that dewy-eyed over a light bulb is insane. The
new bulbs are flawed and imperfect but they seem to be better and more efficient, not to mention that the case for their use has been well put. Argue the case down if you have the knowledge to do so, but don’t try to instruct people that light bulbs are ‘traditional’ or ‘Rubenesque’. You degrade yourselves when you do that and it makes me think you haven’t read enough.
‘How many Daily Mail readers does it take to change a light bulb?’
‘Why does everyone keep changing everything? I fear change.’
What I’d like to do is create an eco bulb in the shape of Princess Diana’s head. That’ll confuse them.
If we can’t change a few light bulbs, we are screwed as a species. We’re done for. And I’m not putting my faith in an entity as stupid, short-sighted and stubborn as that. If that’s what I’m supposed to settle for, then I might as well believe in God.
6
Where to look for God …
IF YOU THINK YOU WANT GOD, AND I’M PRETTY CERTAIN that is what I’m after, it’s very difficult to know where on earth (if that’s the right place to start looking) you might find him. You’re unlikely to run into God in Sainsbury’s and even for lapsed believers I don’t think there’s been a single instance of him having popped up on Facebook with a ‘Hey, remember me? Don’t look at my profile pic … We’ve all aged sooooo much. Watcha up to? See any of the old gang? Had a text from St Peter but … Anyway, get in touch, we’ll have a beer. Remember the song? Chuggalug Chuggalug …’
In the olden days God was about all the time. You barely had to sneeze and God would pop up in one form or another and give you instructions as to what you might do next. There was a time when one could barely move for burning bushes, visions, visitations and heavenly interventions. People popped to the market and as they struggled back with their reusable hessian bags of locally sourced fruit and veg, who should they run into? God, floating down to check in on his new creation. I can understand God’s enthusiasm for the new project. I’m the same when I plant stuff in my garden. I’m a menace for it, nipping back every five minutes to have a look and see how the tomato seedlings are progressing. Any new shoots on the runner beans? Slugs been at it? Birds have probably eaten the lot by now … Come the autumn, half of it’s gone to seed and most of the fruit hasn’t made it past green and bullet-hard or it’s been missed and become a pulpy dollop of snotty rot on the vine. After the first wave of enthusiastic fiddling and interference, I’m sorry to say I lose interest. There seems to be a better than average chance that God is the same gardener I am. I’ve a horrible feeling this may be autumn and the heavenly father’s wellies are nowhere to be seen.
God Collar Page 9