Are you Remembrancing properly?

These days, you can’t claim to have truly honoured the fallen unless you’ve had a poppy-adorned howitzer on display outside your bungalow since at least early October. And you’re rightly smeared as despicable and unpatriotic – unworthy of enjoying the dwindling freedoms our military heroes fought to preserve – if you haven’t scattered a load of limbless mannequins on your front lawn to add that special something to your DIY Somme ahead of Remembrance Sunday (a scene of unsettling thousand-yard stares because they’ve seen some shit in TK Maxx). Is your poppy smaller than a standard hubcap? Well, fuck you if it is!

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Stop talking Britain down? Seriously, how do we talk this place UP right now?

Boris Johnson waving two union flags while stuck on a zip line

There’s an old YouTube video of a festival-goer wandering out of a portaloo while a Dutch TV crew are filming the facilities, who then proceeds to wash his hands in a fetid urinal. As if hallucinating a crystal clear babbling brook and snow-white bar of Dove, he picks up a urinal cake from one end of the trough then shuffles down to the other end where the piss is more plentiful, swishing his hands around in the frothy, citrine shallows. But as he rubs the deoderising block between his palms, he slowly catches on. “This isn’t a urinal, is it?” he asks the Haarlem105 TV presenter. “I think it is, man,” she regretfully informs him.

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We’re all fucked

It’s just over a week since the General Election result cemented our darkest fears, which saw unkempt pathological liar Boris™ returned to Downing Street as the country’s Supreme Leader. A whole week since I drove to work in oppressive silence, unable to bear the sound of gloating Tory Brexiters congaing through the Today programme’s studio.

A tweed-cloaked vampire

A couple of months ago, Campaign magazine featured frog-faced demagogue Nigel Farage on the front cover of their ‘Love & Hate’ issue. They used Charlie Clift’s portrait of the Brexit Party dictator, which shows the smirking scourge of ‘the elite’ in a pinstripe suit, sporting £200 cufflinks, drawing on a £20 Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure Especial Cigar. That Farage has managed to portray himself as a non-elite – fighting for “good, ordinary, decent folk” – is a unique ‘brand’ of deception in itself.

The new normal

Last Friday felt a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where everyone appeared to look outwardly normal but you knew that some of the people you were brushing shoulders with had voted to leave the EU. It was strangely disconcerting.