Gas, and other problems.

It feels, to me, like we’re getting mixed messages about the environment. It feels like there are too many words coming out of too many holes. And if it isn’t words it’s actions, and most of those actions don’t seem to be adding up to an awful lot. Other times there are nothing but words – just words and then a fat full stop. No reaction; no action. Or certainly not an awful lot of good. Things feel edgy. Rattled. Unbalanced. Tipsy. But not tipsy in a good way, rather that sort of tipsy when you think it might be a good idea to get the deep fat fryer on the go, or go for a quick drive and hope for the best, or try to say something funny about sex positions to your mother in law. There’s a lot going on but it doesn’t feel too clever. I’m even beginning to forget what clever looked like in the first place.

At least Boris has put his foot down. He’s been over in America, kissing arses as well as being one, and he has made it quite clear that the next climate summit bound to achieve next to nothing in 40 days’ time will be, must be, a “turning point for humanity”. He’s probably right as it will very likely signpost humanity finally turning to unstoppable, and then terminal, shit. If politicians were that desperate to sort out the planet they wouldn’t be waiting for the next time they all have a window in their diary but instead they’d just be fucking getting on with it. Sadly politics doesn’t work like that, if it does in any fashion, and when Boris almost threateningly says that humanity has to “grow up” it’s all a bit too hard to swallow, more so given that it’s coming from a man who wouldn’t look out of place in a nappy, sucking on a cock shaped lollipop. We should grow up? Maybe he should grow up first and show us what that looks like.

Try as you might you can’t just rely on the David Attenborough club members whispering in your ear to make the planet well again, and so where politics fail the slack must be taken up elsewhere. This slack appears to be partly in the hands of Insulate Britain, a group of lazy, droopy jawed, hip shit, dole out bottom feeders who think that the best way to make people change is by stopping them from getting to work in the morning. Yeah, that’ll work. Insulate Britain is a noxious, valueless turd that has dropped straight out of the infected rectum we call Extinction Rebellion. It is groups like Extinction Rebellion that make me wish we would become extinct even faster: I wouldn’t mind being extinct if I had some comfort in the knowledge that they’d be going down with me. Ultimately Extinction Rebellion have failed (so far) in their blurred mission, not because everyone else doesn’t want to save the planet but because everyone else that isn’t Extinction Rebellion think they’re tossers. The best protests are short and sharp and have achievable goals, while the worst just make people angry and resentful. Frankly, if Insulate Britain keep up playing silly buggers it wouldn’t be altogether tragic if they found their heads and shoulders firmly insulated inside the radiator grill of a speeding HGV.

Moving seamlessly onto HGV’s we can start to see those messages really getting tangled. We’ve been told to expect shortages if we can’t get our lorry drivers back in action, and by that I don’t just mean eating three full English breakfasts a day and throwing bottles of worryingly dark urine into the nations already cluttered laybys. We’ll be low on deliveries of all kinds, from meat to mushrooms to monkey nuts, and the shelves will be empty in a way we haven’t seen since the last time they were empty, which was, er, last year. So that means we need to “grow up” and think about the planet at roughly the same time as we need to get more lorries coughing out fumes on a daily basis. Added to that we just aren’t generating enough CO2 which, unless my understanding of chemistry has reached an all time low, is carbon dioxide. We need this CO2 to keep chicken fresh for a questionable length of time and to keep our plonk fizzy so we can see out the end of days in a unified gulped fug. That’s all great if you’re planning a chicken-in-a-basket piss up festival, but haven’t we been told for quite a while that CO2 is ever so slightly destroying the atmosphere and lining us up for the same extinction that Extinction Rebellion keep banging on about but haven’t got a clue how to deal with? It’s little wonder the whole world isn’t just going round in circles. Which it is, but let’s not complicate things by being clever.

Added to the confusion we are now blaming rocketing gas prices on a particularly tranquil summer when it comes to wind, and subsequently general wholesale gas sellers eying up a cash windfall (two different types of wind, fyi). By the time we get our gas back to normal prices we’ll be blowing through it like herpes through a brothel and it will just ended up adding to our pathetic woes and universal self-hatred. But there is one possible saviour and in comes in the form of Sir Kier Starmer, a man so devoid of charisma and capture that he probably couldn’t hold on to the staff at a third rate motorway service station. He’s been flexing his intellectual muscles by producing an 11,000 plus word essay all about how he’s going to fix this fucking country, but he has failed to appreciate that roughly no-one is going to read it that hasn’t been paid handsomely to do so, and even less than no-one is going to care: William the Conqueror didn’t get his way by bamboozling the Anglo Saxons into compliancy with a complex yet socially just manifesto, he just got on a ship and fucked them on a hill instead. Hey presto. Once again this is a post written purely to write something, anything and get it out (I may, currently, have the equivalent of a casual writers droop), but it is borne of some logic. You can care for the greater good and you can care for yourself, but you can’t do both at the same time. I expect Boris will be first to clamber into the safety bunker when the shit hits the fan, but at least there’s a chance that as we all choke outside his energy supplies will start to run out or, more likely, he won’t be able to pay the bill. It is his mess, my mess, your mess and our mess; have no doubt. Oh, and we might not get everything we want this Christmas, because as we know that’s a much bigger problem. We’ll never know a world that isn’t a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.

G B Hewitt. 23.09.2021