36 Entries That Will Break Rule 2 of this blog

1. I've always felt it's important to break your own rules at least once. There's only two ways of showing how rules exist - one is the rather ineffectual method of writing them down and shouting about them, the other is by exception. Ever notice how, in Shaun of the Dead, they keep doing this? The film is always seen from Shaun's POV, except for when he distracts the zombies and leave the others alone in the pub. There are no Spaced-style cutaway sequences, except that one where they make the plan and bash Philip's head in with a cricket bat. If they just observed the rules at all times, it wouldn't be interesting. As it is, because they only limit themselves to one transgression, they keep the viewer guessing. Even The Wire does this. It famously doesn't have a score or soundtrack - except during the last scene of every season, which tend to be the moments when everything crystallises and you realise the sheer genius of what you're watching. No-one understands what rules are for, unless you break them.

2. Rule 2 - it's in that wee column on the right hand side - is that I'm never going to talk about myself or my life on this blog. In a sense, I'm not going to break that rule at all. I'm going to "talk about my life" in that superficial, invulnerable way that all bloggers adopt. One of the reasons that I hate bloggers so much - and jesus, it pains me to describe this is a blog, even now - is that their entries are intensely personal in the worst way. You never feel like you're reading someone's diary; rather, it's a public image they wish to project, a set of opinions to be shared about things that can only possibly matter to them. Real personal truths are fantastic. But who's going to chronicle their marriage breakup on a blog? Who's going to write about their deep, gnawing fear that they don't really love their new baby boy, or how they can't stop suspecting their best friend of fucking their girlfriend, even though they know full well it can't be true? You get "personal" on blogs in the I-was-stuck-on-a-train-for-forty-minutes-it's-a-disgrace way, but you don't get any level of intimacy. No-one ever confesses to anything terrible. By terrible I don't mean murder, I mean - say - having an affair. I'd happily read a pseudonymous blog about someone who's cheating on their husband, their guilt and their happiness and their self-loathing and their exhiliration. But that kind of confession, a real kind of confession, is not what blogs are for.

3. For example; frequently I walk past small children in prams, and I wonder what would happen if I fell and my knee landed on their head. I'm pretty heavy, not in a Mary Harney way but certainly in a like-a-kebab way. So I have many moments, when I'm walking about town, where I start visualising a small child's head breaking apart; literally being smashed to pieces by the weight of my body. Every time I do this I immediately shove it to the back of my subconscious, my forehead starts to overheat, and I start panicking that it really will happen. That's a pretty minor admission, but you don't get that sort of admission on the average blog, do you?

4. Or is it a minor admission? It occurs to me that people are terribly concerned about the random things that run through their mind. This came back to me yesterday evening, when I overheard two strangers arguing in a coffee-shop and one of them said "I can't believe anyone would think I'd do that." It's a common phrase that I've never understood; frankly, I imagine people doing all sorts of things. If I've not seen a friend for a week, I start wondering if they're addicted to heroin; if they don't answer my calls twice in a row, I start wondering if they actually hate me and if they've always hated me; if two friends of mine start laughing at each other's jokes more than usual, I immediately wonder if they're shagging (even if they're the same sex). These are momentary things which most of my brain instantly rejects, but hell - they're there, all right. The only reason I don't indulge them is that I don't have breasts, so I've been socially trained not to do so. Were I a woman, I'd be thoroughly neurotic.

5. When I say I'm heavy in a "like-a-kebab" way, I mean that I like the occasional kebab, not that I resemble a kebab in any way. I can only think of two ways I might resemble a kebab anyway - either I have a similar fat content, or I've been partially disembowelled and have to walk delicately around to make sure my insides don't fall out. At least one of those isn't true.

6. Anyway, I just mean that I'm always puzzled when someone I know tries the "I can't believe you'd think I'd say something like that" line. My baseline assumption is that anyone is capable of anything, given the right conditions; as comforting as it is to think that we all have a core personality that will never waver, I've never accepted this and I tend to assume people are massively unpredictable. Certainly, I've got no idea what I'm like; my personality varies, depending on whom I'm talking to. This is true of most people - everyone behaves differently with their parents than they do with their friends, to give one example - but they cling to the notion that one of those personalities is a true, 'core' identity. Whenever I try self-analysis I find that I honestly don't know which persona is the 'true' one, so I just accept them all as being part of me. Since one of these facets is a subtle blend of paranoia and imagination, I'm always putting everyone I know in different scenarios. When someone says "I can't believe you think I don't vote," they don't know that I've already imagined them being penetrated by a giant mongoose while they feast on the raw flesh of a pigeon, wearing a cowboy hat and shouting "yee-haw" between mouthfuls. Not voting is pretty minor stuff, in comparison.

7. And of course the thing that really worries me about the pram-baby-vision is that, if it ever really happens, I'll just mumble something about it being ironic. That's enough about babies in prams.

8. On other matters - yesterday there was an article in the paper, saying "Vincent's cost me a breast." Well, if anyone's going to accept payment in body parts, a hospital is the logical place to do it (although you'd think they'd look for major re-usable organs like kidneys). It also occurs to me that anyone in Dublin called Vincent must really hate the Evening Herald, and continuously wonder if headlines like "Vincent's in drug overdose shock" are actionable.

9. In other news, rats have apparently returned to Hamelin, just before the town's 725th anniversary next year - by which time they'll probably all have been killed, so "Rats narrowly fail to create mildly ironic incident" is the headline that should have been used. I didn't read any more about the article, because everywhere I look it's got a picture of rats beside it, and they terrify me. Apparently they're getting rid of them using traps, which makes me wonder what happens if they don't pay the trap manufacturer afterwards. I have visions of all the town's children being found dead in small plastic boxes, having been lured in there by the odour of poisoned Sunny Delight.

10. It's not just rats; rodents in general bother me. People have pointed out to me that this isn't rational, at which point I just point out that phobias are supposed to be irrational. The truth is that rodents just look wrong, and I can't put it any clearer than that. It's the fast, twitchy way they move; the way they can turn on their own length; the marbled dark eyes. It's as though nature has just somehow malfunctioned, and made a creature that logically should not work. In a very careful, specific way, the words don't exist to explain how it makes me feel; the closest I can get to expressing it is that, when I'm near the things, I get the same sort of sensation I imagine I'll get if I ever find myself in a universe of antimatter. Rodents make me feel like I've lost my connection with the world around me, that the rest of the planet no longer exists. And even that doesn't do the idea justice.

11. There's a lot of phobias, if you ever bother to look them up. Agraphobia (fear of sexual abuse), hoplophobia (firearms), pyrophobia (fire) selachophobia (sharks) - which does make me wonder, how do these qualify as irrational fears, exactly? I'm pretty scared of sharks and firearms (although the image of sharks with firearms just strikes me as slightly amusing), but to me that just seems like good sense. Triskaidecaphobia, now that's an irrational fear (the number 13, since you ask). The only other one worth commenting on is coulrophobia (clowns), since to me that's not any sort of fear, it's just a basic human condition.

12. On the corruption of 'phobia' - I don't know when I started getting so annoyed by words being misused. I've always been more than a little pedantic, but that's just a pet neurosis that I hold onto in order to give my character some texture. So yes, I get mildly annoyed by people mixing up 'imply' and 'infer', but it doesn't engender any level of real rage. No, I'm talking about huge, important and emotive terms being used in the wrong context. The 'phobia' thing annoys me because it weakens the term; it reduces a psychological condition to a badge of character, something that people just use to glorify a mild hang-up. I'm not a fan of lifts, for example, but I don't have a phobia; I'm perfectly capable of getting a lift, I'm just not very happy in them. Whereas if you put me in a situation where rats - even tame ones - were crawling over my body, I would quite literally start screaming uncontrollably. I'm protective of the word 'phobia' because I think the distinction is important. And it's nearly too obvious to bring it up, but 'paedophilia' is the leading candidate for misinterpretation. Paedophilia is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children, but we've now become so used to it being bandied around that nobody objects when it's applied to dirty old men who lech at fifteen year-olds. When Tatu made that video in which two teens snogged each other it was accused of appealing to paedophiles. People who get off on fourteen year-olds lezzing each other aren't paedophiles, they're mildly perverted. To me, the distinction's important. We're constantly being told that paedophilia is on the increase - well if you extend its terms to include anyone under the age of consent, then of course it is. I mean, you'd be pretty worried about anyone who didn't fancy Britney Spears when she first appeared, wouldn't you?

13. Although I must admit that I didn't really fancy her, and I'm not just saying that. Even in that school uniform she looked frighteningly... not just old, but threatening; something about her suggested that there was a jaded yet monstrous ex-whore just waiting to leap out from behind her eyes, chew her teenage body up, and then start crushing the population with the giant pulsating vagina in its midriff. When it turned that her inner demon was a baldy-headed self-obsessed nutjob who married a tedious dimwit, I found myself faintly relieved.

14. That's a Hollywood remake waiting to happen if ever there was one... "Britney Spears is Akira. With a giant devouring twat."

15. In fact, if anything, I'm most bothered by carelessness. Obviously I'm not a fan of right-wing theory in general, but careless thinking about big ideas is what bothers me. Paedophiles and dirty old men are very different phenomena with entirely different causes, but if no-one can be bothered to differentiate the two, how are we ever going to progress dealing the issue? People who think carelessly will always go for the easy option and the obvious solution, but no really big problems can be solved by plodding through the obvious answers. The phrase used to describe what I'm looking for is "lateral thinking", but even that's lazy; there's nothing lateral about carefully trying to understand why things happen, and then changing the key points. This, it must be said is human nature - people simply get used to the way things are, and there's a natural instinct to accept it because we see the world as an extension of our own being. The only way to fight against this is to cajole, nag, and effectively keep reminding people that things might be better if they were different. That's what our political structures, and more importantly our culture, are supposed to do. However, both these things train us to be lazy-minded; they convince us to accept things as the "way of the world", which is effectively a coward's way of saying "well I know it's wrong, but I can't be arsed doing anything about it." I don't mind people not being arsed - well, I sure as hell know that I haven't started any revolutions lately, so it's not like I've got a moral high ground - but it's when they start fudging their own laziness that I get irritated.

16. Why else do you think I get so worked up about television? There are very few things in the world that have the raw power of television; something that beams meaning-charged images and narratives into houses up and down the world. I've got no compunction about saying that my entire sense of morality, my core sense of right and wrong, is derived from Doctor Who. Many people find this self-evidently ridiculous, but don't have any sort of problem with those who derive their morality from going to a big building every Sunday to praise their invisible friend. Christianity is some people's native mythology; Doctor Who is mine (and I don't believe mine's real, thank you very much). It would be nice to claim that my I get my political / moral stance from Marxist theory, or the teachings of Buddha. Actually, I can tell you the two moments whence 90% of my opinions spring. One is Tom Baker debating whether to kill the Daleks; the other is Sylvester McCoy shouting "If we fight like animals, we die like animals." One of these moments doesn't even have a conventional narrative, it's simply an image that resonates with me and underpins almost everything I believe in. Is that really so surprising? Every story, at some level, contains some sort of moral or behavioural stance. Television can portray them in more efficient way than, say, Kant; I mean, why would I wade through Kant, a huge tract of endless and clumsy words, when I can see a curly-haired bloke with two wires effectively debating the same philosophy? Some people like to call that sort of attitude a problem with attention span. Actually, it's just valuing means of non-verbal communication, absorbing a message through environment, facial expressions, context, sound, colours... as well as words. Many kids will grow up with their idea of right and wrong being shaped by Christopher Eccleston's Doctor declaring proudly that he's a coward, or Rose Tyler shouting incoherently in a cafe that "there's a better way of living your life... you take a stand, you say no"; it won't just be the words that they remember, it will be the way Eccleston thrusts himself away from the detonator switch, or the stumbling way that Rose arrives at her truth. You still think this is ridiculous? Fine. Then try and remember the two or three or four things in your life that most shape who you are. Go on. Now tell me - are you just remembering words? Or are you remembering moments, with tactility and colour and feeling? Okay, so who's being ridiculous now?

17. I just tried that, and I've realised that I first experienced the do-I-destroy-the-Daleks thing in the novelisation. That doesn't step on my point at all, though. Because it doesn't, that's why.

18. Or, for example, take John Sergeant. He's on Strictly Come Dancing, and he can't dance. However, the audience kept voting to keep him, just because they found his not-dancing ability entertaining. This continued, to the increasing exasperation of the judges, until Sergeant decided to quit the show in case he won it and ruined the whole thing. This episode made the national news, but was generally introduced in a sniffy I-can't-believe-we're-talking-about-this way, and I'll lay good odds that Ian Hislop will make a sarcastic comment about it on Have I Got News For You on Friday... something along the lines of it being much more important than the current economic crisis, ha-ha. But... the John Sergeant story is important, thank you very much. Strictly Come Dancing is, inexplicably, very popular; it's watched by millions of families. At the core of the story is a difficult, proper debate - whether it's important to be serious about craft and reward merit, or whether it's more important to subvert structure and shove the two fingers at the establishment. Thousands of kids will have their views on authority shaped by the John Sergeant argument; a generation will grow up with an understanding of subversion that's subtly influenced by this latest showbiz-spat. On the whole, I think that is more important than the economic crisis. In fact (notice the beautiful narrative circle of this entry, oh I amaze myself sometimes), Tom Baker put it well when he presented Have I Got News For You - "it's much more important than an economic conference. That's just a failure."

19. On economics - nowhere else will you find lazy-mindedness so clearly delineated. The rhetoric we hear is always about 'putting the system back on track' - and yet you'd struggle to find any other environment in which something that failed so spectacularly would be unquestioningly reinvigorated by throwing more money at it. The system is on track, it's just reached the end of the line, and now we have to build more track to keep it going. However, as I've said before, this short-sightedness is... understandable. People tend to operate within the parameters of their institution; they instinctively act to safeguard the institution, not the people it affects. Expecting the bankers to start questioning how they operate is as pointless as expecting a lion to start pondering the merits of a vegetarian diet. So... it's people from outside the financial markets who have to start changing things. What's strangely exciting about the country right now is that, for the first time since the early 90s, people have started to question whether consumerism is actually all that good an idea. And yet no-one in the establishment is mirroring this - the government are cutting back spending and trying to balance the ledger, and the news is still reporting on what IBEC said last week. It should be gut-kickingly obvious to anyone that IBEC's opinions are absolutely irrelevant right now - by definition, IBEC only care about their members, and their members only give a fuck about themselves. And yet the Nine O'Clock news still reads out their press releases, because hey, that's just the way it works. It's no wonder that the establishment is so conservative - if you view the entire socio-economic system of the country as an institution, then anyone who wants to change it is effectively a loose cannon. There's suddenly a lot of people who think we should change the way our society works, but anyone involved in running that society instinctively views them as a dangerous subversive who wants to tear down our way of life.

20. So don't try and tell me that television doesn't matter. Simply by dint of being visual, it changes the way we view the world. I don't want to get into the smart-arsery of 'the medium is the message', but people don't often acknowledge the extent that the media we use (I mean 'media' in the old-fashioned way of 'how we express ourselves', not 'middle-class people who try and convince us that Paris Hilton is important') affects the way we think. Instinctively, these days, we remember things in a visual way - people tend to organise their memories in much the same way as they see films or TV pictures. I can vouch for this - a lot of things I remember are not first-person any more. Instead I see myself from some vantage point from off-screen, with all the other participants carefully lined up in-shot. In other words, I instinctively organise my memory exactly as a film-maker would shoot it. More interestingly, my memories are shot according to mood. The time that someone elbowed me and I fell down a four-foot hole while lots of people looked on is shot like a sitcom; static camera, overdone signalling of the event, and a comedy pratfall. But the memories of me lying on a beach in the middle of the night, turning over life's empty angst in my mind... this is a slow tracking shot, panning across the scenery before alighting on my terribly moody face. If I take time, and make the effort, other things come back to me; mood, smells, surfaces, and I can finally remember what it was like to be me. As time goes by our culture becomes more and more visual, the world becomes less tactile and textured; I have to explore my memory for some time before I remember how things feel. Television and cinema has, quite literally, structured the way I think. How much more important can it be?

21. Actually, here's a more tangible example. In the last ten years, the default style of architecture has become glass, shiny metal, and polished stone panels. I'm not saying this incorporates all architecture, but head out to Citywest or Parkwest and that's all you'll see. There are many people who will try and tell you that this is due to construction methods, and there's probably some truth in this. But if you want my opinion, it's more instructive to track it against architectural representation methods. Over the last ten years, computer modelling has become so sophisticated - and, more importantly, so easy - that it's now the accepted way of presenting a building. Many planners will demand a photorealistic view of a building; most corporate clients insist on it. Architects are as seduced by the power of an image as anyone else, and highly susceptible to being wowed by the computing power of modelling software. So is it surprising that the materials that tend to look best in these images are glass, metal, and polished stone? Computer modelling has a wow factor when it's showing reflective surfaces, but it doesn't do texture at all well. So shiny materials win out; it's difficult to sell something with the tactility of, say, brick, when you present with a medium that makes brick look shit - and, after a while of being conditioned by the images you produce, you will subconsciously start to think in these terms anyway. At this point I could refer to Rem Koolhaas's book Delirious New York, and how the style of those "gothic" skyscrapers was hugely influenced by the fact that the predominant style of representation at the time was charcoal, but I don't want to sound like too much of a smartarse. Here's something lighter.

22. Also in the news - the sparrow population is falling, because too many people are putting decking or paving on their gardens. This is presented as A Bad Thing, but I can't help but feel that a species that fragile rather deserves a kick in the nuts. There's no other group on earth whose survival is based on plentiful well-tended gardens, with the possible exception of Anglicans.

23. Okay, that's weird; I've just heard another story on Radio 4, about studies showing that prams that face away from the parent are not good for children. Thankfully, the reason given was something about making the child feel insecure, and nothing to do with people tripping over and squashing the baby's head like a melon.

24. Radio 4 and Anglicans have just featured in two entries. This isn't entirely surprising, since there is an increasingly Anglophilic side to my nature as I get older. I feel slightly bad about this, as I'm fully aware of my colonial obligation to Hate the Bastard Brits, but I do seem to be getting more English. My last holiday consisted of me walking all the way across Northern England - 192 miles, since you ask - and I did find myself rather seduced by the place. What people don't seem to appreciate about England is how similar it is to Ireland, and yet at the same time different. There are a lot of pubs, but they're all named after polychromatic lions, black bulls, or the body-parts of monarchs. There are lots of small villages, but they're worryingly short of grotesque bungalows and ribbon development. And the English Breakfast is like the Irish one, but it's missing the black pudding and has substituted fried bread instead (which is every bit as vile as it sounds). It's a bit like a parallel version of Ireland where everyone has followed the rules, because they're too boring to think of a way of breaking them. Either that, or the English have hired in a bunch of Swiss people to run the country for them.

25. The other sentence that needs to be said to every English person is, "You know when people speak in regional accents? It's not as charming as you think to do impressions of them right in their faces."

26. And yet, most Irish people will quite happily gorge themselves on the English media, which makes ours seem incredibly parochial. The other thing that happened on the holiday was that I found myself occasionally tuning into The Jeremy Kyle Show. It's quite incredible for a number of reasons, but the main one - except for the absolute fuckhead who presents it - is that you find it almost impossible to believe that people like this exist, or at least that the English equivalent of the Evening Herald hasn't carried a shocked article about it. One of the girls on it claimed that she didn't think she'd slept with one of the blokes claiming fatherhood of her newborn baby. I find it pretty difficult to believe that anyone could be drunk enough not to remember whether they'd slept with someone or not, but physically capable to the extent that sex was any sort of possibility. Although I do have a man's perspective on this. Presumably women can combine sex and napping, which sounds like a perfect rainy day activity to me.

27. So that's the thing about the English - they even do squalor with a bit more glamour than us. They've got an entire underclass to that effect, for Christ's sake, even if no-one's quite sure where the word 'chav' came from. We don't have chavs in Ireland; we've got scangers, but they're not quite as well-defined, and we've got knackers, but they have ethnic connections. The only thing that we do with more drama is religion, since Catholicism just has more darkened ceremony and wanton child abuse than the Church of England does. But even at that, the Church of England can be abbreviated to CofE, which sounds sort of glamourous in a sci-fi sort of a way. Linking sci-fi and religion seems pretty apposite to me.

28. Oh dear, I'm having a go at religion again, but it really is so very easy. The problem is that I find myself coming across like one of those aggressive atheist people, who are just the most annoying people on the planet. I hate the way that they bang on about how there's no proof of a god, in a manner that suggests that only they're smart enough to realise it; I hate the way that they ascribe all the evils of the world to religion, which is so one-eyed and simplistic it's beneath contempt; I hate the dull, crushing way they force their self-satisfied banalities into every conversation, whether it belongs there or not. Richard Dawkins has written something like seven books about the non-existence of god, which to me is more or less the same as writing seven books about the non-existence of a giant purple mongoose hovering over Tullamore. Is there any other group of people who go around, smugly banging on about stuff that's self-evidently not there? Personally, I don't find the existence of a creator-figure to be particularly ridiculous at all... what's ridiculous is the lengths people go to commune with this figure. If there is a god, then I'm sure he just feels faintly baffled by the Catholic Church. 'Bloody hell, are they saying that same prayer again? Why don't they do a Bill Hicks routine or something?' As for the CofEs, he's probably sick and tired of hearing the same old hymns over and over again. Abide With Me is great and all, but I firmly believe that God is a fan of the White Stripes.

29. Ah, Bill Hicks. If ever you want to find a more over-rated speaker, then look no further. Now don't get me wrong, Hicks is hilarious. His timing is extraordinary, the fluidity with which he runs through his routines is spectacular, and his furiously evangelical anger is thoroughly liberating. He's certainly one of the greatest comedians that ever lived. But here's the thing... people aren't happy viewing Hicks as a comedian. Oh no. To many people, Bill Hicks is a philosopher.

30. A philosopher? You're trying to tell me that the bloke who spent most of his time doing impressions of Goat-Boy, who did some (gut-bustingly funny) routines about throwing a womans legs over his shoulders so he could wear her like a feedbag... this bloke's a philosopher? While he is, in many ways, an impressive man, Hicks isn't a philosopher. If you actually analyse his routines as philosophical statements, they're rubbish. His 'philosophy' varies between paranoid conspiracy-mania and a dull, reductive Libertarianism. Listen to a Hicks CD and you'll hear the audience going absolutely wild when he says things like "all governments are lying cocksuckers" and "I love pornography." This isn't a philosopher at work, it's a comedian with enormous personal charisma. Hicks the philosopher, on the other hand, is just full of shit.

31. Libertarianism is one of those mantras that is strangely seductive, because it's so easy. Again, it appeals to the lazy-minded and the uncaring, because it provides a simple rule that removes any personal obligations. Namely, one of Bill Hicks' most basic stated philosophies - "what business of it is yours what I do, so long as I don't harm anyone else." State it baldly like that, and it's convincing. But it doesn't work that way, not really. We're part of a society, and our actions resonate through the rest of the people around us. If the individuals within a society begin to decay, that society also decays. It doesn't harm anyone else if I go out and start wanking on the street, but it's an unpleasant aesthetic to introduce into our culture. Aesthetics matter more than anyone cares to admit, and if this entry has a point, that's more or less it. We take our behavioural cues from our environment; the looks of our buildings, the form of our city streets, the shine and gloss of our media, the stories and myths we tell each other, the behaviour of those around us. Libertarianism assumes that your behaviour doesn't matter, but our collective behaviour is one of the most important things around us. This isn't to say that we all have to return to Conservative behaviour and wear top hats, it's just that the way we act, the things we do, and the stories we tell, are all important. Far more important than political speeches, certainly. Politicians can weight, filter, and pick through our words, they have time to choose the phrase that will alienate the least number of people. You can tell more about Brian Cowen from the contemptuous glower and twitching half-snarl of his mouth before he speaks, far more than anything that comes out of his mouth.

32. This is why I get wound up by Revolutionary Socialists. Logically, I should be in agreement with more or less everything they say, but they're just the most pathetic people you could hope to meet even if you went to a stockbroker's seminar. These are people who still follow ideologies laid down by Karl fucking Marx, methodologies that are based on a model of society that's now a hundred years old. Quite apart from just how lazy-minded the actual model is (Step 1, seize power. Step 2, vest power in worker's assemblies. Step 3, We haven't worked that out yet. Step 4, classless stateless society), it assumes that ideas spread in the same way that they used to, and that people are susceptible to the same media that they were in 1867. Does anyone really still think that you can spread your message by selling copies of the Socialist Worker? I mean really, do they? The only way you can convince people to be ready for a society based on equality, and the lack of possessions, is to fundamentally alter the way they think. To do this, you need to be as sophisticated with your messaging as the consumerist / libertarian wing are with theirs. But while they convey the glory of 'freedom of choice' by careful use of colour, iconography, sound, narrative, and immersive sound experiences... socialist revolutionaries paint "Smash the State" on walls. That's even before you count the Anarchists, who are even more irritating, with an even more stupid plan - Step 1, Smash The State, Step 2, It'll All Work Itself Out. I hate right wing people because they're wrong. I hate the socialists and anarchists because they're so fucking useless, and somehow that offends me even more.

33. The notion of changing the media to affect our thinking; telling stories that subtly reinforce the idea of society; quietly reminding people that 'freedom' doesn't mean 'freedom to buy shit'; using the information around us to propagate left-wing ideals; accepting that, reaching the stage where we genuinely don't need a state or possessions can only happen in the far future, and changing the way people think is the only way to achieve it - I like to think of all these as Evolutionary Socialism, except that it's such a self-satisfied title that it makes me want to punch myself in the mouth. Politicians and leaders reflect our society. Stories and information change it. I know which one I think matters most.

34. Just to clarify, I've never wanked on the street. I felt I should make that absolutely clear.

35. I've developed a spot on the side of my nose. What worries me about this is that it's more of a growth than a spot, something that looks like a permanent fixture that people will politely try and ignore. It doesn't have any of the standard blackheads or 'focal points' that spots do, it's just a shiny red bump that's lodged on the right-hand side of my face, just above my nostril. The only people I know who develop growths like this are teachers, specifically headmasters; the kind with bad breath who are really annoyed about the abolition of corporal punishment, the ones who stand at the front of their class with their hands delicately inserted down the front of their trousers, who ask their students questions about Latin to make them look stupid. There's a discrete type of teacher who treat the job like a vocation in a bad way, as if they've lived their life to bully and humiliate children and/or teenagers. These people shouldn't be allowed to teach, because they're absolute scumbags and they need to be isolated from the rest of the world forever. I'm not quite sure how you'd administer this 'cunt' test, because I don't have time to meet every teacher in the country, and I'm reluctant to delegate.

36. So I've railed against our reliance on words, while producing an awful lot of words; I've bemoaned the increasing lack of tactility in our culture, but I'm writing this in the least tactile medium possible; and I've declared that politicians are useless compared to media, but the last thing I wrote was a badly thought-out administrative policy. I'm aware of the paradoxes at the heart of my life, and I embrace them.