Shipping Off to Boston

I have decided to flee the country. That's right, I'm going to Canada, as soon as I get a visa. I'm in the process, so hopefully it will be in the next few months after I get back from Download.

The response to this has been somewhat underwhelming. I expected people to drop to their knees, screaming in denial with tears pouring down their faces. 'No, why did he have to leave us?' 'He was still so young!' and the classic, 'How will we ever cope without you, Stevie?' What actually happened ranged from between a shrug to the over enthusiastic 'it'll be great!' and 'go, get out and never come back!' which gives me a sneaking suspicion that condeming me to the frozen north was the plan all along.

There are several reasons why I've decided to go, as if anyone needed an excuse to leave this god-forsaken cultural wilderness inhabited by prehistoric brutes and pretentious yuppies. The two formost reasons are listed below.

1) Morally Ambiguious Weather

The sky above England is a derranged schitzophrenic psychopath. This is scientifically true.

It snowed last week. In April. It snowed heavily, and it struck just as I was leaving for work. It wasn't the blistering cold, the wet feet or the fact I turned up at work looking like a Yeti and raging twice as much. I'm upset because of the fact that it had specifically chosen that particular day in April, the one day I have a reason to leave my dark and soiled lair, just to fuck me over. It is like the heavens themselves have transformed into a raging hormonal teenager, scorching us maniacally with blistering desert heat one minute whilst pelting us with rain, hail, snow, melancholia and angst the next. This interruption of mauradering arctic blasts was wedged between two days of glorious sunshine, the kind of weather than means I'll be attending a barbeque on Saturday. Again, this is in April, a month with precious few redeeming qualities.

I told this to someone and they pointed out, not unjustly, that it snows a lot in Canada and goes 22 below. This is true, but what is also true is that it is predictable. You expect a little snow in the Land of Always Winter, and the three day summer is quite beautiful to behold. It's not for warmer climes I'm moving. It is for the comfort of having weather you are genuinely prepared for.

2) Everything I Ever Cared About Has Become an Obscene Pantomime

That was a bit extreme.

Recently, the second thing that made me come to the academic conclusion of 'fuck this for a game of soliders' is the way that somewhere, at some point in history, everything stopped mattering and became a hyper-real Punch and Judy show. It's almost like I'm trapped in a waking nightmare. I did, at one point, study politics on the slightly naive assumption that people are generally decent and that everything could be better once I'd done a bit of research and ironed out all of the kinks. A kind of masocistic optimism, I suppose. I was an happy-go-lucky idealist once upon a time, but this has long been in decline from the moment I realized that people are pretty horrible, not taking things seriously and that ultimately, a benevolent god would smite us from the very earth itself.

Politically, this has come to a head over Pastygate. I'm not sure if it's called Pastygate, but it is a phrase that someone, somewhere would coin. And in a free and fair society, that person would have been laced by machine gun fire infront of their kids.

The pasty row blew up a few weeks ago when the Tories tried to slap VAT on bakery products, which caused a moral outrage and panic buying of sausage rolls. What should have been a rather innocuous price hike accompanied by big business grumbling to itself became a national spectacle. The whole premise, right from the off, was the assumption that something as ridiculous as a steak bake was suddenly critically important to us as a nation. The trouble is, that without going too in depth, it was really fucking stupid. I've long been of the assumption that politicans are laughing at us, but really - Pastygate?

I mean. Really?

It's like anything on the Horror Channel. How can you not realize he's the sociopath?

Cameron desperately defended his policy by defaulting to his 'man of the people' routine, inisiting that he had eaten one of these 'so-called pastry sandwiches' and enjoyed the oozing goodness inside. Miliband went a step further and bought some sausage rolls. Newspapers tried to outdo each other with coverage of the unfolding scandal and how they could imaginatively shoehorn pastry related jokes into their headlines. The entire debacle was like watching the last 20 minutes of Downfall, where a bunch of serious Nazi officers get drunk and then shoot themselves in the face.

Somewhere, while David struggled to remember when he bought his last pasty, thousands of people lost their jobs as Game went into administration. People died while their incapacity benefits were reassessed. Everyone agreed it had been a fantastic piece of theatre. There was a roll on the snare drum, followed by curtains.

So yeah, I'm leaving Britain for as long as legally possible, or until everyone has given up pretending and descended into rampant hedonism, casual bouts of excessive violence and cannibalism.