line between a standing ovation and everyone just wanting to be first out of the room.
• • •
At a luxury five-star golfing resort in Northern Ireland the G8 leaders discussed plans to tackle world poverty, in much the way as you’d try to solve the AIDS crisis in a brothel. Syria was high on the G8 agenda. As far as arming the rebels goes, I think it’s a good idea. As it must be some help militarily if our troops know exactly what’s being used against them in eighteen months’ time. We can arm the Syrian rebels just like we armed Afghanistan, with an agreement to pop back after twenty years to show them our new range of weaponry tastefully displayed in the roof of the local primary school.
The US claimed they would only arm moderate rebel groups, although it’s possible these groups are only behaving moderately because they don’t have weapons. How do you arm moderate rebels? With some strong coffee and the email address of the Guardian editor?
Frosty relations with Vladimir Putin and the Russians led to a slight alteration to the cutlery layout – at dinner it went fish knife, steak knife, Geiger counter. Putin wanted to show off his rippling physique in the lough next door. Surely time to deploy a rolled-up sock. I always do this when swimming – as you tend to get the pool to yourself if people think you’ve shat yourself. Cameron issued Putin with the ultimatum that unless he helps oust President Assad he will be forced to do nothing.
Cameron was called weak for not condemning Putin’s re-election. In fairness, Cameron criticising dodgy election results would be like Richard Hammond calling someone a bead-wearing prick. Labour has criticised Cameron for being ‘weak’, and that means something coming from a party led by a man with the strength of a stick of month-old celery. Putin wept during his victory speech, a combination of raw emotion and tear gas wafting over from where the police were battering his delighted electorate.
Putin’s had some work done around his eyes. I’m told he got all the laughter lines from repeatedly watching footage of the Chechen capital Grozny being indiscriminately bombed to rubble. I confess I’ve had the bags removed from under my eyes. Not for appearance; my pet mouse was just desperate for a leather armchair. This sort of thing does have its place. Friends of mine have a little boy and, without wishing to sound cruel, he had a massive nose. They got him plastic surgery and you barely even notice it now. You’re too busy staring at his double-D tits.
Cameron travelled round India on his ‘Sorry about that’ tour. Dave went to promote trade, and to order a new chequebook after running out of patience listening to Beethoven while on hold for ninety minutes. At the start of his trip Cameron was struck by the visible poverty. And told the driver to take a more scenic route to Heathrow next time. Dave laid a wreath at the site of a massacre of three hundred protestors by British troops in 1919. And as a further mark of respect he waited a full hour before embarking on his sales pitch for the UK arms industry. Nick was left running the country. Though by now even he knows it’s the equivalent of sticking a Fisher-Price steering wheel in the back seat in front of a toddler.
India is like an old couple that has won the lottery and Cameron just happened to ‘pop by’ with the head of HSBC to see if there’s any gardening he can help them with or if they need anything from the shops. While in India, David wore a bandana, went barefoot and made a chapatti. So, that should make up for years of colonial rule and the Amritsar massacre.
Cameron’s going to divert money from the foreign aid budget to defence, by cleverly rebranding missions as ‘conflict prevention’. Fair enough. After all, the more people that die in military activity, the less there are left to need aid. But the charities aren’t happy. There must be some kind of compromise. Surely it’s not beyond us to invent a gun that fires rice.
Then Cameron and Prince Harry appeared together in the US. They were promoting the UK, although they missed the chance to use the slogan, ‘Never a better time to visit . . . as right now we’re not there.’ They toured New York on a double-decker bus, allegedly the first time since last year’s trip to Vegas Harry had heard someone shout, ‘Room for one more on top!’ Presumably, the idea of sending over a prince and a millionaire Etonian to try to persuade US businesses to invest in the UK was to make them think they can slash labour costs as we’ve still got feudalism. The Prime Minister announced Britain has clinched a deal with a US drugs giant to become a global test site for medicines. A global test site for medicines? That sounds pretty sinister. We could unwittingly become a nation of compliant drones, medicated to be distracted by shiny irrelevance while our rulers do as they please. When did they start?
I read an article in the Guardian recently about universities being corrupted by accepting money from fossil-fuel com-panies. I agree, but what about the Guardian accepting advertising money from those companies, or the ones that make cars or sell flights? Or what about the fact that it’s printed on a tree?* Those things are so far off the agenda that you’d look crazy just for bringing them up. But that’s because the press set their own agenda and their inherent contradictions obviously aren’t on it. If I were to justify myself in the way the Guardian does – I’ll do adverts for all kinds of companies but make up for it by talking about how harmful their products are in my comedy show! – I’d be considered at best a hypocrite, and perhaps even some kind of a lunatic. It’s worth remembering that much as we say we like to see orthodoxies challenged, we usually mean other people’s orthodoxies.
I don’t fly anywhere, or drive, and the whole fixed-grin, let’s-pretend-it’s-not-happening approach to global warming has given my adult life the sinister air of mid-period Hitchcock. It’s a big reason I’ve never really felt I fit in with other comedians. It’s hard to buy into anyone’s carefully presented self-image when they take long-haul flights to international festivals every year. All these kooky shows about not being able to relate to your dad performed by people as indifferent to the fate of the Earth as a Dr Who villain.
It’s bizarre in an age in which we are increasingly connected that we willingly choke our planet by taking unnecessary journeys. Flights and trains are packed with business arseholes going to meet people they could Skype, who spend the whole journey calling, texting, emailing home. The ultimate aspiration is to be ‘jet set’, jumping on planes to be away from our families, with headphones on to be away from ourselves.
How much bleaker do things need to get for these guys? Extreme weather events are becoming more powerful and more frequent. Most experts believe these are due to man-made global warming, although the prevailing opinion in the US is that it’s God showing his anger at the lies spread by climate scientists. I’m sure we were all shocked by the Oklahoma tornado. Winds gusted up to 295 mph. To give that a bit of context it’s the same wind speed that sees 90 per cent of Scots reluctantly leave a beach.
Britain is to face wet summers for the next ten years. I don’t care as I’ve just invested heavily in umbrellas and sticks of rock that have baked in anti-depressants. When you cut through the stick of rock it says ‘Buy an umbrella you miserable cunt.’ It’s going to be wetter than Michael Gove’s bottom lip after a melon-eating contest. Actually, the government is forcing insurance companies to cover anyone at risk of flooding – which, if the Bible reports of Sodom are anything to go by, seems to be the entire cast of Coronation Street.
And Britain’s winters could soon be colder because of increased Arctic melting. If the Arctic thaws it could reopen the Northwest Passage, till now just the title of a particularly bleak Preston-based erotic film. A bit of snow in Britain is great. As long as you don’t want to go anywhere, come back from anywhere, leave the house or survive. The AA has warned people to take a special snow kit with them in their vehicles in winter – it comprises two bits of coal, a carrot and a scarf to make their car into a snowman.
I do my bit during the winter months, leaving