To combat corona, the government are reassembling the Isaac Levido-led team that won the election. The virus is sure to be defeated by cynically re-edited footage of Keir Starmer appearing confused or by faking Facebook posts and temporarily renaming the Conservative party website coronavirusgohome.com. You cannot beat Covid-19 with lies. That plague ship has sailed.…
“Am I right in remembering you cultivate a colony of head lice in your cellar, Lee?” Nicola Bridgens, former artist in residence at London Zoo, for whom I once provided the voice of a depressed black widow in an insect house installation, called me, coveting my Pediculi humanus capitis. Ten years ago, my little boy…
“When the government closed the pubs, I said – I didn’t mince my words, I said to them myself, HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” MS Toilets, The Wetherspoonland, 1922 A public health official friend tells me her colleagues now call the Covid-19 virus “Wetherspoon’s Mumps”, a darkly comic response to Wetherspoon boss Tim Wetherspoon’s initial…
In a Southend Oxfam shop last week, I found a decadent 70s paperback of Clark Ashton Smith’s Lost Worlds collection. In the 1932 story The Empire of the Necromancers, the Silver Death plague ravages the land of Zothique, and necromancers make the zombie survivors “labour in the vaults and serve their necrophiliac lust”. Within days,…
For a small fee, the opaquely funded Policy Exchange thinktank will exchange your old worn-out policy for a more rightwing one, chopped out in a pub toilet by co-founder Michael Gove. Nyaaaagh! Gerard Lyons’s uncut analysis of our thriving economic prospects under World Trade Organization tariffs has burned out my septum, and I’ve sneezed snot…
My friend Paul is revered in DJ circles for his vast collection of novelty singles, and his team of ironic selecters, wearing masks of 70s cartoon characters, regularly appear at hipster clubs laying Indonesian porno grooves on the jaded ears of the weird beards. “I’ve got the strangest gig,” he said, “so you’re going to…