The Duologue Currently Playing Out On Repeat Within My Brain

A casually-dressed but otherwise collected-looking woman, Frontal, sits contentedly on a wooden chair in a large, run-down hall. The "Retro Text The Nation" jingle from the Adam and Joe show floats quietly through the walls. Frontal strains to hear, and slumps dejectedly as she recognises it.

Frontal: Oh, God. Stuck on this again. I will be driven literally to distraction. (shouting) Shut up! I cannot think with this playing again and again! I'm trying to sum up my day and make new friends in just 140 characters!

Suddenly, a flurry of noise as a mostly identical but far shabbier woman, Limbic, bursts through the door, slamming it behind her and holding it shut, as if hordes of zombies are trying to scrabble through it. Frontal smirks at the sight.

Frontal: Ah, distraction. Right on cue. And what flight of fancy ails you today?

Limbic sidles over, looking around huntedly, and cowers by the chair.

Limbic: (hissing) It's already here!
Frontal: (dripping with sarcasm) Oh, poor you. What is?

Limbic shoves a well-thumbed copy of thelondonpaper into Frontal's hands. The headline screams "TUBE FEAR: SWINE FLU HITS CITY". Frontal scoffs and tosses it aside. Limbic screeches and pounces upon it, feverishly re-reading an article she's already memorised.

Frontal: Great. So you think we're going to die of a disease that is currently affecting 0.000000008% of the population of this country cos Murdoch has told you you will. More people have died in the last week sharpening pencils.
Limbic: No, no, no, this is the one. This is the big one. This is end of days stuff. Don't you remember that thing on the TV? That thing with that guy, and he was crumpled in the tunnel in the subway in New York, and then three days later every housing estate in Britain was like gulag redux?
Frontal: That was smallpox. And that other thing...oh yeah, FICTIONAL.

Limbic stares glumly into space. Suddenly she slaps a hand to her forehead.

Limbic: Oh, my head. My head hurts! Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God...

She frantically scans the article again and points to the list of symptoms. She stares imploringly at Frontal.

Frontal: Yeah, and how much liquid have you drunk today? Half a cup of tea. Why? Because you've been too busy staring at the computer, without your glasses on, compulsively updating the Guardian swine flu panic blog to go and get a drink. You don't have swine flu.
Limbic: (ignoring her completely, still reading paper) I've got a sore throat too!
Frontal: Your job involves you talking loudly, unnaturally and at length and you've had a very busy day. It's affected your throat as it often does. You don't have swine flu.
Limbic: (hand dramatically back on forehead) My head is hot!
Frontal: Your hand is cold. You don't have swine flu! Jesus, you haven't even BEEN on a tube!
Limbic: (screaming) People sneeze on buses too!

Limbic really quite upset with all this. Frontal sighs. Time to put a stop to it.

Frontal: (gently) Look...this is just a consequence of spending too much time watching 24 hour news channels. They hype this stuff up out of total necessity. They have to fill the time. You've been watching Charlie Brooker, haven't you?
Limbic: (warily) Yeah...
Frontal: We make a passably intelligent person between us. We know that we've not been near anyone who's been to Mexico, that our chances of catching swine flu from the few random people we've been in contact with are very slim, that it seems to be relatively benign in most people it affects, that modern medicine is more prepared than ever for a pandemic, and that it's more likely we'll die being flung joyfully under a bus by a passing murderer.
Limbic: (calmer) I guess that makes sense...
Frontal: Good. Now let's just get on with our lives, and not let ourselves get driven to a breakdown by sensationalist tabloid reports.

Limbic is thoughtful. Then a sudden startling revelation.

Limbic: Oh, sensationalist, is it? Well, answer me this. Has Ben Goldacre rubbished it yet?

A beat. Frontal is stunned. She wasn't ready for that one.

Frontal: What?
Limbic: Has. Ben. Goldacre. Rubbished it. Yet!
Frontal: (knows she's utterly defeated) No.

Limbic leaps up triumphantly and throws her hands in the air. Distant squealing fills the room. Triumph turns to horror, and they run away in a flap. Exeunt, pursued by a swine.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this, the WHO has raised the pandemic level, and we're certainly all going to die. And as you may be able to tell, Limbic has taken full control.

When I Say "We", Of Course I Just Mean "I". You Are Wonderfully Intelligent

Lo, the internet! A brave new world, filled with exciting words and pictures and sound and vision, only 0.01% of which is extremely pornographic, according to QI! (That does seem a little low to me. Possibly the genteel middle-class QI view on pornography is different from mine, and they don't classify it as truly hardcore until the number of phalluses exceeds the number of orifices by at least three) But yet, I am a weaselly creature of habit when it comes to surfing, looking at the same old websites in the same old order - email, email the second, a rifle through all of those lovely gents+dames over there on the right, and finally the peerless BBC news website, which will inform me in clear and unpatronising terms about interesting events around the country and globe, tickle my frivolousity gland with tasteful celebrity factoids, and lie to me about the weather.

But recent events have dragged me from my comfort zone. Try as I might, and believe me, I've tried till my nonchalance-controlling muscles screamed in agony, I cannot ignore the current stinking wave of news stories surrounding politics and the sleazy, nasty, money-grabbing politicians in this once-great land (TM every tabloid reporter currently working furiously on "Kettlegate - Now It's Even Blacker!"). So I ventured into the Politics section to see how long it would be before the picture of David Cameron's chinless, smug face made me so angry I condensed into a super-hot ball of fury and spontaneously launched into an ironically serene orbit around the planet. My ceiling's structural integrity thus far remains undisturbed, which surprises me.

Anyhow. There's budgetry screaming, smearing Dollys, and spouses wanking with subsidised bathplugs, and it all seems to be...well, completely pointless and irrelevant. So there's this bunch of blokes who run things, and most of the running things stuff carries on out of the public eye because it's terribly boring and involved and to do with clauses and sub-clauses and this is why the BBC Parliament channel is niche viewing for democracy nerds and pasty middle-aged white men in suits fetishists. But the rest of it, the rest of the politics that we see, is peacock-posturing and sniping and point-scoring. Great, but who are they talking to? When Cameron splutters indignantly about the irresponsible culture of sleaze, and Brown does his usual mumbled pronouncements of denial interspersed with flashed smiles revealing micro-second glimpses into a truly psychotic mind, who's listening? Us? We may listen for a few minutes, but then we'll get bored and start thinking about Twitter, or Resident Evil, or Creme Eggs. It won't make any difference - we're such a bunch of craven thickos that the 40% of us who actually can be arsed to drag ourselves 300 feet down the road to stick slip in slot will just vote for whoever the Sun tells us to. Such blithering imbeciles that we'll actually spend our hard-earned, credit-crunched money texting into a news channel opinion poll to tell them we don't know how the budget will affect us. We shouldn't be trusted with a democracy.

But yet the pantomime continues, eating up valuable news space that could be used for even more breathless (heh) panic about swine flu (or, One Flu To Rule Them All). Politicians will continue to be somewhere between worthless peons and exemplary members of society, depending on who you listen to, and us numbnuts will continue on our merry way being blithely unaffected by all the ranting and raving and mouth-frothing generated in Westminster and Wapping. Because we're too stupid to do any different.

World's Problems Solved By Multiplyed Pop Forces of G4 And 5ive

Oh yay! It's happened again. I've got all confused and don't know what to think about things. This week: G20 protests and anti-capitalists in general. Incidentally, I am making a small concession in their crusty direction by ruminating upon this subject not in one of my local dens of capitalistic fuck-piggery (RIGHT KIDS) Starbucks, but in an independent and groovy cafe-type thing. Even though it's so twee it's literally making me break out in hives. And yes, I mean literally. Cutesy blackboard menus scattered with chalked hearts? Check. Loaves of gorgeous-looking crusty (not hippy) bread idly lolling about the place like organic wheat Bacchuses? Check. A "pram station" to encourage that bilious of social sub-stratas, the "I claim I'm letting my child roam free to express his individualism but in fact I'm just ignoring him which is neglect bordering on child abuse" yummy mummy? Checaaaaarrgh!

So yes - I know exactly what to think about this so-saccharine-it-should-be-on-Gilmore-Girls caffeine zone. I don't know what to think about the anti-capitalist protesters. First of all. I may have a similar level of knowledge and understanding of the current economic crisis as a rusty and unloved garden trowel, but even I can glean that if capitalism was a person, it's currently experiencing the moment 30 seconds after that "pretending to topple off a cliff to freak people out" gag goes horribly wrong. Why protest about it now? Rebranding Coco Pops as Choco Krispies didn't work and died a death, and no-one's still protesting about that, wearing cartoon monkey masks and squatting in Tesco Express. OK, I concede that it may have got us into this mess - capitalism, not Coco Pops - but ranting at a storm as the clouds disappear over the horizon strikes me as pretty damn pointless.

Even though the protesters are totally right. And I can see that, and I agree with their principles, and of course the world would be a fine and beautiful place if there were no fat cats and no greedy bankers and everyone had a daisy drawn on their face and danced with free abandon in the streets. (Oh! Mother of all shudders) But they're just so annoying! When I was watching the footage of the protests today, watching the dreadlocks shake and the hippy bums parking on the tarmac, I slowly turned into a 1950s bowler-hatted Tory, until I found myself screaming at the television "Get a haircut! GET A JOB!" They annoy me in exactly the same way that animal rights activists do. How come they only ever want to save cute and fluffy animals? Foxes, polar bears, bunny-wunnies... I never see people camped outside Boots showing me graphic pictures of snakes being experimented on, or claiming that giant venomous scorpions have rights too. They're worse body fascists than Heat magazine.

So I remain confused. I like a McDonalds once in a while, and want the banks to lend me many hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy into the bourgeois capitalist notion that I need to own my own home, but I also like smashing windows and shouting at horses and the general process of "daubing". What to do, what to do...