the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There’s no getting away from it. I’m in a bad mood, and that’s official. So bad, in fact, that at times I ape Billy Liar. For those of you who haven’t seen the classic British film ‘Billy Liar’ – and you really need to take a long hard look at yourselves if you haven’t – Billy is a fantasist who yearns to escape the drab northern town where he lives with parents to seek fame and fortune in London.

Well he thinks he does.

Anyway, at one point in the film Billy is outling his plans to his parents during breakfast, who in a 1950’s provincial way, pour scorn on his ambition. Billy retreats into his fantasy world, where imagines machine gunning them to death over their boiled eggs and toast. I know how he feels. In my mind, I’ve committed the most unspeakably heinous crimes countless times throughout my life. It’s a sign of just how much of a demented wrongcock I am, that hardly any of my fantasises have ever been about sex. That’s for the unimaginative. There are so many other, darker, more comic, more twisted, more..imaginative ones to play with.

For example;

Last week, the Sunday Sport was reporting that a couple had found a novel way to earn during the lockdown, by streaming online themselves having sex, rather wonderfully on the same day that most of front pages were full of palace press releases telling us how wonderful, how heartfelt and how just utterly brilliant in every way her address to the nation had been the night before. Coincidentally I had just found out that so many people had been flouting social distancing measures that the authorities had decided to close Brockwell Park to enforce them. This got me thinking. In a deeply twisted way, I hope you won’t be surprised to learn.

Just imagine, well no don’t, not if you’ve just eaten that is, that the laughing queen from jollity farm and phil the greek threaten to do a live two hour sex marathon every day until people stop flouting government advice. And don’t think having a screen turned off will help! This is a fantasy, my fantasy, so my rules, so every screen can be remotely hijacked and turned on – unlike the viewers – and so steam the sexathon live. They could even threaten to take requests, you know, like on those ‘adult’ channels that only broadcast after midnight where viewers text in requests for the performers to perform.

After four days of this the streets would be as empty as phil.

Another one concerns anti-vaccers, people who are so set against vaccination for their child, believing that somehow there’s a conspiracy afoot involving the government, the pharmaceutical industry, Bigfoot and the entire medical establishment. That they have pulled back the curtain to reveal the truth, which they share with equally delusional fuckwits on social media. My fantasy is this.

That at some point a vaccine for CO-VID 19 is developed and a nationwide programme of vaccinations is announced and people arrive at testing centres to get it. A somebody armed only with a white coat, ridiculous hair and a clipboard checks peoples names in the queue to get in and every so often, asks a family. Yes, there’s a bit of a problem, they say. The children can be vaccinated, so to can any adults in the family who didn’t post on social media about how they were. They’d have detailed social media evidence, proving that Snowden right to back them up. They didn’t believe in vaccinations then, so what had changed, apart from their desire not to die?

The third – and probably not the last fantasy I’ll have about all this – concerns this new fangled desire to cook for hospital workers and my housemate. Not like that! She cooked something a few days ago, with cabbage and something turned the liquid an unspeakable shade of grey. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in a 1960’s documentary about the Soviet Gulags. Anyway, she cooks, puts it in some Tupperware, takes it to our local hospital where she gives it to some nurses.

A day later they are all stricken by severe food poisoning, the severity of it depends on my mood.

So some days, like today, its fatal.