People are Abominable

I am in a particularly virulent mood. I cannot look on a human aspect without an absolute, boiling disgust quivering across my form. I barely know how to equate this with my political tendencies - it is a fairly conservative view, to declare that men are inherently wicked and do not deserve trust. More than this, that they must be governed with perspicacity, lest they gain sufficient freedom to bring their baleful nature to its black denouement.

Yet this is not how I view man. I have immense belief in man's potential, and do not think mankind wicked by nature. What I do think is that man has been led from the path of virtue by a wicked system, a system designed to breed competition and greed. I have always despised competition; games such as chess are invariably toxic to my mood - one either loses and feels inadequate, or wins and feels guilty. This is precisely why arrogance is such an abhorrent trait. To say that one is great at something is a relative statement, implying the inferiority of one's coevals. Any truly virtuous person would never brandish such a statement to begin with. It is only the wicked who see competition as so important, and see the diminution of another's confidence as perfectly acceptable. This is also why the value of British understatement is, well, understated. There is something caring in the way one might wish to inflate another's confidence, whilst also feigning utter uninterest in one's own deficiencies.

All sports to me are disgusting. The idea of a team churns my stomach like some industrial vat. What I do enjoy are video games, particularly when there is no winner and no loser. To win or to lose is such a bizarre, yet brutal, notion. Absolutes are best avoided.

One idea I have always found odd is that of nationalism. The idea is that one must be proud of one's nation, for what reason we do not know, but pride we must nurture. First, I detest unjustified emotion - it is the most hollow parody of care imaginable. Secondly, as I mentioned earlier, praise is relative, and to bruit one's own abilities is to soil another's. There is to me something supercilious in this absolute desire to be the best, to win, to defeat others. This is a sadistic notion. In nationalism we see the sublimation of the malice in competition.

Furthermore, nationalism has no rational basis, as far as my senses can perceive. Comedy often reveals hidden inconsistencies in the absurdity of its comparisons - George Carlin said of nationalism that:

I could never understand ethnic or national pride. Because to me, pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn’t a skill, it’s a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn’t say “I’m proud to be 5’11”. I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer.” So why the fuck would you be proud to be Irish, or proud to be Italian, or American or anything?

I think this is the key. National pride reduces the individual to a triviality. It is the abnegation of the responsibility we all bear - to be kind to others, and to be virtuous. 'Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own.' Why am I to be proud of the sixty million others who happen to fall into some arbitrary, geographical boundaries? Pride should be something that is earned by the display of immense virtue, not by geographical proximity. This reduces achievement itself. There is something grudging and spiteful in nationalism. Think of the Olympics. 'This person won a gold medal!' 'They're not British. Not interested.' This kind of petty, spiteful idiocy is so entrenched that its deracination is probably impossible. More than this, to contradict its progression is considered tremendously infra dig.

That most sanguine of philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote of nationalism that:

The cheapest form of pride however is national pride. For it betrays in the one thus afflicted the lack of individual qualities of which he could be proud, while he would not otherwise reach for what he shares with so many millions. He who possesses significant personal merits will rather recognise the defects of his own nation, as he has them constantly before his eyes, most clearly. But that poor beggar who has nothing in the world of which he can be proud, latches onto the last means of being proud, the nation to which he belongs. Thus he recovers and is now in gratitude ready to defend with hands and feet all errors and follies which are its own.

I think there is truth in this too. Then nationalism is a solace for those who do not wish to perfect the soul, who do not wish to improve humanity. It is a lazy path to contentment, vicariously sapping others' abilities. It is parasitical. The irony in nationalism is that it is the abjuration of responsibilities which would be a legitimate source for pride, which really would improve people's lives. To say one is proud that this country produced The Beatles is not as beneficial as to say one wishes to achieve something similar. In fact, to claim the achievements of The Beatles as one's own does precisely the converse - it eliminates the need to achieve this for oneself. I scarcely need to add that I find this negation in nationalism quite deleterious.

That was a fairly lengthy excursion into a fairly unrelated topic. I had not even considered nationalism as I sat down to write this, my mind being absorbed in more quotidian nonsense. However, what I intended to lament was perhaps more important, perhaps more lodged in the gullet of modern civilisation. It is that all can be reduced to greed. Invoke any single action anyone has ever taken, and now consider what personal motives they had. As an example, I am writing this blog with the vague hope it might improve my idiosyncratic writing style. Additionally, this is probably CV-fodder for the future. If this happened to be a blog with more than 2 readers per calendar month, I might also be accused of having commercial ambitions.

Perhaps some self-service is not wicked, but this is not the point I wish to make. The point I wish to make is that it is perfectly easy to look on the world and see only grim rapacity. This sphere becomes a stage for Plutus and his multifarious guises. All becomes hostile, and nobody cares for another. I do try to resist this conviction's reification in my mind, but I fear it to be true. Even love is a biological impulse, with self-service convolving round its entire being. Then, if this is true, what is the world but a desolate landscape of hostility? People care for others insofar as it might cause benefits to redound on themselves. You may notice this has engendered a kind of systemic paranoia in my mind. I cannot look without shivering despair on a world in which all emotion is expedient. Broadly speaking, all interaction you experience with others, dear reader, will fall under one of two gross categories. First, there are those who interact with you out of friendship or familial relation. These people gain some degree of satisfaction from the traits you offer. Second, there are those who are paid to care about you. This is altogether more invidious. Yet both are self-serving.

I do not know what I mean to conclude from all this. Self-serving must be tolerated if one is to remain sane in society. Yet when one marks its presence, it becomes impossible to regard the world as anything other than alien, atomic and strewn with malevolent robots who respect one only when one nourishes them.

'This is all very righteous, are you suggesting you are not greedy and self-serving?' I hear you snarl. Of course I do not suggest that I am free from mankind's horrific bonds, and this is what makes such truths doubly degrading. I, supposedly free, observe iniquity in my contemporaries and shudder as I realise those same iniquities are buried in my core too. Then I consider the immense reconfiguration everything would have to undergo to rectify this, and I am seized by dejection.

Some wanker is hammering on something upstairs, and I really do wish they would fuck in an offward direction. I will remember to exact my revenge in blog post form. Anyway, congratulations if you made it this far, I scarcely did.

They Can Take My Sunrise, but They'll Never Take My Insanity

I think there is something quite steadying about the sunrise. There is a brief, primeval moment every morning when all things are silent and the world itself seems to be an aching parody of its own construction. For a moment, all else is subjugated under its umber majesty. All wickedness and greed is illuminated for the day. There is something deeply important in all this, but it is difficult to entirely apprehend. I think perhaps it is that this sunrise could be anybody's - Homer's, Virgil's, Shakespeare's; there is, in something so decidedly non-human, a humanism and connection with all mankind. It is the only time I am truly hopeful. Something both so fleeting and universal seems too profound to ignore. There is the brief misapprehension in the beholder of this mute spectacle that everything is possible and all is life. All nature is sublimated in some benign warmth, as if everything has been designed to be looked upon only in the morning.

Besides all this, the sunrise itself is rather beautiful. Clouds huddle around the horizon, billowing like torrents of whipped cream. A flamelike glow begins to imbue the air itself with divinity, and presages the arrival of the protagonist in this ignored play. The clouds commingle with the flames, that they might subdue their grandeur, and a colossal elemental fugue holds sway over all things for mere minutes. Groundlings are irradiated with grace as the two abstracts coil round one another in monstrous counterpoint. Neither faction wins, but why should one? This is, after all, a grossly human concept. There is something beautiful in the indifference of nature - man's indifference, on the other hand, is not indifference at all, rather a languid mask on hostility or emotional ignorance.

Then, like an ethereal monarch addressing a mumbling crowd, the sun rears up and all is serene. Some unearthly ataraxy extinguishes all rebellion. A brief few minutes follow, where the sun makes its address, and all things make sense. The world, the obdurate world filled with so much misery, is heaved together in one reluctant lurch, and sits in harmony for a while, until its dull components find an excuse to slip out of the nearest exit and go back to their toil. The sun is pulled from its bed, as with an impossible vacuum, and time resumes.

I enjoy all of this. Presently, however, I feel like I might weep. There is some dreadful machinery gnashing away at galvanised steel, screaming imprecations with its industrial larynx. I find nothing beautiful here, but more than this there is some kind of idiotic, human ignorance towards this grand spectacle unravelling behind it - it is the indifference I mentioned earlier. Worse still than this, the human indifference in the pursuit of money - building grotesque crypts for monetary gain - has blocked my view of the sunrise. All near me is grey, reconstituted sludge: Lovecraftian horrors frozen into place by chemicals. This was almost intolerable, but I still had the sunrise to look on. I had a view, above a car park, of fields rolling into the distance, sealed at the edges with grand hills. There was some vicarious freedom in this. I used to be able to observe the sunrise, imbibe its stillness, forget the quotidian, demotic nonsense man buries himself in. It was only for a short moment, but it was enough. Now it is as if the economic system itself is resolved to destroy me. I'm locked in a grey quadrangle, and I feel like screaming with the machinery which made it happen.

The only time I might observe the sun is at midday, when it has reached a far more punitive stature, searing its victims with infernal beams. The day has begun, people are moving around, and I am not interested in this state at all.

There is something wholly transcendent about the sunrise, which I now must cease to observe. People might laugh at ancient civilisations who worshipped the sun as some incredible demiurge which brought prosperity, but I think this is preferable by far to what we have today. Besides, if we actually looked on the sunrise, we might come to a similar conclusion. But no - we are far too busy for such trivialities! Money must be made! This is the most delirious notion man has yet created, an endless hurricane of prosperity which will make us happy, won't it? We may mock belief, but all we believe in today is money. The desk is the prayer mat and the central bank is the pulpit. We're baptised in an illusion of wealth, that we might gain a taste for it. Then crowd the earth with dull buildings, nothing else is important. For me the occlusion of the sunrise has been the occlusion of the soul.

On Meritocracy

Meritocracy has assumed an almost axiomatic stature in liberal democracy. The idea goes that those who are the most competent, wise and intelligent should have the most power. This sounds fairly unobjectionable, as these are the people who are best placed to improve society, and they should make more reasoned decisions than their gibbering coevals. Furthermore, advocates would say that the people who benefit society the most should receive the most remuneration. This also seems fair.

However, despite all this, and it may be due to my two-day abstention from sleep, I sense something quite repulsive in this doctrine. Those who uphold the virtues of a meritocratic system, and this seems to be most people in the 'public sphere', often brandish meritocracy as a weapon against birthrights - republicans tell us the royals are a load of useless fools, many others campaign against hereditary peerships and such. All of this is on the basis that your place in life should not be informed by mere accident of birth. You may already see the irony here - meritocracy values qualities which only occur through accidents of birth. In other words, the whole concept of meritocracy whiffs of the desire to realign birthrights that they might benefit those who so piously declare meritocracy's sanctity - namely, intellectuals. I have always housed, in the recesses of my mind, the unwelcome thought that politics might merely be a stage for greed - each side calling for a realignment of wealth in their favour. I have the same worry about meritocracy.

I do not suppose I would have embarked upon this blog post had I not had a practical interaction with this theory just now. The story is not a story at all, and so I will summarise: I have found I cannot look on cleaners without execrable pangs of empathy coiling round the throat. The idea that somebody can be consigned to a life of drudgery - most toil is drudgery, but relative drudgery even - on the basis that their genes were organised in a way so as to preclude more respectable work (or, more likely, that they have been deprived of all opportunity, but let us leave this for the moment) stirs in me a grand sense of injustice. I feel a ridiculous need to apologise, or to vow avengement, or to help them clean, yet none of these options uproots the system. I don't think my response is necessarily a common one, however. How often might one observe the rubbishing of someone who works at McDonald's or Burger King? A great deal of people seem to maintain a wicked, spiteful superiority on the whole matter. 'I was born more intelligent, more beautiful, more virtuous than you!' they seem to warble. How abominable. If the same person were to boast their vast inheritance, they would certainly be met with great odium. Accidents of birth are quite fine to broach if they are personal characteristics, and I think this is explained in part by the fact that intelligence can always be dismissed as hard work. Deeming a person lazy is far more acceptable than to deem them dimwitted. This, in turn, is acceptable because work is so deified and lionised in this perverse world of ours.

I'm not at all sure where I am going with this. I'm placing my thoughts upon the dais of bland, syntactic sterility, that I might engender some tranquility in this fucking mind of mine. The conscience is a terrible, but of course necessary, thing. The agony of the critic is that things are rarely amenable to change. To be against capitalism in this world is almost to be against humanity itself; it is so stained into everything around us that to question it requires a Herculean lurch in the mind. I feel bound by a punitive indolence at all times, and the horrors which flit before my eyes with such desolating energy remind me only of my powerlessness.

The fact of the world is that there are people who clean bins for forty hours per week, and simultaneously there are people who have so much money that they could drop £50 with every step and never notice. Under meritocracy, this is all quite fine. I recognise that incentives must be maintained, and we do need the boons the elite shower on the rabble, but I cannot support a system where such ferocious inequality is not only countenanced but actively encouraged. It is a function of the system, not a terrible aberration in its development. People accept things as 'the way the world works', but why? This is a gross abnegation of responsibility. It might be the way the world works, but that doesn't mean it should be. We look on the animal kingdom with horror at its indifference to life, but capitalism achieves much the same thing, if in a far more insidious way. We like to think of ourselves as quite separate from the barbarism of beasts, and you might call someone an animal if they were grotesque in their behaviour, but markets perfectly emulate the savagery of the animal kingdom (indeed, Keynes talked about 'animal spirits' as key in economic behaviour).

That's all. I think I've got that out of my system. What I cannot get out of my system is the guilt and empathy at others' woes and the simultaneous plaint over my own.

On Procrastination

It is 8pm as I begin this post. I woke at around 4pm, just as my day's lectures were coming to a close (though I expect I would have awoken at this time even if I had attended). Since this time, I have lain supine, preserved in state like Kim il-Sung, decomposing with irritating slowness. Hours drift past, spent in a pleasing state of absolute inactivity, a great emulation of some Hellenic accidie, and I finally resolve to winch myself out of my pit.

This series of events - or rather, this series of no events - would be interpreted today as 'procrastination'. I have, by dint of my dazzling indolence, completed approximately 0% of the tasks assigned to me so far this year at university. Indeed, by rights I should make a start on catching up with my homework from primary school. A foul essay looms on the horizon of my mental calendar, and I have done impressively little to prepare myself. So impressively little that it might understandably be termed, 'shit all'. I am a matador, awaiting my adversary with staid resolution. It will come to me, and I will defeat it in a stretch of time which, if offered to me at first, I would publicly ridicule. Yet I refuse as much as possible to ascribe the toxic label of 'procrastination' to all this. I have instinctively disliked the word for a great stretch of time, but was never quite sure why. Then, at 6am this morning, before sleeping, I had a shuddering pang of an epiphany.

Type 'procrastination' in the search bar on Twitter and there will be thousands of recent mentions awaiting your perusal. This, to me, is quite saddening. As you scroll down, through the ocean of worthless text punctured by the emboldened studs of 'procrastination', a similar sense of despair might descend on you. It is not that people are lazy or leisurely - indeed, these attributes propound great nobility in their mute defiance - it is far worse.

It is this: today there is a sense of shame, a transgression attached to leisure. This is what is so iniquitous. The guilt evinced in this litany of self-loathing is there for all to see. This is all to say: enjoyment has become a sin. It is ignoble, debauched, hedonistic, and not socially beneficial in the way that toil is. Bertrand Russell discusses this in his incredible In Praise of Idleness, writing that:

Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. 

This is bad enough, but there is another, more sinister layer to be grafted onto this cake of turd: due to the odd but popular thought that work is Good and leisure is Bad, we have come to see leisure not as leisure, but as time which could be spent producing, or at least preparing to produce. In other words, the supposed moieties of work and leisure are both seen only in terms of work. We are so balefully conditioned that leisure cannot be enjoyed in its own right, rather it meekly hangs in the colossal shadow of toil. There is a secret anxiety that we are not working. This is the wishful sadism in 'procrastination', and its only beneficiary is the capitalist system. We are Rousseau's men who 'ran headlong to their chains', we are Goethe's men who 'have to work for the greater part of their lives in order to live, and the little freedom they have left frightens them to such an extent that they will stop at nothing to rid themselves of it'. We have been transformed into such feeble invertebrates that we weep at the superficial charity of our manacles. We are Winston Smith, who 'had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.' I have seen so many people talk of how they are procrastinating by watching television, or playing a video game - this is leisure! The entire scenario sickens me profoundly. The vicissitudinous anxiety, the sense of eternal persecution in this mode of thought is an ungovernable fetter on the human spirit, and must be shed if humankind is to rise to the summit its faculties demand.

So I sit in my room, voluntary zoo animal (without the free food), and I do not work. And I say, 'fuck you,' and the beast grinds on.

I Cannot Write

Writing has become more than writing to me - it has become some kind of medicine, sometimes a temporary catholicon, always an anodyne. This blog itself is testament to its continued efficacy, for I am certainly not writing in order to be read, keen though I am to impress the legions of Russian spam bots who take great care to imbibe my writing in the most sedulous fashion imaginable.

I was flicking through some essays by Sartre and naturally was interested by On Being a Writer, in which he makes the grand asseveration that writers write to create a world into which they fit; they write to alter the wicked reality. This, he claims, is what separates great writing from mere writing, and I am inclined to agree. I must quote it verbatim, because what he says is quite beautiful:

There is no storytelling gift: there is the need to virtually destroy the world because it seems impossible to live in it. There is no gift for words: there is the love for words, which is a need, an emptiness, a suffering, an uneasy attention one pays to them because they seem to hold the secret of life. Style is a cancer of language, a wound cultivated like the wounds of Spanish beggars.

This is all very negative - Sartre describes the need to write as some sort of void, a deficiency; not a gift, but almost the opposite - a virus, a corrosion. It is not even precisely what I suggested above - that writers must create a world more peaceable and conducive to their existence - it is that the real world must be destroyed. What can I say? I'm a sucker for sensible suggestions.

In states such as that in which I am suffocated at present, I cannot write anything of use at all, and become trapped in some grim panopticon of my own passive design. There is no escape from the savage reality of all things - the semblance of minutest sway in the world is swept up and replaced with a monolithic impotence. This, I can report, is not a pleasurable sensation, and yet it dogs my every movement. Even if I am writing, I am simultaneously lamenting the piece's stains of utter ineptitude. This is to say, that I am not destroying the world more comprehensively is itself a cause for lament. Yet even this is better than settling for the banality of an untempered world. All of this is not to say that I would declare myself a writer, for this would group me with the huge number of other deluded dabblers who believe their witterings make Shakespeare look like Christmas card platitudes. It is undeniable I have written, but so has everyone. What I do say is that I can sympathise with the need to destroy the world, to stash fleeting ideas away like stool samples, to collect words like stamps. The idea that I might not know the definition of a word is a real horror to me - it is as if my freedom of speech has been curtailed in some way. This is how the proletariat was silenced in 1984 - the dictionary was literally shortened. The idea is that that if you can't find the word to express a thought, you cannot support the thought for long, and certainly cannot share it. This is the ultimate in tyranny.

Moving on, part of the irony of art is that something so ostensibly productive can be so bluntly destructive. The solipsism and introspection incumbent on the artist requires an apathy to the world outside of the artistic conceit, which insouciance can only be interpreted as destructive. One necessarily destroys the parts of the world one does not assay. This kind of dedication reminds me of the interesting argument Slavoj Žižek briefly sets out to show the destructive nature of love:

Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not, “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it’s, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say, “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

But back to writing. Of course anyone can sit and smash a keyboard for a bit, indeed I am doing it quite well at this very moment. This, to me, is not really the same as writing, however. There is no cathartic restitution, no real incentive but the avoidance of boredom, and the threat of boredom can justify even the most menial of activities. There is nothing greatly satisfying in depressing buttons (and indeed readers), though there is at least an occupative distraction, and a fleeting stupefaction at the consistency with which my fingers magically produce digital text. I will never understand technology, and this only adds to my sense of wonder at its operation. I do not subscribe to the Enlightenment, Dawkins-esque belief that everything must be fully understood in order to be enjoyed. My sentiments lie far more comfortably with the Romantic belief that not knowing, merely acknowledging the mute vastness of all things extrinsic, is far more salubrious to the human soul. If science did eventually explain all things, I cannot help but think that the human soul would experience, in that precise moment, its fatal blow. One gains far more enjoyment from not knowing how Derren Brown completes his tricks than we might if he were to reveal it all and we briefly admitted, 'Ah - that's clever,' and made our way about our lives. I do not reject the practical uses of science, but to say that all should be reduced to science, by all people, instinctively disgusts me in a way I cannot quite explain.

This all sounds absolutely histrionic and, frankly, bourgeois and megalomaniacal. I therefore thought it would make an excellent blog post. There's not a particular point to this odd heap of syntax, but why should there be? Is there a point in painting the walls in one's house? Is there a point in looking for points? Just a point.

A Panorama

The university in whose scholastic catacombs I am presently immured is remarkable only in its complete lack of remarkability.

Grey edifices, formed entirely of reconstituted Weetabix, stand in obese defiance where they please, blotting out the sky with their asbestos-ridden, carcinogenic vastness. Strange balconies stud their haunches like arrows, transforming the masses into insipid pagodas.

Below the concrete imperium, a small, artificial lake bubbles with the rasp of a faulty iron lung. A slightly manic woman stands nearby, eyeing the scene with impossible interest. Her bag is prised open open with a discomforting adroitness, signalling to all around that, were she so inclined, she could perform a similar strike upon a human head, opening it like a squashy clipboard. Out of this bag is conjured a limitless torrent of bread particles, which perforate the water like tiny howitzer blasts. Ducks then swarm, eager to unseat the explosive material before civilians are harmed. An immense clamour ensues as farinaceous artillery is scooped out of the battlefield and, quite valiantly, into the rapacious gullets of the bomb disposal unit, where it might be subjected to weapons testing and, ultimately, turdification. Within seconds the hubbub has dispersed and, much like Poe's Conqueror Worm, an enormous priapic fish vomits itself out of the water and, finding its launch unsuccessful, falls back to the earth, conflagrated in its own fishy juices as it reenters the atmosphere.

Ducks circle the perimeter of the water, in a fashion I imagine to be synecdochical of the border control of the nation as a whole. Acidic sunbeams tangle themselves in the threshold of reeds, fizzling as they sear the water, resolving in fugues of nacreous tendrils. 

Some quiet bird wobbles along. What the hell is that thing, a quail? It looks like an animated vegetable. But surely quails only exist in egg form, this is common knowledge. Perhaps this was a quail's egg which has been left out too long, in gross disregard of supermarket labelling. 

A man walks past the scene, entirely oblivious to its mania, buried in his cup of shit coffee. This man has never seen anything so fascinating as heated, mulchified coffee beans - he has found the meaning. This is it. This is his calling.

Above all this, a grotesque chimney broods over the entire landscape, a foul parody of the chimney of Willy Wonka's factory, grooming prospective students with promises of Scrumdiddlyumptious bars but, two years later, presenting only fudge-coated coprolites, exhumed from the nearby burial ground in the name of nutrition.

But now I am seized from my reverie, when I realise the small woman who stood so innocently mere minutes ago to my left has now vanished from all sight. The ducks hiss furiously, and I understand immediately that this woman has been returned to nature, stripped to the bone by the chimaerical creatures of the lake.

The ducks turn to me, mandibles snapping, expecting food. This fact, augmenting that of my lack of food, induced a fight or flight response in my brain. I had no chance of gentlemanly combat with these brutes, not least because half of them were juggling flick knives between their exquisite pennons (ducks can boast, I have found, an incredible plumage which they hide as best they can, and a remarkable stripe of aubergine paste beneath their wings). Therefore I ran, dear reader. Heroism is terribly overrated. 

Expensive as Chips

I have just finished the task of eating chips. This is a fact, and any attempt to prevaricate on the matter will I'm sure result in greater ramifications in the future. I should clarify to you the nature of these chips, however. These are chips of the potato, not the poker, variety, and they are certainly not of the computing variety. To eat computer chips would be dangerous, unsatisfying and counterproductive to man's technological development.

This fascinating twist in events began with the recognition that, having quite literally no food in my possession of any sort (I did consider gobbling down a batch of vitamin C pills, I must confess), I decided something must be done to placate the faint corrosion in my core. Impelled by the monopolistic market conditions obtaining in my immediate vicinity in the early hours of the morning, I decided to bite the bullet - though at the time I did not realise this metaphor would soon attain not only a figurative but a literal validity - and make my spindly way to the resident tub of grease.

The horror of which I speak is a kind of locomotive purveyor of any foodstuff - any foodstuff that is liable to cause premature heart failure, I should add. It sits, static and brooding, much like the trapdoor spider from which it takes its inspiration, cloaked in innocuous sheets of metal whilst secretly harbouring its invidious fare, which it hurls on passing drunkards in the pursuit of its capitalist ambitions.

OK - this is all unimportant, one might assume, because the food at such places is inexpensive. I thought so too, until I was forced, by my unhelpful inability to refrain from purchasing things once in a spider's nest, to spend two of my finest, British, fair and just pounds sterling on what can only be described as a Pandora's box of plant derivation. I was quizzed of an evening by a stern man as to whether I would prefer my chips to be salted and vinegared. I acceded to his kind offer - though little did I know it was an involuted masking procedure, designed to screen from my disgust the horrors of the shambles (to quote the immortal Shelley). Having sprayed this arachnidian admixture upon the polystyrene casket in which my culinary hopes were inhumed, he passed the time bomb to me and pocketed my two pound coin, the outer ring of which adopted, in that exchange, a halolike and transcendent quality. Much like a blacksmith pacifying the beauty of a throbbing brand, he submerged the weeping coin into the innermost recesses of his infernal attire, and an audible hiss of anguish erupted from the depths.

I shall now essay to assay the quality of these chips. Drowned in this sickly emiction, which to me was entirely redolent of Marmite and suppurating cheddar, sat an extremely dejected bunch of hollowed-out witchetty grubs (one of these, I found to my horror, was not properly emptied), looks of futility seared into their squashy aspects, as if to convey some immense disappointment at the fact that their lives amounted to this - the production of low-grade potato substitute. The taste was comparable, again, to that of Marmite and suppurating cheddar, and the texture brought a yielding decomposition to the party. I felt as if the demoniac figure from behind the counter had conferred on me the gift of cannibalism, and here I was snatching up little humans from a regrettably-hued allotment and grinding them between my terrific maws. I took great joy in shearing the starchy, foul integuments from their hosts and sanctioning the resident souls to the various rings of hell. 'Gluttony for you, my child! I hope you enjoy eternal privation!' I cry, cackling wildly and spilling the untried upon the floor of my burning chamber. 'I will deal with you later!' I gobble, convulsing in sheer joy. I am Minos, I have unquestionable power, I am sovereign in this realm.

Look, I have no problem with paying two pounds for some decent food. I have done so in the past, and I daresay I will venture to do so again. But two pounds for this necropolitan oddity? Two pounds? Two pounds?! I pay less than that at a proper shop, with legitimate costs to factor in. In stark contrast, what I was dealing with now was effectively a frying pan on wheels. Where are the overheads? Are furry rear-view mirror dice tax deductible? Was this the most inefficient business the world had ever seen? I wondered whether perhaps, in the bowels of one of the fryers, a highly-skilled cadre of ferrets, on generous salaries with free private health care, curated a collection of fast food memorabilia. Rudimentary spatulas, rusted pans and soiled aprons would lie preserved in state, depending from above in solid gold cages, like royal prisoners.

Lastly, I have spoken of the quality of these foul digits but I have left the subject of quantity unforgivably neglected. I can only say of the portion handed to me that it was the atom of the food world, the smallest possible division of anything such that it can remain edible to the human race. Luckily for me, I happen to have a laboratory-grade photon microscope in my room, and was able to locate my meal in under four hours, placing it neatly over two grateful taste buds.

I now sit here, all sullen and impecunious, gazing on the polystyrene, erstwhile host of those blasted things, and I am being fondled by the strange urge to lift the vessel to my face and devour it utterly. The scent is far more agreeable than that of the charge contained within, resembling only faintly that of rotting entrails. Let this be a great lesson - packaging is the future mode of sustenance! And it really is cheap as chips, unlike chips.