We are all going to die

Set your coffee down gently. Okay, I have some terrible news for you. Terrible, horrible news. We are in the midst of a pandemic in this City, one which will pretty much bring society to its fat bloated knees. In a bitter twist of irony, it’s the tiniest being on Earth that is the most powerful.

SWINE FLU. N1H1 motherf*cker.

It’s here, in London town, ready to finish off what the Black Death and the Nazis started.

It wouldn’t be scary if it was just flu oh no. And it isn’t scary if the virus just has a code (SARS? Please, that only killed the Chinese.) We had Bird Flu, but that just screwed up Bernard Matthews. No, this monster needed a name that envisages terror. The pig, the animal people most want as a pet but don’t have, is now the source of the world’s most deadly virus.

This is how it starts, the old apocalypse, a gentle stream of news reports providing the hacking, snot-filled background music to your everyday life. You’re not really listening that hard to the Swine Flu warnings as you’re more concerned with buying a load of coloured jeans from Uniqlo and going up to Shoreditch to eat a soft cheese sourced from Peru. Then it turns out you have an acquaintance that’s caught it, but that doesn’t really phase you as whenever you met this kid he always had an off yellow tint, he was never one of Gaia’s foot soldiers.

So, you buy a magnum and forget about it and oh look, Peaches Geldof went a disco last night. Thanks, London Lite. All the while micro terrorists are zipping through the tube lines and handrails, declaring a tiny Jihad on your immune system.

The Government are setting up committees and hotlines and getting a lot of grief for not giving clear guidelines for pregnant women. This debate doesn’t seem to have much to it – pregnant women should avoid public transport at peak times and crowded areas. Hardly rocket science is it? Not getting on the tube while duffed up should be good advice anyway. There’s no place for a bump at rush hour - I’ve seen someone pour a frappe in a Louis Vuitton handbag and that’s worth much more than a baby*. It’s difficult down there at the best of times, especially without the threat of a highly contagious disease breeding in amongst the squalor of London.

If this is the end of civilised London society then it won’t be all bad. I’ve long since held the notion that I would thrive in a post apocalyptic landscape, living in Big Ben, living off tinned peas and firing buckshot at mutants. I’d marry the one of the only beautiful girls left in the world, then chuck her when a slightly prettier one comes along (don’t judge me, it’s Darwinian).

So this is it. Some reports suggest 100,000 people will die, some say slightly less people will die of Swine Flu than regular flu. But who cares? This is it, the end of days. Go and tell that girl in accounts you want to do horrible things to her in the break room, steal something from Boots, tell your Mum you hate her, rob Topshop, do anything – because tomorrow you might have quite bad flu.

*We’ve looked into it.

London Mayor 2012 - vote Medieval

Are ye sick of the constant bickering and back stabbing that has infected modern British politics? Do you want to see an end to the two-faced shameful melodramas that are played out in the tabloid press?

Then you need to vote MEDIEVAL in the next London Mayoral Elections.

The Medieval Party wants to bring back good old Britain, a Britain with values, with work ethic, and with a feudal system.

We want to hark back to a time where Britain fought against the French for scraps of land, where men were hanged for looking at gentry in the wrong way and where only kings and clergymen ate three meals a day.

There will be no sniping and backbiting in a Medieval parliament, only beheading and poisoning. There will be no doublespeak or rhetoric, only Machiavellian scheming and dueling. You will be sure that your Medieval candidate is stronger, more skillful with a sword and more likely to win a joust than the opposition candidate. Who is very probably dead.

Medieval also vows to end the expenses row in one, swift swing of an axe. Medieval politicians do not claim for expenses, they merely take what is rightfully theirs. Which is usually what is initially yours.

If you vote Medieval, you'll vote for a place where women are not seen nor heard, where beggars really are hungry and where shit slides down the street like a river of death. You will be saying yes to a place where rats are king, where disease is controlled by leeches and where maggots merely tell you that the sell-by date is close at hand.

Lord Robert D'Arcy La Pue, leader of the Medieval Party, speaking from his seat in the court of the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, says: "A vote for Medieval is a vote for a Britain that says no to foreigners, no to democracy and yes to daily, free executions.

"We will bring Calais back to its rightful owners, we will brick up Hadrian's Wall and we will begin bullying the poor into military service that will result in their prolonged and agonising death, the theft of their land and the raping of their family.

"It's 15th century politics for a 21st century world."

"What can you recommend?"

The restaurant industry is cut-throat in London; if you don't succeed in the first 46 seconds you are dead. So restaurants are having to get more and more pretentious, high-brow and original every day - the brains of the sector are trying to develop a completely new niche in the restaurant world, the eatin’ out biz.

The below ideas could be the product of several meetings which involved lots of smoking, continuously cutting each others sentences off with lines like “I would rather eat a bag of your mothers toenails” and spending countless hours trying to get hold of Julian Metcalf, the chief of Pret A Manger, who’s open door policy is not as open as the marketing materials try to promote:

1. ‘Sean’: Basically we take the entire life of Sean, a man, and turn it into a restaurant. All the dishes are either based around his favourite things to eat, or possibly, even more interestingly around core characteristics of his personality (the word ‘peas’ makes him wince). The menu is inter-spliced with pages from his diary (Dear diary, today I looked at my co-workers and all I could think about was a gun – pate and toast). We’d have his pin number and bank statements on the wall along with testimonials from old friends, jilted lovers (“He always waits until it’s his round then he goes to the toilet, his nickname is Sean-Bastard”). The cherry on the cake is the man himself, suspended in a plastic box in the centre of the room, coding invoices and muttering words in French for apparently no reason.

2. ‘Mon petit pleur’: Something slightly classier here. The central concept revolves around a unique dining experience. Imagine a Parisian café at the turn of the century, the wooden floors bleached ivory white with the main attractions. For every part of this meal is constructed around devouring the suffering of others. For an exorbitant fee the customer can pay to eat food complimenting an over riding emotion. For example, the special of the day may be ‘Man told wife has started on the slots again even after they defaulted on mortgage payments’ (accompanying food – salted veal) or ‘concert pianist wakes up from botched operation, handless’ (food – a deep tomato sauce along with a flat bread to mop tears).

3. ‘Chips’: Just a title at the minute, although we're fairly sure this is where the real money is.

Toilet attendants

I'm a bit hungover, so I am not going to beat around the bush. I hate toilet attendants.

If I am paying £8 for a vodka, I think it's pretty fair that I get to piss that up the wall for free. And I know £8 is too much for some watered down, cheap vodka and some economy OJ, but there is an honesty to being ripped off in a trendy, City bar. They could write "we will be ripping you off, you stupid dickhead" on the door, but they don't need to. I know it's going to happen, they know it's going to happen so let's get on with it, and make it a double.

But having a bloke standing around the toilet, usually singing something about sex, is not an honest arrangement. It's supposed to be a break from de riguer of the evening - a few minutes where it's a bit quieter, you can have a breather and think about what you are doing.

Every man in a bar on a saturday night will unzip, begin splashing out the urine which cost oh so much to create and heave a big sigh. That sigh is a little indication that we know we are talking rubbish, shamelessly attempting to have sex with anything in a skirt and helping our livers die just a bit quicker. We know what we are doing is sad and wrong and will only lead to pain, frustration and regret in the morning but we are doing it anyway. So leave me the fuck alone to wee in peace.

Also, I am confident of few of my abilities, but one I pretty much have down pat is the ability to toilet. I can release all that needs to be released in a timely manner and clean up after myself without too many problems. Oh there have been slips - a splash here, a mark there, the occasional unwashed hand - but I am, on the whole, good at going to the toilet. Thank you.

So why should I have to give a tip to a barely-hirable idiot who's only job is to stand behind me, watch me piss (and maybe comment on my abilities) then offer me some soap and a handtowel? I can squeeze soap out of a dispenser myself and I can pick a towel from a pile myself. Shit, I can even wipe my own hands.

No, I don't want a squirt of cheap cologne, I have my own. And no I don't want a lollypop, I am not on pills or 10. I want to wee alone, maybe have a mumbled conversation about how pissed I am with a fellow micturator, heave a big sigh, and then maybe wash my own hands. I don't want to have to feel obliged to give a twat a pound for a job that I can, and wish to do myself.

There was a time where men were not paid to stand around toilets. They paid for the privilege. And no matter what people say about George Michael, dammit it's more honest than the toilet attendant scam that's blighting the stinking piss holes of our country's fine establishments.

R'mance

“Yeowgh!”

“Shh you, why all that din?”

“I said two, but you put all your fingers in”

Dusty Night Terror

“Who are you Sir?”

“My name is Mr Cherrick,

From Ryman, Hucklwitz & D’Troth,

We represent the interests of a Giant Moth”

"Do ya want a can?"

This guy on my bus last week was a full blown nutter. I’m not a fan of that word; never the less, this big mad-fox-eyed Shaun Ryder look-a-like managed to plunge the number 29 to Trafalgar Square into a state of panic. He was a real life nutter.

Everyone had a strained look of “I’m really trying to pretend this isn’t happening, although I am acutely aware that this might end in me getting kicked to death” as he paced down the bendy bus. It was happening though, but luckily it didn’t end up in an old lady getting a kicking.

When something like this happens though, my mind instantly leaps to all those photos from the internal cameras on public transport where some anaemic looking, shirt wearing office worker (i.e. me) gets stabbed in the neck with a William Hill pen 47 times for politely suggesting to the maniac that maybe listening to Dub music really loudly and yelling might not be for the morning commute, it might be suited slightly better to say…3am, in Fabric.

Anyway, aside from randomly shouting at people, calling them “trannies” and declaring “Yeah, I was raised by Yardies, bruv” this chap was having in-depth conversations with himself along the following lines:

“Do you want a can mate?”
“Yeah, I do, can I have one of yours?”
“Yeah mate, no problems bruv”

This is the sort of teeth gritting tension you don’t get on the tube, only the bus attracts this level of terror-inducing psychopath. He managed to shut off an entire section of the bus and keep everyone firmly away from his vicinity. And all it took was an external/internal monologue, some wild golf ball style eyes and a lifetime of substance abuse.