If I recall correctly, the last time I went bare chested was during the summer of 2005, when the reflective paleness of my skin was the cause of a small beach fire and the impaired vision of three unsuspecting bystanders. Since then, to avoid similar accidents from happening, I’ve done the good thing and accepted that I should never remove my shirt, least of all in public.

Genetically disposed to resemble E.T. after he’s been found cold, wet and barely alive next to the riverbank, I’m incapable of withstanding sunlight of any kind. By all accounts, I should be living a hermit-like existence in a bog somewhere, wallowing in misery and self-hate. Yet I somehow keep finding myself in these less than ideal situations.

Subjecting my body to Florida’s brutal sun was always out of the question. But alas I had been outnumbered. Everyone wanted to go to Blizzard Beach, an ironically titled water park that had been done up to look like the Swiss Alps. I couldn’t say no. I had to go, but the plan was to just read my book: to recline on the sun loungers, revelling in my disgust for all of those suntanned, carefree swimmers.

With storm clouds forming overhead, by the time I’d arrived at the park I was sure that within minutes it was going to rain. But to my surprise, as I found myself a spot in the shade, the sun slowly started to reappear and soon the pool was filled with swimmers.

The main attraction at Blizzard Beach is Mount Gushmore, an artificial hill covered with water slides, all varying in size. With a total elevation of 90 feet, the hill is home to the highest “free sliding” body slide in the US, Summit Plummet. I decided that it looked a bit too ambitious for somebody like myself; if I was going to try my hand at anything, it was going to be the lazy river: a slow-moving attraction built around the perimeter of park. The idea was to just relax and let the water take me around. The only goal involved was to avoid being crushed by the really big swimmers.

Later I learned that there’s a story surrounding Blizzard Beach’s construction. Legend has it that way back when there was a freak snowstorm in the area, which led to the construction of Florida’s first ski resort. Of course, the snow didn’t last long, but what remained was a series of snow-less ski jumps and chair lifts, and thus the resort was reborn as a water park. The transformation was completed, supposedly, when an alligator was seen sliding down a flume and splashing into a pool of water, screaming, “Yahoo!”

At least that’s how the story goes.

With a thorn in my side, I spent the first couple of hours reading a book with my shirt on, but was eventually encouraged to take a dip in the lazy river, which was largely covered by shade. I did the same a few days later at Typhoon Lagoon, a similarly designed water park, built some years earlier, which featured a California surf theme. The soundtrack, which blared out of hidden speakers buried in the bushes, featured some fun hits from such bands as The Ventures, The Trashmen and The Surfaris.

Having made it through two trips to water parks with minimal skin showing, it was a relief to visit Sea World a couple of days later, where sea mammals were worryingly both the main attraction and the main course. Operating as a charity, the park claims to be dedicated to saving and preserving marine life, yet its perplexingly fishy restaurants quite happily serve sea creatures on a plate with tartar sauce and slice of lemon. It seems like such a shame that an organisation which reaps the plentiful rewards of not having to pay tax couldn’t refrain from cooking the very animals that they claim to protect on their premises, with tanks acting less like homes for the creatures and more like giant menus for giant guests with whale-sized, insatiable appetites.

But I don’t want to be too critical of Sea World. If I sound like I’m being unnecessarily testy, it’s only because the park happened to be the place where I lost my ability to procreate. A ride called Manta was the cause of this. Tipping me upside down and holding me by the groin, it transformed my manhood into something that I can only describe as regrettably “manta-shaped”, and thus I haven’t been able to walk the same since.

All things considered, though, the day did have some notable highlights, particularly the Pets Ahoy Dog and Cat show, which featured hounds and felines alike performing a variety of dazzling tricks—on land, fortunately for the cats, not in water. There were a few decent rides as well, including The Kraken, which caused minimum testicular trauma, but passed so close to one very low concrete beam that I was sure my head was going to eject itself from the rest of my body as I travelled underneath. Just in case I hit it, I shut my eyes, if only so that I didn’t have witness my own grim decapitation. I also considered in a brief moment of panic that perhaps my eyelids might—although probably not—provide sufficient padding from the collision.

Fortunately it didn’t have to come to that, and I left the ride more or less in one piece—albeit still, regrettably, with slightly flattened testicles.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii. Stormy Weather: Busch Gardens

It’s called Busch Gardens, but from where I stood, Bro Gardens seemed like a more appropriate title. The term bro, in case you’re unfamiliar with it, is used to describe obnoxious sport-loving alpha males, and is often used by those who match the description to refer to themselves without the implied negative connotations. With their white vests and irrepressible rowdiness, they linger around in packs, prowling Busch Gardens for attractive females to bother. No woman would be stupid enough to actually copulate with a bro, but bros try exceptionally hard nevertheless, usually using such tried and tested seduction methods as whooping and aggressive fist pumping.

If I were from the US, I’m sure, without a shadow of a doubt, that bros would be my mortal enemy, but because their kind simply don’t exist back home, I found them easy to tolerate. I suppose if I had to find a comparison, that back in the UK the closest thing we have to bros are lads: that insufferable sub-culture of misogynistic macho men whose wide ranging hobbies tend to include both tits and ass. But even so, bros seemed altogether more endurable, at least in small doses.

The reason for them flocking to Busch Gardens was easy enough to see: out of all the parks, it had the biggest and fastest rides. It was more thrilling than all of the other parks put together, although such excitement seemed to come at a cost. The staff, for instance, were certainly a lot less friendly and the park wasn’t quite as clean as the Disney parks. This had also been the case at Universal and Sea World, but it was especially true of Busch Gardens. It wasn’t any any less enjoyable for it, but it was noticeable nevertheless, if only because of the eerie level of sanitisation in the Disney parks.

However, what made Busch (or BOUSSSHHH as I image the bros might say it) Gardens memorable was the weather we experienced on the ride home. Seemingly out of nowhere, a storm swept up: first there was a powerful wind, then all the weather my party and I had avoided back in the UK fell from the sky, what appeared to be a whole ocean’s worth of moisture. Fortunately, using the excuse that I hadn’t driven since I was 19, I avoided being the one in charge of getting car full of people back to the chalet. Yet simply looking out of the window was enough to make my teeth chatter and my hands shake like maracas. And so for what seemed like an hour, everyone in the car, all seven of us, stayed silent, praying that we would make it home alive.

Finally, after clenching my teeth so hard that my brain started to hurt, we reached the front drive of the chalet. It was then, of course, that the clouds dissipated and the sun shone through again, almost brighter than it had shone all week.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

viii. A Hall of Heads: The Magic Kingdom

Even before I had visited Magic Kingdom, I knew that the It’s A Small World ride was supposed to be an uncompromisingly irritating ordeal. Yet somehow knowing this didn’t stop me from going on it. You see, what begins as a gentle boat ride along a river surrounded by animatronic singing dolls, there to supposedly symbolise international unity, becomes a form of slow and unrelenting torture. My experience was to be exceptionally unpleasant, when the ride malfunctioned on the last stretch of canal, leaving several boats full of children and myself adrift on the nightmarish attraction.

“I want to get off,” whispered a boy in the boat behind me to his mother.

“We will in second,” she said comfortingly, albeit with a pang of dread in her voice. Her words evidentally were not enough to comfort her son, and so with a despairing sniffle, he began to cry, adding a whole new textural layer to the It’s a Small World song.

(For those who are not familiar with this piece of music, the tune is unbearably repetitive, so much so that even a house DJ would be driven mad by its never-ending five-note melody. It is, to one’s mental health what a fist to the balls is to one’s hope of ever having children.)

It was grim, and to make matters worse, this moment seemed to go on for what seemed like an impossibly long time: that small child bawling with all his might, as those terrifying dolls sang on, looking as they did like something that had crawled out of a fire at a children’s home.

It must have been a half an hour before, after many prayers, we were granted a small glimmer of hope: having prepared myself to step outside of the boat and wade through the suspiciously brown water towards the exit, the boat, with a jolting thud, began to move again. We had been spared by the ride, granted by the Disney gods the privilege of being able to live another day. Yet with the It’s a Small World song forever stuck in our heads, playing ceaselessly over and over again, the same siren-like musical phrase, those same seven words (“it’s a small world after all”), I wondered whether this outcome was a blessing or a curse. Sure, we could all carry on with our lives, but a life sound-tracked by the It’s A Small World song is surely no life at all.

I had taken the ferry over to Magic Kingdom earlier that morning, where the view of the park’s vast, man-made lake showed no signs of the horrors that awaited me. Magic Kingdom, of course, is the park that everyone thinks of when they hear the words “Disney World”. It is I suppose, to many people, what Disney World is all about. It also happens to be the most appealing park to children, and thus the least likely to appeal to adults. But aesthetically speaking, it is the most fascinating park, with an unavoidably large fairy tale castle as its main focal point and its magical streets, paved with the dreams and the tears of seven-year-old children.

I had been told before visiting that I must try Dole Whip, which is a sort of fruit juice with soft scoop ice cream on the top. The vendor that sells this peculiarly eatable beverage is not particularly easy to find, but it is worth tracking down, as the drink is the perfect addition to a hot day. Perhaps, back in the UK, such a thing, much like Limoncello when it’s taken back from Italy to dreary Britain, would be completely unspectacular. But when consumed in sunny Florida, Dole Whip is delightfully refreshing.

After enjoying this vaguely tropical drink, I headed over to enjoy a vaguely tropical attraction, The Enchanted Tiki Room, situated close by. Having been around for as long as the park itself, The Enchanted Tiki Room bears none of the thrills of any of the modern attractions. Rather, it is merely a showcase of the best animatronics that 1956 could produce—a simple song and dance show in which a cast of robotic parrots, totem poles and toucans caterwaul their way through a few numbers and speak in hilariously bad accents (the Irish parrot was perhaps the least convincing—and also the most racist). But in spite of it being a fairly low-key affair, I may have enjoyed The Enchanted Tiki Room the most of all the attractions at Magic Kingdom, if only for its laid back old fashioned charm. Increasingly, as I find myself getting older, I glean pleasure from the act of sitting down, and so I found The Enchanted Tiki Room to be a welcome change from the wild roller coasters I had become accustomed to during my trip.

Wishing to continue this trend of sitting down, upon leaving The Echanted Tiki Room, I headed over to The Hall of Presidents. A replica of the liberty bell was located outside of a building of unmistakably American design and inside the walls were adorned with portraits of past presidents. Excited, though also somewhat sceptical to see after having sat through the ludicrous American Adventure at Epcot, I waited alongside an already formed crowd of freedom-loving Americans, some of whom, like the people at the American Adventure, had come pre-draped in stars and stripes.

Patriotism is something hard for a Brit like myself to understand. It just isn’t something that a Brit—or at least and Englishman, partakes in publically. Perhaps privately we might, somewhere deep down, harbour feelings of pride for country. But when in the company of others, we find it favourable to speak of our homeland only with strong scepticism and disapproval. People who choose to do otherwise are invariably either over the age of 70, terribly racist, football fans or all of the above.

These people—these country-loving, U.S.A chanting Americans—seemed to fit into neither of these groups. Of course, there’s no shame associated with loving your country in America, and even those who describe themselves as far left in the US seem to have an inherent respect for the country in which they were born. It’s hard not to admire that in some way, at least until someone takes loving their country too far and insist on wearing its flag as if it were some sort of flamboyant uniform, then it’s just perplexing.

With these thoughts in my mind, I tried to prepare myself for what I was sure was going to be wholly terrible. Then a member of staff asked for everybody’s attention and asked a question. “Who is the only president,” he said, “not to have spoken English as his native language?”

People began to rack their brains, and then one man, one maverick, one lone and bigoted Winston Smith, a stars and stripes baseball cap upon his head spoke up. “Obama!” he said, confidently, as if in no doubt that this were true.

The man making the introduction paused before responding. “Er—no,” he said. “But a good try. The answer is Martin Van Buren, whose first language was in fact Dutch.”

We were invited through to theatre room. The show, which couldn’t have lasted more than 15-minutes, worked like this: all of the past presidents of the United States, all of them animatronic, appeared on a stage and said a few words, one inspirational phrase, a snappy catchphrase (“America is a addiked to oil” – George W. Bush); we then learned about some of the particularly notable figures in US history, such as Ulysses S. Grant, Millard Fillmore and Dork F. Wendle.

An enormous improvement on the American Adventure, the show was certainly a hit with the audience, and also, to a much lesser extent, myself. But now I was hungry for something a bit more intense, something perhaps without animatronics. As it was one of the few rides in the park that was specifically targeted towards older guests, I decided to check out Space Mountain, a sci-fi-themed coaster. If the Manta ride at Sea World hadn’t destroyed my chances of procreating, Space Mountain seemed to finish off the job.

Hurtling around at face-stretching speeds and weaving about in pitch-blackness, the ride did to my body what the It’s A Small World ride had just done to my mental well-being: it left me feeling tenderised, overcome with nausea and a sense of immense dread. Somehow, the entire way around, I felt that my long frame far exceeded the cart. For smaller passengers, it must have been tremendous fun, but for a tall gentleman like myself, the ride felt as if I had just been launched from a cannon though a brick wall; and as I took the last bend, liquid pouring from my head, I wondered whether I was sweating, bleeding, or indeed both.

An exhausted mess by this point, I resigned myself to the People Mover, a ride as unremarkably dull as its name implies. The People Mover acted as a sort of small-scale transportation system around the park, with little waltzer carts taking passengers around Magic Kingdom and occasionally ducking away into dark tunnels filled with various Disney paraphernalia. I was especially taken with it because the carts went continuously around the track, never stopping, meaning that one’s journey only ended when one wanted to get off.

Needless to say I stayed put for almost half an hour, going around the same bit of track, simply enjoying the opportunity to sit down as well as the shade provided by the ride. And so this is where I stayed until the firework display, which may have been even more impressive than the one at Epcot a few days earlier, though, at this juncture, I was too worn out to care. Tired and slightly sore from the sun, I watched the spectacle from a grassy area near the park entrance. Big booming bangs and hisses filled the air, but even hours later after I had heard the It’s A Small World song, it lingered on in my memory going around and around like clothes in a washing machine: “It’s a small world after all! It’s a small world after all!” Alas, it was inescapable, impossible to scrub from my mind.

Perhaps, I considered on the way home, sleep would cleanse my tormented brain. What a shame that ear plugs don’t block out what has already been heard.

 . . . . . . . . . . . . .

ix. Farewell, Orlando: Downtown Disney

My trip to Orlando ended, as is common for most tourists, with a morning spent at Downtown Disney, which exists merely for tourists to waste their remaining holiday dollars in bars, cafes, and on useless tat to give to people they don’t really like. Fortunately I’m so unpopular that nobody even pretends to be friends with me, so I felt no obligation to buy gifts. I was happy instead to sit by the lakeside and drink coffee. It was around the time of my seventh cup in fact, after my eyes started to convulse, that I started to hear a faint discordant sound coming from off in distance.

It was only when I worked out that the noise existed outside of my percolated brain that I decided to investigate. The noise, I discovered, was coming from a nearby bandstand where a high school band was mid-way through a practically atonal performance. But what were they playing? Stravinsky? Liszt? Schoenberg? No. They were playing the worst rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In that I’ve ever heard. At least I think that’s what I thought they were playing. Judging from their collective expressions of terror, I’m not entirely sure that they themselves knew what the piece was.

As terrible a performance as it was, there was nevertheless something refreshingly imperfect about it. After spending so long in a place that prided itself on being uncannily flawless, at that moment in time that group of insufferable musicians were, in my mind, edgy nonconformists. They were like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, opening my mind to a whole new world of artistic possibility. Make no mistake about it: the music was awful—just terrible—but it was it was also quite brilliant.

After they packed up, things quickly got boring again. Downtown Disney, for someone who has little desire to spend money on any things that aren’t books that were written forty or more years ago by now ancient or dead men, was sort of an anti-climax, and so I was glad when it was time to leave. In fact, here’s one good thing about Downtown Disney: it’s not far from the airport, which meant that I was able to relax before the flight and write down some of the highlights of my trip.

As a sceptic, I had come to Orlando already knowing what awaited me. Everybody in the Western world knows what Walt Disney World looks like. Images of Epcot’s geodesic ball and Magic Kingdom’s fairy tale castle have been subconsciously imprinted on our minds, and actually seeing these structures up close provides few surprises.

Holidaying in the Disney parks is surreal experience, but hardly an unpleasant one. Naturally, you won’t find the great cultural and historical delights that you will on trip to Paris or Rome—or to any city for that matter—but in its own strange and artificial way, Disney World does have a unique and fascinating culture. But it’s essentially holidaying with stabilisers. Everything there has been carefully considered and then considered again, and again, and again. And while there’s a side of me that wants to lambast Disney World for being so unashamedly sanitised and for existing within its own mawkish bubble, it’s hard to feel any genuine disdain for it or indeed any of the neighbouring parks for that matter.

The much vaunted educational value of some of the attractions is certainly questionable. The truth is, there is little worth learning on any of them, because the educational sentiment is always merely an after thought. The American Adventure was perhaps the most blatant example of this, as first and foremost it was concerned with pleasing blindly patriotic Americans, perhaps due to Disney’s staunch devotion to not wishing to offend any of its guests. The problem is that Disney tries to disguise information as entertainment rather than simply allowing something with educational merit to be entertaining. Although it is settling to see such a huge cooperation at least trying to inform its guests, I can’t help feeling that, in most cases, they were going about it the wrong way.

Perhaps my favourite part of the holiday was simply being in America, and making the most of a country in which biscuits are considered an acceptable food to start the day. Considering this as I waited in the airport, I browsed the duty free shelves erratically for whichever chocolate bar violated the most EU health codes, and picked up something that was positively glowing with E numbers. I had no intentions of eating it, whatever it was, but I thought it might make a fun gift for someone—for anyone, in fact, who would take it.

After making my way through airport security, I briefly browsed the shelves of the Orlando Airport bookshop—the first and only bookshop I had found on my trip. Then, after purchasing Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of America, which I did so on recommendation, it was time to board the plane. My seat, I discovered much to my delight, was a window seat, and so for the first time in what must have been years, I was able to fully admire the world from high up.

As the plane pulled back and began the long ascent into the sky, Orlando, with its late-night diners and enormous billboards, became a blur of incandescent amber light. Faintly off in the distance, fireworks from Epcot were resounding, and then in a flash of colour it all disappeared, as the land below turned to dark ocean. And so, like a man in a Mickey Mouse costume, I found myself waving out of the window, my eyes beginning to moisten.

“Goodbye!” I said in a voice similar to Goofy’s. “See you again someday!”

  . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When I applied to study at university several years ago, I was given a choice of with whom I wished to live in student halls: smokers or non-smokers. Having smoked only three or so times in my life, and not much caring for cigarette smoke and its tendency to make everything that it touches smell like the burning, soiled bedding of an incontinent hamster, I chose to live with non-smokers. But as I later discovered, I needn’t have bothered picking either option, as several people who I was placed to live with were smokers, all of whom had selected to be with non-smokers. To these people, cigarette smoke was apparently as sweet as Angel Delight, provided that it was coming out of them; when somebody else was exhaling it, things were a different story.

It is often people with this same outlook who ruin travelling in the quiet coach of a train. With stickers lining each and every window, it is near impossible to mistake the quiet coach for a regular one. Yet it is often filled with individuals who believe that impossibly loud chatter is all fine and well, as long as the noise is coming from their own mouths and not other people’s. Somehow the quiet coach has become a platform for people who use silence as a means to have their words understood more clearly: a place for people who have presumed that being quiet is only a requirement for passengers less interesting than themselves.

Ordinarily, it’s hard to feel truly irked about having to share an intimate space with someone who has mistaken a carriage full of passengers for a gripped audience. After all, even the very worst type of passenger is usually easily forgotten. But this isn’t true of the journey I took last Sunday, the day before bank holiday Monday: the own clothes day of drinking nights. And so I feel that the events of that night are ridiculous enough to reproduce here.

In spite of what was to follow, for perhaps the first twenty minutes of the journey, everything couldn’t have gone more smoothly. As we departed from Darlington that evening, the sun shone brighter than it had all year, and inside the carriage passengers appeared to be content to simply enjoy the view out of the window. But alas things changed at York station, where the carriage suddenly became infested with a group of tangerine men, accompanied by women who seemed to take pride in their ability to scarcely cover up both their breasts and vaginas with just one small piece of fabric.

The smell of stale lager and LYNX Africa followed the herd onto the carriage, and as they made their way to any empty seats they could find, the group chanted their unofficial mantra for the evening: “WHEY! OH OH OH YEAH! YEAH! NA NA! BOLLOCKS!”

After several minutes of this one very brave passenger, a woman in her late forties, spoke up. “Do you mind?” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “We’re in the quiet coach.”

“Hear that?” replied one of the girls, nominating herself as the spokesperson for the group. “We’re in the quiet coach. Well, that sucks for you.”

The girl was so plastered with makeup that it would have taken a team of archaeologists to unearth a single feature on her face. A girl of many words, most of them either “fucking” or “like”, for the next ten minutes she subjected everyone in the carriage to her fog horn voice, obviously enjoying how much she was irritating everyone. It wasn’t long, however, before many others started to complain, and soon enough a man whose job it was to politely ask difficult passengers to get off at the next stop had intervened.

“I know my fucking rights,” explained the head girl to the man, as if she were Ghandi fighting for some just cause rather than a drunken idiot oppressed only by her own caustic stupidity. Like an impossibly loud radio tuned to a station designed solely to scare off listeners, she continued to express herself throughout the journey, insulting passengers and trying her best to sound sane. My girlfriend, who had reluctantly been one of the first passengers to complain about the group to staff, received much of the abuse, due to her wearing a pashmina.

“She’s from Kazakhstan,” one member of the group, a male with hair only on the top of his head, bizarrely speculated.

“Well, I’m not racialist!” shouted the girl. “She is! This is Britain. I’m white. What am I doing apart from shouting the quiet coach?”

By this point, her stupidity was apparently obvious even to a few of the girl’s friends, who were shot down for pointing out to her what was all too clear—i.e. that she was violating train protocol, that she was obviously in the wrong and that she was being a nuisance. For a brief moment, their pointing this out seemed to force her into a silence. But this was short lived, and soon enough she returned to yelling any words that happened to enter her head—mostly, of course, either “fucking” or “like”.

Race had all of sudden become her main source of outrage, and as an attempt to prove to her non-consenting listeners that she wasn’t racist, she began being unapologetically offensive about every ethnic minority that she could think of, which happened to be very few. In fact, in her mind there were only normal people, blacks, chinks and an entirely new group that included anyone who she considered to be a bit too brown for her liking. It was this fictitious latter group, we soon discovered, to which my unmistakably white girlfriend had been assigned.

After being treated to an in depth lecture on how asylum seekers are destroying this country, the train began to slow down as we made our way into Doncaster station. On the platform stood several members of the transport police.

“Uh, yeah, we should get off now,” one member of the group said.

For the first time in about half an hour, the girl who had been causing all the trouble had nothing to say. The group just slowly exited the train, as the entire carriage watched the exchange taking place outside. For a moment, the girl seemed to be cooperating with the police to some degree, but then she visibly started to lose it, signalling towards the carriage and pretending that she was the victim in all of this. Then she tried a new tactic: shamelessly flirting with the transport police, who were quite clearly unfazed by her advances, given that she resembled a slab of boob with a face drawn on it.

And so as the train pulled away, now running far behind schedule, this image was the last we saw of the group. Passengers who had gotten on at Doncaster all speculated to what had just happened to this dejected group of terracotta lager drinkers. Then, within just a few minutes, the quiet carriage became a quiet carriage once more. I couldn’t help but feel for the hapless man who had asked the group to leave. Even later in journey, long after the group had left, he looked unsettled and world-weary, as if this was not the first incident on the quiet coach he had dealt with that day. Of course, given that it was a bank holiday, the own clothes day of drinking nights, perhaps somewhere in his mind he knew that it wasn’t to be his last either.

To think of this theory as true is easier than believing that a particularly insane comment accurately sums up somebody’s genuine thoughts. That’s why, when I encounter a comment that reads as if somebody’s brain has violently collided with the “have your say” section of a website, I try to imagine that a doctor or meta-physicist has written it. This way I don’t have to acknowledge that somewhere out there—likely wallowing in a dank basement, the walls all covered with cut up photographs of an eyeless Bobby Davro and shit—is an individual so septic that the only way he or she can express their ludicrous opinions is to strangers that they hate online.

Of course, the last sentence also applies to myself—including the part, unfortunately, about Bobby Davro and living in a dank basement. But I’d like to believe that there is a difference: for starters, I don’t spend my time writing absurd comments below other people’s videos and articles, and I don’t wish death upon certain individuals or blame my frustration with life’s little inconveniences (taxes, stamps, recycling, celery, etc.) on the Jews. Instead, I bottle my misanthropy away until I unload privately, directing my irrational hatred for pretty much all people at myself. I have never—not even once—felt any great compulsion to take to The Telegraph website to voice my disdain.

So who, if not venting intellectuals, are the people writing these comments? Do I know any of these people? Are they family members, friends—acquaintances? Or are they, as I suspect is more likely, the work of shady pariahs living on the very fringes of society, like Richard Blackwood and Thomas Pynchon?

It’s worth noting, too, that not all internet comments are of the insane variety: many also appear to be the work of the sort of tragic pub-dwelling character who, five years ago, would have been condemned to natter on bitterly to anyone too polite to ignore them. How things have changed for this type of person. In this modern age, their views are now read by anyone curious enough to scroll down the page a bit. With their sub-standard Viz-style witticisms and supposed contempt for everyone who isn’t them, they’re living the dream, and receiving all the attention that, traditionally, they never would have received.

Certainly, these people are easy enough to place, but those who are responsible for the stranger comments—the hardcore crazies, if you will—seem to have almost appeared out of nowhere, like a thousand racist, misogynistic and illiterate jack in the boxes all popping up at the same time. It’s as if they’ve been waiting all this time for a platform for their bullshit and dislike of coherent sentences, and now they’ve acquired such a pedestal for their insanity, they’re tearing down the social constraints that have silenced them for so long, and they’re going rogue.

Naturally, as a sort of third-rate journalist, I’ve received my fair share of abuse from these people before. In a review I once wrote of a documentary on the 7/7 bombings in London, in fact, I was taken to task by a “truther”, who insisted that he knew the real cause behind the bombings.

“I should KNOW,” he concluded, trying—I think—not to sound callous, “my brother died ONCE.”

Well, thank god he only died the once, I suppose, and not twice, or three times.

His comment was enough to make me eat my own fist, particularly given that I hadn’t once made reference to who the perpetrators of the 7/7 bombings were in my review. Why, if he really knew the truth, was he wasting his time by commenting on a television review? I couldn’t understand, and I still don’t.

But perhaps that’s the point. Maybe these people don’t have a point at all—who knows? Whatever the answer, I’m sticking by my theory that these comments are the work of a tight-knit community of intellectuals, who are frustrated with the world and just want to relax after a hard day. The internet has the same effect as a bottle wine: it kills brain cells and loosens people up. So if calling somebody a gay face is what it takes for intellectuals to forget their troubles, then so be it.

What do you think? Do you think that I’m right? Let me know in the comment section below. Go on, have your say. The papers and TV channels care about your opinion, and now so do I. Yeah, who needs people who have formed their opinions because of extensive research, when I can scroll down and discover what someone who probably struggles with the concept of canned food thinks, eh? Go on then, have your say. Tell me that I’m a “gay face”. Have your nasty little say.

Although the sky was shrouded in thick rain clouds, it rained only briefly during Margaret Thatcher’s funeral: there was a light shower that cooled the warm spring air, and seemed to suggest that, if the clouds were at all sad about the Baroness’ passing, they weren’t prepared to bawl. I was standing outside St Paul’s cathedral as the service took place, along with the mourners and the gloaters—though the latter group were much smaller than the BBC’s coverage suggested they might be. Neither a supporter of Thatcherism nor somebody who agrees with heckling a deceased person at their own funeral, I was there merely as a casual observer, having found myself in the area with an hour to spare.

I had arrived outside the cathedral at half eleven, after walking along through Bank, where the barriers separating off the road began. I was able to stop just across the street from the cathedral, where the number of people who were waiting to watch the procession was reasonably small, far fewer than I expected. Most carried on with their days, showing only a passing interest in what was taking place, and the ones who did stop, didn’t seem to know what they were stopping for, myself included.

In amongst those who had decorated their faces with what they must have mistaken for the union flag, and the hardcore crazies, who were already pacing and struggling not to voice their bizarre thoughts, I started to wonder why I had decided to venture up the street at all. Then, only adding to these doubts, a lady holding an iPhone approached me with what she regarded as heart-warming news: it appeared that George Osborne’s eyes, like the grey sky above, had also been raining. Yes, inside the cathedral, mere meters across the street from us, the chancellor—his doughy face caked in thick makeup—had apparently silenced his critics by leaking actual human tears. The man who once delighted in announcing enormous welfare cuts had proven that he was not made of steel at all, by crying at the funeral of a woman who was notorious for being brutally callous.

“Aww,” the lady with the iPhone said to me. “So sweet.”

I nodded politely.

As the area began to fill up, the attendees started to seem less strange: many, most likely employees of the offices nearby, wore suits; a few were reasonably old, well-dressed individuals; and several others appeared to be students, some quite young, some in school uniform. One group of about seven teenagers, two of them girls, all of them in blazers, leaned up against the barrier in front of me. They were obviously the pupils of a private school, although I tried not to make further judgements. A man to my left, meanwhile, used his enormous camera to position himself as close to me as possible, and then decided to make the most of our intimate situation by shovelling crisps into his mouth and failing to breathe out of his nose.

No one that I saw there looked as if they were going to riot, protest or surf on Mrs T’s coffin as it travelled down the street. There was also no sign of Elvis Costello, and therefore no cause for the mourners to fear that he might suddenly “tramp the dirt down”. Only one person seemed at all suspicious, in fact: a small teenage girl, who was rather rebelliously wearing a t-shirt with the words “FUCK NEOLIBERALISM” written on it, but she was hardly a threat. As far as t-shirt slogans go, hers was up there with a shocking Slipknot hoody that I once saw, which moaned—in the form of a misanthropic equation—that “people = shit”.

Shortly before twelve o’clock, a woman in her early forties approached me. “What do you people hope to see?” she asked, speaking in such a way that, at first, seemed friendly, until I considered that she had just referred to me as “you people”.

I couldn’t think of decent response, and so I replied: “I’m, uh, not sure.”

The lady laughed, shaking her head at my obvious stupidity—although peculiarly she remained standing nearby, perhaps just in case I wasn’t as stupid as I looked and in fact knew more than I was letting on. Then about a minute later something did happen: the car carrying Thatcher’s body away from the cathedral drove by, travelling at some speed. A union flag, nothing like ones painted on several of the attendees’ faces, was sprawled over coffin, which was clearly visible, even from a fair distance. Clumsily, I grabbed for my phone and to take photograph.

“We love you!” shouted all of the male private school pupils who were in front of me, applauding, waving and whistling in unison. Their two female friends resisted joining in.

It seemed an odd thing to holler at a moving vehicle carrying wooden box that contained a lady, who, by this point, had long since expired. But, then, I’m not sure what is the appropriate thing to say during such an occasion. One wouldn’t lean over the coffin of a recently deceased loved one and bellow “We love you!” or even “We Loved You!” I would have thought a knowing nod would have sufficed, or a smile, or sympathising headshake. Perhaps they didn’t know she was dead.

In a blur, the car was gone and a strange sort of awkwardness filled the air. The two female private school pupils looked sore; their male friends had surely blown their chances of pulling by confessing their undying love for the stone cold Baroness. No one really said much afterwards, and slowly the attendees began to go about their daily lives again. “So that was that then” everyone appeared to be silently thinking, apart from one of the mildly crazy ladies, who actually said these words aloud. And with that, the crowd dissipated, and I walked back along through Bank.

Illustration by Fiona Byrne

Many memories of my childhood and teenage years, both good and bad, involve television in some form or other. A number of these are of specific programmes (The Simpsons, The Crystal Maze, Aaron Carter’s Flaccid Jungle), while others relate more closely to the ritual of watching the TV (staying up to the early morning to watch The Larry Sanders Show during my college years, watching a pre-launched Channel 5 through a haze of fuzzy static).

To approximate, in fact, just how many hours of my young life that I wasted starring into the shiny side of the incandescent story machine would take all ten fingers, a calculator and—after losing count and mashing my fist into the calculator’s keys in frustration—somebody to work out all the sums for me. So, at almost a complete guess, I’ll hesitate to say that I’ve wasted about 14,500 hours: a plausible figure, even if it seems impossibly high, as it is said that the average person spends four to five hours a day watching television.

Largely for my mental wellbeing, nowadays, I try to watch the same amount in an entire month. Yet there was a time in my life, between the ages of about eight and seventeen, when my weekly schedule resembled the inside of the Radio Times. It was the possibility that something good might be on next coupled with the inescapable nature of the medium that kept me watching, hanging on for just a few more minutes, in case Robert Killroy Silk were to inexplicably transform himself into somebody who wasn’t Robert Killroy Silk.

Unique in the sense that it can be enjoyed even in a deep state of laziness, television will always make a tempting distraction for the bone-idle. It seems unlikely, for instance, that many people would watch something like The X Factor if it were a stage show that had to be attended, rather than something that can be absorbed torpidly through osmosis. But because the series is unavoidably in people’s living rooms, it frequently racks up more viewers than there are people in the world who own shoes.

The negative effects aside, it’s for those rare moments when a small glimmer of brilliance flickers from its glassy eye that make watching the television worth putting up with. Only something as sharp and as fast-paced as The Simpsons or Seinfeld could work as a TV series; only in this format could Alistair Cooke’s America have reached so many people and included so much insight. Such programmes are surely proof that television isn’t always as culturally insightful as a coma. In fact, watching those classic episodes of The Simpsons (taped on Betamax, no less) back in the early ‘90s provided me with a first-class education in popular culture, one that has doubtless helped to shape me into the person I am today—i.e. a mentally-maladjusted, misanthropic nerd.

If good TV has played a part in shaping my twisted character, it seems only likely that bad TV has also influenced me to some degree. Surely all that time watching Alistair Stewart hosting Police, Camera, Action! has taken its toll: the hypocrisy of Stewart, a convicted drink driver, hosting a programme about road safety; the demonically shouty way he’d address the camera; his hilariously overblown cadence. Certainly, his presenting style must provide some explanation for why I shot put words out of my mouth rather than speak them, like a man attempting to force his own bowels out through his nose.

Shows like Police, Camera, Action! were a favourite of mine during my teenage years, when I developed something of a fondness for unintentionally amusing rubbish. But nowadays, I don’t have the tolerance for such shows. The older that I’ve gotten, the more I struggle to enjoy television at all, in fact; and now that I spend a fair portion of my time reviewing TV programmes, casual viewing has become a thing of that past. Consequently, I miss out on what I described earlier as the “ritual of watching TV”: not merely the programmes themselves, but the entire experience that comes with watching the tube, which is something of a culture all to itself.

Alas, I can’t foresee myself watching television in the traditional way ever again–at least not in my own home–as only when I visit somebody else’s house do I truly get a taste of what used to be a natural part of life for me. Over the past few years, the internet has largely replaced the role that television used to fill, and I suspect that this is also the case for other people my age. My generation, it seems, will be the last to enjoy television in the form in which it is familiar to me. Those who have been born within the past decade will likely grow up in a world where one can choose what they want to watch, as it becomes increasingly unnecessary to have to wade through rubble to find a gem.

In an ideal world, this shift could give viewers the opportunity to filter out inane rubbish and enjoy a medium that’s ripe with cultural brilliance. Yet it is more plausible that the change will create an environment in which people no longer take chances on new content, instead preferring an enormous catalogue of tried and tested programmes that they already enjoy. Naturally, the big shows will always do well, but it’s the small ones will surely be cast into obscurity: the under promoted documentaries and late-night sitcoms that, several years ago, one would discover almost by accident while frantically channel hopping.

As the digital boom proved, when hundreds of channels popped up shortly after the millennium (The Advert Channel, Bravo, Friendly TV), sometimes choice can be deceptively limiting, which I suspect is the case here. Gone are the days when, to find TV gold, it was necessary to first put up with the apricot face of Robert Killroy Silk. In the present day, selectiveness means that it isn’t to put up with anything on television anymore. Even the idea of having to stay up to watch a programme seems increasingly archaic.

I have often considered myself to have a love hate relationship with television, although, as the medium continues to evolve, I can’t help but look back on all that time I wasted gazing into the magic rectangle with much fondness. It has always been a mixed bag of nuts: some of them delicious macadamias, even if most of the others appear to have already passed through the bowels of a dog.

Never before has this been truer of television, in spite of its uncertain future. As recent programmes such as Breaking Bad have proven, the tube can dazzle even the most dismissive of critics with its artistry, even when the rest of its output resembles something that a dog has left on a rug.