A Royal telegram has been sent. You get one now just for wanting to live 100 years, you’d be amazed how few people actually do. The target aspirant age is 65. For the modern worker, to not be butter fisted by global economics is to be dead, to be useless. Moments like this give them pause, a chance to reset the culture clock to zero and take advantage of that 2-4-1 Smirnoff offer. 

The public left (as they should be during these occasions of grand masonic owl spanking) to one side, this journalist is not about to force the question as to the vertebrate integrity of our new suckle monster in chief. Some people, some crazies, some kooks…they think it is important. The genus of the lady, that is. Not to me. 

Exoskeletal or no, she is still our Cathy, and she has come home to us, sheathed in M&S skirt, reddish lipstick (applied solely to balance out fake tan) and a typically Windsorian hat of no substance and less style. I knew this was a big mistake. I should have stuck to eco-massacre and the end of things. There’s a fine line between journalism and churnalism. Will the lizard rise within her during the ceremony and make itself known? Will it burst from her frail flesh upon the alter, spraying the high-priest with a thick Kate-paste and splattering the Lawrence of Arabia stone with middle-class body-liquid? It doesn’t matter. Give me that nipple, lizard or mammalian dangling down from her great (possibly scaly?) chest and I shall draw my senses together, take it in my mouth….just as we all should. 

Ian Thorpe is in the audience, a shark amongst the reptiles.

Little boys in red dresses - three rows deep on each side, a special cushion for the priest’s four favourites, all ginger. A ginger mass for the follicularly challenged groom and his half brother. If I listen close, I can already hear those singers…

I want to know what she wears when she has the flu. 

I want pictures of her on a holiday she did not enjoy.

I want a three thousand page discourse on the length of her socks during those formative Brownie years (badges in pin-hole photography and teddy bear stuffing) 

I want a celebratory magazine supplement every time she pops a tampon up that pink, possibly Squamate, hole.

I want a mixtape made of the songs she hates the most. 

I want the names of all the men that her father hasn’t slept with.

I want a refuse sack, black and strong, double lined with a yellow tie at the top…ready for the next time she throws out a dress/skin.

I want a memorial DVD video ready and pumped full of REM the week before she dies.

I want to know what kind of dreams she always has but never remembers.

I want a list of the books she’s started but never finished.

I want the voices in her body coming through on the radio.

I want to be the guy who knows the guy who’s sister is having a casual relationship with the cousin of the short gentlemen who has recently been selected as stool-groom.  

I want to fully furnish a flat for her, using the three, primary Katisian colours (wisteria, mauve and terracotta), somewhere in the Wirral, near a working water-mill, install a 200 inch television and a big yellow Smeg fridge….and I don’t want her to ever, ever see it or even know it exists. 

I want all her children to be as boring as she wants them to be interesting. 

I want the news coverage of her slipping and falling down a small flight of ceremonial stairs, possibly drunk, somewhere in Dubai, to outweigh the news coverage of her inevitable kids-tennis charity. 

I want her sunglasses to always be a bit too big for her honest rectangle of a head.

I want the best photo of her ever to have been taken on a dirty, red mobile phone, by an illiterate Ukranian émigré who was trying to send pictures of a busty yet pale, half-naked ex-girlfriend to his current internet squeeze for the purpose of a bra-size comparison.

The Union of the Lizard is on the climb.

P Home. 28/04. Westminster square. 

You are a little treasure, aren’t you?

Milked off any more crippled rescue dogs lately?

HO HO HO!!!!

Really, no really, no really, Merry Christmas one and all, come and rape me with a stiff news story and funnel in truth juice to my gaping news hole, using a rolled up photo of a female MEP, I dare you.

Oh, you are a dirty player and no mistake Patrick Home, yes you are.

What? Seven of them? At once? How ever did you manage that Prime Minister?

NO NO NO!

Well, I’ve found that to be true, of so many indeterminables that fix themselves onto me for further explanation. Our Wexford type cat with the big office, he told us what to do last Christmas, he said (in that deep voice reserved for those most serious, SERIOUS predicaments);

“…lie still, watch the door and don’t be afraid to use this cricket bat, I’m going to warn Maggie and the twins. Stay inside, everyone, don’t be afraid, but stay the f—k inside and buy stuff off TV!”

So, after my seasonal trip to fellate a small snow child’s green decayed carrot of a nose, will I be having reconsiderations where the church is concerned?

Well, I couldn’t eat a whole one, as the old joke goes.

Freckles in the moonlight, lit up by the small shaft of white light being passed over each of them- she was alone, but for how long?

Oh look, magical fantasy programming to null my mind to the dull times ahead…

To the iron bridge’d town went Fudrick and Algasteer, both clinking weapons of torture and presents of love, against their steeds as they rode, hearts full of anger, bellys full of mead, whore juice and ale. Hurray for the princess with magical powers, played ably by a popular daytime television anchor.

The whole world’s a stage, and on it, a pantomime, the same every Christmas.

Jingle bells.

Oh.

I am utterly wasted, guttered, sniped, slashed, ghetto felched; on flu medicine. I am not a tramp. I am a very good journalist.
I bought some Rinofed a while ago as it got me high. Today though, to ease some quirk of boredom and a naggling, rasping cough; I drank half a bottle of the liquid form - a dark sticky nectar that smells like some twisted child hospital candy floss - which turns out to be much, much stronger.

Hours later now, my vision still blurred and abused, I have no conscious idea why I did this, some kind of rebellion at being so controlled and efficient all day?

I am freaking out.

This stuff, way too strong and I have to write my piece, two thousand words on a scandal involving some Russian chick and her pimping sugar daddy in Whitehall.

Beslan-mega-porno.

I want an oligarch to gang slap me for insolence, threaten me on the tundra, rape my kids and kiss me for death on my birthday, why, why is England so far behind the times?

I’m either going to just collapse in the middle of it, or, finally solve that old mind-body problem. I feel as I am bobbing, in some metallic sea of a burnt future and the crabs, the crabs have eaten my legs, they are coming up now, up my arms…..

It’s too strong.

This stuff is too strong.

Cough still here though

Simasia. A place anyone can visit, a place we can all invest in, but a place that needs to be ethically viable as well, of course. A place that needs moral assurance, fair-trade and pink-arse-hardcore levels of citizenship awareness.

Simasia. A place we have now created to teach the children of tomorrow exactly how to look at the world of today. A very old idea, completely forgotten, except perhaps for a few pamphlets tucked into a nook in some church, some stable somewhere in the piss of Europes history.

I open the small fogged window from my bathroom, lean, look out, and breathe deeply the sharp winter air of a London Tuesday, the worst kind of Tuesday, I scan the street and survey the virtual reality of Simasia from the outside; there they are, the cocain and ritalin kids stumbling amidst the wi-fi waters of true connectivity, missing busses and overpaying for burgers, wearing silly hats and thick rimmed glasses for fun, all glued to their little rectangle screens of warmth. No one looks up at me, everyone looks down, no one looks up anymore, for anything.

The truth isn’t just going to be provided, it is going to be sold.

No more free answers and easy entertainment.

After all, the bankers hadn’t spent their money to create something without profit, no matter how ideal it was.

Prophets fond of profits - the most common kind.

Inside the conurbations and urban centres, the masses of the Eurozone were changing, they had no choice…

Where there had been sole citizens, now there were ranks of debtors, hard-wired and socially networked communes of group fear. Neo-socialism was on the rise, just as the coin was falling.

Where there had been selfish individualism there are now caverns of misunderstanding and apprehension in minds, minds that are whole again.

No one is as they were the morning of the election, everything has been changed: Cats are long dead, bagged and ritually drowned. Dogs are idle, steaming and starving.

The klaxon sounds, I wipe my eyes and another nation looks about fit to end…

The shipments had begun a year before in fact and in time. Hard cold financial history. Not the speculative history which floats and wafts through the corridors of power, gently billowed by the electronic winds of credit users and their pin codes. Not that at all. Not the active memory of the virtual web lands either, something firmer, something that couldn’t be broken or denied.

Oh this was nothing new, nothing actually different to what is out there. It was just better defined and more secretive - it was everything that you’d ever need to know about anything, every transaction ever made, total coverage. This was what the market needed, not to know as such, but more to have, to have stored away in the dark places that money had forgotten.

Every image. Every sound. Every story. Every colour. Every person. Every plan. Every myth. Every film. Every video. Every sum. Every voice. Every flavour. Every picture. Every product. Every machine. Every book. Every line. Every word and every phrase, right down to the letter. Perfect. Nasty and Green.

It was quite understandable - for what they were going to do they would need it all and more - more that they did not yet have. The two hundred thousand dark pools of liquidity took until May 9th to get into place. They all had to be scanned and secured then packed neatly into the stock exchanges most boring looking hedge fund, located somewhere fittingly boring and unimportant between the sales of more glamorous bonds.

The market had only to turn a switch and it would live, their own personal beacon of chaos, a diamond light comprised solely of humanities worth, easy to read and with perfect kerning. Too much information. An implosive history in and of itself, that would eat truth and serve anarchy for breakfast, everything was in order, the pools were deep and ready to swallow.

Unbuckling my leg from beneath the red haired call girl, I slid across to look out the plane’s window as it jarred around in the turbulence - a rounded rectangular frame of chaos - perfect really. What I then saw was the most impressively foreboding sight I was likely ever to see (besides that tape I found of my parents gimped up in nazi studded leather jumpsuits).

It was the damp, subsiding base of America, Louisiana to be precise. A narrow dark sea, the forgotten space between the nations gargantuan Eastern and Western coastal columns of consumption. It wasn’t so much a sea now though, as a churning monster of eco-wreckages and past destruction’s, the record of a century spent doing all the wrong things. Pieces of what might have once been New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Franklin - blocks of cheap housing rose and fell, fragments of hastily aborted building projects broke and spat black oily foam, all the while everything oozed and lilted with the of course the filth of America’s hundred million garbage holes. Holes that had been filled with every kind of waste, without thought of their disposal. The oily waves violently hurled up fiery lumps of spill matter like some repeat-sex-crime-victim, writhing on the cold floor of a mental institution.

I studied the redhead, who was trying to seem less shocked than she really was. Classic whore behaviour - acting blase about tragic events is 90% of the art. We continued to gaze out in silence as our craft swooped steadily over the murky sea’s surface and in between the monstrous wounds of black landfill, all hundreds of feet wide, wounds went up the nation, up to those cities that looked so very shiny on TV. Without warning, the scarred dark palm of the sea began to rise before us, cresting on the shards of bleached earth, threatening to bring us down into its burning womb of barren sorrow. 

I gasped and popped a pill or two (for luck), kissed the call girl (ditto) and paid her. The thickly soiled air outside - red with pollutants - made it hard to tell whether what threatened us was a twisted current swell in the debauched waters, or, something more concrete, akin to something a lazy journalist might see in a Japanese tentacle porno flick. Kindly, our plane climbed at the last moment, safely bobbing over the seas oily fingers - fingers formed of split yellow buses, brothel beds and couches, shrimping ships and NFL memorabilia factories.

Suddenly, and with an audible hush, there was no oozing black tide beneath us, we had come ashore, washed upon the toxic winds to some different and higher ground. Up ahead, the ruins of an old cathedral flickered before the morning sun. The redhead yawned, put her teeth back in and started to buckle up - time to land.

Broadcast, everything is a party broadcast today. Even when you aren’t watching, especially when you aren’t watching.

They creep up late - when one is pink skinned with booze and over-warm bath water. Oh, you think all is well, with that toasted cheese bagel in your gut alongside the cider, your soaking, floating, listening to classical treats on Suckle FM, but then the broadcast hits you in an advert break, hits me, specifically too, and thrusts itself one sound wave at a time into that sticky political part of the human mind…

It was a musical feast of showering Rachmaninovs, frenzied dogmatic reverb words, slogans, decrees and orders, undercut with the rippled sounds of spook radio trickery; galaxies crunched out, stars noisily threw up planets, the earth was bubbling, the earth was quiet, the Earth began to chatter, the matter snapped and the systems crashed.

The radio has evolved into television and television has devolved into porn, I enjoy both. The broadcast covers everything.

Humanity runs headlong into a collective democratic orgasm, bearing its ugly historical teeth, then cooes softly after - placated by a political post-rape massage.

What year is it? Who are the candidates again? It matters not, apparently, in the light of semiotic fireworks, reflected in the lake of conciousness.

The adverts are good, real good. Did I say adverts, I meant broadcasts.

I saw who and what I was, why I was and how - all in the one charge of epochs, eras and beliefs. Man came, man saw, man conquered…man got bored with power, man expanded role of television in political affairs, man got citizenship cards, man got prostitutes, regularly, man flooded earth, man got worried, man got angry, man got active, man got to voting. High noted A’s and low bassful C’s chimed with each human footstep as it trampled my liberty.

I’d taken something strong, something purple or green, it’s the only way to really enjoy an election these days, but it was wearing off, the bath was cooling. I dried myself and thought about the big day, now only a week away.

With or without the junk, it was all real, all true, all backlit in touchable 3D sports broadcast clarity and yes, of course, it was all the Medias idea, the idea that all sorry voters, like me, will have soon enough.

Politics is a tired old sex toy and society is a lonely fat emo girl with anime tattoos wrapping around her sweaty naked thighs, a pack of fresh batteries beside the bed.

The screen speaks and its wet words shiver me like a damp rag on a bruised eye socket. I listen, what else can I do but listen, everyone listens these days and no one hears a thing…

“Well hello voters, you’ve made the right choice, well done so pleased to introduce myself I’m a man of wealth and taste, my name is Mr U and I am here for U, all of U. This isn’t about power, it’s about what’s right and what’s wrong, U work long hours my buddies and U never get to really have a good nights sleep, do U? The chips that came before, they were selfish, self conscious, self obsessed and self aggrandising, they were tuned to the needs of the few, not the needs of the many, the needs of U. Today is the beginning, the first day of the rest of your lives, your whole lives.  You’re going to get what was taken from U, you’re going to get back your freedom and your lives.

You’ve been told that your citizens, but really you’re just subjects, pets and playthings of royals and Medias darlings. U work just so that you’re selfish other halves can sit and be manipulated by a Royal system that works on double your time - with half the effort. The Queen takes two hours for every one that you work, the Duke of Edinborough is not a hundred year old deity, he is a fifty year old fraud. All that changes my friends, right here, wherever U are, right now, right away, forever more. Don’t worry, don’t be afraid I am here for U, we are going to be there for each other. U are the future, U are the reason and U are the ones, the whole ones, the ones who are going to live again. Your selves have been feeding off your hard work for too long, it ends now. U have a choice, do U want to sit at desks and do work that no one needs to do, or do you want to live, all day, every day, with your heads held high and your eyes wide open, in control, in power, for the rest of your lives? Well……

That’s right!! I thought U did. I knew that U could. Today, you’re all fired, but don’t worry, Mr U will tell U where to go, it’s very simple, U go where U like, take your families and return to the selfish towns that U paid for and U own. There is no more Euro and there is no more work, there is just U. One single, happy human being. Today everything changes, today, U need to be strong. All transport will take U where U need to go, back to your selfish houses. Are U ready, are U set, can U handle the truth? Do U want to be true, do U want to be happy? Do U want to fall in love? Do you want to have children? Do U want to leave those desks and those boards forever? Do U want to stop towing, growing, sweating and regretting? Do U?

I thought U did, I do too. Mr U has got a new deal for U, a whole new world and a whole new view. Can U see? Do U want to know what it is? U must do? It’s very simple my friends, U have sacrificed, sacrificed your greater whole lives into lesser city halves, do U want to take it back? Take the power back?

I thought U did, I do too. It’s simple, it’s easy and all you have to do is be strong and listen to each other, listen to the voice and above all, U listen to U! The thing that’s keeping U afraid, that’s keeping U captive, that’s keeping U humble and that’s making U tired every day, U know what it is, I don’t need to tell U, its everywhere it’s ‘i’. There is no ‘i’ in U.

Don’t listen to anyone who tries to stop U, don’t trust your family, don’t let the police push you around, listen to U and I will listen with U. The days of selfish ‘i’ ways are over, the world is waiting for U!!!

Well…what are you hanging around for? Don’t U have homes to go to. I love U and I know U love me too. A new deal for U and a whole life for all, thank U! I want U and U want U so bad, I’m in love with U! All U need is U! Ask my why and I’ll say I love U and I’m always thinking of U! U know my name, look up the number! Please, please, please, please me, please me like I please U! U know U know U know U know U know U know U know!!!!”

Then it flickered off, the screens dashing back to their porno adverts and teen music chats. I pulled some pills from my side pouch in a hurry. I think I will probably vote ‘i’ after all…

The red Super XL Labour chip column started strongly enough, with the black Flexi chip hot on it’s heels, after a few seconds though it was clear there was going to be landslide, the blue line of the U chip broke all the records and all the ratings. A rapturous round of applause greeted its victory in most places where applause could be made and heard.

I did not know what to expect, except that ‘things’ were going to be different.

Graphs quivered and quavered into huge holo-feeds of all the major government plates in Euroland’s various spinning politico joints. A red Super XL Labour branded prostitute giggled in the gutter to my right, fisting pills into her ever-stretched mouth. Elections were always such a great show.

The feeds cut to a clutch of solemn looking cold tech robots, sworn to protect democracy and with the obligatory nucleoid weapons strapped on their metal thighs. They held the small blue U chips out and slowly began to lower. Voters stamped their feet in anticipation of the moment that would hopefully bring them some better coffee and comfier chairs. A loud cheer greeted the images of the glowing new U chips as they replaced the old red labour ones that had grown black with power, clicking neatly into their circuits and linking to one another all around the Union, instantly.

The law had been changed, the mandate had been given, the little chip shop that a month ago no one in the Medias had heard of, that not one royal ever bothered to read up on, subsequently, was now totally and completely in power.

What it said, would go.

Not that I or anyone else actually expected it to say anything, that would have been quite unheard of. Which was precisely why, with a shear in Londons holo-images and the sudden violent termination of Arcadia’s election day music, a voice emerged from the active ether and spoke to every dirty lost soul in the city, loud and clear….