It'll probably be all right...

write slogan, save the UK, die...

I am currently horribly ill. I have, in the midst of the hottest summer ever, got a terrible cold. My temperature is up and down and when it is down, I am, despite the forty degrees, reaching for the gas fire remote, and when it is up, I am stuffing ice cubes down my underpants.

My health apps are screaming at me to call 999 or 111 and I refuse because I am certain that one of three possibilities will occur: 1) I will be told to take a paracetamol, 2) I will be visited by paramedics who will give me a paracetamol, 3) I will be told to make my own way to A & E where I will wait in a crowded stuffy room spreading my highly infectious bugs to as many heat stroked elderlies as possible, for five to ten hours, whereupon I will be picked up off the floor, given a paracetamol and kicked out to get a taxi home. Consequently, I have lain in the dark for three days hallucinating.

For reasons beyond my febrile mental capacities, I have hallucinated great whirling columns of darkness flipping flaps of something or other, until white. My mind decided it was a glitch in the fabric of reality. The simulation was cracking. I was trying to install a plug in without sufficient battery. And most of my software could not run on the new operating system anyway.

Back in the day when instead of climate change it was satan, or djinns, of even gods that were supposed to be on our side, who determined the visions our fever dreams produced. I am sure I would have come up with some grand idea that would get lots of likes and create a good number of well-armed followers determined to cleanse the algorhythm and make it safe for “us”, while sending “them” to hell fire.

As it is, I am trapped in a TikTok world where nobody reads and the only attention I can get is to measure the sweat dripping off the end of my nose while playing a kazoo. I am sure that would play very well if I could function sufficiently well to set up a camera. My dying words would be “like, share, subscribe.”

After that Musk’s robots would incinerate me and blast me into orbit, leaving nothing but some now very hungry bugs ready to invade China. The world would end, but as my world ended, it would matter little to me anyway.

Before I become global chaff I am trying to write this, and come up with something quotable, some slogan that you can all latch on to that will save you and turn you away from madness, which as it is conceived in madness is a bit of a tall order. My fever is terrifying. I need to sit in a freezer and contemplate how to save, if not the world, the UK.

Everyone says we are fucked. Politicians are crooks. Taxation, immigration, Europe, energy, prisons, farming, pronouns, bicycles, etc etc. They are all complex problems that require money, your money, not mine, and can be done is so many ways that have already been tried without success. Consequently everyone just pretends to do something, i.e. pay for a group of experts to make recommendations that everyone disagrees with.

All political parties would do well to rename themselves The Party of Managed Disappointment. One can see the great leader wearing a very big hat with the pithy slogan, “Things will probably be all right” written on it. It’ll be shortened to TWIP BAR which I am sure is just as inspiring as MAGA.

An angel will descend sometime during all this, because “Christian” virtues will be mentioned on some chat show, and the angel will present a gold plate bearing the sacred manifesto: We promise not to save the nation. We promise not to destroy it either. We shall attempt to leave it marginally better than we found it. If we accidentally improve something, we shall try not to break two other things in celebration.

Under this grand scheme, every politician should spend one week each month living entirely under the systems they personally created. If they shortened GP appointments, they join the queue. If they closed railway ticket offices, they buy railway tickets. If they increase planning regulations, they fill in the forms. If they propose online-only government services, they would be forbidden from asking their grandchildren how to log in. And every election promise would expire automatically after twenty-four months. If it has not been delivered by then, it will quietly become comedy. Manifestos would thereafter be shelved in the Humour section of public libraries, where they will never be read because nobody reads any more.

For that matter, it is hard to think there would be any traction in even a burning manifesto carved by the finger of a non-denominational, inclusivity, equal opportunity commune of deities.

As my dust blocks the sunlight, incidentally lowering the temperature, solving climate change, the English will be effetely English, the Scottish aggressively Scottish, the Welsh poetically Welsh, the Northern Irish, energetically unconvinced. London would be Singapore without air conditioning, Cornwall would be ignored, but quaint, Yorkshire would still be waiting for everyone to acknowledge their superiority, and foreigners would all be considered to lack any common sense.

My vision unfortunately is still only that weird black swirling flapping pole, with the odd word reaching out as only words can in horror movies: “error” “Error” “Error 35” or something. And right now, in a moment of lucidity, hammered onto the key board in short bursts, I come to the end, hoping the shakes don’t come again. And I strive for a good slogan: “Forget being great again…” That is just too miserable. I can feel the glitch in reality opening up. Perhaps the slogan should be, “Become the country everyone wants to live next door to.” But then that means we’d just be a walk over.

I am reaching for another dose of paracetamol. I don’t think they work. Perhaps after a bit more sleep all will be well. Perhaps I’ll slip through that glitch into a different quantum universe. Perhaps Game of Thrones has the answer: Winter is Coming!