Working life, what a drag eh? Cheer up. You can always rely on the fact that there’s someone worse off than you. If the Monday blues have hit you, remember that someone somewhere today will be earning their lucre whilst elbow deep in shit. Just think about that. You’ll be feeling ashamed of your self-indulgent musings in no time at all.
I am talking about vocational nightmares because today I met someone who worked on The Chris Moyles Radio 1 show. Naturally my instinct was to just grab her and hold her close and tell her everything will be ok, promising she’ll find relief just as soon as her cursed and wretched life is over.
For me this seemed a naturally instinctive response, because if I am unfortunate enough to hear the Chris Moyles show then within five minutes, I find myself struck by an overwhelming desire to take a cheese grater to my own genitalia just from the shamefulness of my own maleness. If such level of despair is possible in five minutes, then being subjected to that throughout your DAY-TO-DAY LIFE must be an existence so mentally torturous, it would make being a victim of Guantanamo Bay seem a reasonable leisure pursuit. But the strange thing was that the woman wasn’t depressed or anything. I’d even go as far as to say that she was even sort of happy, despite having been dealt such adversity by the cruel hand of fate. What a brave soul. Just goes to show the resilient strength of the human spirit.
I used to think I had the perfect solution to the alcohol industry. With my idea I could simultaneously reduce alcoholism and binge drinking, whilst saving the fledging pub trade. Quite simply, I’d lower the wholesale prices on beer in pubs and raise the retail prices for the supermarket and off-license traders. Better still, give the off-license trade exclusively to the pubs, to sell at pub prices. That way, more people will be able to afford to go out and drink in a more sociable setting, which at least has a degree of supervision. There’ll be less people developing alcohol problems whilst drinking uncontrollably alone at home, alcohol would be less available to minors and the pub industry would be thriving again. It seemed so simple. But then, with one off-hand remark, the broadcaster John Humphrys bought my whole theory tumbling to its knees. It was his simple observation that the programme of Chris Moyles, his more popular airtime rival, sounded a bit like a bunch of friends engaged in the kind of frivolous banter you hear in pubs.
So that’s what our pubs – the places we willingly go to and spend our leisure time money in – actually sound like? Well in that case, fuck the pub trade. Let the nation drown alone at home under a sea cheap spirits and despairing tears. Civilisation is clearly over. In fact let’s just fuck humanity. Fuck it quicker than Russell Brand would fuck a grand-daughter. Because apparently 6.79 million people listen actually listen to Moyles of their own free will. The human’s soul deserves no sympathy. It isn’t resilient at all. Turns out it’s just covered in the same shit that those hypothetical elbows were up to earlier.
Still – as our death knoll rings out over our culturally condemned lives, let us always remember one thing.
At least he wasn’t as bad as George Lamb.
