Are you sitting comfortably? Then you must die.

We are now well used to being told that smoking causes cancer, drinking causes cancer, sugar, salt, sunlight and soft toilet paper… and just about everything else in the world causes cancer. Oh, I forgot cosmic rays. Everything in the entire universe causes cancer in humans. But only in humans. The universe hates us and sees us as its biggest ever error, so is turning every part of itself carcinogenic in an attempt to eradicate us before we escape this tumour/planet and metastasise throughout the galaxies. The universe is trying chemotherapy on itself.

Everything we experience causes cancer because people who get cancer are also people who experience these things and in the post-logic world of NewScience, correlation is causation. People who drive cars sometimes crash those cars, people who don’t drive cars never crash cars, so crashing is a direct and definite result of driving. If you drive, you will crash, because only drivers crash and (post-logic world, remember) all drivers will crash eventually. Some hospital workers will be along shortly to tell us how they have seen the terrible results of driving, patients dying in pain, broken and twisted with tubes in every orifice, and they will tell us how driving ruins lives and all drivers are doomed to suffer the same fate.

This is the logic that tells the drones that all smokers will get cancer, all drinkers will become alcoholics, anyone drinking a can of sugary fizz will become obese, and so on. Even when observation is wildly at odds with their crazed imaginings, those crazed imaginings are reality and real reality is wrong. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Church of Climatology, where we are routinely treated to ‘there will be no more snow in the UK’ and six months later, ‘oops, we didn’t order any grit or snow ploughs because the Climatologists said we wouldn’t need them’. Meanwhile we are farting bubbles in the snow and trying to move away before it escapes the snowline at our chests.

Everyone sits down now and then. I like it, especially since I now have a job that does not involve it at all. Journalists sit down a lot because they are writing up their stories. I wonder if the one who wrote this story was sweating profusely as he/she/it typed?

Yes, in Expert Land, sitting down gives you cancer. Why? Well, because everyone who gets cancer has sat down, therefore… oh, it’s not hard to work it out, it’s not even science.

This does mean that those confined to wheelchairs should all be lumpier than my grandmother’s gravy (my father used to ask whether he should carve the chicken or the gravy first, but even he dared not say it to her face). Those wheelchair athletes on the Paralympics must be CGI fakes since according to the post-logic science, anyone who has been seated that long must now be so lumpy that the Elephant Man goes to freak shows to look at them.

All those ASH drones who trawl the internet looking for smokers to abuse are now at greater risk of lung cancer than the people they pretend are attacking them. All those Experts who are typing up reports are at far greater risk of lung cancer than the smokers forced to stand outside to smoke – because they do not allow seating in the risible ‘shelters’.

All the nonsmokers sitting in the pub chortling about their mates outside with their coffin nails… you sitters are now at greater risk of cancer than the standing smokers.

All those fat arses on green seats in the House of Commons… the seats are plain green to deter their sitting addiction and there, right in front of them (well, in front of their arses but since that’s where they speak from, in front/behind becomes hard to differentiate) is proof that plain green packaging deters nobody. They are at greater risk of cancer, including lung cancer, than smokers. Their seats are plain green and still they sit. Such a powerful addiction!

Sitting is more addictive than heroin, and then people sit on each other’s laps. Second hand sitting! We are all doomed! Children are encouraged to sit on adult laps and are even told to ‘sit down’. Forced to, in school, all day. Child abuse! Won’t someone think of the cheeldren?

Or, as a general call to all politicians and whatever is left of science out there – won’t someone THINK? No, I suppose that’s old-fashioned now. Thinking is what old people and retrograde youth engage in. Modern, progressive people prefer knee-jerk reaction based on prejudice and manufactured data twisted into a Moebius strip so that you can go round and round without ever coming to a conclusion.

Well, tonight I have eaten bacon (fried, not grilled), a couple of jam doughnuts and a blueberry muffin, some salad leaves to negate all the calories, and am currently sitting, smoking and drinking all at once. And I am not dead. Not even ill. Am I a statistical anomaly or am I, as I suspect, well within the bell curve? My theory holds that most people actually live like me and that those who follow the whims of the Healthists are the anomalies. They are vocal anomalies, used to full effect by the smug and pompous politicians who are in turn merely hand-puppets for the unelected proctological Righteous.

Add the sedentary lifestyle to my list of Things I Do To Defy The Healthists and I must have died twenty years ago. All that exercise at work does not matter, according to the article. Spending hours sitting around writing is yet another thing that has killed me already. A Healthist prediction of my remaining lifespan must surely be a negative number.

So… if I am officially dead, why am I paying tax? I should get a big granite headboard for my bed that says ‘Here lies Leg-iron, not dead, only sleeping, but maybe dead, best give him a nudge and check’.

Later I will commission a gravestone that says ‘Not sleeping, actually dead this time’.

There are those who say that sitting is unnatural for humans, and that it is the position of the sit that causes all the problems. To which I reply with a scientific term I have used a lot in recent years – ‘Bollocks’.

Monkeys sit on things. They’ll sit on chairs if they have them but they also sit on logs or rocks. Dogs sit. Cats sit. On chairs, if you aren’t looking. They sit in a different way because they have a different body shape, but still they sit.

Chairs were not designed by a carcinogenic sadist who then forced everyone in the world to assume an unnatural position. They were designed to provide a more comfortable place to sit than a random rock or fallen tree. If they were not comfortable, the chair maker wouldn’t sell any. He’d have to rethink his design, maybe leave out the central spike even though it ruins the aesthetics and does mean people could slide off when drunk. Perhaps put the chair arms at elbow level rather than shoulder level. Add legs to raise the seat off the floor. Increase the number of legs from one to three or four to improve stability. Oh, considerable research and much trial and error was involved in the final design of the chair.

I don’t for a moment believe that chairs are carcinogenic. It is insanely ridiculous unless you have a chair made of plutonium and if you had that much plutonium in one place we’d all know about it by now.

But I know quite a few people who will believe it. They will believe that sitting is more dangerous than smoking and I know of a few who sit while smoking! Even more who sit around talking about the smokers standing outside. Can I resist playing with this new absurdity? Am I likely to even try to resist?

No.

It’s probably an addiction. Everything else is now.