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There is a chainsaw-shaped hole in my id. I want a chainsaw. I need one. But I’m scared of them, and when the Brother Who Must Not Be Named tells me I am not allowed to use one because if I do I will chop off some vital part of myself or a member of my family, I do not argue too much.

On Saturday, in the baking heat, I spent the afternoon felling a couple of big trees at the top of the garden. Don’t worry, I’ve not become an environmental vandal. We’ve got thousands of bloody trees. These were nestless, ubiquitous and taking the light off a part of the far end of the house as well as preventing other, more attractive trees from growing. Down they came. Laboriously. Sweatily. Scratchily.

But do you know? I quite enjoyed it. Loppers, saws, pruners, ropes, ladder. It was a sort of Rubik’s cube of a puzzle to work out how to get the buggers down. I was outside, with the dog, in the sunshine, doing something honest and uncomplicated.

With a chainsaw, I would have had the trees down and trimmed up in seconds and then what would I have done (apart from bleed, obviously)?

Sometimes slow is good. Sometimes it’s good to be scared. I’m not scared of very much. But I am scared of the brutal roar of a chainsaw, its cold and unknowing teeth, the speed of the damage it can do. I think I may stay that way.

But then I look at Brother Hamster or Brother Bertie, swinging chainsaws round their unprotected ankles with abandon, and I am reminded that, as my partner often points out, I am not much of a man.  

What to do, then, with this chainsaw-shaped hole in me? Do I man up and make a real chainsaw-shaped hole in me?

Well, on mature reflection, what I do first is turn up the radio and look out of the window and think about it.

Same old same old

House prices are rising too fast in London. The economy may overheat. The ‘recovery’ may be threatened. What to do?

Why, put up interest rates so that millions of families have to hand over even more money every month to their banks and building societies, of course.

Of course the bank and building societies should have more money, that’s the way to make sure the recovery stays on track. Money in the hands of working people? That’s crazy. They may spend it on whippets and beer and bingo, the bastards. Better give it to the bankers so they can spend our money wisely, just like they did last time. That’s the way to make us recession-proof.

Yes, it was only last week that leading bankers, economists and rich people met to discuss how to bring the tiniest shred of decency and morality to their world model of unfettered free market capitalism, and yes, their hollow words are still an echo on the summer breeze…. and yes, those words meant nothing.

The Government has been angling for this, with the compliant aid of the Bank of England, for months now: the friends who paid for the Government’s election are growing anxious for the welfare of their portfolios. No other economic model can apply. No alternatives are available. We can live no other way. Up go the interest rates! Hooray go the millionaires! The economists and journalists can start writing the articles to be printed in three years, four months, two days and 17 hours’ time about why the next recession happened.

Will this stinking fucking world never never never never never never never never never learn?

Privacy news

According to the film star Charlize Theron, being Googled is like being raped. The soccer player Wayne Rooney said it was disgusting that he and his wife Colleen were photographed when in Portugal. We’ve seen the aloof, nose-aloft look that celebrities adopt. We’ve seen Kate Moss’s arrogant sense of entitlement as she puts on another frock. Or takes one off. We’ve seen footballers decide to censor the nation’s press through super-injunctions.

“When we become rich and famous we don’t forgo our rights as human beings”, they say.

Actually, yes. Yes you do. When your oh-so-slim talents bring you enough money to feed a million starving children, you pay a price. Frankly, I don’t give a flying donkey’s haemorrhoids about you, your dullard families or your sickening selfish lives of greed and excess, but if others do, then tough. If you don’t like it, hand it back. Hand it back. Stop doing it.

Corruption news

A massively expensive enquiry continues into alleged corruption in awarding the 2022 World Cup to Quatar. I wish they’d asked me. I could have told them it was stinking filthy corrupt without stirring from my window.

Play a tournament in a country with no sporting heritage, no soccer background, in unendurable heat, with no infrastructure, no native population of fans? Abuse workers to consume yet more of this poor world’s dwindling resources building cock-extension stadia in the desert with money that could help so many? That’s a sane decision, is it?

Soccer. There can be nothing else more perfectly suited to the world in which we live. Brainless, greedy and corrupt, a grasp as tight and a heart as shrivelled as the bankers with their hands cupped tight around the testicles of the cosmos.

The sublime Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations has just been on Radio 3, and I have had to stop to listen, shoulders shaking, eyes filling.

I am regularly told that such purity of beauty, such ecstasy of love and joy, would not move us so much if there were not the interest rate rises, the Charlize Therons, the overwhelming shittiness of modern life to provide balance, contrast, light and shade. Well, I’d be willing to take the risk.

Views news

Thanks for your comments on last week’s blog. Yes, I was a tad tetchy. Still am.