My idea of Hell is a commercial Irish pub in which every day is St Patrick’s Day. In the corner of this cultural abattoir stands the lummox Paddy McGuinness of tabloid TV fame, crooning through ‘Delilah.’ Synthetic cheer dusts one’s lungs. Tinned laughter gloms on to Paddy’s cheeky-chappy chatter. The unseen commander of this naraka pulls Paddy’s strings:
“What do you call this?” Paddy’s pinguid palm presents what is to a well-adjusted person, a bread roll.
The captive audience convulses in unison. Representatives of the condemned rise to their feet one by one to reel off their geographic monikers for the beguiling lump of risen dough.
“That were a teacake!”
“Don’t be daft!” says another. “That’s a bloody bap, is that.”
A coal-dusted man of capable violence towers above the squabbling mob. The din of affected regional accents sucks out of the atmosphere.
“That there is a barm, is that. I’ll tussle wi’ any man who say nowt else.”
Paddy McGuinness, the human wind chime, senses the only concept he can sense—consensus. “From’t now on, this is a barm, is this.”
As with Sisyphus, I am condemned to compère this matinee of eternal tedium.
In this layer of Hell, all books dress in Comic Sans and reside on Kindle. All music here is the malfunctioning-washing-machine variety, which flows through EasyJet flights to Ibiza. Wine glasses shatter upon touch.
Corpulent women, all named Roz from Camden, incessantly play the bongos. Reiki healers realign your chakras. Bristolian slam poets with dreadlocks invade one’s eardrums with ‘An Ode to Palestine’—a rhyming couplet etched on an endless scroll. O.J. Simpson plays catch with Heinrich Himmler and Edward Bernays. Influencers, bless them, are legion here. The inability to take a satisfying selfie, despite tens of thousands of perfect takes, torments them for eternity.
Here, one cannot smoke despite the absence of time and notions of mortality. However, at least this is not the ring above, where wellness coaches, traffic wardens, financiers, lawyers, and human organ harvesters gather, and where no distinction exists between them.
The regular Hell of ample warmth does not bother me—I’ve holidayed in Sevilla at summer’s most punishing apex. It’s like living in a Salvador Dali painting. But one million lifetimes of Delilah burrowing into my eardrums and exploding amid my skull meat slicks dry my default atheism.
No, I’m not quite God-ified. Thou shalt not rap upon thy neighbour’s door with a copy of The Lighthouse; but thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s wife’s arse.
Irony is the most human of things. One evening, I’d planned to sip coffin-varnish Gin and Tonics and mock the deluded. A Netflix documentary on near-death experiences offered the perfect evening.
Scores of the living claim to have once died and shuttled off to a verdant valley of indescribable beauty and light, where they met loved ones and even God himself. They describe a heroin-like state of pure contentment, only to be shunted back to this murky realm of Ozempic and TikTok. These cosmic astronauts respawn here on Earth with a sense of wonder and without a fear of death. Despite my resistance, I watched on.
A grave fear washed over me. If I continue to entertain this piffle, I thought, I’d invite a consciousness worse than death, that of the New Age hippy—a newfound interest in drum circles and a disinterest in soap. But the Green Party membership remains ever remote. Instead, I settled on the long murmuring belief that there might be a meaning to all this. Even if there is no good reason why Paddy McGuinness is here with us. I’d rather rebirth as a peasant during Mao’s Great Leap Forward than stew a mung bean.
Near-death experiences are strangely uniform across cultures, ages, demographics, geographics. Many recount lucid, vivid journeys into realms they cannot adequately paint with mere words. All this despite being clinically dead.
The after-effects are often profound. Many abandon their long-cultured atheism. Then again, this could just be a chemical reaction—the brain lulling the body into the big sleep. In that case, Pascal’s wager takes on renewed vigour: What, exactly, has one got to lose?
It’s hardly profound, I know. But I settled on the half-baked notion that we might be here for a reason. That reason might be to develop our souls to their highest frequency. That arduous task might take a million lifetimes. How would one develop his soul? Through suffering and struggle, I’d guess. But not the type of ‘struggle’ prefixed with the German possessive pronoun, mein.
According to reports, our disabling times have pushed great swathes toward church pews. Belief in God has trebled amongst Gen Z. Many churches claim an infusion of supple skin and intact hairlines regularly swell their Sunday congregations.
My lukewarm agnosticism is nothing of the sort. I’m not seeking Latin Mass or proclaiming to know anything not already obvious to the layman.
But this conversion serves two purposes. First, I can add the rabid atheist to my list of satirical targets. Second, I may stand at least some chance of an otherworldly reprieve and escape from the infernal Irish pub, home to the most heinous creature, singing the most insidious song.
I hope you had as much fun writing this as I had reading it!
No need to enter ye local oirish tavern to experience Dante. Nor yet to go to oibitha. Just open any source of so-called news are voilà! Here we have the flabby complacent fuhrer, issuing diktats about how our would be annihilators are to be treated by us. We shall give thrm board and lodgings, mobile phones. We shall bypass the pedophilia and misogyny.
We shall encourage them to use our churches, our school, our hospitals at no expense.
We shall allow them to work illegally, to enter illegally and to rape and pillage our women, our communities and our country with impunity.
We shall bow to their narcissistic neuroses. Our sport shall be self flagellation and our prayer shall be "Mea Culpa".
The final ring of hell, betrayal, has already been effected by aforesaud flabby fuhrer.
Welcome to the ununited kingdom of hades.