An awkward encounter led me into a moral maze, with a holy trinity fighting over my Scotch dosh
“The poor are always with us. So speaks the man who has not learned to use a whip correctly!” And also thus spake the unsung genius comedian Simon Munnery, in character in his 90s parody of impotent bedsit fascism, The League Against Tedium. The act seems arguably less satirical today as its best lines have become actual government thinking. What is Priti Patel’s proposed Channel migrant policy if not, however it is dressed up in the sterile language of info-deterrence and reasonable force and common sense and re-seized sovereignty and taking back control, merely cudgelling children back into the cold sea to die, the Kindertransport in satanic reverse? But what are we to do with the poor, who have the temerity to seem especially visible over the festive season, the smelly bastards?
A week before Christmas, I waited in the small hours at a bus stop outside Dalston’s Rio cinema, having spoken at the Covid-decimated London premiere of a film I wrote, King Rocker (“the new gold standard for rockumentaries” – the Scotsman). A babbling woman in a bobble hat approached me for money and, it being Christmas, I fished in my pocket. After all, it was highly likely the exuberant lich was in fact a manifestation of Christ himself, come to test my generosity, something that I am convinced has happened to me on several previous occasions. I would not banish this Dalston Christ to the lowly stable. I would welcome her at my Christmas Inn of Spare Change. For I am a good man.