Last Orders

You’re in the pub; it’s been a good night. You’ve had too much to drink and you realize that irresistible doner kebab demon is whispering in your ear again. You promised you’d never listen to him again but you know that, like every time before, you’re going to capitulate this time, too.

The barman has just called “last orders” and closing time is fast approaching. It all started well, reached a high, and now you’re looking at a future which contains the inevitable multi-coloured doner street splatter as you stagger home.

You try to remember the lyrics to that Cohen song but all you can think of is the phrase Toes In Line, which makes you giggle.

The night has ended and it’s time to close the doors on all the fun.

I kind of get the sense that the barman running the Pub of Western Progress has called last orders; it’s closing time on the West. We started off with high hopes, had some fun, went too far and got a bit too giddy, and are now going to bitterly regret things in just a short while as the doors are closed for the last time, and we wake up to the perpetual hangover of global governance in our “best interests”.

Oh, you might be allowed a drink or two, provided you’ve been fully stabbed with whatever the next Pharma concoction masquerading as a vaccine is, and you haven’t strayed beyond your 15 minute ghetto habitation zone, or posted anything your government disagrees with online, but forget the doner. It’ll be a McMaggot, or a Roach Wrap¹, because there won’t be anything else on the menu. You’ll be staggering home, not because you’re drunk, but because you’ve had to put on seven jumpers and three large overcoats because no one can afford to put the bloody heating on².

You’ll be allowed just enough alcohol so that the lady with a beard and that weird bulge in their pants begins to look oddly attractive. There’s still a part of you coherent enough to profoundly hope she, or it, doesn’t find you attractive because if you refused any advance you could be jailed for being transphobic.

We’ve built back bitter - and I’m not talking about a decent pint of Adnam’s here.

If we still have those things called pubs in the New Era of Safety™, conversations will be monitored to ensure that no one is harmed by unduly hateful speech and that people don’t start spreading that Misinformation™ stuff all over the place. It’s quite possible that we’ll all have to have those voice-activated digital “assistants” in our homes - to protect the kids, you understand, because we can’t allow parents to abuse their kids by wrongly calling them a boy or a girl.

But rest assured, they’ll never, ever, ever be used for inappropriate surveillance. You can trust us.

We’re facing a crisis - and we need to try to keep the pub open. It’s not a crisis of some hypothesised ViralDoom™, or some GlobalBoiling™, it’s a crisis of governance. More and more we’re seeing our governments take upon themselves a more Maoist role - we know what’s good for you and we’re going to make you do whatever we decide is best for you. If you disagree, you’ll need to be re-educated through the techniques of legal sanction or cancelling, and you’ll do most of it to yourselves as you back away from the flood of abuse you get from your fellow citizens for straying from the Approved™ narrative.

Being in musical mode this morning, I’m reminded of Pink Floyd’s song Mother from their album The Wall.

Whilst not hitting every parallel to the totalitarian progression we’re seeing in our governments today, it does capture something. They’re building walls around us; a wall around our cities, our food, our energy, and even our thoughts. Our mother governments might let us sing a bit, but they won’t let us fly.

And where would we be without gloriously mixing up our musical metaphors? Metaphors exist on a spectrum, you see. So we can see that they’re building these walls around us and they’re not even putting a bloody door in them.

Today’s pessimism is all Cohen’s fault. I knew I shouldn’t have listened to the miserable bugger’s Live in London album this morning³. Or maybe it’s the pints of Adnam’s bitter I had last night?

1. Made with cricket flour

2. We won’t be in danger of global boiling anymore because all the Earth’s “greenhouse” gases have been eliminated and now it’s fucking freezing.

3. And what a brilliant album it is