by Dear Readers, hand on my heart – yes, I have one and it is bleeding a little but increasingly illiberal – I intended to use this column entirely to lower the temperature of our national debate. Oil spills on troubled sewage waters. Don’t apply butter to the burning sense of injustice.
But this morning, I woke up to find that I am suffering, really suffering, from GFD. I don’t know if you are aware of this but GFD stands for “Generalized Fury Disorder”. Oh, you too? Huh. What are the chances?
High enough, I think, if you’re as worried as I am about Meghan Markle’s buckwheat jam. I have no clue why, but every time I come across their American Riviera – Swirls on Kittens / Baby Head Scent – Orchard brand, I want to grab a pillow.
Now that she’s brought out a limited edition strawberry jam – only 50 jars, hand-made and given to an exclusive group of influencers – I’m afraid I’ll have an aneurysm. He is. Directly. So. SO. Annoying.
Especially since I’m here, letting Montecito-origin soft fruit live rent-free in my head, which means I’m the joke. If only I could laugh. Instead, I’m crying under pressure to say the least.
Inflation contraction means that every time I buy a new piece of jewellery, the catch is so tiny that I need a neurosurgeon trained in computer-aided manipulation to open and close it.
My new pond pump came without a plug; which even the Freddo Index cannot explain. And olive oil is so expensive now that I save vegetables in La Mer face cream – sure it’s £2,200 a jar, but it keeps my courgettes moist wonderfully.
I’m no economist but it seems to me that when the Office for National Statistics announces the basket of goods and services it uses to calculate inflation will no longer be vinyl records, rice cakes or even those packets of cheese and onion air no longer exists. which used to include crisps. I’m confident it will be empty rather than a car tire load.
Who on earth can afford to keep replacing their tires when our roads are so congested that Netflix seems to have commissioned an entire series titled Good Year Bad Year based on six ordinary families trying to find an out-of-town supermarket before their Bridgestones are shredded.
Nothing works, especially as the parts of the NHS that depend on it stay well for years. The social care sector is collapsing before our eyes and I still struggle to understand why I had a better mobile signal in a tropical rainforest in Uganda 10 years ago than I do now in Somerset.
How are we going to balance anything when you can’t guarantee Wi-Fi on a train? But our politicians are too busy talking about things that don’t matter in a cynical, calculated attempt to distract us from the things that do. Anyone interested in Angela Rayner’s council house sale? Seriously?
Mark Menzies, the Tory MP, has been suspended after he allegedly made a late-night call asking for party funds to pay “bad people” outright. There are no council houses. With apologies; I grew up in one and it was very nice, with a loo downstairs and everything, but all the same, this tedious, ignoble investigation is a red (haired) herring that shows badly on the Tories, who have more than enough of their own. to fry fish.
Not only are they using our patience, they are wasting the police’s time. Didn’t the Old Bill find bike theft to be ignored and hate crimes to follow?
I feel my GFD rage is rising because of the lack of humility, of accountability, in the way the Conservatives continue to win the election. What would they really do if they won?
Can you imagine the eerie silence that would fall on Number 10 if they did? It’s almost worth voting Tory to see who drops out or drops out first when Liz Truss drives her Estonian tank onto the rose garden lawn and the bloodbath resumes.
Meanwhile, north of the border, the SNP has gone official asking little children to become LGBT allies. Or maybe it’s a BLT? I haven’t lived there for a while but I believe the diet is still pretty terrible.
Especially the trans garbage that is being forced down everyone’s throat by a load of extremist activists. Sorry, did I say extreme? I meant the nuts and bolts to whom the nationalists sold their integrity on the promise of the youth vote at the next referendum.
The trouble is, by that time, those misguided ideals will have grown up, realized that they have the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe and were masked by the donation of pay to the misogynist myth that a biological man can be a woman and there will be no Edinburgh Christmas fireworks. to be a patch on the pyrotechnics. A hint of gender fire bone of the insanities.
I could go on. Fury Disorder is therefore generalized; the cost of a stamp, the fact that I can’t get my prescription medication from the pharmacy, that poor lad who put in 20 years of service and got the bag from Sainsbury’s as half an inch a few bags for life at the end of a night shift. The smell of vapes.
I’m afraid I’m broken. The only thing I can cure now is Japanese cuisine kintsugi, where liquid gold seams are used to repair damaged vessels. But I suspect it will take something rarer and more valuable to settle me. I need balm for my soul.
Sorry to ask, but does anyone out there have a dollop or two of handmade Montecito jam to spare?
