“Good for her,” I thought. She’s obviously endured a trying and tempestuous day in carting around a living being inside her swollen belly. Surely, one generous glug of life-affirming Rioja—straight from the bottle—won’t hurt the little sprog.

Plastered on this bottle of wine is a health warning. A red stripe strikes through the silhouette of a pregnant woman. She’s with child, as the devout say. In Council Estate English, she’s up the duff. With one hand pressed to her side, she exudes a fierce determination, like a marathon runner at the starting line. A pregnant woman lofting a bottle of wine to her lips isn’t meant to inspire admiration. Drinking in utero isn’t big nor clever.

And yet, I haven’t seen such a social pariah since my teenage years, whilst bouncing from house party to house party, on a council estate deemed ‘deprived’ by those fond of clipboards and Microsoft Excel. Such places seethe with visions one is not meant to see. You don’t see pregnant women waddle into the corner shop and appear with a bottle of blue WKD pressed to their lips these days. Nor do you see packs of sullen teenagers glomming outside the store, rehearsing their lines: “Excuse me, mate. You couldn’t get us a slab of Carling, could you? I am seventeen, like.” You don’t see that anymore. Not until last Friday evening.

The shop’s CCTV swivels ominously into view. Flashing across my eyes is the court report. My ruined career. What would my peers think?

We were once those kids outside the shop. Any man, nay—philanthropist—who obliged earned the title of ‘legend.’ Today, I suspect the term would be ‘weirdo’ or worse.

And so, with my future respectability hanging in the balance, I return to my teenaged charges with a slab of Peroni.

“They didn’t have Carling,” I say. This is a lie. Carling is the lager of the insufficiently ambitious. And white-working-class boys have nothing if not ambition.

“Not here, you silly sausage,” I yelp. “Round the corner.”

I hand off the slab of cans and bask in a glory earned only by accident of chronology and birth.

“Mate,” says the rangy one. “You’re the fucking GOAT.”

He palms a tepid can of Peroni into my hand as if it were a golden Rolex gifted after 30 years punching numbers in a cubicle.

The pack of teens scuttled towards the groves beside the river. The reedy one glanced back to dispense the coveted upward nod—a mark of respect amongst the tribe.

Those poor boys. Don’t they know that the chief medical officer recommends no more than fourteen units a week? Doctors claim so. That abstemious regimen—if you can withstand its life-dissolving rigour—adds four years to one’s life.

My humble role in their quest to sink a few beers beside the river earned me a cool two units. For their enterprise, the boys had 23 cans of premium lager between three.

That’s an ample seven each and two to barter for cigarettes or mild sexual favours amongst the girls they spend their every moment trying to impress. Or at least it was like that when I was 17.

Fourteen units. That’s around seven pints per week. The arithmetic of pure boredom. If West Ham, my perennially underachieving football team, ship two goals then I’m liable to sink fourteen units that evening. If they ship two by half-time, I’ll slake fourteen units in the fifteen-minute interval.

I suppose a mea culpa—as unfelt as it may be—is in order.

Supplying booze to underage drinkers (proxy purchasing) is a criminal offence, punishable by an on-the-spot fine of £90 or up to £5,000. Offenders, like your humble narrator, can face three months in jail.

Police can confiscate the illicitly gotten booze. And they do with gleeful abandon. The memory of spending my entire weekly wage—£27.50—on 48 cans of Carlsberg, only for the sociopathic PC Dillon to pour each and every hard-earned can down the drain, still hurts some twenty years on.

Then again, it’s a rite of passage. The penalty in seeing schools of teenaged boys scrolling on their phones—not up to no good—pains me more. Sinking a few Carling and confessing your love for your mates is a crucial landmark in growing up.

Those boys, and your admiration for them, feels indelible. In your head is the conviction that your mates at 17 will never wander nor stray far from the pack. They’ll be your mates at 21 and 37 and beyond. They’ll watch you get married and divorced and their kids will sink cans with your kids someday. They’ll be there until the end when they drop a handful of soil on your coffin. But they won’t. Best mates become awkward strangers.

They think their bond is forged in iron and hops. They don’t yet know that the upward nod of the tribe soon becomes the downward gaze of the mortgage-holder avoiding eye contact in the fresh produce aisle.

And so, I kid myself. That my little act of gratitude—illegal and foolish as it may have been—altered that well-worn path between friend and stranger, at least for a little while.

That unmistakeable triple knock on my front door didn’t happen. Despite my obsessive rumination, no policeman turned up to announce to polite society that I am a degenerate scumbag corroding the moral fibre of the nation’s youth.

They’re teenaged boys, after all. And if they have anything about them, they know that one doesn’t grass on one’s benefactor. Especially not one knighted the goat.

That’s right, I thought. I am the goat. If only for a day or two. They’ll find another good Samaritan willing to score them a slab of Carling. But he’d oblige in minimal fashion. He’d follow their instructions to the letter. He’d return with a slab of Carling—the beer of the woefully unambitious—whereas I dipped into my own pocket if only to elevate their tastes.

If I’m lucky, they’ll learn the two essential lessons of growing up. One: that the real world is vastly more hopeful than the one on their five-inch screens. And two: that life is too short to trade a cold beer today for an eternity in a nursing home tomorrow.

Oxford Sour now publishes full time.

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The Sad Death of Tabloid English

The last great folk poetry of the English-speaking peoples.

Once upon a time in Great Britain, you could not step five paces without a tabloid newspaper bunching around your ankles. Punchy papers such as The Sun and The Mirror papered over the pavements. Dripping in alarming red ink, the tabloids stained millions of fingers each day.

These newspapers flaunted their own vernacular. A compressed, bawdy, semi-literate poetry understood by the barrister and the bricklayer. They termed prisoners as lags. They routinely exposed vicars and love rats in sex shame hell. Sexual acts were always romps and unfailingly steamy. When gleefully exposing the bulimic carnal appetites of a Premier League footballer, The Sun rioted in tabloid morality: Prem Star probed in coke-romp shame.

Tabloid English was the national language of Tabloid England, an inglorious village of sixty million governed by shame and redemption playing king and executioner.

A typical story followed the hero’s journey. A love rat celeb probed in a steamy romp with a busty babe. His mugshot, dripping over millions of copies of The Sun, devastates his wag and tragic tot. Over the next week, readers absorbed daily developments in this love rat’s inglorious, public collapse. In cafes and pubs and salons and everywhere in between, they’d debate the finer points. In Sunday’s edition, our fallen hero breaks his silence. The love rat reveals his coke-booze shame. He apologises. His hero journey ends, ultimately, with redemption.

In today’s post-tabloid culture, redemption is in short supply. So too is shame. Few lament the passing of Tabloid English and its gaudy primal screams. But it served a vital social instinct. What replaced it is far from humane.

For want of a better term, I’ll call it Therapy English.

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At least she looked like her photos. Raven hair, feline eyes, heroin-chic frame. Never mind the venue—hip postcode, oat milk, Palestinian cola.

“Oh, you’re tall!” she said in italics.

What does one say to that? ‘Thanks, I worked ever so hard for this.’ Never mind. I sat down and ordered a flat white.

“Milk?” asked the barista.

“Just the, erm, normal milk. Please.”

The barista looked at me and began, silently, to calculate the likelihood that I voted Reform, liked Nigel Farage reels, and thought Palestine was a province of Narnia.

My date ventured: “So, you’re a writer? And how is that? What with AI and all? So that—Christopher—makes you… empathetic.”

My Fitbit buzzed. My heart thrummed at 155 bpm. Am I striding up Pen-y-Fan? No—my date looked like Jane from Breaking Bad. Readers with XY chromosomes will know how this ends.

I lost the ability to shepherd words down from my brain and neatly along my tongue. Verbs became nouns and nouns became verbs. Sentences sunk into quicksand. She enunciated each syllable of my name—Chris-tuh-fah­—like a child who never tired of play. This dissolved my pre-emptive list of dislikes.

Apart from the conviction that I might die or go mad at any moment, the date ended in success. As I tiptoed behind her out the door and into the daylight, I shot my most right-wing grin at the barista. Hard cheese, comrade.

It wasn’t just her looks. She taught me a new word each day. Granted, she didn’t lift them at will from the glorious Chamber’s Dictionary. There was empath and holding space and unpacking and processing and a mystical force called the patriarchy.

Her friends, needless to say, were not founding members of Oxford Sour. They branded anyone with wealth, intelligence, looks, or means beyond their ample supplies of each as privileged. Girl, 27, was resolute in her own foundations. But her friends sniffed out oppressive forces in a packet of Marlboro.

A BBC News alert could reduce them to inconsolable foam. A pinging iPhone spun Girl, 27—the in-house therapist—into a maelstrom of soothing buzzwords.

If, say, Bloomsbury Publishing rejected one of these friends with a terse email, this was not proof of a perilous job market but a conspiracy of men. Men who looked like me.

My skin colour and genitalia convicted me of high crimes. These disappointments were at least partly my fault. The epithet—white male—clouded the air like sarin gas.

They called this antiracism—one word. Lurking in bottles of culturally appropriated sriracha, snarling at the bottom of Daunt Books tote bags—the white male conjured juju spells like a mad witch-doctor.

Despite my misgivings, I joined them at a gathering in an enclave of East London. The lampposts were festooned with Stop Gentrification! stickers daubed by the hand of trust-funded arts graduates who wouldn’t notice if their rent jumped from £1,200 to £5,000 overnight.

On the bamboo coffee table, I plonked an eight-pack of a mid-range lager called Red Stripe, a Jamaican beer. To my non-astonishment, Girl, 27, had orbiting her head like satellites a constellation of men dressed like turn-of-the-century stevedores. They all worked in something called ‘creative.’

My reserves of safe-for-consumption small talk slicked dry within seven minutes. A balding, ventricose Millennial who smiled when he should nod and nodded when he should smile, shuffled forward. Eyeing the can in my hand, he said:

“Red Stripe. Nice. That’s Jamaican beer, right?”

On the can rested the words ‘Red Stripe Jamaican Beer.’ The only accurate observation of the night.

Heads swivelled towards my choice of beer. In my head swirled two possibilities: either my purchase suggested a worldly embrace of British Afro-Caribbean heritage, or here goes Pasty McWhiteman appropriating the lineage of a historically marginalised culture.

My inquisitor glanced at my Red Stripe and then at the cans of Guinness resting in every hand his eyes could see. With the show-trial adjourned, I hummed Come Out, Ye Black and Tans—the old Irish rebel ditty. Hard cheese, comrade.

I swigged my beer, imagining each gulp to possess voodoo powers. One big gulp conjured the image of a lovely 92-year-old Jamaican lady in her Sunday best tripping over a kerb.

“What’s so funny?” asked my therapy-grinned friend.

Nothing was the answer, both metaphorically and literally. What struck me early was their signed-on-the-dotted-line commitment to not find anything even remotely humorous. No joy nor outbreaks of laughter were even momentarily possible, what with all the unspeakable trauma in Gaza and Sudan and whatnot.

Any misfortune, a feature once accepted as a part of life as breathing in oxygen, met the doormat of the patriarchy. Snapped a shoelace? Patriarchy. Unseasonably warm? Climate catastrophe. Unseasonably chilly? White males.

Every fifteen minutes or so, Girl, 27, checked in on me, only to rush off and firehose another outbreak of reality rudely announcing itself to one of the throng.

A quadruple gin and tonic is best enjoyed alone or at least amongst those who believe that men cannot get pregnant.

My reluctant playmate, dressed in overalls which didn’t quite believe in him, ventured:

“So, you write about politics?”

Before my lips could separate, he reeled off a well-tread litany of absurdities and warned of the coming fascism. Gays in the closet. Signs saying, ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ stamped on shop fronts.

I offered a few statistics from the Social Attitudes survey. Few in Britain care about with whom one sleeps, nor the colour of one’s skin.

“You should consider the source of those statistics, actually…” he spat back. His male allies nodded like Subbuteo figurines.

I got the feeling that if they solved every unspeakable injustice by breakfast, they’d publish a fresh list by lunch.

On the way home, we stopped at a pub where pork scratchings were starter, main, and dessert.

Girl, 27, swigged a double gin and lemonade.

“I’m so impressed with you, Christopher,” she said.

“Why?”

“Well, look—I know my friends can be… forthright.”

My cheeks broke into Morse code.

“You handled it well. I mean, making up those statistics was a genius move.”

Three days later, my WhatsApp flashed.

The message began like those job rejection letters one gets from Domino’s Pizza. I scanned the rest. Words like holding space and patriarchal forces welded together in sentence shapes. At least the only c-word she reached for was Christopher.

I cracked open a can of Red Stripe, the voodoo doll beer, and poured its golden contents down my neck. A Jamaican pensioner stepped on a plug. Another snapped a shoelace.

“Better them than me,” I thought.

Oxford Sour now publishes full time.

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In an age of artificial slop and tech-bro dystopia, Oxford Sour fights back with wit, wisdom, and style. Mankind is all right, actually. We don’t need a software update or yet another app.

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Social Contract

What happened to ‘social’ media?

Oh, how I miss the old social media. The one that claimed, with a straight face, to be ‘social’. Connecting people, it said. A lofty ideal, sure. But one worth at least paying lip service towards.

But what I really miss about the old Facebook is the wisdom one imbibed with each visit. You’d log on breathless, quivering in wonderment at the mere prospect of a day enriched forever.

I’m referring to the now defunct staple of those early days. The Thirst Trap with Inspirational Quote—a mode of intellectual smuggling so elegant it deserved a Royal Charter. First came the sugar: a lithe young woman in a bikini engineered to defy both gravity and modesty. Then came the medicine: quotes from Gandhi or Rosa Parks. Occasionally, for the more intellectually inclined, a dose of Foucault.

For the unadorned, Facebook’s philanthropy once possessed lofty intention. It worked like KGB subterfuge, apparent only years after the fact. Peppered across the old Facebook were photos related to friends, acquaintances, and people you might have once spied groping the wonky lemons in Aldi.

It was a community. On Sundays, you’d play a Masterchef host, picking apart your old English teacher’s gravy-sodden roast beef and questioning the sad pallor of his limp, insipid broccoli. The poor fool might know a bit about The Tempest, but he knows nothing about salting his cruciferous vegetables.

That was the old social media. Now Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

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You must admire the confidence of a man who signs a dotted line into an open relationship. It’s like volunteering to be the third wheel on your own bicycle.

According to The Guardian, open relationships are enjoying a moment. The ménage à trois works like so: Your girlfriend or wife enjoys a host of sexual suitors, and you do the same—in your head and with your dominant hand.

The premise of an open relationship is simple. It’s much like Marx’s famous dictum envisioning a communist paradise: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” The problem: the man vastly overestimates his ability to satisfy his needs.

Last week, Louis Theroux’s viral Manosphere documentary introduced the achingly modish term, one-sided monogamy. Manosphere disciples revere that concept. It’s the liturgy of the Very Online. The gospel of superior men who prove their superiority by desperately seeking the fleeting approval of other men.

The open relationship commands acres of online space. The crusty upper class call it swinging. The enlightened middle class call it polyamory. We council-estate kids call it shagging about. Apply whichever definition, therapeutic or otherwise, to suit your tastes, preferences, or tribal affiliations.

It all means one thing. The open relationship plays out as a tragicomic performance of asymmetrical desire. In plain English, the open relationship is more one-sided than a North Korean election.

Women watching that Netflix documentary spat battery acid at their screens. What? He shags his way through Soho whilst I stay here in Penge, artfully arranging the organic celery in little Poppy’s Instgrammable lunchbox? Not bloody likely.

Not bloody likely, indeed. Here on Planet Reality, immutable laws of nature keep the male half of the species attached to a short biological leash.

Consider the Desire Disparity Principle. Generally speaking, a woman has options. She may sleep with whom she wishes. A man sleeps with one of the few willing to be disappointed by him. Nature designed this law to avoid the obvious: if men could sleep with whomever they wished, we would still be thousands of years from discovering fire.

If you don’t believe me, conduct an experiment. Or just sign up for a dating app. With every swipe right, a woman will gain another admirer. Her inbox pings like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. Inside are enough snoozy openers to sedate a sack of Xanax.

Every open relationship diarised in The Guardian follows a James Patterson formula. A middle-class Islington couple agrees to an open relationship. Their heads flood with expectation. She shortlists ten promising applicants from a pool of hundreds, if not thousands. He scribbles their names on the whiteboard in the garden office. She splurges a small fortune on Honey Birdette. He obsessively checks his barren Hinge inbox.

“It’s okay,” he assures himself. “The old world is dying. The new is yet to be born.”

And yet, a new world is born—audibly—at least in one bedroom of four. Meanwhile, our revolutionary man checks again whether he’s turned off his notifications.

He has options. None of them good. He could advertise his need only for reality to dawn: his ability to meet that need doesn’t quite match up. His need is the planet Venus resting on a golf tee of ability. Stocks in his sexual market value collapse like the value of NFTs.

He takes a silent vow of celibacy. Just for now. At least until the nympho hordes finish whatever is keeping them so occupied. He develops an interest in West Ham United. Why let one person break your heart each Saturday when eleven footballers can do the same?

The groans of carnal rampage cut through his AirPods. He scours online. Sex Addicts Anonymous holds a weekly meeting in a discreet hotel lobby just down the road. No, he thinks, too desperate. His Fitbit buzzes. Sarah has burned 707 calories in her latest workout. He almost taps the ‘Kudos’ button. Best not disturb her post-coital bliss.

With an empty inbox, Utopia descends into dystopia. He Googles ‘sex robots near me’. Not for his own gratification, of course. The plan is much more practical: By introducing ‘Candy’ to the strangers forming an orderly queue at the front door, he can at least whittle that line down to the most committed of guests. Male nature being what it is, culls just three from the line snaking past Gail’s.

He presses the nuclear button. In a long and thoughtful WhatsApp, he explains: We are on different carnal journeys. In my present space, I think it’s time I took a breather and focused on my self-care.

The Siamese blue ticks of doom confirm the worst: message read. He pleads for the three dots of redemption. No avail. He checks Hinge one last time: tumbleweeds enjoy more company.

The open relationship is the only system in history designed by men and won—decisively—by women. Men may have invented it. Women perfected it in practice.

The only mystery is why anyone thought it would turn out otherwise.

This column makes no apology. What came before us was more cerebral, more meaningful, more beautiful, less chaotic, and infinitely less tedious.

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The Triumph of Obviousness

A coffee with the herd of independent minds.

Frequent any Millennial-run haunt and you risk a diabetic coma—not from sugar, but from sentiment.

You’ve been here a thousand times, if once. Exposed brick. Austere hanging lamps. Chalked slogans daubed on the wall: Our coffee is for everyone.

Welcome to Filter. Or Brew. Or Caffeinate. The name is always a verb. Much like the leaflets and posters demanding action on this and to resist that and fight the other. The design budget—lavished on antique typewriters and distressed wood—has done its work. The counter is an art installation of scaffolding poles and planks. The menu, bleached of pound signs, offers a smorgasbord of caffeinated virtue.

Behind it stands an earnest man in his late thirties, dressed like a dockworker who has never seen a dock. His beard glistens faintly with jojoba oil. In an affected American accent, he asks: What can I get you?

You hesitate. Is it large here? Or grande? God forbid they insist on venti.

The walls ache with twee. Be the change you wish to see. A Banksy print hangs prominently: a homeless man with a sign reading ‘I want change.’ Helpfully, a nearby observer explains the double meaning buried in the word ‘change.’

Until this morning, you—a jaded, mid-thirties Millennial—straddled the philosophical fence. Now, you know for sure: homelessness isn’t much fun. Another print, that naked Vietnamese girl running from horror. But now there’s Mickey Mouse and Ronald McDonald beside her. The premise: War destroys innocence. Well, I never. If only a stencil graffito tackled the moral gordian knots of our time—incest, say, or cannibalism—so that we’d finally know when to tut and when to applaud.

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In an unnamed central London pub, I ordered two pints of Guinness.

A strange twenty-something, dressed like a garden gnome, chimed in:
“Oh, mate. It’s so much quicker and easier if you download the app.”

I’m not a physics professor, but I ventured: “How would it be either? I’ve ordered them from your friend, here.”

“Fair point, mate. Fair point. I see that. But it’s so much better on the app.”

My helpful friend—draped in overalls, a beanie, unblemished safety boots, and wraparound glasses—slunk back to his iMac. He’s either a Creative Director or a Director of Creative.

“Right,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I shuffled off to the snug, two pints in hand and fourteen pounds eighty pence lighter.

You cannot order a Guinness in London without arousing unsolicited chatter. Did you know it tastes better in Dublin? Yes, it does. They keep the best stuff over there, you see. Whatever you do, don’t bite. Just nod and smile.

Of course, a global brand exports an inferior product whilst maintaining an impeccable reputation for consistency. That’s how riotously successful brands operate.

I sipped carefully, avoiding any suggestion of Splitting the G. Nobody took notice. The pub was silent except for the sound of tapping. Everyone unified in a common goal: sending data to a rather thankful Silicon Valley.

For all the pretence of progress, the gents’ room was a throwback to the dark ages—the twentieth century. For a start, the glass read ‘Gents.’ Nothing more than porcelain tiles, chrome fixtures, and Victorian ingenuity. I expected something more… modern.

A school of treble gins sparked a waggish streak.

“Excuse me, mate,” I said. “Does the toilet have an app?”

He looked at me as one might look at a relative given six months to live.

“An app, bro?”

“Yes.”

“Ummm. Nah. Well, I don’t think so anyway.”

This bathroom suffered from a severe lack of progress. Urinals? Check. Sinks with piped water? Of course. Lockable cubicles? Yes. Obligatory can of Tennent’s Super—a Tate-worthy monument to underclass Britain—indeed. You go in. You lock the door. You fulfil nature’s requests. You flush. You wash your hands. You leave, without sight or sound.

This cannot be right.

Many London pubs have embraced the 21st century. In these futuristic boozers, one can watch Spurs lose on the screen above the urinal. One can also watch opposing fans direct their stream over their hated opponents. I’m kidding. English football fans, known universally for their panache and decorum, wouldn’t dream of such savagery.

In this age of dizzying technological progress, it cannot be long before the Victorian toilet enjoys a 21st-century reimagining. Each morning, I scour the internet, hoping to see either Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates—dressed like a homeless person and standing before a gigantic screen—revealing the latest development in lavatorial technology.

Think, for a moment, like a tech titan, for whom every solution is a problem to be solved. Think of all that data quite literally going down the toilet. With each flush, a catastrophic loss in potential shareholder value.

Naturally, the solution is not to leave things alone. Here’s the solution to this very modern problem.

By downloading the GoFlush™ app, hooked up to your SmartPotty™, you can monetise your toilet habits. You can even livestream to your followers. After all, who needs a toilet to simply flush away one’s business without fattening the profit margins of the world’s richest men? Why should the livestreaming and monetisation of one’s bowel movements be exclusive to niche OnlyFans creators?

This is the age of progress. Traditional toilets are relics of a primitive age. These Victorian anachronisms do not collect valuable data nor ship dollars to Silicon Valley. Only by harnessing some of mankind’s greatest minds can we correct this glaring problem. Why, in the 21st century, do we tolerate toilets which do little more than remind us of nature and our savage past?

By collecting data from the arse it enthrones, SmartPotty™ discerns what the user ate for lunch, what they drank at break, whether they’re getting enough fibre. A runny, off-colour stool devoid of adequate protein? Here’s an ad for protein bars.

Does this sound a little lavatorial? It shouldn’t. In Careless People, Facebook sold targeted ads gleaned from rather invasive—sorry, innovative—reconnaissance. A teenage girl deletes a selfie? Now is the perfect time to shower her with ads for plastic surgery.

In this brave new world, even answering nature’s call will break from its 18th-century doldrums and join the 21st.

Soon, SmartPotty™ will empower us all to share our valuable data with trusted partners and empower Mark Zuckerberg to turn shit quite literally into gold.

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Nil By Mouth

A pandemic of Turkish teeth and Brazilian bums obscures the real crisis.

The word ‘influencer’ sounds much like ‘influenza.’ If rushed out of a mouth too rapidly, you’re liable to confuse the two. It’s simple. One describes a highly contagious disease, deleterious to human health and often fatal. The other has something to do with the flu.

There’s an outbreak of influenza in Dubai. Or so I heard. On Sky News, a breathless reporter braved the unceasing heat, the unceasing humidity, that unceasing sense of unreality which stalks Dubai, that gaudy theme park in the desert. She sought that peculiar species: the influencer.

For the unaware, the influencer is Great Britain’s only remaining export. Yes, the nation which gifted the world the industrial revolution, dragging man from a nasty, brutish, and short life into one just nasty and brutish, exports influencers across the globe. Many land in Dubai.

That glinting shard of glass in the sand attracts influencers like iron filings to a magnet. Anyone pretending to be someone lives in tax-free, crime-free Dubai. Naturally, influencers adore their slave colony in the sun.

Here in dreary, rain-sodden England, reality intrudes upon a one-time high priest of the reality-TV-influencer complex. Scott Timlin, also known as Scotty T, appeared in court last week charged with fraud.

Scotty once starred in a riotously popular reality show called Geordie Shore. The premise: Mahogany-skinned twenty-somethings with the manners of a topless blender, hop from party to bed to bed to party. They fall out. They make up. They make up. They fall out.

Around the early 2010s, nightclubs bubbled with imitators. Topless boys, their chests smoother than Fabergé eggs, bopped to tinny beats like Scotty T. They didn’t get drunk but ‘mortal.’ Barbers trimmed countless heads in the Geordie Shore standard-issue: Too short on the sides, and too long on the top.

I caught half an episode back in 2013, when 1.2 million of my fellow Brits—all of them permitted to vote—tuned in with Jesuitical devotion. The memory is a kaleidoscope of Grey Goose vodka bottles, tanned torsos, tanned tits, too white teeth, mewling, screaming, shouting, cackling, all to the drumbeat of house music. An episode of Geordie Shore was like watching the impulsive id team up with the rational ego to beat the shit out of their moderating influence, the superego.

Last week, I recognised a face in the paper. Scotty T was one of seven influencers in court for illegally promoting FX trading schemes to their Instagram followers.

They promised easy wealth to anyone who wanted a piece. The reality, as Scott’s lawyer outlined, was not as it appeared on Instagram.

Scotty’s three million followers imbibe a daily stream of bronzed torso, Turkey teeth, and modern-day snake oil. Ironically, he models a brand called ‘Ikigai’—the Japanese concept of living purposefully.

There’s a ‘natural’ cannabis-based medicine for ADHD. High-protein microwave meals. There are pills and potions. There’s even a BMW with the licence plate: ACHIEVE.

And then there’s reality. Scotty’s lawyer revealed that Scotty earned £30,000 last year. He needed a £5k loan from his mother “to stay afloat.” A Lidl supermarket manager clears £55k.

That’s not to revel in Scotty’s misfortune. It’s none of my business.

Back when things made sense, that is, before the ‘End of History’ 1990s, young men like Scotty left school and walked into well-paid industrial jobs. They put their heads and hands to good use and even bought their own homes with enough cash spare to stow away for the future.

And then the Very Clever People boxed up those jobs and shipped them overseas. Meanwhile, ‘reality’ TV exploded across our screens.

And then came social media. With a click of a button, anyone can become anything. Or at least they can pretend to be. So, I guess we are all influencers now. But, as W.S. Gilbert once put it, if everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody.

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Amongst a crowded and competitive field, the most prodigious modern bore must be the type who, after waiting for their turn to speak, says, ‘Oh, but that’s a generalisation.’

Social policy demands you reply in kind, as if generalisations—the meat and potatoes of language—warrant a caveat. They don’t.

When a friend says, ‘Oh, Korean film is great,’ they’re generalising. Is all film ever to spawn from South Korea indeed great? I’m sure there’s a dud amongst the many, many cultural atom bombs. Is it strictly true to say that all Korean films are great? No. Is it worth pointing this out? Obviously not.

Another linguistic kamikaze pilot is ‘reductive.’ To boil down a topic to its essence is reductive. If you wish to sound faintly interesting to the strangers huddled smoking under the umbrellas outside The Pride of Spitalfields, just employ that term. Isn’t this Guinness rather reductive?

But I have a weapon for you, reader, when surrounded by bores. After they finish yapping, just say, “Hmmm. That’s a little opaque, no?”

They quite nearly shit themselves. “Opaque? What do you mean? I’m not… it’s not.”

Let your pretentious prey piddle on the pavement for a moment. Watch them ransack every drawer in their skulls for a simplifying solution. Once they offer it, reject it out of hand.

“Hmmm. But isn’t that a little… reductive?”

You cannot lose. Plus, when you scuttle into the pub and glance back, a glorious sight. They’ll scowl. Then they’ll beg their boring friends to piss off to the next pub, away from their tormentor. They’re exposed as a fraud—an impostor—a pseud. And they know it.

This tactic works best when the waiting time for a pint exceeds four minutes and there are too many bums on too few seats. Expose enough frauds and the boozer is yours for the evening. In central London, on any given evening, a full seventy percent of pub patrons are legitimate targets.

Of course, I’m generalising. I’m being reductive. I’m rioting in stereotypes.

For all the taboos clouding around stereotypes like sarin gas, they get a bad rap. We bags of water and electrified meat think in patterns. We observe behaviour, social cues, the way someone pronounces ‘issue’. We mentally file these details—millions of details—into a backless filing cabinet.

When the time arises, we consult the receptionist burrowed in our skulls: I’ve heard posh girls emphasise the ‘et-uh’ in theatre—as in thee-et-uh. Therefore, this sinewy siren’s parents live somewhere in prosperous, cobblestone Kent. They vote Tory. They drink Bombay Sapphire and they drive Jag. They scraped together £30,000 a year for Poppy to elbow her lissom frame into a mid-management role at a Soho creative start-up. Am I wrong? Often, but not today.

Modern culture forbids little but to make generalisations or indulge in stereotypes. But we all do. From left to right, stereotypes and generalisations reign. Stereotypes are often unfair. Generalisations often over-generalise. That doesn’t mean they’re untrue.

My healthy prejudices could paper over the Sistine Chapel ceiling and leave reams of material to spare.

Here’s one. If a keffiyeh-draped Zoomer, a cloud of vomity weed smoke hanging above their green and purple feathers, joins the train at Paddington, I know where they’ll skulk off: Bristol—the epicentre for British progressives too neurotic even for Hackney Wick.

I know everything about them. They love Jeremy Corbyn. They hate J. K. Rowling. They vote Green. They smoke green. They eat nothing but plants. And their pronouns change with the wind. The curious thing about freethinkers, as their pin badge exclaims them to be, is that they all think the same thing.

My prejudices are not political. This one I call the Three Ts. The first T is for teeth. The second T is for tattoos. The third is for Trenbolone.

When traipsing around central London, scanning for a pub in which to sink a few jars, I spy through the window. If there is more than one young British male possessing the Three Ts, I reasonably deduce a few things.

The first is that he has recently travelled to Turkey and returned with a set of impossibly white gnashers and a pre-pubescent hairline.

The second is the clock tattoo on his sleeve. This, should you enquire, means a great deal to him. “Oh, this? Yeah. It represents time and, like, how time passes on and all that.” His girlfriend, too blonde for the Third Reich, dutifully mimes each word.

The third T, given the current vogue for protein shakes and triceps dips, demands a trained eye. A quick glance over his mountainous shoulders suggests he jabs 200mg of Tren into the upper stretch of his backside every Monday evening.

The Three T is usually a politically decent chap. At least he does something useful for a living and questions the well-intentioned folly which welcomes millions from countries which aren’t exactly liberal in their tastes.

Put it this way, I’d sooner send my self-assessment tax returns to the first Three T I see on Holborn High Road than to the current crop of over-promoted traffic wardens in parliament. That, I admit, is a bar so low it is a carpet.

Although docile when alone, the Three T succumbs to the mob. When joined by his fellow tribesmen, he reverts to a lumbering beast. Nocturnal and keen to hunt in packs, the Three T exerts dominance. He starts a fight with the 97-lb neckbeard pouring his sixth pint of Madri.

If one is in luck, the Three Ts fight amongst themselves. This is quite the spectacle. You see, the Three T sprays on his shirts and requires a tube of KY Jelly to shimmy into his jeans. Such shrink-wrapped attire is not ideal for scrapping in pubs. The result: it’s like watching two seven-foot bears scuffle beneath a five-foot ceiling. Don’t get too close. Your £7 Guinness will dress the carpet and you’ll shit yourself. It’s best to avoid such enclaves after 8 p.m.

Everything I have just written is verboten. Of course, we must play pretend. One is forbidden to notice such things, at least to say them out loud. We must treat each and every soul as a dazzling starburst, undimmed by tribe, class, fashion, or habit.

But the brain, militant reactionary it may be, refuses to comply. It files and sorts and groups and predicts. Despite modern sensibilities, the mind remains a hard-boiled bureaucrat at heart. And stereotypes, however impolite, remain its dearest paperwork.

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A Conspiracy of Competence

Kakistocracy (n) government by the worst, the least competent, the least scrupulous

Recently, whilst drowsing away the evening in a disreputable boozer in which requesting a treble gin doesn’t induce cardiac arrest in one’s hosts, I met an interesting chap.

We shared a few jokes about the insipid Keir Starmer, the tiresome Angela Rayner, the oleaginous Wes Streeting. We joked about West Ham’s unfunny misfortunes. We mocked a young lad who let the entire postcode know he was drinking non-alcoholic beer.

And then, having exhausted the marginalia, we swivelled our heads toward the football on the screen above.

My disposal friend turned toward me. He confided: “You know why them Americans got the World Cup this year, duntcha?”

“No,” I said. “Why?”

“Fink-a-bad-it…”

I thought about it. America. The world’s sole superpower. The richest, most powerful, most culturally hegemonic nation on earth and indeed ever. I considered their resplendent stadia, their 350 million citizens, their gaudy, undeniable wealth, and their infuriating ability to make even the most humdrum event entertaining.

“I’m not quite sure…” I said.

My disposable friend enjoyed my studied cluelessness.

“The Jews. Mate, them Jews run everyfink.”

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In our wayward teenage years, we played a game known colloquially as Council Estate Roulette. The ancients called it coitus interruptus. This haphazard method of contraception features in the biblical story of Onan.

Of course, Onan was not subject to sex education in school. Onan wasn’t implored to stretch a condom over a banana as the white faces of one’s classmates blared tabloid red. Onan, who had taken to sleeping with his brother’s wife, had little notion of teenage pregnancy, nor how to avoid such a perilous fate. But Onan paid for his sins. His name will forever tie up with ‘onanist.’ A starchy term for what we British call a ‘wanker.’

In the mid-2000s, breathless talk shows still feigned a consensual morality. Emblazoned across the ticker tape were words like ‘teen’ and ‘pregnant’ set before liberal applications of the exclamation mark. Dr Phil, the stentorian Texan, made his grain by lambasting teens who’d flouted the warnings imprinted upon their heads in Sex Ed.

MTV helpfully laid out what befell those foolish enough to ignore their teachers and parents.

Reality shows such as Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant depicted the Dickensian lives of those suffering with a chronic and life-shattering condition which we council-estate kids called up the duff. The mewling and the screaming and the sleeplessness and the helplessness didn’t seem big nor clever.

Excuse the teenage vulgarity. I’ve spared you the more potent phrases to describe being up the duff. The coarseness was the point. To get another pregnant was to ruin one’s life and possibly that of two others. 16 and Pregnant sketched a nightmare without end. Those grainy Al Qaeda hostage videos, which ping-ponged between our phones at lunchtime, offered a preferable fate.

We didn’t need revved-up reality TV shows painting perilous pictures of pregnant teens. Real life conjured plenty of case studies in how not to fuck up your life.

Nobody, it seemed, escaped the terror latent in just six words. After all, both the truthful and the manipulative could simply send a text, I think I might be pregnant. Those six words guaranteed not just a breathless reply but weeks of Pavlovian obedience.

The very phrase stalked us all like cultural polio. And if you caught the bug, you could count on your mates to make you feel eminently worse. They’d glory in your patent horror. Your life is ruined! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ruined! Inside every teenage boy lurks the semi-feral instinct to glory in the misfortunes of their closest friends.

The senders of such world-spinning texts were often economical with the biological facts. That did not matter. As soon as those six words appeared, a sleepless terror dissolved the next four weeks.

Desperate, the afflicted sought the advice of older boys. These menstrual mystics toggled between ancient faith-healer and modern podcast bro. Shrouded in a shamanic air; they’d scratch their chins learnedly:

“So, you say the incident happened on a Friday evening?”

“Yes… why? Is that bad? Is Friday bad?!”

“Hmmm. Well, it’s not good. More pregnancies occur on Fridays than on Mondays. Everyone knows that.”

“They do? Really?! Oh, fuck. Fuck!”

The social lubricant of such peril was a fearsome cider called White Lightning, known to devotees as Quite Frightening.

Just a few quid secured a lavender three-litre flagon weighing in at a meaty 7.5% ABV—enough to tranquilise a rampaging elephant. That lunatic soup fathered more teen pregnancies than all other alcoholic drinks combined.

The terror sparked by those six words stretched for weeks until the author of doom recovered their monthly schedule. Of course, that was a time for celebration. Two bottles of White Lightning, please.

How times change. Aside from our former prime minister, Boris Johnson, nobody appears to be fathering children. From South Korea to South Africa, the baby bust colours the globe a shade of grey. The United Nations said recently that global fertility rates were mired in “unprecedented decline.”

Swivel-eyed commentators cast scorn upon my generation, the Millennials. We’re too busy slathering avocado on toast and starting up tiresome podcasts to sire a few sprogs. Not quite. Across the globe, most people surveyed in that UN report said they wanted two or more children but couldn’t afford to do so.

I suspect there’s more to it than money. We are living through what some have dubbed a ‘polycrisis’. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, things have been less than agreeable. A quick scroll on your phone vomits up war and crisis and falling wages and rising rents and the acrid sense that nothing works—if it ever did.

The polycrisis theory reminds me of the sociologist Robert K. Merton’s theory of strain. In a nutshell, strain occurs when the gap between socially ascribed goals (i.e. settle down and have children) stretches too far from the structural means to achieve them (housing, good jobs, stability.) The result is social instability, a quality of which we are not in short supply.

After all, to have children is to vote for the future. As recently as 2010, the birth rate sat at a healthy 2.1. Historical crises often shut off the baby tap.

I don’t pretend to have the answers. My hunch is that our baby bust will transform into a baby boom once the modern world emerges from its decades-long self-indulgent freak-out.

Now, here is where it gets interesting. If you dig into the numbers, you’ll glean that anti-teen pregnancy campaigns have, over the last few decades, enjoyed rampaging success. Between 1991 and 2023, teen pregnancies dropped by 75 percent. Logically speaking, much of the current baby bust stems from this riotous success.

If you look closer, you’ll see that the decline in teen pregnancies is particularly steep from around 2010. Ironically, in that very same year, White Lightning succumbed to the forces of social disapproval and was cleared from shop shelves—never to be seen again.

Reader, I merely note the historical correlation between the two.

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You might think filling one’s ear passages with silicone is an extreme solution to the incessant chatter of the modern world. Obviously, you don’t endure the London Underground. Earplugs don’t work. Threats to firebomb the noise polluter’s family home don’t either. Neither does polite British tutting.

Desperate times demand desperate measures. I will consult YouTube. Surely, one helpful soul has kindly filmed themselves squeezing a tube of industrial silicone into their ears? No such luck.

Not to despair. Help is at hand. Transport for London, the mythical entity alleged to manage the city’s Tube, has revealed its campaign to tackle the smartphone scourge: sickly posters splashed in kindergarten colours.

The campaign targets the “disruptive behaviour” of passengers who were evidently raised by a pack of snarling hyenas. They blast reels, videos, music. They FaceTime their cackling friends. Not so long ago, a fellow passenger revealed to us—her captive audience—that someone named Sarah had caught the clap from someone named Travis. Syphilis? How literary.

Miraculously, researchers at Transport for London discovered a rare tribe thought to be long extinct: Londoners who communicate with their fellow human beings by making noises with their mouths—one thousand of them, in fact.

Researchers approached these strange beings with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. They prodded them with a stick. That didn’t work. After jabbing them with a cattle prod, they looked up from their phones. Several members landed in Accident and Emergency, complaining of neck strain injuries.

Seventy percent of those surveyed said the constant noise screaming out of smartphones drove them crazy. One responder suggested offenders receive forty lashings in public. That is a bit much. Ten should do the trick.

TFL wavered from such brutal and effective methods. Campaign posters politely ask passengers to wear headphones.

I’m afraid that TFL’s well-meaning campaign hasn’t quite restored sanity on the London Underground.

Last week, I sat next to a grown man grinning at his phone like a Hindu cow. On the screen was a captivating spectacle. Someone, somewhere, makes it their daily business to buy gigantic, waist-height glass bottles of soda. This clearly well-adjusted person then rolls the bottles down a flight of concrete steps. Our friend dissolved the journey between Hammersmith and Leicester Square in a trance. Bottle. Roll. Smash. Bottle. Roll. Smash.

This reminded me of the satirical film, Idiocracy. The plot follows U.S. Army librarian Luke, and prostitute Rita.

After signing up for a hibernation experiment, the two awake in America, year 2500. Mountains of trash litter the landscape. Planes fall out of the sky. The citizens drag their gormless faces between Starbucks (which is now a coffee-serving brothel) and shopping malls even more dementing than those today. Over centuries, the dumb have biologically outgunned the smart.

The citizens of this moronic inferno drain their days glued to hyperactive screens. Their favourite content includes the Masturbation Channel and a reality TV show called ‘Ow! My Balls!’ That show follows a hapless man as he gets whacked in the testicles.

They cultivate high culture, too. The profound film, Ass, zooms in on a pair of bare bum cheeks. The sophisticated audience fizzes with laughter as the bum, for two hours, passes wind.

Back in 2006, Idiocracy was a well-done satire which stretched logical extremes. Today, I’m not so sure it is as ridiculous as it once seemed. Just spend ten minutes on the Tube, inhaling the noxious TikTok fumes spewing from smartphones.

Transport for London has a point. But it is far too late. We are a nation of dopamine addicts. Those dopamine crack pipes stitched to our palms are quite literally designed to suck away as much of our time and attention as possible. An intervention, at this late hour, must be drastic.

How about a campaign outlining the terrifying effects of watching brain-rot content for hours and hours each day? A growing body of research suggests today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s lobotomy. Am I rioting in hyperbole? No.

One study found that watching short-form video is more harmful to our brains than soaking them in booze. At least, the latter indulgence might get you laid.

Several studies link smartphone culture with declines in comprehension, literacy, and the ability to reason. Others link smartphones with rising narcissism and collapsing social capital. And then there’s the nascent research suggesting that smartphone addiction may trigger ADHD and Autism-like symptoms in the addicted.

No doubt many will accuse me of overstating the case. But a trial which began in Los Angles this week may reconfigure a few minds.

The plaintiff is a California teen who claims Instagram wrecked her mental health. According to her, the app zeroed in on her insecurities, feeding her “harmful and depressive content,” which led her, eventually, to self-harm. She also claims to be a victim of “bullying and sextortion” on the app she first joined aged ten. Instagram, she claims, didn’t care.

I’m not surprised. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, wants eyeballs on screens much like a crack dealer wants lips on pipes. After all, they’re not in the social media business. They’re in the addiction business.

That trial is the first of a coming legal deluge in which some 2,000 others will accuse tech titans of intentionally designing their products to addict their users.

Of course, many will pooh-pooh my concerns. But in the background, the evidence swells: smartphones make us dumber, less ethical, more psychopathic. They erode our ability to reason and to think. They rot one’s self-image and corrode one’s mental health.

They’ve even driven a few poor souls to suicide. Apart from that, reader, they’re completely harmless.

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Announcement: Oxford Sour is now my full-time job.

In an age of artificial slop, optimisation, and disposable opinion, this publication exists for the real, the imperfect, and the ridiculous — the things that still make us human.

Readers who want the work in full can subscribe below. Paid readers receive the weekly essay and the exclusive column Last Orders.

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The horror. The horror. The pub landlord looms behind the bar, counting her filthy, ill-gotten lucre. From the £6.40 she forced from my wallet at gunpoint for a pint of Guinness, this latter-day kulak chivvies a larcenous fifteen pence.

Reader, you read correctly. Correct, too, is your sense of my facetiousness. The landlady, whose name I forget, is a diminutive Irish lady who insists with old-world charm: “Go sit down, I’ll bring this over to you.”

This pub, The Britannia in trendy Hoxton, performs a civilised witchcraft. The landlady charges a rural price in a Central London postcode. For her efforts, she keeps a piddling fifteen pence from each pint sold.

There is much chatter over the state of the ailing British institution: the local boozer. Since 2000, some 15,000 pubs have called a permanent last orders. At this rate, we’ll enjoy a mere scattering—perhaps 10,000—across this increasingly dreary land by 2040.

That chatter, well-meaning though it may be, commits the most modern of offences: over-complication. In an age of algorithms and optimisation, we miss the pints for the barrel.

According to the commentariat, British pubs are dying because of ‘changing tastes’—a claim debunked nightly by a brief sojourn to Wetherspoon, the British chain pub so successful it has planted its flag in Alicante, Spain.

If the British pub were truly coughing up blood-speckled phlegm en route to a timely death, why are Wetherspoons packed from morning to night? The answer is simple. Prices.

Saunter onto a Wetherspoon carpet and you are transported back to 2007, when drinks changed hands for south of a fiver. Walk into a typical high street boozer, and you’ll find £7.50 pints justified by beanbags, quizzes, skittle alleys, or some other flummery dreamed up by a Millennial in a brand awareness meeting.

This difference is not trivial; it is psychological. Charge a fiver and I’ll stay until you kick me out, demanding ‘just one more!’ I’ll traipse home, forty quid lighter. But charge £7.50 and even the drunkest of Keynesians snaps his wallet shut.

Such forward-thinking pubs, blinded by the false prophet of progress, suffer for the same reason their political equivalents suffer: ordinary people sense bullshit. Much as those in the lanyard class talk in acronyms and buzzwords conceal their lack of substance, the pub with the skittles alley conceals its obscene prices.

Yet those prices are not the work of some avaricious kulak, lest Labour see all business owners in that light. Of the fiver you hand to the landlord, a hefty portion goes straight to the state. After wages, overheads, and enduring energy costs amongst the highest in Europe, he is left with a princely fifteen pence.

Despite the modern political class’s addiction to motion without movement, some things do not need revamping or reimagining. This is why Wetherspoons thrive. No music. No quizzes. No retro games. No axe-throwing. Just tables, beer, spirits and reliable prices. Young and old alike. Every night of the week.

I would sooner lose an evening in a pub that stopped the clock in 1973 than forfeit a minute in a gastro pub that harangues its captive patrons with youth-club amusements. A bar behind which lopes a grinning Jeffrey Dahmer and upon which sits a suspiciously cloudy cocktail entices me more than a pub quiz—an activity which surely violates some forgotten article of the Geneva Convention under ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’

So too, it turns out, with Generation Z. Among this supposedly abstemious cohort has emerged the niche phenomenon of the ‘Old Man Pub’: a traditional boozer serving reasonably priced drinks to those who wish to buy them. Behind the bar lopes a rotund middle-aged man compulsorily named either Jeff or Dave. His face hangs in healthy incredulity at the steaming imponderabilia drifting in from the outside world.

His eyes train on half-empty glasses. “Another?” is all he says. Your intention to have one or two dissolves into pints three, four, and five—but it scarcely matters. Jeff charges a fiver a throw, even in central London. That’s two-and-a-half pints an hour on minimum wage. Not the gold standard of four, but respectable. No budgetary guilt. Everyone’s a winner.

Our political class could learn a thing or two. Politics, like the local pub, lives or dies on reciprocity and trust. Hence Nigel Farage’s appeal. Whatever one thinks of him, he is reliable. His party has led the last 200 polls for good reason. He does not speak in acronyms or managerial slogans. He talks as if warm blood courses through his veins. Farage is perhaps the only politician who can pose convincingly with a pint in his hand. Why? Farage enjoys a pint. No focus-group photo op necessary.

A poll this week found Brits think we are in a worse state today than back when the global economy melted in 2008.

I suspect Farage’s fun-loving, everyman appeal charms ever greater swathes of a nation quite thoroughly fed up. They’ve had quite enough of the Acronym Ayatollahs and their fatwas on everything fattening, fun, or pleasurable.

Many in the media and London’s cultural circles will never understand this. They lacquer their lives with appearance and appurtenances. They scoff at Farage’s appeal just as they scoff at the notion that a pub need only sell beer at a fair price.

What plagues our pubs plagues our Parliament and almost everything else. The managerial mindset—thinking in Excel, speaking in acronyms—excels at motion without movement. There is always something to optimise, future-proof, or revitalise. Why? Because standing still exposes the standee. Crack open the managerial skull, and you will find kernels of nonsense exploding like popcorn in a hot skillet. You won’t find much else.

One of my beloved pubs, The Lamb in Bloomsbury, has served patrons with grub and grog since time immemorial. The concept riots in simplicity: offer an agreeable room in which people may douse a few hours with their preferred poison or sit alone with their thoughts. The bar is never empty. Once, I jokingly asked whether they had an app. The barmaid scowled at me with studied horror. “I’m kidding! I’m kidding!” She still eyes me with suspicion.

The formula appears to work. Charles Dickens drank there. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set too. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes staged their famous public skirmishes there—the ritual foreplay of doomed lovers.

They say that every pub is a parliament. Pubs, for me, are the original social media. But with one crucial difference: there is no edit button and no filters.

Hence why modern politicians look so patently weird whenever their PR team squeezes them into a boozer for a photo op. Their rictus grin suggests they’re starring in an ISIS video. No wonder. The pub is the last place on earth where they might encounter that most beastly of creatures: the ordinary—and thoroughly pissed off—British citizen.

Welcome to Last Orders. As an avowed curmudgeon, it is my duty to say what others deem unhelpful. This weekly column leans into the belief that what came before us was more cerebral, more meaningful, more beautiful, less chaotic, and infinitely less tedious.

Last Orders is where Oxford Sour does its best work.

Each week, I launch my fountain pen at my plush notebook with scant regard for what is popular, acceptable, or even agreeable. I’ll be right and I’ll be wrong. But never will I sedate you with safe opinions or plain prose. Our world has enough HR bores and traffic wardens. We landed in this cultural ditch for one reason: too much flattery and not nearly enough honesty.

If civilisation must end, then we’d best poke fun and laugh as the waves of progress pierce the hull of common sense.

Pour me a treble.

High Farce

Life imitates social media

This week, we discuss the ancient Roman solution to the scourge of celebrity. Then I reveal why civilised people drink a bottle of wine in thirty to forty-five minutes. We also have Brendan Behan slating critics, and the worthy winners of this week’s Lead Paint Prize.

Salut!

Free to Rome

Modern problems require ancient solutions.

Oxford Sour readers may feel duty-bound to keep up with the Beckham family feud, but dizziness is the more honest response. When absorbing the New York Post’s foam-flecked coverage, one would believe the paper received payment by the word—by threat of death by lions.

For the mercifully unaware, Sir David Beckham once bent free-kicks between two posts, whilst his wife Victoria once bent eardrums to jaunty pop songs. All told, the Beckhams earned their fame and lascivious fortune. They’re at least good at something tangible. But the gods’ favour did not fall upon their son, Brooklyn. Hence, the Beckhams have fallen out in spectacular fashion. To this grubby theatre, the rest of us are slaves.

Such news would not, in more cerebral times, trouble the well-adjusted nor squeeze itself into the pages of any reputable newspaper. But these are not cerebral times.

The ancient Romans trained a watchful eye on such celebrities. Prostitutes, thespians, and other undesirables earned the title of infames. The Romans tolerated this class but warned citizens not to get too close lest they transmit their lurgy.

In ancient Rome, sneezing rats enjoyed greater social prestige—and posed less danger to the republic.

Why were the Romans, to transplant modern sensibilities, so judgemental? Why did they forbid infames from voting or from public office? Why not just let the infames live their truth? The Romans distrusted those who made their grain by faking emotions. Infamia was the legal and social penalty imposed on those who forfeited their reputation.

Peruse any major news story and you’ll discover a certain infamia threaded through it like Blackpool rock—inescapable, sticky, and garish. Modern celebrity is to culture what lead pipes are to water. The Romans had a point.

If it is not Olivia Nuzzi lunching on her ‘non-sexual affair’ with a promiscuous Kennedy (but I repeat myself), then it is Zach Polanski, leader of the Green Party UK, reducing care workers to ‘bum wipers’. (This from a failed actor and lapsed boob-whisperer.) Survey the entire cast of thespians and celebrities and you’ll find the vast majority hold views vagrant and bereft of common sense. A wedge of Stilton possesses greater depth and erudition.

Why, then, do we exalt actors and celebrities as more than neurotics marred by a pathological need for attention? Actors are great at pretending to be someone else. Many are worthy. But why do we presume such people hold special insight into human nature—or even the faintest grasp of life as it is lived? They are paid handsomely to suspend reality. They soon forget it ever existed.

In the 1990s, a phalanx of thinkers warned of the coming idiocracy.

One of these prophets, Neal Gabler, author of Life: The Movie, argued that entertainment values had replaced all else. We once praised actors and celebrities for their unique talents; by 1998, we had deified them as gods possessed of unearthly powers.

Gabler missed our social media age. Today, if one has the scruples of a famished hyena and a selfie camera, one can achieve fame. Gabler’s insightful book makes one major mistake: he refuses to say whether this transformation was good or bad, which is akin to not passing judgement on the flames engulfing your head. Neither did he suggest any solution.

I have one. It is much too late to reverse this social scourge. So what can we do?

In ancient Rome—mercifully beyond modern HR oversight—it was legal to beat infames on the street. Whenever one snapped a shoelace or had a disagreeable morning, it was routine to slap an infamis and make oneself feel better. This practice was later restricted. Eventually, citizens could only beat infames whilst they were on stage. Shortly thereafter, Rome collapsed. I merely note the historical correlation.

Modern problems, it seems, require ancient solutions—or at the very least, ancient standards.

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My teenaged niece and nephew do not believe a word their gin-addled uncle says. When I claim wistfully that we once wrote great novels, produced great music, and created great film, they scoff as if I’m claiming the moon is made of cheese. To them, culture stopped in the year 2000.

It’s all a conspiracy. Since the 1990s, creativity has dipped its feet in concrete and ambled over Tower Bridge. This is not nostalgia talking, nor a sentimental whine about ‘how things used to be.’ It happens to be true. And this decline is visible everywhere: in education, politics, culture, art, and everyday life.

Take the most egregious word ever to pollute the English language: reimagine. Not only is this word not really a word, but it describes something grotesque.

An author has released a novel to much fanfare. The premise? A reimagination of Moby Dick from the perspective of a cross-dressing female sailor. Reader, are you still with me? Roll your eyes clockwise for ‘yes’. Call Me Ishmaelle reimagines Moby Dick. A harsher observer might call such reimagination something else entirely.

This culture of reimagination suggests one thing: we cannot create original works, so we plagiarise the greats instead. Is ‘plagiarise’ too harsh a charge? Perhaps. But where is the line between ‘reimagination’ and ‘ripping off the work of another’?

Let’s ignore the merits and demerits of reimagining great works. A cursory Google chucks up a wall of such reimaginations. It appears that we as a culture have forgotten how to create something new. Have we simply exhausted the limits of human creativity? I highly doubt it. After all, now and then, a great work of culture slips past the slop and the sludge.

According to experts, creativity has dissolved beneath wave after wave of tests and schedules and supervisions and optimisations—beginning at school and continuing into work. And yet, we seldom produce anything that feels genuinely daring or, dare I say it—alive.

But these are not isolated problems. They are features of a deeper cultural condition—a culture of anxiety that meddles relentlessly in favour of outcome over process. And that culture is the antithesis of creativity.

We could call it safetyism. A condition that, in its broadest sense, is a culture of anxiety. It seeks to protect, to manage risk, to guarantee outcomes in advance. It is obsessed with what might go wrong. Everything must be assessed, justified, and rendered safe. Creativity, however, depends on the opposite conditions. It requires discovery, percolation, waste, and the freedom to let things be. The essence of creativity lies not in optimisation but in process.

A creative culture focuses on exploration rather than results. It tolerates uncertainty and allows ideas to develop slowly, privately, and imperfectly. Many ideas must die quietly for a few to live. An anxious culture, by contrast, demands proof of value before the process has even begun. It asks what an idea will lead to before allowing it to exist. This inversion is fatal. When we prioritise outcome over exploration, the creative faculties cease.

Naturally, this anxiety culture is hostile to free speech and freedom of expression. Risky speech is treated not as a condition of thought but as a potential harm. Speech is policed, softened, hedged, or pre-emptively withdrawn. Creativity cannot survive this atmosphere. As Orwell warned, take away freedom of speech and the creative faculties dry up. The point is not merely political. Creativity requires the freedom to say foolish, premature, or unpopular things — often privately, often tentatively. A culture that fears risk in speech will inevitably fear risk in thought.

Worse still, anxiety culture replicates itself. Each thing deemed ‘unsafe’ narrows our tolerance for discomfort. The safe becomes unsafe, and the unsafe becomes unthinkable. Over time, almost everything feels risky. This is how cultures stagnate: not through overt repression, but through the internalisation of fear. When free people censor themselves, creativity dies in the womb.

The smartphone has turbocharged this culture of anxiety. By filling every empty moment, we have abolished boredom—the natural precondition of creativity. This culture fixates too upon outcome. Dating apps reduce the mess of intimacy to a clean, editable spreadsheet. You must be at least six foot to ride.

Travel to any major city and you’ll see swarms of self-same crowds, eager to prove they were somewhere rather than merely be that somewhere. They record concerts and tick off itineraries, all consumed by the deliciously ironic fear of missing out.

Look around you. If you are in public—or what used to be public before the smartphone—over half the surrounding people are likely scrolling through their phones. Adult life has become an anti-process life. We are checking email, building our brand, retweeting to curry favour, deciding which grievance to adopt. What are we not doing? Thinking.

To be blunt, we spend an average of six hours a day on our phones. This habit dissolves attention spans and erodes the capacity for deep thought—indeed, for sustained thought of any kind. Overstimulation leaves no time for ideas to mature, no silence in which problems can be solved. Smartphones fry the electrified meat between our ears, which still thinks we are roaming the plains spearing bison.

This is why boredom—or what we should really call reverie—is essential to creativity. Boredom is not emptiness. It is incubation. It is the state in which the unconscious is allowed to work. There is a reason we have our best ideas in the shower, on long walks, or just before bed. There is a reason we are told to sleep on it. In those seemingly empty moments, boredom knits together novels, symphonies, and ideas. Scrolling never will.

The daily routines of great artists and thinkers confirm this. They were routines of process over outcome: walking, thinking, doing nothing. What we now call deep work was once called work.

One of the most useful pieces of advice given to any creative person is not to talk an idea to death. Ideas need time away from noise, opinion, and premature judgement.

Our culture is the reverse. Twitter is to culture what lead pipes are to water. It is the antithesis of creativity. How many ideas are tweeted into oblivion before they have time to become anything at all? How many novels, plays, films, and symphonies have we chattered into cot death?

The results are everywhere. Risk-averse cultures do not stop producing culture; they recycle it. We reimagine novels. We reboot films. We update classics for modern audiences. Why? Because reimagining is safer than creating. Creation involves the risk of failure. Adding a few bells and whistles to a master work does not.

The political consequences follow naturally. An incurious culture produces incurious people, and incurious people produce crude politics. Black-and-white thinking flourishes where reflection has died.

Our loathsome public discourse is not an aberration. It is a symptom of a culture scrolling itself to death. Just witness the modern fetish for cancelling public figures without so much as a word from the accused. In plain English, it’s a reversion to something much uglier.

The antidote is not more content, more platforms, or more optimisation. It is a return to process. A culture that tolerates boredom. A culture that allows ideas to fail quietly, off-screen, and in peace.

Creativity does not need to be engineered or reimagined. It needs to be left the hell alone.

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When leafing through the newspapers, I mentally tally each story involving a man hauled before the courts, charged with what editors starchily refer to as “performing a sexual act.” Practitioners of this curious pastime appear to be everywhere. They hide in bushes. They burrow in parked cars. They even self-indulge in the vegetable aisles of Tesco.

In the council-estate English of my youth, these men were caught wanking in public. Today, officialdom shrouds their weird ways in hygienic buzzwords and bleachy evasions. At the end of each report, a solicitor doles out the latest trope: His client is seeking a diagnosis for ADHD or autism. This is a developing trend. A few years ago, the stock mitigation slithering from the lawyerly tongue was trauma or an adverse upbringing.

As a young court reporter, I grew used to this class and its linguistic sluttery. The most testicular excuse I ever heard seared itself onto my brain.

Defending his client’s weekly appearance before the judge, a solicitor said:
“Your Honour, we have been here before. All I can say on behalf of my client is that he does not believe he is stealing, so to speak. He believes he is correcting the broken, late-capitalist system.” Reader, he fought to steal another day.

Doubtless that habitual offender still liberates iPads and iPhones from the capitalist oppressor, fencing the goods to justice-involved persons, many of whom are people experiencing opioid addiction.

This habit of euphemism does not merely excuse the guilty. It swings its sickle elsewhere.

Under our Labour government, the dictionary of euphemisms has swollen to rival War and Peace. Each day mints a fresh brick of Lego Language—words pressed together into sentence shapes that feel moral without actually meaning anything. Euphemism is not just annoying speech; it is a habit of mind. The mouth that traffics in euphemisms aligns with the mind that thinks in euphemisms too.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Labour’s declared War on Misogyny. According to our betters, Britain is a scorched plain over which misogynists roam, knuckles dragging, hypnotised by Andrew Tate and the Manosphere. These creatures, we are told, stalk the land, muttering statistics about male athletic advantage like a swarm of demented Daleks.

Our Labour government, its approval rating currently three percent lower than the percentage of Brits who believe there is a monster living in Loch Ness Lake, will train teachers to spot misogyny in boys and send ‘high-risk’ offenders to courses to ‘tackle the root causes of misogyny.’

Misogyny, however, is not a vibes-based category. The word comes from the Ancient Greek misos (hatred) and gunē (woman): hatred of women. Until recently, it described a pathological condition involving fear, control, and violence directed at women. Such brutal men exist. They always have. But are they representative of the average British schoolboy doom-scrolling through social-media nonsense? Press X to doubt.

Yet this is where the campaign now lands: in classrooms of adolescent boys, taught to interrogate their latent depravity before it has manifested. It is not behaviour being punished, but probability.

In a culture strapped to the algorithm, only the most extreme definitions float to the surface. The brain, trained by screens, learns to seek the sensational, the novel, the ludicrous. And so, Labour shapes its moral imagination on content rather than evidence.

The Netflix drama Adolescence perfectly captures this drift. For the unacquainted, the series—an incel murder story drugged liberally with “that Andrew Tate shit”—was received as revealed truth. For The Guardian, it was “the best TV show ever.” It was not. Even a semi-literate eye would charge Adolescence as, well… adolescent.

Nevertheless, Adolescence assumed the status of revealed truth. On a BBC news panel, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch was interrogated for admitting she had not yet seen it. Middle-class parents dutifully watched alongside their sons, scanning their offspring for signs of misogyny leaking from its gills. Fiction hardened into diagnosis.

Life now imitates social media. Labour’s plan to tackle misogyny appears lifted directly from the website formerly known as Twitter. Schools will teach boys that it is not acceptable to act like barbarians. One wonders who imagined otherwise.

What these awareness seminars will not address—naturally—are the forms of misogyny that are neither hypothetical nor algorithmically inferred, but routine, organised, and existing beyond a Twitter feed or a Netflix menu.

They will not dwell on forced veiling, female genital mutilation, so-called honour violence, or acid attacks—practices documented in Britain and overwhelmingly concentrated within small but electorally critical communities governed by brutal patriarchal codes.

A rational observer might reasonably conclude that such practices meet any serious definition of misogyny: not ironic hatred, not incel posturing, but actual coercion, violence, and control exercised over women’s bodies and lives. You know, the very domination that Iranian women (and men) are currently risking their lives—quite literally—to uproot.

Yet these realities remain untouched and unmentioned, whilst classrooms revert into courtrooms enlisted to pre-emptively correct the imagined sins of adolescent boys. The reason is not moral complexity but political convenience. Euphemism thrives where naming the problem would threaten electoral arithmetic.

And so, the language grows ever softer around real brutality, even as it hardens against boys whose only crime is to physically resemble a fictitious incel murderer on Netflix.

A more hysterical observer might call this Orwellian pre-crime: the punishment of potential thought. I will settle for something simpler. When a society loses confidence in its ability to name real wrongdoing, it compensates by inventing symbolic offenders. Uncle Siggy Freud called this ‘kicking the dog.’

And so, we slouch toward government by algorithm: a country in which actual crimes—criminal and cultural—go under-punished and unmentioned, whilst imaginary ones invite moral crusaders to kick those closest to their boot; those who cannot bite back.

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Back in the early 2000s, I’d trade a handful of Attarax—the dreamy sedative—for sticks of low-grade hash, and with the reprobates I called my friends, skulk off into the woods safe from the steroidicidal Mr Lewis—our overzealous rugby teacher.

Most of us had a ‘script’. Tens of thousands of other troubled teens were deemed problematic—what I insist was healthily cynical—and regularly dewormed with a wonder drug called Seroxat.

That little white pill promised not just the earth but the earth’s inhabitants a cure to their inherently faulty human software. Seroxat, its breathless champions assured, could even cure shyness. Doctors plonked millions of such pills down millions of throats.

Until the ink in their pens ran dry.

Overnight, my faithful little dove arrived with one wing clipped. Then two. The next day, she was gone for good.

A BBC Panorama exposé aired a few weeks later. Those weeks—marked by vomiting, shaking, clucking like a junkie—enjoyed headlines with words like scandal, suppressed trial, and suicides. The miracle drug had told a few tall tales. One study revealed an awkward truth: suicidal thoughts were higher among those who’d taken the drug than those on a sugar pill.

By the time I was twelve, eccentricity and teenaged angst had graduated from normal features of the human condition to pathologies in need of cure. Doctors bought it. Parents bought it. Patients, too.

This was, of course, the End of History.

Our grandparents defeated fascism. Our parents outwitted communism. With no more demons to exorcise, liberal capitalism—the final state—turned to human nature itself.

The prevailing wisdom back then viewed depression and anxiety as one would a spluttering engine. Maladies of the mind were not existential, social, or moral, but mechanical. Depression was simple. A chemical imbalance. The cure was straightforward. A chemically imbalanced brain found repair much like a seized Toyota engine found oil. The End of History, it seemed, entailed the end of suffering itself.

Let me complicate matters before someone does so for me. Zoloft saved my life.

I don’t mean that quite so literally. Zoloft has saved me countless hours each day. Before that trusty little pill, I’d dissolve much of my waking hours in failing to please the impossible demands of Uncle OCD.

My condition isn’t the type one contracts on TikTok. It’s not quirky. It’s not an understandable yen for neatly aligned bookshelves (who doesn’t demand such things?). It is the kind which convinces you that you may have knocked over a child in the road en route to town. After all, what else could that bang have signalled?

It’s the kind that Googles hit and run and has you click through page after page of nothing whilst scenes of tearful juries condemning you to death flash through your brain. It’s the kind which asks: Do you think they’ll revive the death penalty for this? You deserve it. I mean, running over a kid and driving off. You’re a fucking monster, mate.

With OCD, no news is not good news. No news is indelible proof that there could be bad news. Of course, you know that this heinous act hasn’t happened. You know it. But with OCD, you never quite know it.

Not to invite accusations of shilling for Big Pharma, but Zoloft stopped all that. It’s not a magic pill. OCD is a chronic condition. But it saves me the bother of being at constant attritional war with myself.

Neither are its cousins in any way miraculous. In 2021, a major Cochrane study broke the taboo: the chemical imbalance theory was laid on the wayside, its spine snapped in six segments—antidepressants work only in a “small and unimportant way.”

Now let’s riot in nuance: the chemical imbalance theory suffers from residual 1990s wishful thinking. But millions—like me—swear by these little helpers.

Our culture is emerging from a decades-long bout of magical thinking. We confused chemical relief with cosmic resolution. Zoloft hasn’t cured my OCD. But it has turned down the volume so that I can hear myself think. And that, as Carl Jung insisted, is where meaningful change lights a cigarette, pours a large Rioja, and gets to work.

In Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, the evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse argues that anxiety and depression are not necessarily disorders at all. They are often functional responses—defence mechanisms that have evolved to protect us. Panic attacks are the smoke alarms of the mind: unbearable, overwhelming, and sometimes triggered by burnt toast—but not evidence of defect.

Nesse tells patients something profoundly comforting: you are not broken. Your mind is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Carl Jung made a similar argument decades earlier. “Neurosis,” he wrote, “is an attempt at self-cure.” For Jung, anxiety and depression were not conditions to grouse over but signals that one’s life had drifted out of alignment. They were wars with oneself—painful, destabilising, but potentially transformative. To blunt them indiscriminately was to risk arresting growth.

This is the irony at the heart of the antidepressant age. At precisely the moment we became obsessed with self-help, we may have medicated away the very mechanism that forces self-reflection. We turned the mind’s emergency signals into background noise. We confused comfort with health.

This is the inevitable result of a culture that long ago decided suffering was a mistake. That the human condition itself was mere faulty software.

In such a culture, the idea that anxiety might be meaningful—or that depression might demand change rather than suppression—sounds almost heretical. And I hope it does.

If Jung and Nesse are right, then we must consider this cosmic irony: we spent decades trying to cure our minds of their own attempts to cure us.

And now we are sicker than ever. As they say, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

Announcement: Oxford Sour is now full time.

Oxford Sour is now my full-time job. For too long, this publication has coasted on that millennial malady: potential. Those days are dead. Over the coming weeks, I’ll publish 25 essays. No more Millennial dithering. No more bullshit.

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Sitting beside me is a can of the notorious Special Brew. Shorn of its old label—and shined into bougie respectability—this imposturous lager possesses just 7% alcohol compared to the once brain-belting nine percent ABV.

After sitting calmly like a Hindu cow, nothing magical happened. Something was AWOL. That sedative, oily glow as it seeps into one’s brain, healing and soothing the neural pathways like a dose of EST—nothing. Gone is the beauty of Special Brew.

Luckily, for research purposes, I imported a slab of the old recipe—Italians, it seems, are trusted to choose what they pour down their throats.

I giddily report the following symptoms: that feverish glow crawling along the upper lip, spreading upward and across the brow. Something is lighting tiny fires beneath my cheeks. The brain connects previously loose strands of thought. The only drink, as Kingsley Amis declared, so effortless in her ability to “create goodwill,” is doing just that. Along comes the creeping conviction that the British could be great and happy again if only we stopped taking ourselves so bloody seriously.

As a boy, I harboured a peculiar ambition: as soon as I could passably fake legal age, I’d scramble some pennies together and find out what that golden can of lager was really all about. In the local off-licence, she attracted the gentleman and the gentleman of the road alike.

I’d see them snap a single can of Spesh from a family of four. The other cans, sold in fours without exception, seemed conformist and dull and beset with envy and adulation toward the irreverent Special Brew on the top shelf. Here was a tipple to unite all peoples. Besides, anything dedicated to Winston Churchill by order of the Royal Danish Court is clearly a ducal affair.

Syrupy, thick with charm, surprisingly drinkable, blissfully unbothered by its vandal reputation—Special Brew seduced serious men. Churchill loved the stuff, and Kingsley Amis did, too.

Her shaky reputation was unwarranted. Anti-booze charities claimed Spesh was “as bad as heroin and crack” and a tipple not enjoyed but endured by the homeless and the helpless. In truth, her most ardent devotees were older professionals, who, like me, enjoyed the cause and effect of this riotous little lager.

Now it is a sanitised version of itself, just as this country has become a sanitised version of itself. I suspect this new recipe, in a previous life, drained its time posting personal-best 5Ks on LinkedIn. Special Brew—the old irreverent, the old fuck off, the old don’t take yourself too seriously—has fallen into the soup of conformity.

This is part of a wider trend of being told what to do. Declining and insecure civilisations always turn first to what people drink, think, eat, and laugh at. Those are the first pleasures to disappear when the elites are unsure of themselves. What is public safety if not insecurity made law? Crack open the head of every busybody, and you’ll find fear and self-loathing.

And so, the character who once embodied the truth-telling, irreverent spirit of the Special Brew devotee becomes a dying breed. His honesty is no longer appreciated in a culture of image, filters, and bullshit. Declining civilisations like to micromanage, and the result is always the same.

Christopher Lasch lamented the rise of personal branding—the death of the artisan and the ascent of the other-directed personality—or bullshitter in plain English. No wonder we are all so mentally unsound. We no longer know who we are, so we try to control that which we cannot.

Just glance at current trends: adverts ecstatically plugging alcohol-free beer. Your friends and loved ones plunging themselves into ice baths and waffling on about their protein windows.

The irony. A culture never so permissive has never been so abstemious. We have freed the individual from all constraints. And yet, they construct a bespoke iron cage and call it a journey.

Look, reader, it is no business of mine who drinks what or who optimises what. But live and let live works both ways. That was, in more cerebral times, called compromise. We enjoyed smoking sections in bars. Playing music on the Tube was a capital offence.

But the Puritans and the rule-makers have won. Thanks to a nonsense tax from on high, my favourite bottle of red costs me one pound more than last week.

Is that a life-changing sum? No. Will it prompt better choices? Absolutely not. What is it then but a surcharge on personal freedom?

This is why the battle of Special Brew proved vital in our struggle against the box-tickers and wellness bores. And it is one we lost thoroughly, meekly, without an errant swearword fired.

In more gloried times, Special Brew was a fearsome 9% by volume and four-and-a-half units per can.

The prigs, as usual, got what they wanted. Because 4.5 units exceeds the recommended daily allowance from our irreproachable NHS, the can itself once served as a kind of defiant gesture: a golden middle finger.

A confident country—and a confident brewer—might have leaned into this. Such ‘fuck you’ marketing would have pulled in many a professional tippler with magnetic force. Alternatively, they might have shrunk the can to the exact millilitre that evaded some nonsense guideline, the way New Yorkers brown-bag their tipple of choice to skirt municipal piety.

Instead, we sanitised. We complied. And we obeyed.

Conformity—true conformity—is always born of a lack of confidence. Great civilisations trust themselves; declining ones impose petty rules with which they beat their citizens over the head.

And so, we arrive here: a culture enchanted by rules and regulations and ‘it’s for the best.’

But all is not lost. For me, much of the current populist wave demands a return not to the 1950s but to a time when things made more sense, and when we minded our own business.

Only time will tell. And in that time, I will spend larcenous sums importing a glorious drink which, to borrow the therapy-speak of my betters, promotes wellness.

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As if compelled by unseen forces—one imagines that scene in The Exorcist—my fellow traveller adjusts his AirPods, straightens his spine, and ‘locks in.’ Before him lies the cluttered still life of Productivity™: a crumpled FT, a bottle of protein-infused kefir, and two boiled eggs sweating inside their polypropylene coffin. For several moments, he sits with priestly solemnity. Then, as the train inches forward, so does he.

And so, begins his morning recital. I would call it theatre, but theatre requires even the slightest concession to its audience. There is no risk of such grace here.

“Jenny? You still there? Jenny? Excellent.”

He repeats her name as though invoking the supernatural. Dale Carnegie once advised this rigmarole; it’s meant to build something called rapport. Unfortunately, Dale Carnegie never sat captive before a disciple who had taken his gospels quite so literally.

“Jenny (build rapport), could you run those numbers by me again? (assert authority). I’m hoping to parallel-path with you moving forward (signal tribal membership). Great! (convey enthusiasm). Jenny, let’s circle back at 1400 GMT; I want to put a pin into an area of emerging awareness.”

By this point in the sermon, I’d developed several areas of emerging resentment and the unignorable desire to drive pins into eardrums—mostly mine. His monologue, which suggested he charged by the word, stretched unabated from Reading to London Paddington, where he skulked off the platform and into the neon vomit of the city like a Roman senator descending into the Suburra.

In the false refuge of a nearby pub, the missionaries gather and gab incessantly. Chirruping clots of earnest twenty-somethings discuss REM-centric sleep regimes, dopamine stacking, and some Santeria called ‘sunlight dosing.’ They sip protein-riddled IPAs. They recite “Huberman says…” as the devout once invoked St Augustine.

These rituals—the 21st-century Lascaux cave paintings—serve one purpose: to peacock one’s devotion to a deity known as The Grind. Like all deities, The Grind demands a daily sacrifice for a distant, mostly hypothetical reward.

We have struggled to name this social pathology. Grind culture. Hustle culture. 996. No days off. Whatever it is, it is not working. In truth, it is the inbred relation of Performative Reading—Performative Working. This theatre drips with all the fripperies of work and none of the results. Much like a Hinge premium account, or indeed the British state.

Émile Durkheim described the malady of the infinite: limitless aspiration tempered by limited means. Merton called it strain theory. When the gap between our aspirations (a career, a mortgage, a life) and the structural means to achieve them (stagnant wages, runaway house prices) yawns too widely, the result is social chaos—or what Durkheim called anomie. The under-45s call this phenomenon life.

The trouble with chasing work and leisure is that you catch neither. The average young Brit is exhausted yet frantic, motivated yet always on. For Durkheim, this motion without movement was the prelude to social collapse.

Consider those viral morning routines that spring from the nether realms now and then. Is it just me, or do these enterprising grind-bros spend four hours each dawn doing everything but something useful? It is an elaborate cabaret of… nothing much at all.

And the plague of productivity has not, I’m sorry to report, increased productivity. On that spectral economic measure, we Brits wheeze like chain-smoking snails behind the Dutch, the French, the Germans and—of course—the Americans.

Wages, meanwhile, have remained in a medically induced coma since 2008. House prices, on the other hand, have long treated plausibility as optional. Once, the average home was three times the average salary. Today, it is eight. Should this continue, innovative London estate agents may soon offer a new service for the mortgage-atypical: virtual reality goggles.

Peruse the job ads. A publishing assistant now earns the kind of salary once associated with mercenary summer jobs and cautionary tales. The average graduate, saddled with debt and at least one HR-approved acronym, earns a sliver above the legal minimum.

The Germans get it. The Dutch get it. The French get it. The Americans understand little else: hard work demands reward. Anything else is sparkling masochism.

Here in Britain, we worship the grind, but not the commensurate wages that would make the grind worth grinding for.

So why maintain the pretence of productivity?

Because real, hold-it-in-your-hands success—money, property, stability—has become a luxury item. To compensate, we settle for metrics pervious to our efforts: steps tracked, sleep monitored, diet optimised. These provide the soothing illusion of progress.

Meanwhile, record numbers of young Brits have fled the country. Many have fled so frantically they have flocked—willingly—to that dystopian desert theme park known as Dubai.

I don’t begrudge them. Nor do I resent the curious public self-abasements of the true believers. Every age riots in its boutique vanities. But somewhere between the boiled eggs and the biohacking, we have surrendered the ability—the unproductive luxury—to sit, think, and be.

Leisure is not the enemy of work. It is its civilised enabler. Ask the disconcertingly productive French. Ask the knuckled-down Germans. Ask almost anybody.

But don’t ask the Brits—unless you catch them scuttling along Heathrow Terminal 3, en route to any country where things still at least pretend to make sense.

Eat The Meek

Because there’s never gonna be enough space. So, eat the meek and savour the taste.

Welcome to the inaugural Last Orders. As a man born at least two thousand years too late, I revere—without the faintest compunction—the old school. Why? Because I am, proudly, a curmudgeon: one of those allegedly demented, tweed-addled types with the gall to suggest that what came before us was more cerebral, more meaningful, less chaotic, and infinitely less tedious.

Last Orders is my attempt to restore the great newspaper column to its former glory. Each week, I’ll lob my fountain pen at whatever is careening around your mind and mine. I’ll be right; I’ll be wrong; I will not apologise. I intend to provoke. I refuse to bore you or sedate you with safe opinions or plain prose. The world already has too many HR bores and traffic wardens. We’ve landed in this cultural ditch for one reason: too much flattery and not nearly enough honesty.

So, pour me a treble. And one more thing: I don’t live in an ivory tower. Drop me a message—suggest a topic, lob a grenade, complain. But please, no more marriage proposals. I’m far too busy to take a fifth wife.

The Courage to Be Disliked

British decline and the politics of self-help.

One of Rachel Reeves’ first acts as Britain’s first female chancellor was to pull down all the pictures of men from the grand state room at 11 Downing Street. This, in a country that has elected three female prime ministers in her lifetime. The first—Margaret Thatcher—entered No.10 two months after Reeves was born and ruled until Reeves entered her teens. Thatcher’s photograph, incidentally, no longer hangs on the wall in her old study. Our prime minister, Keir Starmer, tore that down, too. The portrait “unsettled” him.

I wonder what it must be like to live in a serious country and not a kakistocracy—rule by the worst, least qualified, most unscrupulous. Or at least in a country ruled by adults unaffected by their teenage traumas.

An illuminating piece in the FT revealed Reeves—alongside the rump of our talentless political class—as one such character. When a local businessman in Scotland asked about taxes on North Sea oil and gas, Reeves dropped any notion of economics and lectured the chap on gender politics instead: “Talk to me with respect,” fumed the furious Reeves. “I am the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

Reeves scored a victory, in her mind at least, for that peculiar cohort which celebrates its genitalia like the Mayans worshipped the sun.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, to furnish her proper title to which she invests such esteem, traffics in the curious dialect of modern identity politics: that bipolar tongue in which one is simultaneously fragile and fierce. Upon appointment as the first female chancellor, Reeves claimed without a sense of scale to have “smashed the glass ceiling.” That’s despite three other women occupying the office above hers—the proper job—before her. The glass, it seems, is visible only to Reeves, and the selectively oppressed.

This is the vocabulary of our therapeutic age: the language of empowerment welded to the language of victimhood. On Mondays, Reeves is the deserving heir to “all the great women who came before us.” On Tuesdays, she is the helpless victim of misogyny, sexism, and a cornucopia of isms and ilities—mysterious forces which shrink or expand according to one’s performance.

If one slogan could define our age, it would be: It is not my fault.

Walk into any bookshop and you’ll find the same ethos lining the shelves. Ranks upon ranks of pastel-coloured optimism, each volume promising to ‘unlock your inner genius’ or ‘unleash the beast.’ The cover features a gawping face. The title, a forced marriage between a verb and an abstract noun, the more grammatically offensive the better: Be Your Brilliance. These books are hokum. These books are what Marx called the opiate of the masses: selling a world in which there are no limits, biological or environmental. The only limitation, it appears, is a lack of imagination. Self-help books are lottery tickets for the credulous.

Reeves governs as if she has inhaled the lot.

The British economy is wheezing; under her care, it has progressed from whooping cough to phlegm-flecked emphysema. Wages are stagnant, investment is down, inflation is up; energy bills are monstrous, and red tape is calcifying. These are concrete realities. Reeves answers them with abstractions and an almost spiritual belief in intention over outcome.

Whenever reality intrudes, she supplies mythology. She has been “underestimated” all her life. That’s a strange claim from a graduate of both Oxford and the LSE, and who now runs the sixth largest economy on earth. If anything, the gap is reversed: the results of her work fall far short of the respect she demands. But that is symptomatic of our age: your work doesn’t reflect your competence, your bank balance doesn’t reflect your financial literacy, your waistline doesn’t reflect your grasp of calorie expenditure.

That is the eternal appeal of the self-help philosophy: nothing is final, reality is optional, poor results don’t reflect upon you. If anyone suggests otherwise, they’re guilty of misogyny or racism or sexism or ageism or thin privilege or insert imaginary bugbear.

The Budget revealed the endgame. Taxes went up, growth went down, and Labour’s promise not to tax “working people” dissolved via the oldest ruse in Westminster: frozen thresholds that drag millions into higher bands. It is a tax rise without the decency to admit it.

Meanwhile, a record exodus of young Britons allows Labour to boast—without irony—that immigration is finally falling. Some 700,000 have fled the country, tired of buying another round and never seeing one return their way. Meanwhile, the real pressures—crushing energy costs, strangling bureaucracy, a housing crisis—remain untouched. This was a budget for Labour MPs, who are effectively staging a sit-in protest at the Houses of Parliament. An election held today would evict all but a handful from public life.

Reeves might have benefited from reading The Courage to Be Disliked, the Japanese bestseller rooted in Alfred Adler’s neglected genius. Adler’s core idea is disarmingly simple: separate your tasks from the tasks of others. Do what is yours to do; abandon the corrosive need for approval. The modern cult of grievance—addled by self-help voodoo—collapses under such clarity.

Had Reeves adopted Adler’s teachings, she might be free—free from the need to be acknowledged for her genitalia; free from hallucinated misogyny; free to observe cause and effect. Free to see with clear eyes the real-world results of her policies without invoking the penurious conspiracy of unseen spirits.

Chance would be a fine thing. Such a fundamental shift would require a virtue that no self-help tome would dare suggest: the courage to see things as they are and not as one would like them to be.

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