A comedy of horrors.

The modern world offers you a choice. Utter despair, or laugh like everyone who’s seen Tommy Cooper’s ‘spoon in a jar‘ gag. I think the world went downhill fast when he died – a fearsome Smoky-Drinker and an intelligent clown. I wonder if the young of today can appreciate the humour in this bungling magician (he actually could do it, it was just funnier if it went wrong) and his terrible, but usually hilarious, one-liners.

If there is hope, it lies not in the proles. O’Brien was right, they are animals. Sheep. They do as they are told and demand to be told what to do. They demand that everyone fits the mould they have been forced into, everyone pays the taxes they are forced to pay (it never occurs to them to think ‘if he doesn’t have to pay it, why do i?’). They demand everyone works harder to generate more taxes, everyone watches the mindless nonsense on televison and accepts it as real, everyone fits the British Standard Human definition they are delighted to accept as forced on themselves. They are useless. They do as they are told and they live and die on command.

The hope is in those who reject prole life. Whether they choose to despair at the modern world or laugh at it, those who do not accept it are the ones who hold some hope for a future.

Not me – I’ve been around for over half a century and my life, though thoroughly enjoyable, is bound to be somewhat wearing on the body I have. There was a tale I heard about a researcher who studied the men of Scotland’s remote islands, men who lived on salted fish and whisky. They were in rude health into their eighties then they died suddenly. No slow decline – one day you’re enjoying life, the next day you’ve left it. That researcher reached the conclusion that the islanders were living on two poisons, each the antidote of the other. The excessive salt hardened their arteries while the whisky eased blood flow. Eventually the balance broke and… pop, you’re gone. Sounds good to me. It’s close to what I’ve been doing.

So I have thirty years at most left to giggle and chuckle at a world where a cardboard caterpillar can be charged with smoking, where risk assessors decide that people might dance in a dangerous fashion to the dirge of the British National Anthem (How do you dance in a dangerous fashion, I wonder? Even the Scottish sword dance is only slightly risky and if it was done to ‘God Save Mrs. Queen’ it would be so slow as to be utterly un-dangerous).

A world where children can’t play ‘tag’ because it’s dangerous. Kids used to be able to have some fun in the old days. A world where, at work, I overheard a strapping six-foot young lad declare that the floor I had mopped and put a sign on saying ‘this floor is wet’ was dangerous. Really? What the hell use would he have been in my lab then? A lab full of seriously dangerous things you can’t see but which could blast your last three meals out of every available orifice and then you die in pain in a pool of your own vomit and shit. All it would take is one mistake. A wet floor, with a sign on it saying  ‘wet floor’, dangerous? The weakness of modern people amazes and, often, amuses me.

Yes, I torment these feeble drones with made-up stories of the horrors that ‘could happen’. Why not? They are conditioned to be scared of what ‘could happen’ and let’s be honest, if I don’t use them for amusement, they are no bloody use for anything else. Imagine a future army full of people terrified of guns and knives. I do not want to live to see the inevitable result of that.

There is a silver lining. There will always be the rebels, the non-conformists – and I do not mean the hippies who refused to ‘conform’ by wearing a damn flowery uniform and all living the same way. I mean those who look at the world and either shake their heads in despair or just burst out in fits of laughter. It’s a comedy of horrors we live in now, run by people we could replace with chimps and see a vast improvement.

The controllers and their drones will not win. They cannot win, they have never won. They banned hard drugs and look how that turned out. They banned handguns and arrested grannies whose fathers had left a rusty Luger in the attic as a war memento, while Filthy McEvil and his drug gang are all armed with shiny Uzis and nobody seems to mind. They banned the carrying of knives and stabbings rocketed.

They struck at tobacco and we learned the truth behind the propaganda we had previously accepted. We learned that it grows perfectly well in the UK, we found alternatives to the packaging, we re-learned pipe smoking and found tubing – the latter was a niche market before they forced us to look at it. Plain packaging? Bring it on, fewer and fewer of us buy any packaged stuff any more. I see Tesco profits were massively down at their last report and I wonder how much of that was down to the daft shutters at the tobacco counters? I will not buy things I cannot see.

Electrofags came into existence as a direct result of the smoking ban. Yes, the Puritans made them happen. Can’t smoke? Okay, we’ll invent something that looks exactly the same but isn’t. Go on, Puritans, let’s see you ban steam. They have tried and they’ll try again.

They hit drinking, and homebrew is on the rise again. My first batch of plum wine is still bubbling at just over one gloop per second so it could turn out to be particularly vicious. I hope so. Basic beer and wine brewing is astonishingly easy and when the doc asks how many units you drink, you’ll have no idea at all. I don’t even know how many cigarettes I smoke, I just make them as needed. Strength? Not a clue. Don’t care. Thanks, ASH.

I wonder how many are re-learning the art of deep-frying in preparation for the attacks on fast foods? How many are investing in lard and salt stocks before those are banned too? If lard is banned, one Prescott could supply at least a county with pure rendered fat for a month and many other politicians could finally be proved similarly useful.

There will be some rebels. You can’t see them, you can’t smell them and you can’t work out who they are. Tobacco plants have the advantage that they don’t look like anything more than a tall plant with flowers on the top. They look like a shot cabbage. Not as easily identifiable as pot (although I do recall reports of police impounding tomato plants they thought were cannabis so if you let a cabbage shoot, expect helicopters at dawn).

The loonies work on our side. They always do, they are just too dim to realise it. Look at this silly image of tobacco harm (link left by stopcpdotcom). None of those things apply to me and I have been smoking for well over 30 years. I have been mistaken for a nonsmoker on many occasions and was once asked by a student why I didn’t stink of smoke when she knew I was a smoker. It’s because I wash. Nonsmokers don’t always bother with that. The rabid ones – antismokers – thnk in logic that tells them ‘Smokers stink. I don’t smoke,. therefore I cannot stink’ and it can be eye-watering to be in the same room as them. Fortunately more and more nonsmokers (not antismokers, they are beyond any level of sense) are realising that the things done to smokers are coming their way too. Normal nonsmokers haven’t even noticed tobacco smoke. Shocking, for the drones.

No matter how bad it gets there will always be some who see the absurdity in the drone-fears and who laugh at the comedy horrors.

The proles/drones? Worthless. They will do as they are told and live someone else’s life while insisting they are doing what they really want – and they are the ones telling us we are in denial. Let them. These people don’t matter at all. They are not even real. They are someone else’s construct living life from a script and thinkng they have free will while gladly boarding the free rie to the abbatoir. They cannot be helped because they don’t want help. Stop trying. Let them go.

It’s a funny old world out there. Laugh at it or cry at it,  but never just accept it.

I think I’ll end with a song. There has been an outbreak of underdog songs lately, some good, some terrible, some in between, but I like this one. Could be because it mentions trains…