Welcome to Dystopia

Last year, as no doubt you remember, the students woke up, got organised and set about destroying London. This seemed the sensible option and would get everyone else to treat them like they were responsible grown-ups. The guy who threw the fire extinguisher from the roof has been jailed, which I support. Alright, it didn’t hit anyone and no damage was done, but it wasn’t exactly the most sensible course of action was it?

That fire extinguisher hitting the ground was the moment at which the public realised it had gone too far. People who want to go to university are supposed to be intelligent, and I don’t have much faith in the intelligence of someone who thinks throwing heavy objects from a tall building into a crowd of people below is a smart idea.

But anyway, I’m not really here to talk about that, or the fact that graduates are increasingly becoming the jobless ones, or indeed that in some parts of the country youth employment is up to 20%, something I’m very aware of as I have just lost my job.

I’m now a statistic.

Still, I’m not here to mope, I’m here to talk about Africa. In Tunisia last week, riots and protests broke out and the government fell to be replaced with another. And this week, Egypt decided that it hadn’t been on the news for a while and did the same thing. More interesting, in an unprecedented move, the country shut down its Internet and SMS services. The country is effectively in lockdown. It might as well not exist in this modern, tech-centred world.

It does mean though that journalists in the field have the advantage now, as no one in Egypt can tweet or blog about what’s going on, they have to speak to journalists directly to get their voices heard out of the country.

As we were watching the riot footage and I casually awaited the collapse of the Pyramids (my knowledge of modern Egypt is very minimal, so I’m staying old school), my father said, “That’ll be us next.”

“Really? Do we get a go?” I said.

“Well, this is all about people being pissed off with the politicians,” he nodded. “And that’s pretty much the state we’re in.”

Do I really think that anarchy is coming to Britain, a country that currently considers it anarchy to refuse a cup of tea? I don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate. Except I do and it will! We’ve seen a taster of what can be done – and that was just the students, a group known for their laziness and drunkenness (if the stereotype holds). What would the rest of us do?

Don’t forget, Britain once owned a quarter of the world – the desire to conquer runs deep within our veins and I don’t imagine it’ll take much more for anarchy to set in.

This country is in a terrible state, you can’t deny that. The high street is on its last legs, the economy remains screwed, education is preposterously expensive and don’t even get me started on the price of petrol. Still, the government has decided that money is better spent importing pandas to Edinburgh, building Olympic stadiums to knock them down again in 2013, and reintroducing the Great Bustard to Britain.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Olympics is an important cultural event but we can’t really afford to host it right now, so why not swallow our pride (a deeply un-English concept) and give it to someone who can. I also support breeding programmes of rare animals, but I don’t support spending billions on getting Edinburgh a tourism boost when it is already a very touristy place. And the Great Bustard is an impressive looking bird, but do we need them back in England right now?

The government need to wake up because right now I’ve given up reading dystopian novels – I’m living in one. And it all seems like it’s going to take a turn for the worse again soon. Cameron, Clegg and the rest have time to try and appease the public. We all knew that economic recovery would be hard, but they’re cutting and taxing in all the wrong places. Ask celebrities to contribute from their fortunes. If the politicians really want to show they care, they could all take a 50% or more pay cut, prove they aren’t doing it for the money. Coming on stage and telling us they understand how we feel isn’t enough, because they don’t.

So come on Cameron, you haven’t got long. Cheer us up or before long the business in Tunisia and Egypt will look like a scuffle on the playground.

I’m not ready to spend the rest of my life in a George Orwell novel.

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Finally, if you haven’t been watching 10 O’clock Live, you should start. Whoever thought putting David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne in a room together deserves a medal. Mitchell has proved himself to be even more intelligent than we thought and an excellent interviewer, unafraid of asking the difficult questions. Brooker spits more venom than a quiver of cobras. Carr is the master of the over-the-line one-liner – for some reason I find them acceptable from him but not from Frankie Boyle. And Laverne does a good job at keeping them all under control and making sarcastic commentary.

Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm. Do it.

A Weighty Issue

Apologies for my long absence. What with the flu and work and wine I have been too busy to write anything but I am now back and ready to get going again. I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year and have looked back on 2010 with whatever emotions it deserved and are now ready to press on.

And so my first topic of the year is obesity. Or, rather, one very obese man in particular.

Paul Mason, the former fattest man in Britain, has decided to sue the National Health Service (NHS) for letting him get too fat. At his heaviest, he weighed nearly 70 stone (980lb) but thanks to gastric band surgery (paid for by the taxpayer, of course), he now weighs a comparatively dainty 37 stone (518lb).

According to the news reports, he sought help in 1996 when he reached 30 stone (420lb) but his doctor told him to exercise more. Then, when he reached 64 stone (896lb), he was referred to a dietician instead of, as he requested, an eating disorder specialist.

Mason claims that he will use any compensation to help other obese people lose weight, which all sounds very charitable, but is merely a ruse to make us think he’s a nice person – and I don’t deny that he is, I don’t know him – that is the victim in this whole scenario.

The thing is; how can he now blame the NHS for his gargantuan size? Alright, they didn’t get him an eating disorder specialist, but since he was already heavier than Crete (roughly), can they really be blamed for his lifestyle? He was told in 1996 to exercise more, advice he clearly ignored, and instead returned to bed to eat 20,000 calories a day – ten times the recommended daily intake for an average man.

I’ve always been lucky that despite eating a lot of crap food over the years, I’ve managed to remain relatively slim. Not as slim as I once was, but my BMI is spot on apparently, so obviously something’s gone right (for once). But if I was to put on a bit of weight and found I had to buy size 36 jeans or something, I’d start to notice that I was getting bigger, at which point I would do something about it.

Mason let himself reach 30 stone before deciding that he was too big, and when the doctor didn’t prescribe a magic pill for him to reach his ideal weight, he ignored him and continued eating to more than double his size. Doctors can be blamed for a number of things – leaving a rubber glove inside your body during surgery, for example – but unless the doctors were coming round to Mason’s house and force-feeding him, then you cannot claim they are responsible.

What was the NHS supposed to do? Send round someone to stick their fingers down his throat after every bingeing session?

I’m not here to tell people how to live – if you enjoy eating then good for you, eat away. But if you are going to eat so that you reach preposterous sizes, you are not allowed to complain about your size and bemoan the fact that you are fat. You are the one eating it, no one else is to blame, so if you’re going to gorge daily on the same amount the whole of Tunisia gets through in a week, then you have to deal with the consequences and understand that you’re unlikely to be on America’s Next Top Model.

What gets me is, that after a certain weight, Mason was unable to move, confined to his bed, which meant that someone was bringing him food and casually taking part on his ritual to destroy his body. Personally speaking, if I saw someone I loved doing this to themselves, and it was me who was supposed to be bringing them food, I wouldn’t be able to do it. If they really want it, they’ll have to get up and get it themselves. And if they’ve fattened themselves up to the point that they’re as mobile as the Empire State Building then tough luck for them.

This whole “blame culture” seems very American and I do not like that it is leaking over into this country. For some reason, no one is capable to taking responsibility anymore, so everything is someone else’s fault, even if it quite clearly isn’t. People are possibly unable to see the damage they are doing to themselves, and when they realise what they’ve done, they can’t bring themselves to believe that they would hurt themselves in such a way.

Mason should have listened to his doctor and started exercising more or eating less junk, if he wanted to lose weight. How did he think continuing to eat would help matters? I don’t understand how someone can let themselves get to such a size without realising halfway to that point, “I probably should lose some weight now.” And since everyone wants something for nothing and the problem solved yesterday, that usually now means a gastric band operation, or severe liposuction, or any manner of surgery that means they won’t have to lift a dumbbell and can go right back to stuffing their faces with Big Macs as soon as it’s over.

At which point they start the whole sorry process again, all the while professing that it isn’t their fault. As a basic rule, if you can be seen on Google Earth from any distance other than street level, it might be time to start thinking about dieting.

I hope that Paul Mason loses his case, because if he wins, he’s teaching people that it’s OK to pass the buck on your own failings, and also, it will open the floodgates for everyone else to claim it’s the NHS’s fault they have lung cancer (because no one told them to stop smoking) or liver failure (because an NHS representative didn’t get all the pubs to replace their beer with a non-alcoholic substitute).

Maybe your glands and genes play a small part, but not much. If you’re that fat, it’s your own fault and you can’t blame anyone else for it.