Plain ordinary.

Did you think I’d died? Or maybe had my hands obliterated in some bizarre cushion-arranging mishap? Well neither of those things have happened and nor have I been sneakily storing up writing, like a squirrel on amphetamines. I’ve just been very lazy and also quite busy with other things. Actually, scrap the busy bit, I’ve just been lazy and to be honest every little acorn of an idea has vanished into the ether before it’s had a chance to bloom into something worthwhile. I suppose it’s as close as I’ll ever be to being in the brain of Vanessa Feltz, who I have decided is now my unwitting arch nemesis, thanks to the damage she continues to inflict on my ears. Anyway here’s a load of bilious crap to be getting on with.

God bless Theresa May, our new overlord and protector. And blessed be us, the great ordinaries of this most wonderful of ordinary nations. Whether it was intended or not Mrs May pulled out a bit of a clunker this week by referring to pretty much nearly all of the earning population as ‘ordinary working class people’. I am indisputably a middle class twat but as I also work for a living, and don’t earn a sheikh’s ransom doing it, I feel obliged to put myself in that category too. They say that money makes money and I can hereby assure you that whatever my money is doing the one thing it is most emphatically not doing is making more money. So here I am trying to squeeze out a bit of writing during a phase that can only be described as productively arid and all the while having to live with the knowledge that I am little more than mundane; just one amongst millions of Tesco Value Peas being governed by a questionably dressed, hatchet-faced, prize winning marrow.

Having said that it’s really rather fun to look at the lives of the extraordinary (never was the letter ‘a’ so redundant) and think that maybe you could have done a little worse after all. Take Kim Kardashian for instance. But maybe not by surprise. For a start she possesses the hugest arse on the planet, but we’ll discuss her husband in just a moment (I’m here all week). Now I know the party line is to say that we wouldn’t wish an armed robbery on anyone (or anyone’s kids, of course, never forget the bloody kids, so innocent, so fragile, so weak, until they tell you to ‘fuck off Grandad’ and stick a knife in your liver) but it seems irresponsible not to point out that she virtually wished one on herself. Who needs to travel around with millions of pounds worth of jewellery? Who is so involved with themselves that they need to be showered in bling and crass and vulgar from the moment they unglue their eyelids? Who needs to tell all 90 squillion of their followers where they’ll be staying, what they’ll be doing and which absorbency level of tampon they generally prefer? In fact the bit that made me feel most nauseous was chubby chuckler and humour-bereft, jammy git, James Corden, tweeting a supportive message that wriggled so far up poor Kim’s pinched sphincter it could have counted the gold plated baked beans she had for breakfast. Not that she could have eaten breakfast, what with the shock and all. Look it up, once you’ve procured a suitably voluminous bucket. Oh, I forgot I said I’d come back to Kanye but there’s little to be said really. He genuinely is the planet’s biggest twat.

Tyson Fury. I have been told several times this week that ‘concerns are growing’ over Tyson Fury’s mental condition. I must declare that I’m so unconcerned about him I’m beginning to think I might have Asperger’s. Here’s all you need to know about Tyson Fury: he’s a heavyweight boxer. Even Columbo wouldn’t need an hour and a half of repeat visits to work out that being vigorously hit round the head by a minotaur is likely to lead to some serious cranial issues later (or sooner) in life. The guy earns a fortune. The guy takes cocaine to tackle his depression. Which is like chopping your foot off to tackle an in-growing toenail.

Pauline Cafferkey! Speaking strictly for myself I am thoroughly exhausted of hearing the story of Pauline Cafferkey. What a trooper! First she does one good thing to make herself feel better about herself. In doing that good thing she contracts one of the most fearsome viruses known to humankind, because the thing she consciously chooses to do is to stroke the foreheads and mop up the leaking anuses of people who have contracted one of the most fearsome virus known to humankind. Through someone’s fault (possibly her own, it’s a bit hazy despite the recent committee review) she returns to Britain, a country which takes pride in not having a fucking Ebola epidemic, and proceeds to spend her time yo-yoing in and out of hospital and soaking up vast amounts of money being treated and monitored and treated and monitored and treated and monitored. If she is still a threat to the general health of this nation then can we not just sponsor her generously to return to Sierra Leone and live out her days there? Or even more productive – just lock her in a big glass cage and see how that underhand little virus really works, so that the next fucking idiot with a temperature who boards a plane in Africa doesn’t spread this shit EVERYWHERE and send our fine bone species into the history books.

There, that’s three and a bit people who can legitimately claim to have lives with just a little extra ordinary in them and would I swap mine for theirs? No way, I’ll just be boring, moaning old me forever and ever, and that’s just something ‘the wife’ is going to have to get used to.

G B Hewitt. 10.10.2016