Dispatches from the Factory Floor #3: The Unbearable Wankness of Being

Book-learning is overrated. In which of the Dover Thrift Editions can you learn the difference between Madeleine McCann and a submarine, what you call a ginger prossie, or that the wheelchair is the only part of a vegetable you can’t eat? Wherever fatalism reigns, men may be crass but it needn’t follow that they are dour.

There are exceptions, of course, and Neil, for whom all things are imbued with an ineluctable quality of wankness, is one of them. How weary, stale, flat, unprofitable, and wank seem to him all the uses of this world! This drill bit? Wank. This weather we’re having? Wank. This life of man? Nasty, short, brutish, and wank. All that lives and may love? Wank.

Where I come from this state of mind is called depression. Where I have ended up it is called being a moody cunt. Where the emphasis falls is on the moody, it being a given that one is a cunt.