Go Swimming, See The Sights

What could be more picturesque than a naked man drying all his genital crevices under the wall-mounted hand-dryer?

Google appears to lack illustrative images. Yes, I'm sad too.

Meanwhile, on the way back from swimming, some spectacularly arrogant driving inspired a new marketing slogan, which I'm happy to licence to Range Rover and other companies, perhaps accompanying a picture of a child in crosshairs.

Oddly, Google fails to provide an appropriate image for that too, but here's one I made earlier.

Because let's face it: hit a kid in a tin can and she might bounce off alive. Smack her with a 4 ton brick carrying one person and an iPhone and it's Game Over.

Charles Spencer King, RIP

(Note for visitors: if you aren't a builder, farmer or live up a mountain but drive/want an SUV, you are scum. Sod off - after reading the rest of this)

Spare a moment's thought for Mr King, who was knocked off his bicycle and killed last week, another tragic victim of arrogant, dangerous driving. He seems like a thoroughly good man. He said this

"Sadly, the 4x4 [SUV for Americans] has become an acceptable alternative to Mercedes or BMW for the pompous, self-important driver. I find the people who use it as such deeply unattractive. To use them for the school run, or even in cities or towns at all, is deeply stupid".

Farmers and builders need these things. Nobody else. Mr King drove a VW Golf and appeared to labour under the illusion that people buy things they need, rather than to impose a set of (disgusting) social values on others.

Why do Mr King's views on Chelsea Tractors matter, apart from the fact that he's right on these awful, dangerous, monstrous and polluting examples of why capitalism is a moral and environmental failure?

He designed the Range Rover (now morphed into this offence).

The original - designed so that a farmer could hose out the sheepshit then drive to the Young Farmers' Ball

Current Range Rover: designed to impress more junior executives and other drug dealers: consumerism's no fun without 'conspicuous'. More importantly, you need the several tons and four wheel drive for that treacherous 1 mile drive to school because let's face it, North London's a terrifying and threatening extreme environment.

The new Range Rover Evoque. Why have a life when you can buy a 'lifestyle'?

Environment saved

I was keeping this for Radio 4's Genius program, but the need is too urgent to wait for a new series.

I think that most of the drivers I know don't care about the damage they're doing to the environment and to the lungs of pedestrians because they're insulated from the immediate effects. Likewise, the exhaust fumes disperse and we don't really notice it any more.

So the way to shame people into driving less or driving cleaner cars is to increase the immediate effect of the pollution. I have the answer. Add harmless black dye to the exhaust so that each vehicle pumps out a foul black cloud proportionate to the pollution produced, so that everybody can see whose cars are poisoning them, and gains a visual index of the degree to which our air is polluted. Link it to another pump which exudes a revolting but harmless gas into the vehicle's cabin - I suggest the eggy deliciousness of human flatulence - in proportion to the engine output (for SUVs, I'd prefer to link the exhaust pipe to the air conditioning, but apparently that counts as murder).

Before long, the selfish bastards in urban SUVs will be rushing to buy Prius's as their clothes stink of bottom and passing pedestrians lob bricks at the filth factory speeding past. It won't cost drivers any more, it doesn't penalise people who have to drive for work, it simply emphasises the costs of how we run our society.

Friday's conundrum (again)

Today's Friday Conundrum is quite simple: who really needs a slap?

My list is obviously endless, with Hazel Blears at the top, but taking in people with hairstyles, Tories, entire categories such as advertising and PR workers, 4x4 drivers, litterbugs, UKIP, anyone who uses their mobile telephone as a music player, Steve Quitterill…

Don't mind me, sometimes I get a little cranky

I like people. Most people. Some people, anyway. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not an undiscriminating misanthrope. There are groups with a permanent place in my Top Ten for Summary Execution - Tories, hippies, SUV-drivers. I'd like a t-shirt to flash reading 'you are an arrogant, selfish, polluting, greedy, egotistical, inadequate, shortsighted bastard (unless you're a farmer or builder)' but fear that they wouldn't be able to read the whole thing as they flash past en route between suburban home and suburban prep school. 

So anyway, apart from them, I like most people. Except for the three teenage girls who casually dropped their fast food wrappings on the floor in front of me as though there's no more natural place for rubbish - inconceivable to them that bins even exist, let alone should be used by the likes of them. 

No, the only person who really got to me today is a complete stranger I see every Monday. I queue up to get into the pool, so I'm already feeling slightly cranky. Waiting my turn, I idly gaze out over the car park where he sits in his highly-polluting car, warming up for his swim by having a cigarette. So he's driven to the pool and smokes as a preliminary. I want to smash his headlights in and then calmly explain that a walk and no cigarette would help him no end, and would leave the congested lanes for people who don't intend to poison themselves (and others), before dying expensively on the NHS. OK, so he's finished his cancer-twig. Then, EVERY WEEK, he strolls to the front of the queue and pushes in so aggressively that nobody says a thing. After that, he races to get changed first, grabs the widest lane and swims down the middle so that nobody else can share it. 

The final straw was after I left the pool today. Trying to cross the ring-road, who should shoot straight through the red light while I was on the road but this utter, utter wanker. At least I'm compensated by the knowledge that a fat smoker, dangerous driver and non-seatbelt wearer is probably going to die younger than me. Does that make me a bad person?

Urge to kill… rising.