Coming home today through a rough neighbourhood I saw some guy coming out of the Fish & Chip shop.Now I sometimes do this; I eat my chips and I find them satisfying.
This fellow was dressed in clean, new casual clothes.
He walked a few feet and stopped with the packet open, and began shovelling chips into his distorted mouth as though he hadn't eaten in a month.
But he was well-fed.
The expression on his face was one of slightly belligerent invisibility, as though frightened that somebody would spoil his hurried moment of physically crude gratification.
And that is what passes for a life in England.
That is the sole gesture towards moral existence, the refuge of a retarded 12 year old from a background of abject poverty, but projected onto prosperous middle-age.
The mental holocaust in this country is such that only the most trivial of (guilty) pleasures are allowed, and then crudely and fearfully, as though the gods that do not tolerate will appear at any instant and not-tolerate even a bag of chips.
Think of this desperate debasement, self-imposed by a lifetime of habit, next time you hear the miserable middle-class female pretence of obssession with chocolate.
Is this what people have come to?
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