A spectre is haunting Britain – the spectre of Conservatism. All the Powers of Middle England have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Big Business, The Countryside Alliance, Fundamentalist Christians and large swathes of an uninformed electorate.
Horrifyingly, I learnt today that one of my oldest and closest friends appears to have joined Conservative Future, the Tory youth organisation – judging by the Facebook groups he’s joined anyway (I’m hoping to retract this when it turns out he’s joined it to troll).
Its perhaps unfortunate that I now have an official Tory Friend. This means that every time I talk about him, he’ll be labelled with the prefix “my Tory friend”, to differentiate him from the Guardianistas I usually hang out with.
I’m not sure what horrified me more – the fact that someone I know has outed themselves as a Tory, after experiencing years of me railing against the party both on my blog, and in my sweary real-life self, or that an apparently well educated, relatively young person can be indoctrinated by Tory dogma, and actively support the party.
It’s weird – its like when you find out one of your friends is gay, only worse, as him being a Tory will actually impact upon my life in a negative way, if his votes in elections are counted – and like when you find out that someone is gay, it contextualises history and suddenly it all fits together, like explaining why someone has spent so much time kissing men.
It does all make sense now though – the lack of political views, and silence during political discussion for all those years wasn’t due to being uninformed or lack of interest… it was because he was too afraid to admit to being a Tory. Until Cameron came in, they were the Nasty Party – they still are, but Cameron has inexplicably made it acceptable. Which is why its only now he’s come out Tory. Maybe the reason his appearance at the party at the local Conservative club was so fleeting because he was scared that his two world were colliding: the one where he knows me, and his secret Tory life with his evil Conservative friends?
Who knows what is going on inside his brain now? And worse still, what does this mean for my opinions? If others think like this, why don’t I? Maybe leaving the standard of living on the poorest people to the whims of the free market is the best way to do it? Maybe the market never does fail? Maybe an overpowered, sabre-rattling military is the best way to achieve world peace? Maybe immigrants are coming over here and doing the awful thing the Dailies Mail and Express say they do?
Please, readers, tell me: has the whole world gone insane or I am the mental one?
I had an excellent day yesterday – I went down to London to meet my nerdy mates from my other website. Here are some exciting photos of me looking really popular in the company of other people:
Chris, Lottie, Barney, Kyron, Ant, Me, Sam, William, Shark, Kat and Dan. Not pictured: Katy.
Dan bothering a mime.
It being Easter, we thought we should respect the religious aspects, and celebrate Jesus’ death by recreating Leonardo’s Last Supper.
As luck would have it, Barney looks a bit like Jesus. And Sam looks a bit like Mary Magdeline. And I played the part of Judas. The other apostles were perhaps a little less enthusiastic.
Spending about eight hours with me is difficult enough for anyone, really. Unfortunately, William’s Jamesomalley tolerance was slightly less than eight hours, so he ended up punching me.
But it was fun. I may have another tale to tell about this in a few days.
People came almost literally from all over the country – we had people who’d come from Scotland, Wales, East Anglia, Kent, the south coast – almost everywhere really. My friend Jeroen, who’s from the Netherlands, had even given up a day of his holiday in London to meet us all.
Nearly everyone who was there.
Being the webmaster and technically the owner of a major website has its perks. In the afternoon, when we were all in Hyde Park, my fellow administrators and I managed to persuade a couple of the lesser proletariat to go and buy us drinks. The other interesting thing was that because I’m the webmaster, the bloke at the top, I sort of assumed the leadership position. I was making executive decisions about where we should go and where we should go and so on.
Jeroen, Mike, Me, Steffan and Terry – the PKMN.NET Administration team.
It was when I was speaking to the group as a whole and leading people to a spot in the park that I realised that I had created an army. I’d re-iterate that it was amazing, but I fear that it could be (correctly) interpreted that I was enjoying the power trip and megalomania more than I was the meeting people.
Most of the gang lasted until Leicester Square.
After the “official” meet in Hyde Park, about fourteen of us took a trip to Leicester Square to acquisition some food, before (at my command) heading to Westminster via Trafalgar Square. It’s not a trip to London if you don’t see Big Ben. It wasn’t until we were sitting in an underground bar in the former Greater London Council meeting (just across the Thames from Parliament) that we realised we were missing someone. Whoops.
We found him eventually though. As the evening went on it ended up with seven of us, the most hardcore of the gang going to another pub near Euston station – which coincidentally, was a Scream pub. In other words, the same brand of pubs I go to all of the time – and it was just like the ones in Leicester, with its stacker, video jukebox and pool table. The only difference was that it was charging London Prices.
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