Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Wednesday 25 July 2012

Reasons to be cheerful.

WE'VE all been too depressed for too long.

Winter lasted all the way to June, it's been strike-strike-strike since 2010, everything's had either a tax or a u-turn and sometimes both, and the billionaires have got all the money.

The people in charge of us have always been disconnected from the common herd but the current lot are so detached they've got their own Palladian mansion set in 200 acres of Capability Brown-designed gardens.

We all know it's belt-tightening time but for some reason ours are around our throats while corporate businessmen are running out of notches to accommodate their ever-expanding girth. People are being slaughtered willy-nilly while the world looks on in Syria, and there's more soldiering going on in Stratford than there is in Helmand.

Nurses, coppers, border officials, taxmen, Job Centre staff, and the often-overlooked-but-quite-important clerks are all getting laid off from the public sector, the genuinely disabled are losing their benefits alongside the cheats, and it seems like everyone's avoiding tax except the people who earn the least.

We're in the biggest recession for 50 years, we're told it's all the fault of the poor who deal in cash and rely on benefits, we're very likely to be downgraded by some blokes in suits which will cost us even more and the man in charge of the economy is a 2:1 history graduate with the brain of a duck.


Six million of us are fuming around our own capital city because some Belgian bureaucratical git needs his own lane, we wish we'd had the money and foresight to leave the country for two weeks, everyone's going to be looking at us while we're feeling all sweaty and fat and bits of the country are literally falling into the sea.

Ronnie Barker's boy is in court for being a pervert, Michael Jackson's family seems to have kidnapped itself, this woman is possibly the most unhappy bride of all time, and the fact America's first woman in space was a lesbian is apparently the most important thing about her.

Fine. OK. Deep breath.

Let's look at the positives in this.

Summer has arrived, and the shorter it is the sweeter it will seem. At least there are still some unions with welly that can get the government riled, and they're also capable of seeing sense. As for the billionaires, they seem to spend their time dodging the taxman, addictions, and gold-diggers which probably catch them because they're so fat. The hungry move quicker, that's a fact.

Maybe if we let the one per cent who think they have a right to rule screw it all up for a few years, then we won't have to put up with them for another couple of decades. Fat businessmen will die quicker, Syria is surely just a matter of time, and at least Stratford doesn't have IEDs for soldiers to worry about.

The public sector probably was a bit bloated but if everyone who's been laid off sets up a limited company and sells their services to their old employers for more money and less tax then perhaps they'll all be rich and smug like Jeremy Paxman and Jimmy Carr.

The Chancellor can't last, not just because he's bad at his job but because he's ultimately not a stayer. Some day soon he'll wake up and realise he's made such a mess of everything his only option is to change his name back to Gideon and claim the voices in his head made him do it.

The Olympics will be over in a few weeks, and in the meantime all the predictions are that the opening ceremony is a corker, we've good chances of gold medals and there's almost bound to be a plucky underdog to cheer at some point.

Added to which - Katie Holmes has finally got free of Tom Cruise, Ronnie Barker's son has at least come back to face the music, the Spice Girls are only going to sing at us once more, Muhammad Ali is not dead yet, the navel-gazing of Leveson is over for now, and Batman is doing hospital visits.

Better than anything else, Banksy is still with us.


Everything is going to be OK.