nunoncastors

Promachoteuthis sulcus, it’s where old dentures go to die.

I will eat your soul. He seems to be saying.

I’m sorry if I’ve already gone on about this, but I’m so infused with rage that I’ve lost all perspective. The fact that anyone could do this to another person leaves me so brimming with fury and bile that I’m inclined to dispense a swift and terrible retribution at the end of a claw hammer.

I know, now and again, that it is commented upon by friends and colleagues that I’m a monstrous cynic as though they cannot understand why. This sort of thing is why, this and a million other little needles that jab at me daily. We live in a society where pissing on a dying woman is someone’s idea of a laugh, where people can go their entire lives as nothing more than a burden, constantly sucking in time and effort and resources like some vast whirlpool of indolence. Are there wonderful things in the world that make life worth living? Undoubtedly, yes. But they’re so overshadowed by shit that for me, finding them unspoiled is an unexpected joy.

To paraphrase Terry Pratchett (I know, what a reference), “I fear I may be a bad person because I know what I think rather than just what I say and do. I choke off those little reactions and impulses, but I know what they are. So I try to act like a good person.”

I really do. I try to be even-handed and polite, I try to abide by the rules and mind my own business and, most of all, I try to leave people to do their own thing because everyone is entitled to live their lives as they see fit. I may grumble about it, but I try.

The problem is that what I actually think is that the country is a fetid shithole full of people the world would be better off without. I’m aware that there are worse places on earth to be, and that’s part of the problem too. Because I know people are starving in Africa, because I know that child soldiers exist, and because I know that some people have endured horrors that are beyond my ability to imagine, I also know that in this country there is no reason for anyone to be pissing on the dying, throwing stones at fireman, assaulting nurses in hospitals or generally acting like complete and utter tossers.

I hate them for it.

Genuinely. Seethingly. Hate them for it.

I loathe how it’s possible for people to sponge off the state for their entire lives and never give anything back, to sit in their slum with Sky TV blaring out the latest drivel and think that the rest of the country owes them an existence. I hate the foul offspring of these people, who lurk about on parks and street corners, gibbering some faux-Jamaican patois and asking people what they’re looking at. I hate addicts and alcoholics and every other weak willed fuckwit who refuses to accept that their problem is of their own making and won’t do anything about it. I hate how society panders to the stupid and those who won’t help themselves, how CCTV monitors everything and political correctness is seeping into the very fabric of the nation.

Celebrate diversity? Fuck off. Everyone’s different; they’ve always been different, what’s to celebrate? It’s the status-bloody-quo. Of course what they mean is, ‘celebrate not being racist’ but they’re too namby-pamby to say it. Prisons are full, do we build more? No. We give paedophiles and murderers shorter sentences and career criminals day release. Brilliant. Role models have been replaced by footballers and ‘gangsta rappers’ who espouse a life of bitches and bling. We’re becoming a nation of slack-jawed, antisocial, apelike morons and the police, the people who are supposed to hold back the tide of shite, aren’t actually allowed to do anything without filling in a thousand forms and apologising for arresting the miscreant in question for infringing their human-bloody-rights.

People are apparently getting the highest grades ever in A-levels etc. Really? Where the hell are they? Most of the students I come into contact with couldn’t find their arse with both hands but can appropriate a pair of Ugg boots and forty gallons of hair gel without any apparent difficulty. The government however, can find it’s arse with both hands but then proceeds to think of a way of extracting more money out of the populace with this newfound discovery so it can feed it back to the feckless gobshites and their Sky TV in order to secure votes because, ultimately, the Government no longer reflects the wishes of the nation as the nation either a) doesn’t fucking trust it or b) is completely apathetic to whatever the self-serving fucks say.

I try to be a good person, I really do, but it’s so hard when what I really want is to start lining people up against a wall ready for the firing squad.

This prick first.

The title of today’s rant is stolen directly from a government nannying initiative aimed at helping people to stop smoking. Essentially, it strips away all personal responsibility for the task and offers up a selection of excuses / easy ways out. I feel this is a massive waste of time, effort and money on behalf of the government and so I would like to put the following concept out onto the internet to see what you guys think of it.

There is only one way to stop smoking, show some fucking backbone.

I have a habit of thinking too much about trivial things and taking an excessive interest in the seemingly mundane. I’m one of those people who look up beyond the ground floor in cities and ponder what buildings used to be used for, who built them and what stories they hold. I’m fascinated by secret doors and all those little things that people see every day but never really look at. I’m a bit odd really.

Oddities aside, I had the following thoughts today as I wandered around Market Square sampling wares from, oddly enough, a market. I can heartily recommend Ostrich burgers by the way, they’re most tasty, doubly so with onions and chutney. Mmm… Anyway, until recently Market Square (Nottingham) was a featureless slab with some slightly shit fountains that served no other purpose that as a congregation point for tramps, wankers, the socially awkward and people waiting for friends.

It is still all of these things.

However, it is now used intermittently for the purpose from which its name is derived. There is, once again, a market on Market Square. Nothing remarkable about that, you may think. Not so because, if you think about it, there’s something enduring about markets. They’re simple and basic and fun. People have been going to them for millennia and, while I agree they seem mundane, there’s something amazing about that fact. I spent my lunch doing something people before my have done for thousands of years. I wandered about, I chatted, sampled and haggled and came away contented. I can’t recall ever having been contented going to a supermarket. And there’s the rub, for all the progress we’ve make in terms of the ‘retail experience’, all people really want is – well, what they want. I sat eating my Ostrich burger (seriously, really tasty) and watching all the people mill around the stalls, poking about curiously and chatting with the traders and it struck me how many of them there were. Granted its lunch and people getting out of their offices for an hour are bound to be intrigued by pretty much anything, but the majority were buying little things here and there.

Two stalls just sold vegetables, proper, home-grown, mysteriously coloured and unusually shaped vegetables with earth still clinging to them, a few more were selling meat and game, and one even proudly sported a sign declaring ‘Grand Sausage Tasting Today’.

And very grand they were too.

This is what I think we’re missing, we’ve vast malls and supermarkets and homogenized high streets, but they’re all so impersonal. Sure, they’re convenient and cheap, but they’re also hollow and soulless. You trudge around a supermarket staffed by people with dead eyes and vacant expressions and, what? You save a little time and money because the food’s bought in bulk to maximise company profits and they’re open all the time because they employ the desperate and needy who’ll work whenever. I hate it, I think everyone does, we just accept it because it’s there and no one thinks about it. But watching people get excited because they’ve spotted a stall that only sells homemade cheese, or someone making approving sounds about the chutney they’ve just sampled, it made me think how much nicer it is and appreciate why markets have endured so well, beyond the need to buy stuff.

So, last night, being Wednesday, a group of us went for drinks and tapas and spent a pleasant evening worrying that maybe we are middleclass after all and indulging in our own particular brand of conversation. It’s quite difficult to quantify what we actually talk about or the manner in which we do so. I mean, we’re a bright group, we all paid attention at school and our interests and experiences since then are varied, our frames of reference distinct. Accordingly, our conversation slews about from topic to topic in unusual ways, there’s a lot of surrealism and fantastic scenarios, fictional back stories and claims. We’re childish and puerile yet still manage to meander from an upcoming ski trip to the Picture of Dorian Grey to Duncan not having a soul because he’s ginger.

I don’t know if this is born of being old friends or simply that we are all a little unusual. Most likely, it’s both.

It was while we were on the subject of Duncan being soulless that Kate, Stephen’s girlfriend – and my friend, I suppose. I really need to break the habit of thinking of people in relation to other people. They exist on their own after all –, insisted that she didn’t believe in souls. This, I suppose, is fair enough unless you’re sitting in the sort of company we provide where someone (me) is likely to offer to buy it from you if you don’t believe that it exists.

Five pence exchanged hands, I owned a soul and ultimate power over an individual was mine. MINE I TELL YOU!

The problem is this, I like Kate, she’s nice. So after about five minutes I sold her soul back to her at the original price and did nothing untoward with it at all. It strikes me that I missed a trick, but there you go.

You see, even though most people don’t believe in a soul, after a bit of thought they arrive at the conclusion that, even though it doesn’t exist, it’s probably better to retain ownership of said abstract, just in case it does, it could be important. I mean, your soul, right? Who wouldn’t want to keep hold of that?

Fortunately, I’m not unreasonable and, as I said, sold it back. Which is just as well really, automatic doors don’t work for the soulless. Just ask Duncan.