You see a story like that, and I think you have to wonder about just how vicarious and downright obscene this is getting.

So, there’s been a wee bit of a Twitter firestorm over this comment by Roger Helmer MEP:

Why is it OK for a surgeon to perform a sex-change operation, but not OK for a psychiatrist to try to “turn” a consenting homosexual?

Which, as reasoned questions about deeply divisive and complex issues go, is up there with ‘I don’t mind queers, but why do they have to be so bloody obvious about it?’. Roger Helmer, if you’re wondering, is also the latest gentleman to resurrect the age-old line of thinking that homophobia isn’t a real thing, because, like, no-one’s afraid of homosexuality.

So, I saw that and I thought, hmm, perhaps Mr Helmer is cleverly raising one of those unspoken, seeming hypocrisies that underlie the idea of political correctness. What a maverick he must be, to be so concerned with confronting the awkward questions. And then I scanned the rest of his recent tweets, including:

Drill, Baby, drill! Good news on the BP/Russian/Arctic oil drilling deal. But can we trust the Russkies?

And:

Trade Minister Lord Green refuses, on moral grounds, to promote the UK arms industry. He should resign.

And thought, no, maybe he’s just a bit of an arse. Perhaps that’s unfair. But a lot of his tweets (ugh, I hate Web 3.whatever) seem like reasonably facile efforts to get a rise out of people. It’s just that this latest one seems to have struck a nerve.

But his question should be answered, in any case. Immediately jumping on the #sackhelmer bandwagon is only going to lend ammunition to the ‘it’s political correctness gone mad’ brigade, after all. And besides, if our elected representatives immediately get dogpiled by outraged members of the public every time they say something condescending or ill-informed in a public medium, it’ll be like making them accountable. And we can’t have that, it stands in the way of three hundred years of tradition.

To put it in its full context, the original tweet was responding to this story, wherein a counsellor told an undercover gay journalist that she could ungay him and cure him of his ‘mental illness’ via carefully-regulated doses of Bible, for which it now seems very probable she’ll lose her career.

So, what’s the difference between that and gender reassignment? The thing is, the way the question’s worded makes them seem like two sides of the same coin, and that strikes me as a false equivalence. The difference between gender identity and sexual orientation notwithstanding, gender reassignment is first and foremost a physical change – you’re altering the outward manifestations of someone’s sex in order to match their perceived gender, and any psychological aspect is helping them cope with that change.

Whereas, trying to change someone’s sexual orientation, their desires or impulses or whatever, that’s a strictly mental thing. When people transition, they’re not changing what they feel their gender to be, because they’ve felt that way beforehand. The whole ‘woman trapped in a man’s body’ thing is a cliche, but it’s a cliche for a reason.

Pictured: freakish powers of deduction.

So once you start getting into the psychological aspect of sexual attraction, well, things get a lot more complicated than that. All the same, there’s precisely no evidence that ‘ex-gay’ therapies are effective at changing sexual orientation or behaviour, and are likely to do more harm than good.

Granted, our conceptions of sexuality evolve with society, and it’s unrealistic to expect to fit everyone into the box of ‘gay’, ‘straight’, ‘bi’, and so on, because not everyone’s going to conform to those categories exactly. We know people experiment, for one (and thank God for that, if it wasn’t for confused straight boys I never would’ve gotten laid when I was younger).

The Kinsey scale is perhaps a better alternative, but it still doesn’t cover everything. And how could it? Human sexuality is messy, complicated, and hard to fathom at the best of times. How do you explain fetishes, for instance? You can get into Freudian explanations, but those get ridiculous fast. And I’ve still yet to find a satisfactory explanation for why I’m a three-drink bisexual on some occasions and not others, save possibly a deeply-repressed bout of heterosexuality.

But with all of that having been said, it’s pretty well-acknowledged that people do tend to settle into particular orientations along the Kinsey scale, and that they’re extremely resistant to attempts to change them. When you’re trying to deal with something as instinctual and powerful as sexual attraction, you can just about repress it entirely, but changing the entire direction of it? It just doesn’t seem feasible to me.

That, of course, is partly the point. If someone’s experiencing homosexual desire and they don’t want to, desperately enough to see a therapist about it, surely the better answer is to enable them to come to terms with said desire, rather than try to sweep it back under the carpet?

But there’s an agenda here, of course there is. The key phrase here is ‘Christian biblical framework’, and with that comes a certain school of religious thought that would rather have repressed, miserable, sexless homosexuals than well-adjusted ones getting laid all the time and causing hurricanes. After all, it wasn’t too long ago that aversion therapy was in vogue for much the same purpose.

And hand in hand (but not in a gay way) with that goes the idea of homosexuality as illness (I have a lot of issues with Christopher Hitchens, but he hit the nail on the head when he pointed out the fallacy of a god who ‘creates people sick and commands them to be well’), or of eliding any kind of common ground or community between LGBT people, by writing off any sort of activism on our part as being part of a ‘radical homosexual agenda’, and casting any homosexual inclination amongst the flock as being (as I once saw it wonderfully put by a Baptist website) ‘struggling with homosexual attraction’.

As demonstrated here.

So, why isn’t it OK to ‘turn’ gay people? Well, because it doesn’t work, it casts homosexuality as something that needs to be treated, and because it necessarily manipulates guilt and shame for the benefit of a narrow view of religious morality.

Charmingly, I know at least one person keeping a countdown of the time it takes for Roger Helmer to be found with a rentboy. But no doubt he’ll become a sort of C-list political martyr for this, along with the other Tory MEPs to have been vaguely controversial (Daniel Hannan springs to mind). The European Parliament seems to be a breeding ground for this sort of thing, possibly because Conservative MEPs don’t actually feel obligated to do much. With, but not of, indeed.

Sit with me and we’ll raise a glass to Europe.

But not the nice, friendly kind of sex, with scented candles* and Bach playing in the background. Nooo. Y’see, some people actually sell it. I know, I had to go and lie down for a moment on my fainting couch too. Some people sell sex, and that’s terrible. Apparently.

And a prize goes to whoever gets this reference.

This aggression will not stand, man. I got quite exercised by this blog post. Fundamentally, it’s a new twist on an old, old view of sex workers, and no less troubling for all that.

But how many gay men actually have to sell their bodies in order to put food on the table? Very few I would say.

Look, I can’t give you numbers and frankly I don’t want to give you anecdata, but that, to my mind, displays an astonishing amount of naivete. Unless you believe that gay men are somehow possessed of some kind of forcefield that makes them immune from such things as poverty. That certainly seems to be the public perception at the moment; this idea that gay men are naturally thrown into a life of expensive cocktails (make your jokes now and get them out of the way), endless dancing and general glamour. And that’s an improvement on the way things used to be.

Yes, some do have limited options, but there are also those who follow this path because of deep seated issues of self esteem and good old fashioned laziness and greed.

Ah, there we go. Good whores and bad whores. That’s familiar, too. The poor poor working classes, whom We Must Pity for their Limited Options, and those we expect to know better, as it were. In fact, that’s positively Victorian – some orphan girl takes to the foggy streets of Whitechapel and, well, it’s all she’s good for, but when a Lady of Society becomes a Fallen Woman, well, that’s a scandal. My arse. As if it makes any moral difference whatsoever.

I don’t like the pity angle either, played-out as it is. It’s condescending beyond belief, for one. And for another, it seems like people think that sex work gives them a right to judge someone’s life for them, in a rather prurient manner. ‘…there are also those who follow this path because of deep seated issues of self esteem and good old fashioned laziness and greed’ could apply to merchant banking just as accurately. This idea that we have to save sex workers from themselves is a frustrating one, because no-one stages an intervention to tell anyone that working in a call centre is an ultimately futile and meaningless path in life that is doing irreperable damage to their mental health.

Laziness and greed, too. I like that. From now on I suspect that’ll be my stock answer in any job interview when asked why I’m interested in working for Initech or whatever. Thing is, sex work is hard work, in oh so many senses of the word. There’s a lot of variation, granted, but I’d ask you to consider whether it’s any lazier or greedier than, say, selling cars for a living. In fact, don’t even get me started on greed. Unless you want me to get into right-on, Trot-student ‘capitalism makes whores of us all, maaaaan’ mode, I was rather under the impression that working in exchange for money wasn’t so much greed as good economics.

Bursting on to the exploitative gay scene some men do not know how to react when they hear the words they have longed to hear for such a long time – “you are attractive.” It can be like a drug and, as with all drugs, nothing is ever enough.

If this guy was projecting any harder I think I could use him to show off my holiday snaps. Some men have issues with self-esteem. A revelation! And this apparently leads to sex work. Or becoming Louie Spence. Honestly, if the choice is between ‘rent-boy’ and ‘television personality’, all of a sudden the moral decline doesn’t seem so bad.

A large section of the gay media glamorises male prostitution. These people, with their seemingly perfect (and often supremely photoshopped bodies) are seen as celebrities.

A large section? Really? And I love that it’s supposedly a gay thing, because funnily enough I don’t remember seeing Secret Diary of a Rent Boy on ITV2 any time recently**. You might instead say that the media’s stopped freaking out quite so much about sex work; I think ‘glamourisation’ might be on the strong side, all things considered. It’s the difference between aspiration and fantasy, and that’s a pretty wide gulf.

And the fringe benefits are simply wonderful – does not everyone yearn to be on the guest list for Fire and Area every Friday night?

No.

We are almost led to believe that we are losing out if we do not choose this lifestyle. We are, heaven forbid, not reaching our full potential as “A- Gays.”

I think there have been some crossed wires here. I have a lot of problems with the gay media – the body fascism, the consumerism, the general shallowness – but the idea that we’re somehow being pushed to sell ourselves to get through the door at Club Wankfest just isn’t happening for me, at least not without some concrete examples. What this does sound like to me is ‘Doesn’t everyone want to get into Fire on a Saturday night? Well, I do, and if I can’t it must be because of those damned prostitutes!’. Which, I’m sorry to say, is a logical leap I can’t quite follow. Yeah, the gay media sucks. But we’re hardly being ‘force-fed’ it. And it’s only as serious as you take it yourself; feeling that prostitution is being sold as necessary to enjoying that lifestyle of club nights and cocktails and all the rest of it requires that you buy into the myth that that whole thing is required of a gay man, yes?

And more to the point, the implication is that gay prostitution is new, or newly commercialised. Does anyone in the audience remember Jean Genet, please? And besides, they don’t call it the oldest profession for nothing.

I have never had a problem with prostitution.

So the point of the rest of the post is…?

What I do have a problem with is delusion and lack of integrity. Selling your body to manipulative men who also often have severe issues with self esteem is not the way to build a satisfying life. It prohibits personal growth and the ability to construct meaningful relationships with people. In the long term this can only lead to a regime of diminishing returns. The consequences can be dire – a shallow existence based on lies, self justification and a personality that is not in synch with the real world.

Ah. Right. Well, ‘delusion’ and ‘lack of integrity’ are pretty subjective things. And then after that we’re back to condescending. ‘X is not the way to build a satisfying life’ is one hell of a generalisation, for one. And characterising the men who use sex workers as manipulative? Well, yes, sometimes that’s true. But honestly, most of the time if they were manipulative enough they wouldn’t need to pay for it. For an existence based on lies, it can be surprisingly honest. More to the point, this whole paragraph is talking about sex workers as if they have no self-awareness or insight whatsoever, which I’d like to think is very far from the truth indeed (1385 words, for heaven’s sake), and are living a life that can only lead to diminishing returns and other such badness, with no exceptions.

I’m sort of walking a tightrope here between ‘What are you on about, Alex?’ and Way Too Much Information, I know, but bear with me. It is possible to do sex work and be fulfilled, happy, whatever. Granted, it’s not a choice that most people would make, but to characterise it as fundamentally dishonest or ugly or lazy or morally repellent, any more than anything else, is inaccurate and unhelpful.

Recently I met an individual several times who seemed to be fairly decent. [...] I then found out that he made his real living through escorting. It was not the escorting that I had an issue with. It was the fact that this person had been deliberately deceitful about how he earned his money.

Okay, okay, deceit is bad, etc etc. Whereupon we find out that this guy is in it for the money and the glamour and so on and so forth. I see absolutely no problems with wildly extrapolating from that to an entire industry.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been round the block more times than Pat Butcher

Now there’s an image to savour.

…and consequently have a very liberal attitude to sex. What I will not tolerate, however, is evasion of the truth and a total lack of self respect for others. These qualities should never be compromised because they are the very things that make us civilised human beings.

Evasion of the truth and lack of self-respect for others [sic] are the very things that make us civilised? That’s probably true, especially for a certain value of ‘civilised’. If it wasn’t for absolutely shameless lies the governments of the world would never get anything done, as the Wikileaks cables demonstrate.

Moreover, the idea that sex work is a perversion of the naturally honest and forthcoming nature of interpersonal relationships? Yeah, right. Were that true, no-one would ever cheat on their partner, and I could find someone on Grindr whose height and weight were exactly what they said they were.

I believe in sincerity, decency and trust. I also believe in frankness. I remember years ago Aiden Shaw writing about his life as a prostitute in his book Brutal. He said that he had a problem with the word escort. He felt it conjured up a rather twee picture of people holding hands at champagne fuelled parties. He preferred the word prostitute because it did what it said on the tin. It did not hide behind pretence and said “do you have a problem with that?”

Is it still a euphemism if no-one earnestly believes it? I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who thought the escort-client relationship was purely innocent, and that the guy was paying for the time as opposed to the particular use of it. Pretence isn’t always a bad thing, and you can draw certain distinctions – ‘escort’ can be a fairly narrowly-defined term, particularly when money comes into it. More to the point, it’s a case of N Word Privileges to my mind. If Aiden Shaw would prefer to call himself a prostitute, that’s his business (literally, too). But when you’re describing someone else, it becomes more judgemental, the connotations change. If you work for BAe in sales, I might call you an arms dealer, but whether it’s true or not the point is derision and insult.

It’s not unlike the disparities between the words “porn actor” (how much acting is actually required to pull off even the most extravagant orgasm as you have a thick cock or fist shuved [sic] up your arse?) and “porn model.”

Never having been in porn, this is somewhat outwith my experience, but from what I hear, you’d be surprised. I’d imagine that after a while it just gets to be work, and if you’re doing that X times a week, well, it has to take it out of you.

Needless to say that this unnamed individual is off my Christmas list now.

Well. Clearly that’s the mature response, isn’t it.

Blaerg. Nearly 2150 words, this particular rant. Rest assured I’m not going to make myself into Bel du Jour any time soon. The next one’s likely to be a lot more prosaic in nature, I fear.

I know two things about Uganda, and neither is really about Uganda. Take that as representative of my general knowledge. The first is the phrase ‘Ugandan discussions’, and the second is a little case-in-point of the British media’s hypocrisy; white racists want to kick all the Asians out of a country, they get their propaganda republished, black racist does the same and he’s a murderous tyrant. A little consistency would be nice; either you call the EDL out for the racist fuckwits they are, or you’re forced into a position where you might have to argue that Idi Amin was just, y’know… misunderstood.

Not that I’m defending the guy. I mean, he was a murderous tyrant. When the US ambassador, of all people, describes you as ‘”racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic”, (which has to be a bit rich, all things considered) I’d take that as a hint.

* Not like that, though. Trust me, bringing candles into it is very far from friendly. Potentially awesome, though. …what was I talking about?

** If only because I haven’t finished writing the treatment for it yet.

Snow on the roofs, seasonal music in every shop, ubiquitous tinsel. You’ve got to love this time of year. Even if you don’t. Otherwise, people get really intense about it. Sometimes it seems as if you can’t be unenthused by the whole prospect without vengeful hordes of mawkish, sentimental, Capra-watching*, teacher-says fucks descending from the hills to set about you.

I’m on my own this Christmas, partly by choice and partly by circumstance, and I’m fine with that. This is probably the first year I’ve managed to avoid the whole family thing, and believe me when I say that it makes a welcome change not to be gorging myself on turkey and fending off awkward conversations left, right and centre**.

But I should probably explain what’s been going on with me lately, and why I haven’t been blogging at all. I’ve had a bad week, no question about it. It’s been wall-to-wall panic attacks, mostly worrying about my health. Going to bed every night shaking with fear that you’re not going to get back out of it again in the morning is no kind of way to be spending your time, believe me.

This was in large part precipitated by my actually being a bit ill; my new GP tells me I probably have some sort of minor chest thing, which explains the symptoms that I’ve been using to convince myself that there’s something seriously wrong with me. Mercifully, things seem to have improved a bit over the past few days; I’m not shaking uncontrollably, at least, and that’s progress. Hopefully things will continue to get easier – I’m remaining optimistic, and not drafting long, maudlin just-in-case blog posts, if nothing else.

So, still feeling run down, but a bit more sanguine about it. And since, to quote Serendipity, that can mean either accepting or bloody, that just about covers all the options. But that’s the backdrop to Christmas for me this year, and I think it’s a more than adequate set of reasons to want to opt out of the turkey-and-booze shade of affairs.

The ever-insightful Aethelread has some similar thoughts on this Winterval business over here, which I highly recommend you read; I agree with just about everything in that post, with one exception. Thing is, right, if there’s one thing panic attacks are good for (debateable), it’s making you reassess your life and so on and so forth.  Of course, most of the time far too much, but all the same, some good can come of it.

This isn’t the Damascene conversion part. I haven’t gone and gotten myself born again (there was enough palaver the last bloody time), or anything like that. And I don’t want to bore you with religious stuff, so suffice it to say that my stance on matters spiritual remains guardedly agnostic. Admittedly with a newfound respect for how comforting it is, even if it’s just going through the motions (this is why I’m hanging onto my little Saint Sebastian medal), but still feeling free to be a little bit subversive at the same time (this is why it’s Saint Sebastian).

Anyway. Aethelread mentioned something that stuck with me:

The longer I live with my mental interestingness, the more I become convinced that there just isn’t any point in trying to fight it.

Which is sort of unfair out of context, given that the next five or six paragraphs explain it a bit more; read it yourself, but I’d summarise it as, there’s no point struggling with your own mental health to do stuff you don’t enjoy, just because it’s expected. Which I agree with completely. Like so:

There are still some things I have to fight, of course – panic attacks, the more insistent kinds of depression, above all, the paranoia – but I’m coming to the conclusion that there are other things that I can just let go.

And I can see the sense in that. More than that, it’s a problem of the sort that if you ask ten people, you’ll get maybe fifteen different answers. But I think for my own part, and that only, I disagree. I do feel obligated to fight my own mental weirdness in more ways than just the parts that make me feel miserable, or scared, or whatever else.

Thing is, I don’t think that’s necessarily conceding defeat to the forces of banality. I’m not hanging up my contempt for the gender binary just yet, for example, and that’s pretty far from normal for most people, I think, even in a country where men wear skirts. But equally, I’d quite like to be able to make myself a sandwich without needing an hour and a half of convincing myself that it’s OK to do so.

But like I said, it’s a highly individual thing. And I think the difference in my case is that a lot of the time, the stuff anxiety or depression or general fucked-up-ness prevents me from doing is stuff I would love to be able to do. Plus I’m (relatively) young and stupid stubborn, and I’ll admit to taking a certain amount of pride in, when encountering panic-shaped difficulties, picking myself back up and wading through them.

So, in other words, I’m not giving up on normal just yet. Not if that’s what it takes for me to be happy with my life. But each to their own. I guess what I’m trying to say, having taken 952 words to get there, is… merry Christmas.

Noddy Holder can fuck right off, though. Here’s your festive song for the day:

* Fuck Capra. He’s on The List, right after Horatio Alger.

** ‘When are you going to meet a nice Catholic girl?’ Funny thing is, I’ve met quite a few. And haven’t even slept with any of them, which is probably worth bonus points.

You said, “I’ll go to another country,
go to another shore,
find another city better than this one

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong,
and my heart like something dead lies buried.

- Constantine Cafavy, The City

you gave me a suicide bed and two choices,
no three:
starve, go mad or kill yourself.

- Charles Bukowski

Wake up at three in the morning, two or three separate songs playing in my head at once, thoughts racing:

ohchristi’mupwhatwhyaremyhandsshakingpleasestopdoingthatican’tdealwiththisagainnotnowthere’sso
muchwrongwithmeSHUT
UPeverything’sgoingtobefinealexyou’refinenoi’mnotnoi’mnotsucha
fuckingliarsonetimesit’sscaryidon’tknowwhyyoukeepkiddingyourselfypu’reevenapersonit’spatheticjustgiveupnowit’snotasifanyoneelseSHUT UPhelpandit’syourownstuidfuckingfault

Pull myself together, go out on the balcony, still feeling off, weird. This is getting to be routine by now, but it doesn’t seem to get any easier.

YOU’LL NEVER FASHION YOUR DAMAGED SOUL
BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO CLEVER TO LOSE CONTROL

Deep breaths. Shaking like a leaf, and I know it’s not just the cold. All I can see is ice, half-melted snow and old stone. I catch myself worrying and that makes me worry more and I feel bad about feeling bad and that makes me feel worse.

Shake it off until the morning, go out for another bottle of whisky and some cigarettes. Drinking too much. Don’t care. Unshaven. Look bad. Feel bad. Getting some strange glances. I feel very glad my head is opaque. I can feel myself losing my breath again, unsteady on my feet.

AND NO-ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND
WOULD MAKE MY HEART THEIR HOME

Head over to the till, probably shambling along like some mad scientist’s pet project lurching down from the castle to murder some villagers. Give my ID to the cashier. Have to help her find the right page. She sees my old address; haven’t had it changed yet.

“London?”

Smile, “Yes.”

“You’re a long way from home.”

And I look at her and I say yes, yes I am.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years,
wasted them, destroyed them totally.

You won’t find a new country,
won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.

So that’s why I haven’t been blogging. Think of this as one of those things in primary school on the first day of term where you have to talk about ‘what I did on my holidays’.

I should explain. I don’t want this blog to become one of those ‘things I hate, of which there are many because I’m so fucking edgy and controversial, innit’ shoutboxes, any more than it is already. But, for fuck’s sake, Michael Macintyre.

Thesis: Macintyre represents everything that is wrong with comedy, and also Britain. It’s as if he was grown in a vat in some secret laboratory deep beneath the countryside, as part of a secret project to create the blandest, most inoffensively beige – no, I take that back, not even beige, fucking magnolia – comedian ever to walk the earth. A comedian for people who thought Peter Kay was just a bit too fat and a bit too northern. All the Butlins-style sing-along you-remember-that-thing-from-the-80s-right desperation, left to mature in a pool of a mysterious gentrifying fluid (I like to think of it as Pinot Grigio) until the layer of scum and bacteria slowly coalesced into a vaguely humanlike form with a terrifyingly shiny face. Less Labradoodle, more paramecium*.

Of course, that was after he’d established himself, and duly gotten smug and complacent. Then again, if I could make a living by doling out bland Waitrose anecdotes I’d be pretty smug too, I suppose. But I remember seeing him on TV somewhere before he got ubiquitous, and he reminded me of nothing so much as a regional sales team manager for a company in Basingstoke that makes accountancy software (you know the type, the guy who goes in for corporate team-building exercises), who had been kidnapped by a band of psychotic murderers and forced to make with the comedy, and was wildly running down everything he knew about for signs of amusement, while desperately pleading to God not to let him die. Women! Why do they take so long to get ready?! My first car was a bit shit! I’ve done grocery shopping before! Scottish money is odd-looking! Old people answer the phone differently! Traffic annoys me! Oh god, I just want to live!

Sometimes, if there’s nothing else on and I’m forced to watch this shit instead of, you know, reading a book or going outside, I like to amuse myself (and let’s face it, he’s not going to do it for me) by aiming a laser pointer at the screen and imagining there’s a guy up in the rafters with a sniper rifle, a la Ronin. Try it, I think you’ll find it adds something approaching drama to his routine, especially now 24′s finished.

I think the word that comes most readily to mind when describing the guy is safe. No-one has ever been offended by a Michael Macintyre joke, other than for reasons of shiteness, and unless he goes off the deep end completely and decides to call his next tour Hitler Was Right, they never will be. And paradoxically, that’s a large part of what I find so offensive about him. I grew up listening to Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, and as a consequence of that it’s always been an article of faith for me that comedy is at its best when it uses humour to reveal a greater truth. It shouldn’t just be observations that anyone can relate to, because everyone already knows them; for me, comedy exists to challenge assumptions, to fuck with people’s heads and to undo their preconceptions. If you’ll let me go on a little liberation theology tangent here, humour’s in large part a tool that allows us to confront the messy, difficult stuff in life; to be transgressive, or silly, or outrageous, or camp.

Carlin picked the English language apart, and it had the effect of making us think about how we use language. Going back as far as Chaplin, Modern Times did more to get people thinking about, and laughing at, mechanised, industralised society than anything else I can think of. But that requires a comedian with more to say about society than its attitude to making airline peanuts easy to open.

And of course, one of the best responses to bigotry, self-importance, ignorance or good old-fashioned intellectual laziness is to laugh at it, whether it’s Adenoid Hynkel or Hedy Lamarr. But it seems like an equal number of people just like to have their prejudices reaffirmed, whether by Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown, Al Murray or Ricky Gervais. But my problem with Macintyre is that he’s the equivalent for people who don’t have the imagination to be prejudiced.

I called him the human Labradoodle earlier, and I stand by that. A big floppy dog that bounces about a safe, boring middle-class existence, and then looks at you as if he’s expecting applause when he shits all over himself.

…and that’s the longest heckle I’ve ever done.

* Incidentally, the above description is also how they make Yakult. ‘Friendly bacteria’ my arse.

Or rather, c’est le fucking bastard bastard BT Openzone wi-fi that decides it doesn’t want to work for days at a time*. But! All sorts of exciting things are happening in Britain. Plus one thing that’s only exciting if you’re the sort of person who buys commemorative plates.

But, more relevantly, those wacky, mixed-up Islamist kids have (possibly) been at it again, exploding a small bit of Scottish countryside and giving us the title for this post. So far, so meh, right? Well, in a fit of masochism, I had a look at the Mail’s take on the story. Which is played fairly straight, but the comments are amusing:

"That's how dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."

Stewart Lee was more right than he knew. By this point, I can’t even tell if this is someone taking the piss, so blinded am I by the Mail’s comment section idiocy. My brain says yes, but my heart holds a horrible suspicion that they’re not (nice inversion of the no true Scotsman fallacy, either way). Don’t even ask about the 473 people who voted it up.

Of course, ‘appen when I were a lad, we used to drench ourselves in petrol, set ourselves alight and dance around the village fete for coppers, but now the politically-correct ‘elf-n-safety brigade have banned it, ’cause it might offend queers or something. Broken Britain!

I do wonder what the worldview must be like. Just imagine the reaction to the aforementioned Glasgow airport terror attack/spectacular comedy fuck-up. Guy drives a jeep full of propane canisters or whatever into a building, frantically tries to set the whole thing on fire, catches fire, and then wanders around the area for a bit screaming until John Smeaton kicks him in the gentleman’s region. If your natural response to that is, ‘well, he’s going to be getting a stiff letter from the HSE and no mistake’, then possibly you’re missing the point. And as we all know, if you’re not permanently shitting yourself with fear over ‘Mumbai-style terror attacks’, suspicious packages (hurr hurr), bombs in ink cartridges, Al-Qaeda operatives parachuting into Britain disguised as nuns, etc etc, then the terrorists have won.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have this profile of some super-ultra-double-secret anti-terror police. Following on from that BBC thing inside GCHQ, one does begin to wonder about this whole secrecy thing. ‘You can see inside our offices, but mostly just to be told exactly what you’re not allowed to see’ is practically viral marketing, so hats off to the security services for some of the best media work they’ve done since Operation Mass Appeal**, yeah?

This time, however, it’s the West Midlands Counter-Terrorism Unit, which I’m sure does valuable work and blah blah blah stalwart defenders of liberty, bulldog shedding a single tear as the Union Flag wafts gently in the background and so on; but really all I can think of is how much less glamorous 24 would’ve been if CTU had been based in the West Midlands. Images of Jack Bauer brutally torturing a suspect to find out who nicked all the hubcaps off his car.

Anyway, a fine example of what I’m getting at with this sort of story is this passage:

Some areas were strictly off limits. Next to a door marked with a sign that indicated top security clearance was needed, I was told that “in theory” I might be allowed in, but I would need to be vetted, specially trained, and probably would not be allowed to reveal what I saw.

The skeptic in me thinks that the police were taking the piss here, and that instead of a fancily techified command centre or a bleeding-edge CSI lab, that was the facetiously-labelled door to the office bogs. I mean, that’s what I’d do if I was a counter-terrorism policeman***.

‘Specially trained’, though? Seriously, just what the fuck would warrant that? Vats of acid? Are the Army’s deadly killer badgers being redeployed from Iraq to hunt down extremists? I think we should be told.

* It actually cut out just as I was about to hit ‘Publish’ on this post. You can imagine my frustration.

** Interesting thing. I don’t know about spies, but within the military British practice has been to give operations one-word names unrelated to what they’re actually doing, like Corporate, Granby or Banner (The Falklands, First Gulf War and Northern Ireland, respectively), and save the two-word ones for exercises. Whereas it’s usually the Americans who go in for two-word names as an opportunity for some ludicrously overblown morale-boosting, such as Just Cause or Infinite Justice. Funny that.

*** Which is one of many reasons why I presumably never will be.

George Square, yesterday.

Maybe that comes across as a bit hostile. I’m coming to love Glasgow, as it happens. But if I ever stop taking the piss out of things, that’d be a pretty good sign that I’d gone all pod-person.

Anyway, I’m still alive. Just been in a weird place mentally (and physically, I suppose) a lot lately. Oddly, the blog’s traffic has actually gone up in my absence; I’m not sure whether that’s because of Google updating their servers, or just that people enjoy the blog more when there’s nothing on it. If it’s the latter, at the rate hits are growing, I could probably retire now and live off people paying me not to do things.

Thoroughly boycotting Halloween this year, mostly out of apathy. Did manage to go out for drinks with wonderful blogger la, and had a lovely time. But generally, I haven’t been good at keeping up with things. Keeping weird hours, for one thing. But also, I’m having some gayngst. More than angst, anger. Not that homophobia’s anything new, of course. But this year we’ve had a spate of gay suicides, a pogrom of sorts in Uganda, an anti-gay riot in Belgrade, and the usual stream of petty lies, slanders and general acts of villainy.

I was doing OK with this, for the most part. I mean, still furious. But mostly dealing. Happened to stumble across this. Generally, I have a policy of not reading comment sections for the sake of my own blood pressure, and this is a good example of why:

That’s strange, listening to all the media luvvies you’d think that they were the majority. In the interests of ethnic diversity surely we are now due a cull. Let’s start with the one who made the most fuss about the Pope’s visit, Peter whatshisname.

Which is an admirable demonstration of how the whole dog-whistle politics thing works. Paper says ‘X raises questions about the importance placed on homosexuality’ (and it really doesn’t, given that it’s almost certainly an undercount), target demographic think ‘hurr hurr fags’.

Not that that was my initial reaction. Specifically, my first thought was along the lines of ‘bring it on, motherfuckers, I’ll be up in the highlands with my band of queer partisans’. All of the tabloid bullshit, not just about LGBT issues, but immigration, health and safety, the ‘PC brigade’, this whole you-couldn’t-make-it-up bollocks, it might seem innocuously stupid, but it kills people. That’s what’s at stake here. Sometimes it drives kids to suicide, and sometimes people start to take that suggestion of a cull seriously.

And the response to all of this is, what? The It Gets Better project, apparently. Well, if it helps, it helps, but frankly it just struck me as self-indulgent. I remember being a closeted teenager, and I don’t think a bunch of videos from gay people telling me how great their lives were would’ve done a great deal for me. Especially since the central message seems to be ‘stick it out for however many years’. At the risk of Trot-faction style factionalism, this is more my speed.

Either way, I’m tired of shrugging this stuff off. Tired of having to live with every libel. Tired of having representatives that don’t represent half of what they’re supposed to. I think we need a bit more militancy. When Nick Griffin was on Question Time, I remember him drawing a distinction between well-behaved, behind-closed-doors don’t-frighten-the-horses gays, and ‘militant homosexuals’, who were apparently ‘really creepy’. I think it’s incumbent upon LGBT people to creep out people like that.

So, I’m going to be devoting a lot more blogging time to rants, I suspect. In the wider view, what can you do about it? Well. You could donate to something worthwhile (do your research first, as the Stonewall business illustrates). But the main thing is, I think, that if you’re gay, closeted, and it’s not going to kill you, come out. Half the problem with LGBT rights is that we’re too much of an invisible minority. Motherfuckers gotta learn.

And once you’ve done that, everything you can do that fucks with peoples’ heads is an improvement. Making out in the street. Holding hands. Going out in a PVC miniskirt or giant combat boots and other such genderfuck. A bit less timidity is what’s needed, as far as I’m concerned. Worth noting that just about every advance in LGBT rights has come from people organising and demanding them, not just waiting on the goodwill of their betters. Call people out on their bullshit.

Still here? Oh well, it was worth a try. I suppose I’d better furnish a description then, hadn’t I? Essentially, it’s a hobby (‘sport’ would probably be overdoing it) wherein a depressingly large number of depressing men run around fields and woods firing little plastic pellets at each other.

Now, the devotees of airsoft are a truly cosmopolitan mix; you have the sinister halfwit Nazi types with the extensive collections of SS ‘memorabilia’, the pervy old men, the ex-squaddies working off their mid-life crises after their time in the Army Catering Corps by pretending they were in the SAS (they’d tell you about it, but it’s all top secret, innit), and the obligatory handful of pimply youths who enjoy playing with guns and trying to spend as little time as possible unsupervised around the aforementioned pervy old men. Airsoft flatters itself a more grown-up version of paintballing, which perhaps inevitably leads to a lot of these social rejects talking in earnest, loving tones about killzones and the three-block war (not just an airsoft phenomenon – you get it in videogames, too).

So naturally you can see how it’d appeal to me.

I’ve been airsofting all of once (which may put the above little rant into perspective), having been dragged to one of these shoot-your-friends game-days by my friends as a kid. I can’t say it was a pleasant experience, as you can probably guess. Running full-tilt into a branch conveniently positioned at face-level (I’m just that well co-ordinated) probably didn’t help much, to be honest, but at the time it seemed entirely too close to a) exercise and b) something likely to lead to me having to show the court on a doll where the bad man touched me.

Which leaves me with a dilemma, because the other day, someone linked me to a Wikipedia article about ballistics (yes, I have strange friends – at the same time I was also conducting conversations about how it’s impossible to find good tiramisu these days, and why the Jaguar E-Type is sex on wheels), and this set off a massive interweb spree that ended with 128 tabs open in Firefox, and me seriously considering spending actual, tangible money on an air pistol and some little paper targets to take my frustration out on.

My twelth birthday party left a lot to be desired.

The thing is, I don’t want to be That Guy. Possibly you know the one I mean. The one who totally could’ve been in the army, honest. The target demographic for Soldier of Fortune, or in his older form the sort of person who hangs around in his local claiming to have been the first man onto the balcony in the Iranian Embassy Siege. A side effect of the ‘more grown-up than paintball’ effect is that there are genuinely people who spend thousands of pounds on this stuff, and frankly, I fear becoming one of them. There’s actually an airsoft site not too far away from me, and with a certain perspective, running around the woods shooting at drunken Scotsmen seems like it could be… well, a laugh.

Things, however, have changed. Back in the day (he said authoritatively), safety consisted of my friend’s dad handing me a FAMAS and telling me to be careful where I pointed it. Now there’s a rather involved security process to ensure criminals don’t get their hands on the deadly pellet-firing menaces (seriously, you could have someone’s eye out), or one has to take the (rather sensible) precaution of having it painted bright orange or similar to avoid having an interesting meet-and-greet with your local armed response unit (and I’m too pretty for jail).

My own internalised war-nerd guilt and repression aside, it’s interesting to me what this says about our national psyche. The UK is thoroughly gun-control (unless you live in Sandford), and I love that about us. It’s something thoroughly ingrained in our post-war culture. While Tennessee is debating whether or not it’s acceptable to take a gun into a restaurant or a place of worship (and in America, they often amount to the same thing), it’d be unthinkable (not to mention illegal) to own a gun over here purely for self-defence.

A fine dining experience.

But it does strike me that this attitude also has downsides. For one thing, when there’s no more room in Hell and the dead rise to stalk the earth, we’re going to be stuck with throwing our record collections at them. But less facetiously, I think as a nation (or a national stereotype, at any rate), when guns are involved with something, we do have a collective tendency to lose our shit. Granted, that’s because any time the issue comes up in the news cycle, it’s either because one of the aforementioned nutters has finally snapped and stalked from house to house, putting structurally-superfluous new holes in innocent people; because some yokel used his shotgun to kill a sort-of-mostly-innocent burglar; or because the police have shot someone for being a shade too brown/Irish/generally suspicious.

All in all, the effect seems in this patchouli-scented, organic-buying Guardian subscriber’s view to be that anyone who has anything to do with the nasty bangsticks who isn’t one of Our Boys (TM, PBUH, copyright News International 12/9/2001) must bring themselves to climax over back issues of Guns and Ammo. Then again, if that’s the case, there’s probably a job for them somewhere.

As for myself, I’m stuck in a moral minefield. Guns, the Nice Liberal part of my brain tells me, are Bad. The Responsible Adult part tells me they’re puerile and idiotic. But always the monkey hindbrain speaks, and mostly what it says is, “HURRR WANNA PLAY WITH GUNS”.

Maybe I’ll just save up and buy myself an old deactivated Lee-Enfield (amusingly, easier to buy than an airsoft gun) and hang it above the fireplace to encourage debate at my dinner parties. What an interesting dichotomy between a beautiful design and a singularly ugly purpose, they’ll say. What a neat comment on the nature of colonialism, ancient and modern. And mostly I’ll just smile, because I enjoy the irony of using as a conversation starter something built, more than anything else, as a conversation ender.