We British have a wonderful ability to screw up. Just as we’re strutting around, proud as peacocks parading our arrogance and unbearable ‘attitude’ with our heads held up high, the hand that no one sees drops a banana skin right in front of us and it’s all over. It’s the one thing we can rely on. It’s possibly why we have such a highly developed sense of humour. We have no choice. The alternative is to live with one long permanent depression for when we look around us, there is an awful lot of arrogance about. That’s a lot of bananas. Whenever my frustration and anger at the world takes me close to the very edge of my sanity, I take comfort in the thought ‘Ignore it. It’ll go away ,’ and in time it does. There’s no need to take a pill to block it out. It’s more fun being straight. I watch and I wait.

Blair’s government is wonderful entertainment and overflowing with bananas. They can try and socially engineer us all they like. They’ve been rumbled. No fancy PR firm can save them now. They will never succeed in taking away our initiative, our freedom of speech, our imagination, our sense of the ridiculous, or our souls. Yet they never stop trying . We may no longer believe in going to church on Sundays and we may not belong to any particular faith, but despite that huge social change, our souls remain intact. It survived the ruthless side of Thatcherism and it will survive this sly and creepy period of politics. Our spirit is too strong for anyone to crush. Hearts and minds? They belong to us. Not to the creeps and thugs in Tony Blair’s government.

We can’t ignore terrorists even though we have tolerated muggers and crack heads and drug barons for years. Muggers can keep their flattering name. They’re still thieves and their victims aren’t the mugs the name suggests. But never mind. They tried to win our tolerance but they failed. Crackheads can break into a pensioner’s home , rape her , rob her, terrorise her and kill her, but we won’t be told by Jonathan Ross that drugs are a bit of a lark. We don’t really mind him . But we mind crack heads. Jonathan’s funny; some of the time. But he’ll screw up one day and all that money will attract endless parasites and sycophants. It’s his soul that’ll see him through, not the money.

Drug dealers can lord it over whole neighborhoods in our cities and play with their precious little Kalashnikovs, terrorizing all they please ,like the mentally retarded soulless morons they are. They’ll murder anyone who stands in their way , but they’re still jerks and cowards and certainly as ruthless and ignorant as anyone the Middle East has to offer . I find dealers more obnoxious in some ways because their God is money. So none of us are going to be that impressed with the next rock star who tells us all about his excursions into drugs and how it made him the genius he thinks he is. We’re never going to buy the notion put forward by music and Art critics, that Art has to disturb. By that standard Bin Laden is the greatest artist of them all. Flying planes into Twin Towers was original, inspired, and disturbing. But we’re never going to swallow that horseshit. (Pardon me, I’m not perfect either ). Sooner or later we all fall on that banana skin and suffer the humiliation we deserve.

So let’s not get carried away with the thousands of illiterate graduates and ex-punks who are now in middle management trying to tell us how to live, what to eat, what we can and cannot say, what to think, what to wear, or what we are allowed to do in our gardens and homes, or which CD we should be listening to, because one day they’ll all be gone and the last thing they will hear is the sound of laughter as they fall flat on their backsides on all those banana skins.

Faith is a wonderful thing.