We're All Going To Hell

Yesterday I went shopping. Since the truth is banal, pretend I was off to Louis Vuitton to bag one of their latest.

As I walked up a shiny Whitechapel street, I passed a man lying - apparently unconscious, probably asleep, possibly dead - on a set of steps. A can of cider was next to him.

Terrible, eh? It was a cold day, too. I thought - briefly - hey, I should do something. What, though? What should I do? 

What anybody nowadays would do. I carried on walking. Didn't check for a pulse, didn't slap him around his cheeks to see if I could wake him up, didn't kick him in the ribs and check for money. Just walked on.

Yeah.

About 10 steps later, I thought about what I was doing. All that stuff they taught me in primary school about helping out, about being the Good Samaritan, prodded my conscience. I was doing something Really Bad.

But it would be fine! Because walking towards me was a young man, all smiley and competent. He clearly wasn't a misanthrope. He'd have his conscience screwed into the sticking place. He'd Do Something.

Damn right he did something. He walked past. So did the next three people who passed the body: the jogger, the young girl, the Nun*. They all kept going.

There you go. The modern world. Of course nobody stopped. We all saw the can of booze, we all made the judgement. Plus, this is the modern world. This is modern London. Sure, I could stop to help the fallen, but I'd probably end up with a knife in my ribs as a thank you. Or I'd get sued. Find out I'd contravened some council directive about only approved First Aiders getting involved with the unconscious and the pathetic. Yeah, yeah. There are lots of reasons why I didn't do anything but the main one was that I couldn't be bothered. I wanted to do my shopping, wanted to get home. Just had the DVD boxset of Life On Mars delivered, see, and I wanted to watch that.

Things to do.

I did wonder, when I walked home, what I'd find. Would this poor bastard still be lying on the step? Would the rats have found him? Would somebody have finally done something?

In case you're wondering - or care - he was alive. Alive and well, in fact: he wasn't on the step anymore. He was standing outside the newsagents, eating a Ginsters cheese and onion pasty.

Happy ending. Good.

PS: Today I'm doing sympathy. Poor Britney.

*Of course the Nun didn't really just walk past. She spat on him, too, and kicked the guy in the ribs.

It's Always A Good Day

...when it starts with vomit on your bed. Two piles. Nice.

This post was going to be an opportunity to kvetch about Ricky Gervais and the sheer awfulness of celebrities who insist on telling us poor non-famous mites that it truly, really, awfully, sucks to be famous. Yes, I saw the Extras christmas special/end of series, and I'm truly grateful for what it taught me and the rest of us ordinary drones.

Yes, thanks to Extras, we can at least be grateful that we're not being snubbed at The Ivy by the latest reality celebrity to be excreted out of our TV sets and onto the front page of Heat. We might be in daily hell, screaming through from 8-til-5 at the sheer futility of what we're being forced to do in order to pay our rent, but at least we're not having to repeat the same stupid catchphrase day in and day out...

...yeah, right. Were we supposed to laugh? Was this supposed to be some kind of refreshing honesty? A celebrity saying that the whole media circus is bullshit...is this irony?

Trouble is, I'm sick to death of celebrities trying to tell us that, actually, fame is really, really difficult. No, being famous doesn't suck. In the scheme of things, it's a pretty good deal. Paparazzi everywhere? You can afford the restraining order: but you won't get one, because then where's the publicity?

Yuck. I can't even be bothered to complain about this anymore. I've got some vomit to clear up.