March of the Lemmings Read online

  It was brilliant having student lodgers, who were like older brothers and sisters I never had, but who would go after a year or so and drift slowly away: Welsh Jocelyn, who read to me; Gordon from Manchester, who taught me karate moves and bought me contraband Conan magazines from Nostalgia Comics in Smallbrook Queensway; Rachel, whose uncle in America was the Marvel Comics writer John Byrne and who got me some signed Spider-Man art; and Emma, who liked The Velvet Underground, back when no one else did, and who let me and my sixth-form girlfriend sleep secretly and uneventfully overnight in a countryside hotel, where she worked after she absconded from Solihull Tech. I had a fantastic childhood, with my mother, in that little house, with all those groovy teens who thought I was a cool weirdo and were kind to me. Last week, Welsh Jocelyn texted me to check my current address, over forty years on. Maybe she remembered my birthday is coming up. No one in my immediate family did.

  8 Abba are an essential element of my childhood, and so many of their songs are seared into my memory, irrespective of the fluctuating value of their cultural currency. My dad had their tapes in the car, and my mum had their analogue synth-driven masterpiece Arrival on vinyl, which occupies a similar sonic territory to Pulp’s 1995 breakthrough, Different Class. We took the kids to the Abba Museum, in a snow-smothered Stockholm, at Christmas 2018, which my Swedish brother-in-law thought ridiculous. I found it very moving, especially the stuff about how the (often superb) Swedish psychedelic and progressive bands ostracised Abba for their perceived crimes against music, but I bailed before I reached the room dedicated to that Mamma Mia musical, and the subsequent film, which I think are cheesy and trivialise Abba’s legacy. I didn’t want to see that music-theatre filth. That’s not the Abba I remember.

  Is it ethical to raise a royal baby in captivity?

  21 October 2018

  Royal babies are baked to order, like lucky pies, to provide gurgling distractions in times of crisis. Last week, the world’s scientists agreed we have twelve years to limit the worst climate-change damage or else face mass extinction. Within days, as floods washed away the villages of the Aude valley and their delicious French wines, we began fracking in Lancashire in the face of heroic protest, and a dismissive Donald Trump accused scientists of having a ‘political agenda’. Nothing changed. But look! A baby!! A baby!!! A bouncing royal baby!!!!

  Like many former Class War subscribers now approaching late middle age, I belatedly find myself quite a fan of the Queen, largely due to Dame Helen Mirren’s amazing acting in the film The Queen, in which she invested the eponymous heroine with imaginary depths and assumed feelings.

  Michael Parkinson is such a fan of Dame Helen Mirren’s talents that he keeps a stuffed toy of Nyra, the magic owl Mirren played in The Owls of Ga’Hoole, under his pillow. Sometimes, in the restless night, Michael Parkinson sneers at the felt owl for its voluptuousness and accuses the woodland creature of trying to bewitch him. But the Yorkshireman is from a different time and must not be judged by the owl-respecting standards of today.1

  Monarchists’ last line of defence of the royal family boils down to the fact that they, and specifically their newborns, are good for tourism. But if this is the case, then surely we as a nation are guilty of failing to fully monetise the royal babies’ tourist appeal. Can we afford to be so profligate with our assets in the forthcoming era of Brexit-driven financial uncertainty?

  For the last four and a half years, I have worked on my laptop most days in the café of London Zoo, where I am unknown to the tourists. The zoo’s marketing people persuaded me, over an enchilada one lunchtime, to provide the recorded voice of an ennui-stricken black widow spider in the Bug House, but other than that I am virtually invisible in my café corner. And so I am able to eavesdrop on the staff.2

  Plans are afoot, so it would appear from the brown-coated huddle I overheard last week, to repurpose Berthold Lubetkin’s iconic 1934 penguin pool. While recognised as a twentieth-century design classic, in 2004 the enclosure was emptied of penguins, who didn’t like swimming in it as, like Boris Johnson, it was too shallow to be of any use to anyone.

  Having frustrated generations of sea birds for more than eighty years, Lubetkin’s white elephant now languishes drained and dry, too famous to demolish and too impractical to function, the Millennium Dome of marine aviaries. Now, it is to be inhabited again, but only, it would appear, during usual zoo opening hours. Would the normal keepers be doing the feeding or would the zoo’s latest addition have its own handlers? the hushed staff asked one another. Would they be allowed to look it in the eye? Would there be special protocols? And above all, how was the zoo going to cope with the tourist numbers when the next royal baby was put on permanent public display in Lubetkin’s empty penguin pool?

  Everything had been thought through in meticulous detail, the possibility of public objections overruled in deference to our desperate need for tourist dollars. Tickets will be auctioned to the highest bidder and income projections are already off the scale, knocking pregnant pandas into a cocked hat. Royal chefs will prepare the child’s food on site, but the normal zookeepers will be required to hurl the luxury dinners from buckets towards the royal baby, encouraging it to leap and caper for the paying public’s delight.

  When the royal baby reaches school age, a tutor will sit in the enclosure with it all day, to make sure it is properly educated, though he or she will bring their own packed lunch, which must not contain nuts. The royal child will be permitted to do its main toilet on tabloid newspapers in the private penguin nesting area, but everything else will happen in public view, thus preparing it, perhaps more successfully than with any previous royal, for a lifetime of spotlit scrutiny.

  And should the royal baby, heaven forbid, suddenly choose to dress as a Nazi stormtrooper and parade around the penguin pool saluting, or to show its bottom to partygoers, the child will learn the hard way what it means to live a life in full public view, as the camera-phones of those surrounding the enclosure flash into social media-integrated life.

  And at the end of each working day, the royal child will be airlifted by helicopter to Kensington Palace, where it will then live a completely normal existence as a member of the royal family, waited on hand and foot, opening hospices and being stalked by photographers.

  But once I saw a gang of young men leaning over the Asian short-clawed otter enclosure wall to feed Starbursts™ to the animals. I told them that the sweets would surely be very bad for the otters, and to their credit the boys went off, horrified, to find a keeper to confess to.3 And everyone knows the implausible, but not necessarily untrue, urban myth of the amorous Florida zoo employee who died due to his overfamiliarity with an alligator.

  Can we expose a member of the royal family to these kinds of risks in the name of national solvency? We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves, as a society, if we are prepared to prioritise the generation of money over the mental and physical well-being of a child, even if that child is a member of the royal family. Call me unpatriotic, or a snowflake, call me what you like, but I for one will not be queuing up to see the newborn royal baby leaping around for food flung from buckets into a disused penguin enclosure. I think it is wrong.

  Well they already live in a zoo, don’t they, albeit a series of luxury ones? Tepapa

  1 Michael Parkinson’s creepy 1975 interview with Helen Mirren is an object lesson in how the world has changed over the last forty years.

  2 This zoo spider voice-over job is the only thing I have ever done that gives me any credibility with my daughter’s friends.

  3 I spent about four years writing most days in the café of London Zoo, and I would go and see the otters, which I have loved since reading Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter as a child, whenever I wanted a wander. The stupid way members of the public behaved with them, feeding them crisps and sweets, made me think the world would be better off if all humanity were exterminated and otters were left to inherit the Earth, tossing tiny pebbles from paw to paw.

 
A no-column Brexit is the only way forward

  18 November 2018

  Dear readers, it has been an honour to try to write this week’s supposedly funny column about Brexit for you. But I regret to say that after a long and painful struggle through Wednesday 14 November and the morning of Thursday 15 November, attempting to write a funny column on this week’s proposed Brexit deal, I have found that, for my part, I cannot complete it.1

  Throughout my attempts to deliver this week’s funny column, I have been hampered by the fact that Brexit moves either at impossible speed or remains in a state of terminal inertia. I am like a photographer, commissioned to document the offspring of the hideous forced mating of a slug and a hummingbird, still wondering what shutter speed I should use. It has proved impossible to reconcile the need to provide a column that will still make sense on Sunday with the demand that it is delivered to my editor on Thursday morning.

  I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the Observer and you look at how it works, it is particularly reliant on content being delivered in advance of the paper being printed. I think probably the average reader might not be aware of the full extent to which the choice of content in the finished newspaper is dependent on stuff being written in advance of publication.

  Who caused the Brexit disaster? I wondered aloud on Wednesday morning, as I looked for a peg to hang this flimsy piece on. Was it Disaster Capitalists, like Arron Banks, planning to profiteer from the chaos? Was it Disaster Socialists, like Jeremy Corbyn, hoping to home-bake a better Britain from the wreckage in his Islington patisserie? Was it Disaster Racists, like my relative who voted Leave to ‘get rid of the Pakistanis and Indians’, and whose existence will now be questioned in below-the-line comments on the online version of this piece, accusing me of inventing a straw man to demonise stupid Leave voters, as if there were any need to fabricate one. Or was it the Disaster Johnsons, like Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Johnson, hoping to drop an Etonian biscuit into his reflection in the melted molten-metal puddle of post-Brexit Britain and let lustful nature take its course?

  Whoever is to blame, as Wednesday afternoon turned into Wednesday evening, and my 10 a.m. Thursday morning deadline loomed, the full impossibility of delivering the mildly satirical column expected of me by both my readers and my editor began to dawn on me. I emailed my editor to ask if this week’s piece could be absent from Sunday’s printed edition of the Observer and then belatedly inserted into the online edition, by unilateral agreement, perhaps in as much as two years’ time, as a kind of satirical column backstop, when the meaning of the week’s events finally becomes clear. But, like the EU, she is inflexible and cruel, and rejects my unilateral backstop arrangement, and instead demands that I continue to provide the levels of content I had been contracted for at the time stipulated.

  During Wednesday afternoon, on talk radio, the phrase ‘vassal state’ started to emerge as a mantra, chanted by angry people who didn’t understand it, and I wondered if this was the sort of thing that might fill up a paragraph or two. Indeed, the same furious Leavers now fixated on the ‘vassal state’ previously offered up the words ‘WTO rules’, as if they were a protection against Euro-serpents. And what did ‘vassal state’ mean exactly? Perhaps I could have pretended that it meant we wouldn’t be able to import or export our own Vaseline, or decide ourselves what was an appropriate use for it, and then make a column out of that idea? Perhaps not?

  I waited for two and a half hours, from 5 until 7.30 p.m., for Theresa May to come out of No. 10 and solve the riddle of the Brexit sphinx, hoping I could make a column out of her statement. I started drinking cider and began to find the word ‘backstop’ funny in and of itself, as if it were some kind of innuendo. I wondered how, as a vassal state without its own supply of Vaseline, we would cope with our backstop arrangements. My friend Kevin Eldon, who plays an old wizard in Game of Thrones, suggested the vassal/Vaseline/backstop idea could perhaps be linked to the notion of ‘frictionless trade’.

  For a while I thought maybe I could make a whole column out of this trivial and smutty conceit, but I realised it would leave everyone dissatisfied, diminish my standing in the columnist community, and discredit the Observer newspaper, and that a bad column was perhaps worse than no column at all.

  In short, I cannot reconcile the content of the proposed column with the standards expected from me by both my readers and my editor. This is, at its heart, a matter of public trust. I appreciate that you may disagree with my judgement on this issue. I have weighed very carefully the alternative courses of action which I could take. Ultimately, you deserve a column which can satirise the week’s Brexit events with conviction and understanding. I am only sorry, in good conscience, that this column is not that column, and so I hereby announce that I am abandoning this week’s column forthwith, shrugging my shoulders with a ‘will this do?’ insouciance, pressing ‘send’ and leaving someone else to deal with the mess I have made.

  My respect for you and the fortitude you have shown while reading this difficult column remains undimmed.

  How about using your column to explore the idea of CANCELLING BREXIT? Or perhaps you are another media ostrich with your head in the sand … ignoring the fact that unless we CANCEL BREXIT we are committing to years of the same mess since June 2016. Kalumba

  Man up! Hairy Scrotum

  Nobody voted for this column. Moose Tickler

  Ha, like I give a fuck, I qualify for an Irish column on my father’s side. Not In A Million

  In this case, no column would have been far preferable. Brodie Jigsaw

  You just can’t help taking a potshot at Corbyn, can you? Socialism – sharing resources – is simply too radical for mainstream press mouthpieces. Shame on you. Eegarcia

  1 This piece is basically former Brexit secretary Dominic Raab’s resignation letter, and his speech about the Dover–Calais crossing, with some of the words changed. The writing was on the wall for Raab anyway, after he had said, the week previously, that he ‘hadn’t quite understood’ how reliant the UK’s trade in goods is on stuff coming in on boats.

  Why Jacob Rees-Mogg is still voting with his feet

  2 December 2018

  As the lies that drove Brexit unravel under the spotlight of actual fact, so the reasons bewildered Leave voters gave for supporting it seem increasingly tragic. My relative who wanted to get rid of Pakistanis and Indians and other people from the far south-eastern region of the EU, finds they are still here, curing him, presenting the news and cooking delicious baltis.

  Those wooed, understandably, by the bus-borne ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ bullshit now know it was just one of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Johnson’s many self-serving falsehoods. But even now it is being regurgitated by Theresa May, a horrible vomiting cormorant sicking up lies into the squawking beaks of the terminally and furiously disappointed, hoping that if their gullets are at least full of something, anything, however baseless, they will at last shut up.

  Those who voted Leave as a protest, hoping to give the elite a scare, reluctantly admit they overplayed their hands somewhat. Even Michael Gove, who, in the words of his Daily Mail wife, was ‘only supposed to blow the bloody doors off’, now chooses to attach himself, the limpet of regret, to the hulls of various blameless environmental causes, in an attempt to disassociate himself from the national catastrophe his pitiful vanity has initiated. Michael Gove hopes to be remembered, instead, as the Dian Fossey of Surrey’s hedgehogs. But Brexit is Michael Gove’s only legacy. And the shame of it will outlive all of his hedgehogs.

  Only Jacob Rees-Mogg, one of our few conviction politicians, can still hold his head up high and say that he had a reason to leave the EU that remains not demonstrably untrue. For, in the early days of the Leave campaign, Rees-Mogg nailed his colours to the same mast of hope that he was again saluting last Monday morning, when he made the case for hard Brexit once more to his familiar, Nick Ferrari, on LBC: the ben
efits of free trade focused through the lens of Cheaper Footwear.

  It is true that in 2006, the shoe-producing EU nations slapped blocks on Asian shoe imports that drove up high-street prices. But only a genius like Rees-Mogg could realise how emotive this footwear issue was for the UKIP/Brexit axis. Brexit supporters, it appears, get through a lot of shoes, after hurling them at the television whenever Gina Miller comes on Question Time.

  And now, long since all other supposed good reasons for exiting the EU have been invalidated by facts, Rees-Mogg’s ‘cheaper footwear’ gambit remains undiscredited. But this is largely, it must be said, because no one from the corrupt pro-EU elite thought it important enough to try and discredit, which just shows how out of touch they are with what ordinary people care about.

  For many Brexit voters, the financial benefits of EU membership – investment in rural infrastructure, sharing of scientific research, work and education opportunities – remain tantalisingly abstract, and seem geared to the needs of the metropolitan liberal elite. But the cost of footwear is a tangible concrete concept, and it is this notion that Rees-Mogg harnessed to arouse the Europhobia of the British people. After all, everyone has feet, or knows someone who has, whereas not everyone knows someone who has benefited from the work of the European Space Agency. And if it is trying to contact queue-jumping aliens, that is hardly likely to endear it to the Brexit voter.