Here’s the piece

I appreciate that there have been many genuinely terrible events this year, but those that have sickened me the most haven’t involved massive loss of life or the destruction of entire nations, but have been instead smaller, less obviously catastrophic, incidents, which nonetheless seem to suggest that we, as a species, have no heart and soul, and deserve to be destroyed by global warming as soon as is practically possible. Here’s my top ten!

1) Irish bookies Paddy Power add a promotional jockey figure to the back of the 3000 year old English chalk hill figure, The White Horse of Uffington. The horse may have been a tribal emblem, or have been of religious significance. To me it’s a beautiful place of pilgrimage after a contemplative walk along the Ridgway, one of the most edifying long distance paths in the world.
To Paddy Power it was a publicity opportunity, that’s all, and it saddens me whenever I think of the desecration they inflicted on the horse’s graceful lines. Bookies operate a tax on desperation.
I hope everyone who works for Paddy Power, or thought this was funny, is fucked to death by a giant white horse, the cold-hearted sport morons.

2) Poachers cut off thousands of rhinos’ horns, which have no medicinal value, for the Vietnamese homeopathy market.
Pretty soon there won’t be any more rhinos, but Vietnamese people who’ve drunk powdered rhino horn will still be dying painfully of cancer, which is some consolation I suppose.

3) Jimmy Carr dodges tax. 99% of the highly-paid work Carr does is a futile waste of time which degrades the human spirit.
But at least, we assumed, he was paying tax on the massive fees he received for it, and putting something back into schools, hospitals etc. Except that he wasn’t.
John Bishop said, “Jimmy Carr’s tax arrangements are like his jokes. Every comedian in the country wishes they’d thought of them.” You could say that. Or you could say, “Jimmy Carr’s tax arrangements are like his jokes. Easy to admire from a technical point of view but lacking in any essential moral core.”
And Carr’s only punishment? To be briefly satirized by John Richardson on 8 Out Of 10 Cats, and then shouted at by some builders. Hopefully this will at least sabotage Carr’s shark-eyed attempts to work the Liberal Satire Market on shit like Channel 4’s 11 O’Clock Live. He writes good gags though and once offered to lend me money. But it’s not enough.

4) Chris Moyles dodges tax. Same as Jimmy Carr, except marketing himself as ‘ordinary bloke’, whilst stealing your 90 year old gran’s license money, rather than that dirty cash of Alcopop companies that sponsor all Channel 4 shows.
Worse than Jimmy Carr then. And he tried to cover it up.
Imagine taking money for “The Gospel According To Chris Moyles”, admitting in your own introduction that you knew it was a bit of a shit book, and then not even paying the tax on the fee. How can he live with himself?

5) From beyond the grave, Jimmy Savile’s secret Glam rock Dracula reign of terror allowed the right and media big business to kick the apparently self-loathing BBC to death. And you tolerated it.
Remember that, when all TV is I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and all TV news is Adam Boulton licking gravy out of George Osborne’s gusset. Remember that you stood by and did nothing.

6) Danny Boyle’s Isles Of Wonder is temporarily viewed by people who have never been to the theatre in their lives as somehow subversive, but is in fact the last gasp of publicly funded art.
Boyle thought he was slyly mocking the government with his millions of dancing NHS nurses, but the assembled dignitaries just stood back and smiled through gritted teach because they knew they were about to destroy for ever all the regional theatre operations that nurtured this smug liberal hipster, once they’d milked him and all his gullible volunteer friends dry for the grand opening ceremony of their sterile corporate egg and spoon festival.

7) James Dyson, who invented a kind of wanker’s Hoover, described the whole idea of teenagers being interested in arts and culture as “going off to study French lesbian poetry”, a dismissal that manages to be racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-intellectual all at once. Good French lesbian poetry renders Dyson’s Hoover irrelevant anyway.
It doesn’t matter how dirty your flat is if you have a book of French Lesbian poetry to transport you. Here’s hoping Dyson’s millionaire penis will be torn off in the suckpipe of one of his own Hoovers, a fate that would never befall a French lesbian poet.

8) Young rich people living in shared Hackney houses. Imagine Jack Whitehall. Now imagine loads of Jack Whitehalls, some of whom are women, all living in a shared house, the front yard piled high for years with rotting pizza boxes, because they’re just passing through, temporarily, raping East London for dirty-realist experiences, until their parents buy them all luxury flats way off West.
They’re the only kind of young people that can afford this city now and that’s why it’s dying. Imagine them, with their double-barrelled names and braying laughs, having noisy all night parties, the decks operated by a man in a deep sea diving helmet, inflicting ironic 80s Human League records on the lovely little old lady two doors down, whose husband fell at Dunkirk, and for what? For these Jack Whitehall faced cunts?

9) Drug dealers do business outside my door from 11 pm – 4 am most nights, which I don’t mind in of itself, but they allow their menacing weapon-dogs to foul the footpath incessantly and with nonchalant impudence.
What can you expect? They have already abandoned the social contract. But should my two year old have to stamp her wellies into excrement which could blind her just so shared Hackney houses full of Jack Whitehalls can stay up all night talking about how hilarious Rufus Hound is on that thing.

10) Last week I woke up at three in the morning and looked out of my window to see a hooded man, leaning on my gate and pissing through it, for two or three minutes, onto my path. There are many bushes and walls within a few seconds’ walk from my gate. At the end he took a tissue out of his pocket and wiped the excess urine from his penis, though not from my gate, before heading off, avoiding all he excrement left by the drug dealers’ dogs.
My kids potter about in the four foot square space we laughably call the front garden. I had to get up early and go out and throw Dettol over everything, being careful to wipe any frozen piss off the ironwork gate itself. What’s going on? Contempt.
A collective inability to see the bigger picture. It begins with Paddy Power shitting on the Uffington Horse and ends with a man pissing on my gate. I have hated 2012. I expect next year will be worse.